How Amy Carnath Conquered The World
For ataniell93. A sort-of-sibling to Carefully, Correctly Wrong. Crossover between the Profit TV series and C.J Cherryh's novel Cyteen. The Cyteen characters are the property of C.J Cherryh and the Profit characters are the property of David Greenwalt and John MacNamara. No copyrights claimed, no money being made. PG for a couple of sexual references.
How Amy Carnath Conquered The World
1
Gloria Strassen had gone away. Amy Carnath knew that, because Gloria's peg and locker at the playgroup weren't the same any more. They used to have a picture of a friendly red apple, and a long wobbly word that meant Gloria. Now they had a friendly sun instead, and a smaller less wobbly word. Amy thought it might say Amy because it was the same shape at the front, and that meant she had another peg and another locker, but sera Ramirez who was in charge of the playgroup didn't think so. Anyway, Amy didn't have a sun on her peg, she had a butterfly.
Amy didn't mind about only having one locker and one peg. It wasn't like her stuff slopped out of its place all on its own the way Sam's did. What Amy minded was that they had taken away Gloria's pictures from the big board beside the window.
Amy hadn't liked the pictures, any more than she liked Gloria. Gloria screamed and pushed and bossed, and the pictures weren't that good. One was a blobby platythere, and Sam could draw platytheres better. The other was supposed to be Gloria holding hands with her mama, though it just looked like a lot of triangles to Amy. She'd seen the way Gloria's mama held hands with Gloria, like Gloria was a large piece of equipment that needed dragging from one end of the labs to the other, and it didn't look like the way Amy's mama held hands with her, but it didn't look like any triangles, either. What worried Amy was that if Gloria and her pictures could disappear, then maybe she, Amy, could disappear too.
She was squinting stubbornly at the board, trying to make the new train that stupid Stef Dietrich had drawn be Gloria's platythere instead, when sera Ramirez clapped her hands and told everybody it was time to go out to the sandpit. Amy went to her peg and put her coat on. Most days she could put her coat on by herself, but today her plait got under her collar and made her eyes spring with tears and sera Ramirez had to help. Sam watched her in a serious, worried way, and grabbed her hand when sera Ramirez told them to make pairs. It took a while for everyone to arrange themselves into pairs, because Stupid Stef was crying over nothing at all and Yvgenia wouldn't come out of the toilet.
Amy didn't mind holding hands with Sam. Sam was stocky and blond, and was always the same size as the children a year older, so that people thought he was that age and snapped at him for being slow. She liked him better than Yvgenia, who whispered, or Tommy, who sometimes had snot on his fingers. They marched out through the sunshine towards the sandpit. The sunshine made hard bright shapes, a bit like Gloria's triangles, on the surface of the water where sometimes sera Ramirez let them feed the fish.
"Tommy hasn't got anyone to walk with," said Sam, watching Tommy trail along beside sera Ramirez.
That was because Gloria had gone away, and the person with the short name that wasn't Amy hadn't come yet. Amy scowled. "Gloria's gone. They took her paintings."
Sam looked more serious and worried than ever. "People go sometimes. Valery went."
Amy didn't think she could remember Valery. She screwed up her eyes and tried and tried to remember, but all she could think was that Valery was a word people like mama and sera Ramirez sometimes said. "Did Valery have a peg and a locker?"
Sam didn't say anything, but he tugged at her hand, which was making a fist in his. Amy opened her eyes.
Some azi children were passing by; they bowed to sera Ramirez as they passed, looking even more serious than Sam. They were the same sort of size as Sam and Amy and Stef and the others, but Amy thought they must be older. Maybe azi didn't grow at the same speed. The CIT children from the playgroup were dressed in the bundled, haphazard sort of way that happened when you weren't quite big enough to manage your own shoelaces and mittens but you had to practice anyway, and their clothes were the same cheerful colours as the pictures on the pegs and the lockers. They all moved at their own different speeds, from Stef's sulky edge-of-tearful shamble to Maddy Strassen's skipping bounce.
The azi all wore black, neat black, like they had a pernickety mama, and they walked like grown-ups.
One of them turned round to look at Amy. Amy turned round and looked at him, too, until Sam pulled at her hand again to make her hurry. The azi boy was dark, and pretty like Stupid Stef; prettier, because he hadn't been crying. He had big serious dark brown eyes the colour of the water in the fishpond when the sun wasn't shining.
She felt like he was remembering her, like if someone asked him what colour her shoes were in ten years time when he was a real grown-up man, he would be able to tell them. That made her feel better. Maybe he remembered Gloria, as well, and Valery. Maybe he remembered everything.
"Why don't the azi come and play with us?" she asked Sam.
"They just don't," said Sam. When Sam talked like that, shutting things down, not wanting to talk about it any more, she thought Sam was being like an Older. But he wasn't Older-like in the same way the azi were. Thinking about that gave her a mixed-up feeling, so when they got to the sandpit she didn't play with Sam, she played with Maddy and Yvgenia instead, and she thought about the azi boy and his eyes.
2
"I just don't like him," said Sam. "Maddy Strassen says he's got mean eyes."
Amy carried on doing her makeup in the mirror. She wasn't very good at eyeshadow yet, and it needed concentration. Somehow whatever she did it came out in hard bright clumpy shapes rather than the smooth washes of colour that other people could do, and also, she never seemed to be able to get the same clumpy shapes on one eye as on the other, so she generally looked lopsided. Sam always said she looked beautiful whatever she did, and that made her want to cry or hit Sam, though naturally these days she didn't do either. After all, they were seventeen now, not four and a half.
Outside the door, she could hear the adult party going on. That didn't make her want to cry. It was just uncomfortable and boring, like a puzzle-box she didn't much want to solve and open. The puzzle had a lot of different layers. There was the chatter and the power-games and the who-stands-with-who and the drinks. She didn't like the drinks. They put orange juice in the punch, to show they could afford it, and the difficult, bitter citrus-taste of orange juice and alcohol together would always remind her of Ari's parties.
As far as Amy could see the grown-up New Year parties were just like Ari's, but with another couple of layers of puzzle-box over the top, so that it was mostly about power and money, instead of power and sex. Which was good, because who wanted to see Petros' backside heaving about, or Maddy's mother sitting around naked with her sloppy bare breasts falling into her armpits talking about sex in that silly drunk way Maddy did?
That made her think about Maddy, and what Maddy might - or might not - have said about Jim, and Sam hovering there waiting for an answer. Anyone else that size would have towered or maybe even loomed, but not Sam. "Maddy's just sore because I won't lend him," she said lightly.
"No," said Maddy, coming out of the cubicle and making room for herself at the mirror with a shunt of the hips that made Sam blush, "I'm not sore, because no one will lend me their azi, and Sam won't oblige either, will you, Sam?"
"I'm sure Ari would send Catlin round to run you through those self-defence moves again, if you asked," said Amy, bitchily, because she and Maddy weren't quite friends and she wouldn't have Maddy trying to psych Sam.
"That isn't what I meant and you know it. And anyway, that Jim AJX of yours does have mean eyes, and everyone says the only reason Ari weaselled him out of Green Barracks on a cheap transfer on the internal budget for you was because the rest of Security don't trust him."
"If the mechanisms of what you're calling trust in azi were that easy to understand we'd all be out of a job,"
Maddy made a face at Amy in the mirror and whisked out again. Sam looked like water that had been ruffled. "Amy - "
"What? You've got that air-headed friend of yours, I've got Jim."
"I don't think anyone's got Jim, and I think however many interventions you run on him - "
"Sam, this is nonsense. Jealousy..."
"It's not." He put his hand on her arm. She felt as if she could feel his hand against the bone, through her slippery copper-coloured blouse and her skimpy muscles and her thin skin.
The door opened. The sound of the party tinkled in; laughter, and children running about with sugar cookies, and Windy Peterson had cornered one of the visitors from Novgorod, a soignée woman with braids, and was talking to her urgently about something or another. Amy touched her hair, which was managing to be lank and frizzy both at once, and wished she'd braided it after all.
"Sera, is everything all right?" said Jim.
He managed to be self-effacing even for an azi, which was fascinating considering the way that he moved. The way he moved was fascinating all on its own - it kind of reminded her of the way the horses talked to each other with the way they carried their heads and the way they decided who would go first at a gateway - but it was more fascinating to see how people reacted to it. She'd watched him a lot. When he walked, the movement all started from his shoulders, as if he was pushing his way through invisible water. The last time she'd seen anyone walk like that it had been a news clip of a contender for the position of Mayor of Novgorod, an angry stocky man called Anton Kuznetsov who prided himself on coming up from the slums. Everyone had felt threatened by Kuznetsov. Anyone who walked like that ought to look like a threat, Amy always thought. But Jim didn't.
She knew what it was. She'd studied it in fish. Protective colouration.
"Everything's fine, Jim," said Sam, his body radiating everything's not fine from his own overly drawn-back shoulders to the way his hands were making fists without knowing it.
"Yes, ser Whitely," said Jim without a blink, the yes that meant nothing at all, and didn't Sam know it. "Sera?"
"It's fine. Let's dance." She put her hand on his arm. He smelt good. Most of the people in the room smelt of nerves or sweat or perfume or, in little Ingrid Kennart's case, damp nappy. Jim smelt of clean clothes and clean hair. His hair was sleeked down at present, but it always managed to contort itself into various mad vertical shapes overnight, and she was the only one who knew. He never smelt of fear or sweat or sex like CIT boys did. She supposed it was an azi thing; they had better-regulated endocrine systems, and she should know from the amount she'd studied them.
On the other side of the room, she could see Ari. Ari was just about Amy's best friend, but it often felt as if she was only friends with about ten percent of Ari, and that the rest was off doing other invisible things that involved more puzzles, puzzles Amy couldn't see, that had been set a hundred years ago. Ari's azi Florian was standing a half-step behind her. Her other azi Catlin was dancing with Stupid Stef Dietrich. She was showing him up, Amy thought, with a little flash of covetous pleasure, because she'd wanted Stef for three long years and Stef had never wanted her back.
Stupid Stef thought he was so sharp and so handsome, but when he was dancing he looked flabby and uncoordinated, like he only had about half as many muscles as Catlin and didn't use those right. Amy saw Ari look over at Catlin, just a split-second flash of a look, and it was like they each knew what the other was thinking.
Amy never knew what Jim was thinking unless she was actually in Supervisor mode. But she supposed, sensibly, that that would come in time. He might be an Alpha, and people might mutter about about his Experimental status meaning an untried fix on an old and problematic geneset, but she knew she could manage azi. They couldn't possibly be any more unreasonable than CITs.
And, she thought, her hand finding the firm little bulge of muscle that was Jim's bicep under the faultless azi-black sleeve, and her eyes finding the complicated curved and compressive shape of his mouth, they were much, much more decorative.
3
Novgorod. The subway. Somehow the tiles of the subway were always slippery, even though there was no rain to fall and no mud to be tracked in. Some of the slipperiness was spittle and urine and the chemical cleansers the staff used to try to keep both of those at bay. The rest of it was other people's condensed breath.
It was very early morning. There would be no train for another thirty minutes, but there were two men standing by the turnstiles that led onto the platform. One was neat and dapper and preternaturally still. His long coat did not stir, and neither did his gloved, folded hands. The other was a big blond man in a very good suit, who shifted from foot to foot, disturbed by the cavernous emptiness and the ghostly potential for crowds.
"Councillor Carnath would never condone such a use of Science Bureau funding," said the man in the coat, his voice soft and slightly puzzled, as if this were all nothing but a misunderstanding. "I'm sorry if you were misled."
"Misled? I've got half of Union baying for my blood and the other half under the impression that I'm on their bloodthirsty, Abolitionist side, and I owe that money to..."
"I think I can help you find the money." The voice still sounded deferentially polite, even confiding, but something made the big blond man shake his head and stare, as if he'd discovered a whole new sentient species, here on the Novgorod subway. His foot slid on the tiles as he made the little involuntary movement. He swore. The man in the coat put out an unexpectedly strong gloved hand to steady him by the elbow, and looked into his face.
Sam Whitely had only once seen another man look up at him quite like that, and then it had all been an appalling misunderstanding. He told himself that this was still Amy's azi, that Amy had got set in her ways, calcified over with power and the ability to have things exactly as she liked them, in a way that was entirely understandable in a woman who had been running her own wing of Reseune since she was eighteen and had held the seat for Science since she was fifty. No doubt the azi hadn't actually met anyone who wasn't on Amy's staff in long enough that something had gone wrong with his social responses. It happened, particularly with the Security-trained ones who weren't all that social to begin with.
"You mean Amy can help me find the money," he said, clinging to the belief that the conversation had swung over like a train on these appalling, brutal tracks but had now found its balance once more. "From the allocation."
"Do you really want Amy to know about your gambling addiction?"
The azi had gone eetee; he shouldn't be saying Amy, it should be Councillor Carnath, from him. "I think you should report to your Supervisor when you get back," said Sam, pulling himself up to the higher ground that all CITs had in times like this.
"Thank you, ser," said Jim, as if he'd been paid a small bland compliment. "I hope this won't spoil your working relationship either with me or with the Councillor. Everyone deserves a chance to put things right."
He laid out the explanation in a logical, soft-spoken way that almost distracted Sam from how criminally insane it was. Almost but not quite. "This ends with either Reseune Security shooting me or the Novgorod Civil Guard shooting me," he said bleakly. "Or with me in your pocket forever more."
"I only believe in keeping useful things in my pockets," Jim assured him. Sam had no idea at all whether he should read humour in that rejuv-young, restrained-looking face.
Before he could answer, a youth in an ill-fitting Novgorod Transport uniform ambled up to the turnstiles. "Papers, please."
Sam and Jim looked up at him, the irritated looks on their faces momentarily utterly identical. The youth looked at the papers; passed over Whitely with nothing but a nod, but looked downright respectful when handing Jim's papers back to him. CIT papers, Sam noticed belatedly. Some fool in the Bureau of State had handed over to this monster the papers to pass for a human being.
"Ser Carnath?" said the boy, giving the top of the nearest turnstile a polish with his sleeve. "That's Reseune, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Jim AJX Carnath, and brushed a speck of dust off his coat with his gloved hand. "I'm Reseune."
How Amy Carnath Conquered The World
1
Gloria Strassen had gone away. Amy Carnath knew that, because Gloria's peg and locker at the playgroup weren't the same any more. They used to have a picture of a friendly red apple, and a long wobbly word that meant Gloria. Now they had a friendly sun instead, and a smaller less wobbly word. Amy thought it might say Amy because it was the same shape at the front, and that meant she had another peg and another locker, but sera Ramirez who was in charge of the playgroup didn't think so. Anyway, Amy didn't have a sun on her peg, she had a butterfly.
Amy didn't mind about only having one locker and one peg. It wasn't like her stuff slopped out of its place all on its own the way Sam's did. What Amy minded was that they had taken away Gloria's pictures from the big board beside the window.
Amy hadn't liked the pictures, any more than she liked Gloria. Gloria screamed and pushed and bossed, and the pictures weren't that good. One was a blobby platythere, and Sam could draw platytheres better. The other was supposed to be Gloria holding hands with her mama, though it just looked like a lot of triangles to Amy. She'd seen the way Gloria's mama held hands with Gloria, like Gloria was a large piece of equipment that needed dragging from one end of the labs to the other, and it didn't look like the way Amy's mama held hands with her, but it didn't look like any triangles, either. What worried Amy was that if Gloria and her pictures could disappear, then maybe she, Amy, could disappear too.
She was squinting stubbornly at the board, trying to make the new train that stupid Stef Dietrich had drawn be Gloria's platythere instead, when sera Ramirez clapped her hands and told everybody it was time to go out to the sandpit. Amy went to her peg and put her coat on. Most days she could put her coat on by herself, but today her plait got under her collar and made her eyes spring with tears and sera Ramirez had to help. Sam watched her in a serious, worried way, and grabbed her hand when sera Ramirez told them to make pairs. It took a while for everyone to arrange themselves into pairs, because Stupid Stef was crying over nothing at all and Yvgenia wouldn't come out of the toilet.
Amy didn't mind holding hands with Sam. Sam was stocky and blond, and was always the same size as the children a year older, so that people thought he was that age and snapped at him for being slow. She liked him better than Yvgenia, who whispered, or Tommy, who sometimes had snot on his fingers. They marched out through the sunshine towards the sandpit. The sunshine made hard bright shapes, a bit like Gloria's triangles, on the surface of the water where sometimes sera Ramirez let them feed the fish.
"Tommy hasn't got anyone to walk with," said Sam, watching Tommy trail along beside sera Ramirez.
That was because Gloria had gone away, and the person with the short name that wasn't Amy hadn't come yet. Amy scowled. "Gloria's gone. They took her paintings."
Sam looked more serious and worried than ever. "People go sometimes. Valery went."
Amy didn't think she could remember Valery. She screwed up her eyes and tried and tried to remember, but all she could think was that Valery was a word people like mama and sera Ramirez sometimes said. "Did Valery have a peg and a locker?"
Sam didn't say anything, but he tugged at her hand, which was making a fist in his. Amy opened her eyes.
Some azi children were passing by; they bowed to sera Ramirez as they passed, looking even more serious than Sam. They were the same sort of size as Sam and Amy and Stef and the others, but Amy thought they must be older. Maybe azi didn't grow at the same speed. The CIT children from the playgroup were dressed in the bundled, haphazard sort of way that happened when you weren't quite big enough to manage your own shoelaces and mittens but you had to practice anyway, and their clothes were the same cheerful colours as the pictures on the pegs and the lockers. They all moved at their own different speeds, from Stef's sulky edge-of-tearful shamble to Maddy Strassen's skipping bounce.
The azi all wore black, neat black, like they had a pernickety mama, and they walked like grown-ups.
One of them turned round to look at Amy. Amy turned round and looked at him, too, until Sam pulled at her hand again to make her hurry. The azi boy was dark, and pretty like Stupid Stef; prettier, because he hadn't been crying. He had big serious dark brown eyes the colour of the water in the fishpond when the sun wasn't shining.
She felt like he was remembering her, like if someone asked him what colour her shoes were in ten years time when he was a real grown-up man, he would be able to tell them. That made her feel better. Maybe he remembered Gloria, as well, and Valery. Maybe he remembered everything.
"Why don't the azi come and play with us?" she asked Sam.
"They just don't," said Sam. When Sam talked like that, shutting things down, not wanting to talk about it any more, she thought Sam was being like an Older. But he wasn't Older-like in the same way the azi were. Thinking about that gave her a mixed-up feeling, so when they got to the sandpit she didn't play with Sam, she played with Maddy and Yvgenia instead, and she thought about the azi boy and his eyes.
2
"I just don't like him," said Sam. "Maddy Strassen says he's got mean eyes."
Amy carried on doing her makeup in the mirror. She wasn't very good at eyeshadow yet, and it needed concentration. Somehow whatever she did it came out in hard bright clumpy shapes rather than the smooth washes of colour that other people could do, and also, she never seemed to be able to get the same clumpy shapes on one eye as on the other, so she generally looked lopsided. Sam always said she looked beautiful whatever she did, and that made her want to cry or hit Sam, though naturally these days she didn't do either. After all, they were seventeen now, not four and a half.
Outside the door, she could hear the adult party going on. That didn't make her want to cry. It was just uncomfortable and boring, like a puzzle-box she didn't much want to solve and open. The puzzle had a lot of different layers. There was the chatter and the power-games and the who-stands-with-who and the drinks. She didn't like the drinks. They put orange juice in the punch, to show they could afford it, and the difficult, bitter citrus-taste of orange juice and alcohol together would always remind her of Ari's parties.
As far as Amy could see the grown-up New Year parties were just like Ari's, but with another couple of layers of puzzle-box over the top, so that it was mostly about power and money, instead of power and sex. Which was good, because who wanted to see Petros' backside heaving about, or Maddy's mother sitting around naked with her sloppy bare breasts falling into her armpits talking about sex in that silly drunk way Maddy did?
That made her think about Maddy, and what Maddy might - or might not - have said about Jim, and Sam hovering there waiting for an answer. Anyone else that size would have towered or maybe even loomed, but not Sam. "Maddy's just sore because I won't lend him," she said lightly.
"No," said Maddy, coming out of the cubicle and making room for herself at the mirror with a shunt of the hips that made Sam blush, "I'm not sore, because no one will lend me their azi, and Sam won't oblige either, will you, Sam?"
"I'm sure Ari would send Catlin round to run you through those self-defence moves again, if you asked," said Amy, bitchily, because she and Maddy weren't quite friends and she wouldn't have Maddy trying to psych Sam.
"That isn't what I meant and you know it. And anyway, that Jim AJX of yours does have mean eyes, and everyone says the only reason Ari weaselled him out of Green Barracks on a cheap transfer on the internal budget for you was because the rest of Security don't trust him."
"If the mechanisms of what you're calling trust in azi were that easy to understand we'd all be out of a job,"
Maddy made a face at Amy in the mirror and whisked out again. Sam looked like water that had been ruffled. "Amy - "
"What? You've got that air-headed friend of yours, I've got Jim."
"I don't think anyone's got Jim, and I think however many interventions you run on him - "
"Sam, this is nonsense. Jealousy..."
"It's not." He put his hand on her arm. She felt as if she could feel his hand against the bone, through her slippery copper-coloured blouse and her skimpy muscles and her thin skin.
The door opened. The sound of the party tinkled in; laughter, and children running about with sugar cookies, and Windy Peterson had cornered one of the visitors from Novgorod, a soignée woman with braids, and was talking to her urgently about something or another. Amy touched her hair, which was managing to be lank and frizzy both at once, and wished she'd braided it after all.
"Sera, is everything all right?" said Jim.
He managed to be self-effacing even for an azi, which was fascinating considering the way that he moved. The way he moved was fascinating all on its own - it kind of reminded her of the way the horses talked to each other with the way they carried their heads and the way they decided who would go first at a gateway - but it was more fascinating to see how people reacted to it. She'd watched him a lot. When he walked, the movement all started from his shoulders, as if he was pushing his way through invisible water. The last time she'd seen anyone walk like that it had been a news clip of a contender for the position of Mayor of Novgorod, an angry stocky man called Anton Kuznetsov who prided himself on coming up from the slums. Everyone had felt threatened by Kuznetsov. Anyone who walked like that ought to look like a threat, Amy always thought. But Jim didn't.
She knew what it was. She'd studied it in fish. Protective colouration.
"Everything's fine, Jim," said Sam, his body radiating everything's not fine from his own overly drawn-back shoulders to the way his hands were making fists without knowing it.
"Yes, ser Whitely," said Jim without a blink, the yes that meant nothing at all, and didn't Sam know it. "Sera?"
"It's fine. Let's dance." She put her hand on his arm. He smelt good. Most of the people in the room smelt of nerves or sweat or perfume or, in little Ingrid Kennart's case, damp nappy. Jim smelt of clean clothes and clean hair. His hair was sleeked down at present, but it always managed to contort itself into various mad vertical shapes overnight, and she was the only one who knew. He never smelt of fear or sweat or sex like CIT boys did. She supposed it was an azi thing; they had better-regulated endocrine systems, and she should know from the amount she'd studied them.
On the other side of the room, she could see Ari. Ari was just about Amy's best friend, but it often felt as if she was only friends with about ten percent of Ari, and that the rest was off doing other invisible things that involved more puzzles, puzzles Amy couldn't see, that had been set a hundred years ago. Ari's azi Florian was standing a half-step behind her. Her other azi Catlin was dancing with Stupid Stef Dietrich. She was showing him up, Amy thought, with a little flash of covetous pleasure, because she'd wanted Stef for three long years and Stef had never wanted her back.
Stupid Stef thought he was so sharp and so handsome, but when he was dancing he looked flabby and uncoordinated, like he only had about half as many muscles as Catlin and didn't use those right. Amy saw Ari look over at Catlin, just a split-second flash of a look, and it was like they each knew what the other was thinking.
Amy never knew what Jim was thinking unless she was actually in Supervisor mode. But she supposed, sensibly, that that would come in time. He might be an Alpha, and people might mutter about about his Experimental status meaning an untried fix on an old and problematic geneset, but she knew she could manage azi. They couldn't possibly be any more unreasonable than CITs.
And, she thought, her hand finding the firm little bulge of muscle that was Jim's bicep under the faultless azi-black sleeve, and her eyes finding the complicated curved and compressive shape of his mouth, they were much, much more decorative.
3
Novgorod. The subway. Somehow the tiles of the subway were always slippery, even though there was no rain to fall and no mud to be tracked in. Some of the slipperiness was spittle and urine and the chemical cleansers the staff used to try to keep both of those at bay. The rest of it was other people's condensed breath.
It was very early morning. There would be no train for another thirty minutes, but there were two men standing by the turnstiles that led onto the platform. One was neat and dapper and preternaturally still. His long coat did not stir, and neither did his gloved, folded hands. The other was a big blond man in a very good suit, who shifted from foot to foot, disturbed by the cavernous emptiness and the ghostly potential for crowds.
"Councillor Carnath would never condone such a use of Science Bureau funding," said the man in the coat, his voice soft and slightly puzzled, as if this were all nothing but a misunderstanding. "I'm sorry if you were misled."
"Misled? I've got half of Union baying for my blood and the other half under the impression that I'm on their bloodthirsty, Abolitionist side, and I owe that money to..."
"I think I can help you find the money." The voice still sounded deferentially polite, even confiding, but something made the big blond man shake his head and stare, as if he'd discovered a whole new sentient species, here on the Novgorod subway. His foot slid on the tiles as he made the little involuntary movement. He swore. The man in the coat put out an unexpectedly strong gloved hand to steady him by the elbow, and looked into his face.
Sam Whitely had only once seen another man look up at him quite like that, and then it had all been an appalling misunderstanding. He told himself that this was still Amy's azi, that Amy had got set in her ways, calcified over with power and the ability to have things exactly as she liked them, in a way that was entirely understandable in a woman who had been running her own wing of Reseune since she was eighteen and had held the seat for Science since she was fifty. No doubt the azi hadn't actually met anyone who wasn't on Amy's staff in long enough that something had gone wrong with his social responses. It happened, particularly with the Security-trained ones who weren't all that social to begin with.
"You mean Amy can help me find the money," he said, clinging to the belief that the conversation had swung over like a train on these appalling, brutal tracks but had now found its balance once more. "From the allocation."
"Do you really want Amy to know about your gambling addiction?"
The azi had gone eetee; he shouldn't be saying Amy, it should be Councillor Carnath, from him. "I think you should report to your Supervisor when you get back," said Sam, pulling himself up to the higher ground that all CITs had in times like this.
"Thank you, ser," said Jim, as if he'd been paid a small bland compliment. "I hope this won't spoil your working relationship either with me or with the Councillor. Everyone deserves a chance to put things right."
He laid out the explanation in a logical, soft-spoken way that almost distracted Sam from how criminally insane it was. Almost but not quite. "This ends with either Reseune Security shooting me or the Novgorod Civil Guard shooting me," he said bleakly. "Or with me in your pocket forever more."
"I only believe in keeping useful things in my pockets," Jim assured him. Sam had no idea at all whether he should read humour in that rejuv-young, restrained-looking face.
Before he could answer, a youth in an ill-fitting Novgorod Transport uniform ambled up to the turnstiles. "Papers, please."
Sam and Jim looked up at him, the irritated looks on their faces momentarily utterly identical. The youth looked at the papers; passed over Whitely with nothing but a nod, but looked downright respectful when handing Jim's papers back to him. CIT papers, Sam noticed belatedly. Some fool in the Bureau of State had handed over to this monster the papers to pass for a human being.
"Ser Carnath?" said the boy, giving the top of the nearest turnstile a polish with his sleeve. "That's Reseune, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Jim AJX Carnath, and brushed a speck of dust off his coat with his gloved hand. "I'm Reseune."