Regenesis by C. J. Cherryh

own leap of logic bothered me and I wanted your reaction on it, but do I get a sensible discussion, on this one or the last two weeks? No. First you ignore it—”
    “I didn’t ignore it. I corrected it!”
    “Twice, without any explanation!”
    “I’d think you damned well knew my objection!”
    “I’m not reading your mind!”
    “So I said something, tonight!”
    “In the bar? You didn’t say something in any rational way. You went orbital without a launch, just up there, bang! No preface, no sensible discussion, nothing but a fucking emotional reaction, alcohol-fueled, and fluxed to the max. You aren’t thinking clearly on this. Dad. If you saw something in my work that triggered a flash of your own—”
    “Don’t you go patronizing with me!”
    “All right, all right. This is it. We’re going home.”
    “Home. Is that what you call it?”
    “I live in Wing One! I live there because there was a time, thanks to my trying to find out about your situation, that I was apt to be arrested, which was damn near a monthly event in my life, and it was getting serious, about then. I’d have been in lockup. That was my choice.”
    “And then things all changed. All right. Level with me. There was a time they wouldn’t trust you. I’m not talking about the little darling. I’m not even talking about Denys. I’m talking about Yanni. They wouldn’t trust you. Now they do. Why?”
    “Because she told them to. Because Denys Nye is dead, and his apparatus isn’t functioning any more. Because Yanni likes me better than Denys did!”
    “ Because she told them to . Because she’d had a chance to work you over, that last time, when Grant was in Planys, and you were here solo, in her reach.”
    It was too close to the truth. He didn’t want to lie about it. “She’s a kid. Dad.”
    “She’s a monstrosity. And she got her hands on you when Grant wasn’t around. She finished what her predecessor started. Didn’t she?”
    “Dad…”
    “I’m not hearing you deny it. Is it true. Grant? Did she do that?”
    Silence from that quarter. Grant had prior orders, an instruction from his current Supervisor that outranked anything his first Supervisor could order on that topic.
    “I draw my conclusion,” Jordan said. “She did. Just you? Or both of you?”
    “I have the session tapes,” Justin said, braced for the storm. “And nothing happened. She asked me where I stood on certain matters. I satisfied the questions—that I wasn’t an assassin. That you weren’t. And Grant wasn’t.”
    “Let me see the tapes.”
    Reasonable request, on one level. But not a good idea. That second thought flashed up, fast and hard: Jordan wasn’t any father—Jordan and he twitched off exactly the same impulses: Jordan took a deep breath and he felt as if he had just breathed. Jordan flared off and his own adrenaline surged, mirror-image. He couldn’t help it. He was a PR, Jordan’s exact replicate, and the resonances were there, every muscle twitch. It was his face, as he’d never be, because he’d started rejuv at thirty-five and Jordan hadn’t until forty-five—but it was close enough. Every lift of a brow, every frown, psychologically connected as they were, to hoot, by Jordan’s having brought him up as a son—resonated, in a way a natural son wouldn’t feel it. They were twins. Identicals. And his father, besides all that, besides the fact that his father’s own gut would react to that tape of him lying there, deep-tranked, undergoing questions from Ari’s twin—besides all that, his father was a psych operator, and the first time seeing that tape, Jordan might be in shock, but the second and third time through he’d be gathering bits and pieces, tabs, things he could use in a constant, battering attempt to undo everything he’d seen done, to grab hold of parts of his son’s soul and jerk—hard. Every damned time anything came up that Jordan didn’t like, he’d have? a key to his psyche that nobody else