Regenesis (14 page)

“We’ll order initial tape for Domestic Supervision,” he said. That would call Theo BT-384 and his partner Jory to the labs for what they might think was a routine training update. Instead, under a heavier sedation, a deepset tape would reorder their priorities and loyalties and bind them simply to their Contract. They would lose the focus they had, and gain a more general one, the knowledge they were to serve an important domestic situation somewhere, of some sort, together.

That would break their absolute focus on their current general assignment. It was—an azi could well remember—a disturbing and emotional experience. Theo and his partner had been destined for ReseuneSec. But they were about to run a ReseuneLabs household…a different world indeed. The walk they would take from the barracks to the labs where they would get their Contract would be a cold walk through absolute non-existence.

It felt so good when the Contract turned out to be the answer to every study, every ambition, every hope of one’s life. Even knowing intellectually that the emotion was pre-programmed in an azi, it still jolted everything, still evoked a response of absolute joy.

“Bring them here for all the specific skills tapes?” Catlin said, following his train of thought, as she did, without his quite uttering it. It was best to have that part done here, not exposing any of sera’s people to lab personnel.

No need to report the decisions to sera. Sera had told them handle it. They did.

They took Theo BT-384 and Jory GJ-2720 to be in charge of the household, Callie to be under their authority in domestic matters, but in charge of orders and supply, which would please Callie no end. They took the other set. Logan GL-331, with his partner Hiro GH-89, for general staff under Theo. Jory, and Callie, and then swept up two individual epsilons, Tomas and Spessy, for general cleaning and maintenance service, with a paired couple of thetas, Del and Joyesse, for maids of all work and sera’s personal wardrobe.

And most of all—the one find about which they’d had absolutely no doubt—two other betas, a paired set, Wyndham and Haze. Wyndham and Haze, both male, had been destined for a hotel in Novgorod, to run a very high-end restaurant with a VIP security certificate—the CIT master chef intended to retire. The CIT chef and the hotel could wait another year. Sera had just gained one sure prize.

Staff might be a little crowded downstairs, given the number of rooms in the lower half of the apartment given over to storage. The CIT living space of the apartment was very large. Its travertine floors and high-ceilinged rooms had easy room for a hundred CITs at a party. But the staff, all but themselves and Marco and Wes being resident in the downward L of main staff quarters, were going to need more beds than they had. Those had to be ordered.

Training tape would occupy the new staff’s leisure time for several weeks. They’d be in deepstudy in their quarters in their off hours during that time, and then they’d emerge to make the place run smoothly.

Especially the front door. Especially the kitchen.

So. Decision made. Die cast. The new staff would go through medical, take their pre-Contracting tape. Contracting itself took a single moment, once that essential groundwork was done. They’d first be taught social behaviors and protocols in lab, nobody but Admin knowing where they were going, and there would be no great fuss here to disturb sera’s mood. All sera had to do was agree to it and sign the request.

Once it was done—they could draw a breath, not be working twelve hours on and twelve off, as they were now, as they had done for months, while sera studied day and night, and ran background checks on everyone around her. They didn’t disagree with sera’s preoccupation with security. They weren’t quite sure that the threat to sera’s life was entirely past. They’d seen her through childhood. They’d gotten her this far alive.

But the day was coming when sera would need a staff far more complex than they had ever been, and in which they might not be as close to sera, as all-in-all, as they had once been. They saw that coming—though Florian was upset by the prospect. Sera seemed less happy because of the pressure on her, and that defined everything. She’d snapped at him. She’d never done that and not apologized. So they had to take special care of her.

“We should monitor Justin tonight,” Florian said abruptly, “or Hicks will. I don’t want that.”

Catlin said, “I can do it.”

“Set it up,” Florian said. “I have to make sure Gianni stays on track until dinnertime. Then we’ll trade assignments, and I’ll go.”

The storm passed overhead. On the monitor, a ray of sun hit the tower, in the gray, glistening world outside.

A private plane, glistening white, came in wheels-down for a landing on a puddled runway. The tail emblem, the Infinite Man of ReseuneLaboratories, was distinctive. It was Reseune One.

Yanni was back.

A
PRIL
25, 2424
1748
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“How was Novgorod?” Ari asked purposely, over the shrimp cocktail. “Quiet?”

“Agreeably so, actually,” Yanni said. He had never yet asked the reason for the dinner invitation.

Not uncommon for Yanni. Yanni Schwartz gave very little away, and he’d always accorded the same privilege of reticence to her, since she had been on his good list, or thought she was. He was on rejuv, of course, dyed his hair, was eightyish and looked forty, except that most people that looked forty weren’t forty. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a strong face. She liked that face. And it made her feel better that he showed up on time and didn’t act guilty at all—as if he was going to have a reason to give her. Oh, she so hoped he had a reason. Something in her unknotted just because he’d come in and met her cheerfully, without a flinch.

He’d brought her a trinket from the capital. Giraud used to do that, and this one, when she unwrapped it, looked even to be from the same company as some of Giraud’s gifts. It was a desk sitter, a little glass globe with a holo insect that crawled in a circle so long as you set it in the light. He had handed it to her before they sat down at table and she had it by her plate. It kept running, brilliant green armor and serrated jaws, round and round.

The gift-giving urge in Yanni was new. She noted that.

One thing was sure: Yanni had thought about her when he was in Novgorod, and Yanni had never particularly curried favor: he’d always been fair, and expected it in return. Now that he was here, at her table, she could actually quit fluxing and remember Yanni, not the reports she’d found in System. Maybe he
had
brought her the thing just because it tickled his fancy, and made him think of her.

In her opinion, that was the way family ought to be. She’d almost begun to think of him that way. Until this last week.

“I love the bug,” she said.

“Beetle,” he said. “A Glorious Beetle.”

“Well, he is, but is that his name?”

“
Plusiotis gloriosa
. Native to the western hemisphere of Earth.”

“He’s really that green?”

Yanni took a little advert card from his coat pocket and set it in the middle of the table, between them and facing her. “You can actually get a collection of insects. The butterflies were obviously the big item. But you have one of those, I remembered. I thought you’d rather have the beetle.”

She had Giraud’s butterfly. They lately had real butterflies in the Conservatory. All sorts of them. But they didn’t have a beetle.

“I absolutely love him,” she said. It had been ages since she’d spent time in the Conservatory. Reseune sprawled, from the high end, where Wing One sat, down to the town and the fields, and she hadn’t been to the Conservatory since—oh, long before the shooting that had brought Denys down, long before the world had come apart. She and Maman used to go there when she was small, to walk the garden paths and see the flowers.

The family that she had once had, had been broken by Denys’ order. Yanni’s family, too. Scattered by the same set of orders, sacrificed to the Project that was her, sent out to a distant star-station, depriving Yanni of relatives, including stupid Jenna. She wouldn’t be surprised if Yanni did resent her. But she hoped he didn’t.

Lump-lump-lump, in its endless silent circle.

She dropped her napkin over it, to remove the distraction. Looked Yanni in the eyes—they were brown, direct, hard eyes.

“It doesn’t have an off switch,” Yanni said. “Except light.”

“So there’s nothing up I should know about,” she said, direct to the point, regarding Novgorod and the legislative session.

“Oh, the Paxers are kicking up the usual fuss, we
didn’t
get the remediation increase we wanted, and there’s talk about putting an embargo on Earth-origin wood veneers.”

So he wasn’t going to get to the topic of secret meetings straight off. So neither did she. “It’ll only drive up the price. It won’t ever stop the demand, will it?”

“It might drive the price far beyond what the average citizen can afford. Take the mass out of mass market. Earth is claiming its woods are a sustainable resource. We’re saying they’re not, on an interstellar scale, and we’re talking about a hundred-year embargo.”

“If Alliance doesn’t go with it—” she began. She hadn’t been interested at all in that, but a brain cell fired, and she couldn’t help it.

“Alliance is actually going with it.”

That
rated a lift of the brows, for an item that hadn’t been to the forefront of the news at all. The Alliance kept their hands off their own forested world, at Pell, a planet called Downbelow, barred exploitation by vote of the station residents, if not the far-flung ship-communities that were the greatest majority of that government.

So the whole ecosystem of Downbelow was protected from intrusion—because practically speaking there was nobody but Pell Station that would mount an expedition down there. The ecological sensibilities of the Alliance capital, however, had not stopped the Alliance merchanters from buying up luxuries out of Sol System hand over fist, which they were selling, hand over fist, to Union. Since the Alliance sat halfway between Union and Sol, a ban on certain Earth products
couldn’t
be meaningful without Alliance compliance, and she’d have bet Alliance, composed mostly of merchanter families, wouldn’t possibly go with it.

Uncommon that Alliance and Union both, former enemies, ended up banning something so prized by the rich. Never mind that they could easily synthesize the product. Never mind that there were very good synthetic veneers, down to the cell structure, if you wanted that. The fact a thing was
real
aroused a certain lust to possess, in certain moneyed circles. People would pay fortunes for what was
real
and Earth-origin. Crazy, in her opinion.

“Well,” she said. “So no more wood from Earth?”

“I think it will pass in the Council of Worlds,” he said. “A lot of talk, a lot of fire and fury and discussion. The spotlight’s on the users of certain products, and no senator wants to be tagged as one of the conspicuously rich consumers. They’ve exempted historical pieces from the ban. I’ve objected that we’ll see an uncommon glut of relics coming out of Earth. And we get one other quiet little provision—the Hinder Stars Defense Treaty gets moved forward. Talks renewed.”

“That’s good.” It was.

“So,” he said, in a changing-the-subject tone, “how are things here?”

And still no mention of the private meetings. “Same as last week. Same as the week before.” There was some local news, not as dramatic as the ban on wood veneers. “The new wing has its foundations laid.”

“Saw that, as the plane came in. Looking quite impressive back there.”

“They’re mostly finished with the storm tunnels and accesses now—conduits are going in.
And
they finished the power plant up at the upriver site. Precip stations are about to go online.”

Not that much besides a twenty-bed residential bunker and a machine shop stood on that remote site yet. The new building, well upriver, was in the early stages, a lot of raw earth and robots at the moment, superintended by a small azi technical crew and a supervisor, and soon to be occupied by the loneliest and craziest people on Cyteen, line-runners on the automated precip stations.

“Fine,” he said. “And how are your studies going?”

“Oh, good enough.”

“So—” Archly. “—are we moving researchers in upriver?”

“We’re a few months from that.”

“I don’t think I’d like the climate.”

She didn’t like the implication of that, not at all. He’d sensed she was stalking him. He’d Got her. She was sure her face had reacted in some dismay. As of now, it had a frown, which she immediately purged.

“Oh? And what did you
do
” she asked, in her best Ari One mode, “in Novgorod?”

“You have to trust me.”

And
now
was he going to bring up those secret meetings? “Oh. I do, but I’d really like to know, and you know I’d like to know.”

“Well, I agreed with Corain on a compromise. Fargone’s hurting for jobs. His constituency
at
Fargone is extremely important to him getting re-elected if he’s challenged for the seat. So we put in a new lab wing. We get Centrist Party support on a rider tacked onto that bill,
because
it helps Corain’s constituency at Fargone, and, here’s the core of it: the Eversnow project gets underway.”

“Eversnow!” That hadn’t been part of the report.

“Eversnow.”

“It’s a dead project.”

“Not dead. We get a station at Eversnow, a full blown research station
on
Eversnow, and a new lab at Fargone that’s very quietly aimed at terra-forming, exactly as originally planned on Cyteen—the Centrists’ favorite dream—but out there, where it’s
not
going to cause us trouble.”

Her pulse rate was getting up. Her blink rate would be. And he’d read that in a second. “So we’re suddenly friends with the Centrists and we’re terraforming Eversnow, of all things. And producing alpha azi at Fargone.”

“A few.”

“We
have
a lab at Fargone. The Rubin Project was at Fargone.”