She was watching things for Yanni, that was what he’d said. Keep an eye on things while I’m gone. And like a silly azi she’d taken it as something she ought to do as a point of responsibility, along with her studies and everything else. She wasn’t trusting of Hicks, even if he had stood back and let her deal with Denys. But once she’d gotten into what was going on in Novgorod, all the same, it turned out she’d have done better to keep a closer eye on Yanni himself for the last several months.
A meeting with Spurlin. Dinner with Mikhail Corain, in Yanni’s hotel room. And no record kept that she had yet reached via Base One, which meant he hadn’t recorded it in Base Two. She wanted Yanni back here. She wanted him back so she could look him in the eyes and see him answer and hear a really good explanation of what business he had having an off‑record supper with Ari Senior’s old enemy–after an off‑record meeting with Defense, which was a bureau that hadn’t been that nice to herat all.
That didn’t make for a good night’s sleep, no matter how badly she needed it.
BOOK ONE Section 1 Chapter vii
APRIL 26, 2424
1506H
Keyboarding flowed and went on flowing, a spate of pure creation. The hindbrain could do one thing, recording what the brain had already decided had to happen, while the conscious and unconscious raced ahead, doing what they most liked to do. Occasionally Ari muttered a voice command, like a third hand, to locate a piece of programming and get it in queue, hardly noticing.
She tagged certain things to her just‑finished voice recording, then issued another command to autocheck and report on bugs and mandatory halts, a caution, before locking that little bit–and everything ever to be chained to it–firmly into Base One’s files.
That was how she wrote program for her successor…cautiously. She had put her half‑finished creation under a brand new heading, whimsically, as ariagain. It was almost ready to go permanent. Electrons ported themselves where they needed to go and changed what needed changing, creating a new, self‑defending thread…but only in that folder.
It ran and reported clean.
Final button‑push. She handed it to Base One for System trial. More electrons checked it through and did whatever Base One did to protect its own programming. She didn’t know. She just knew how to make it work. Someday she’d learn what the first Ari had known about System–but someday wasn’t this day. She just wanted momentary distraction from Yanni and Giraud and lessons and all of it.
And the little file was only one of a set of files, all linked, all for some day when she would be dead–cheerful thought, but she had to plan for it.
She planned more sessions to follow this particular tape. She was planning, while the fingers, in hindbrain lagtime, handled what she’d thought nanoseconds ago.
On the vid screen at her elbow, a thunderstorm built and broke above the sprawling establishment that was Reseune, thunder that vibrated through the building around her. The tall precip towers that rimmed the cliffs above the river had talked to the weathermakers in orbit, and between them they’d loosed a lair‑sized storm, taking the potential that was up there and making the spate of rain happen now rather than later, when the scheduled flight was due.
Just a small convenience. The weathermakers did nothing in this instance but hurry things a few hours and make sure that Yanni Schwartz, inbound from Novgorod, would land meticulously on time.
Reseune was tiny on the surface of the world that was Cyteen–a white dot from the perspective of Cyteen Station, seat of the Union Senate, which dealt with the wide universe. She’d seen her world–well, half of it–well, at least the mid‑continental Novaya Volga valley, which was the highway down to Novgorod, to Swigert Bay, and the wide ocean.
Mostly the world outside the human zones was desert. The native life saw to that.
Excepting woolwood forests, which loosed deadly strands human lungs never wanted to meet.
Excepting the mud flats and ocean beaches near human habitation, which frothed with an unwholesome stew of dieoff–you really didn’t want to smell it.
Terran stuff had early on gotten into the oceans, a bright idea that the modern generation was working to remediate. Purer Reseune water flowed down to the oceans on this continent these days–gone were the days when raw sewage had run down the river, deliberately loosed into Swigert Bay and outward, killing native life, breeding wildly, and creating that lovely yellow dieoff froth on the beaches.
In the early days, the driving colonial notion of how to manage Cyteen had been changing air and land, ridding the world of native species, creating a new Earth for humankind. Then they’d found that the native life–or part of it–could prolong a human life for decades. Now, the plan was carefully managed enclaves, and in a small program–too small a program, in Ari’s view–PlanysLabs and ReseuneLabs alike tried to save what they’d begun too hastily to destroy.
The first Ari had had a lot to do with that change of purpose…and the growth of the rejuv industry. Through that, and control of the azi system, she’d built the economic power of Reseune, and, using its dominance in the Bureau of Science, gained immense political power.
Yanni Schwartz wielded that power now, being Proxy Councillor for Science. And down in Novgorod, where the planetary legislature sat, the Bureaus of Science, Defense, Information, and Trade, habitual allies, had all joined with Mikhail Corain’s Citizens Bureau to authorize an azi‑production lab at Fargone. She’d heard the news. She’d gotten it before the official broadcast. Budget items she’d seen as headed for easy passage, which was what Yanni was supposedto be promoting down in the capital, had been quietly dropped from the legislative agenda, none objecting.
Sheobjected. And she was pissed as hell.
Yanni was supposed to persuade the opposition party to pass an expansion of the upriver remediation project. But instead…the Council voted on a budget for a new azi lab, on the fringes of space– alpha‑capable, no less, clear out at Fargone. Reseune didn’t let that technology off the planet, and all of a sudden they were moving it out of Cyteen System?
The remediation budget was dead until the next session, and meanwhile how were they going to keep the team of scientists on that project doing something creative? Reseune was going to have to fund their salaries solo, or have them break apart and go onto other projects, momentum lost, knowledge scattered.
Session was over. Yanni was coming home. And she had questions. A lot of them.
Nothing argumentative, she decided. A nice, quiet welcome home. Nothing to let on how much she knew about the secret meetings. If Yanni didn’t know how far she was in command of Base One, she didn’t want to make it too evident; and if he knew, she didn’t want to let ReseuneSec know it.
“Staff memo,” she shot out, via house minder. “Yanni. Dinner.”
That order flew to staff, and, give or take the emotional fragility of the staff cook, she dismissed dinner preparations from her current list of concerns. Florian and Catlin would see to the invitation and make sure Yanni and dinner arrived in due time…if they had to send down to catering.
BOOK ONE Section 1 Chapter viii
APRIL 25, 2424
1652H
Yanni Schwartz was on his flight back to Reseune, and sera, who had been definitely On and angry for the last several days, wanted to see Proxy Councillor Schwartz, socially, with due courtesies, of course–and immediately–for dinner.