Florian got the message in the apartment’s security station at the same moment Catlin did, at the console next to him, and they exchanged hardly more than a flicker of the eyes before Florian turned to make the supper arrangements. He keyed. A message flew to Yanni’s Reseune office, and a small routine–another few keystrokes–searched Yanni’s existing appointments for conflict.
None. Unless Yanni had set something up that wasn’t on his schedule here at Reseune, he hadn’t any dinner appointment.
He had one now, and Yanni’s domestic staff had become aware of it in time notto prepare dinner for his homecoming.
Florian fired off a done, advised their own skittish kitchen of formal dinner for two, and resumed work on his own problem, which had, for the last several days, involved searching azi profiles of availables for sera’s household.
The two of them, Ari’s personal bodyguard, were sera’s absolute top‑level staff. Second in rank were Marco and Wes, who ran night shift, and protected the household any time he and Catlin were both off premises–they were older, much older, and canny in the extreme. That would leave Marco and Wes exactly where they were, their backup, no matter what others came in–and besides that, Wes had a special authority, being their on‑staff medic. Corey and Mato ran errands, helped in kitchen and served as backup security personnel as well as domestics–they had come in from another staff, and their qualifications were excellent. A solitary and harried beta, Callie‑BC‑3218, majordomo pro tem, ran their domestic staff with tolerable efficiency.
Then there was Gianni, their pro tem cook. Gianni would have entered meltdown had the guests tonight been more than two, but he would likely manage one more serving, given adequate notice, instead of sera’s usual changeable schedule.
And, be it noted, in Gianni’s defense, he lacked supervisory qualifications–he was not emotionally able to make clear staff assignments. He hated to raise his voice, and, when asked his preferences directly, said he simply wanted to do desserts the way he could really do them and hoped sera would find someone to handle the other things.
Well, they tried. In Callie’s place, they needed someone with the security training necessary to back up sera’s bodyguard, the ability to order CITs assertively, at need, and–a talent more regularly employed–the voiceto command respect from Wing One’s ReseuneSec officers. Callie BC certainly didn’t have the voice. She politely and tentatively suggested rather than ordered. She’d been one of the Carnath household, well qualified in supply; but she hated having to face interpersonal problems. Or deal with CIT emotions.
The household really, desperately neededan alpha like Seely, in Florian’s own view. They needed one, like Seely, that had the capability to act decisively against anyone, even a born‑man who claimed supervisor authority. Thatstrength wasn’t easily come by. The original Seely had been Denys Nye’s majordomo…and there was actually a seventeen‑year‑old azi of that exact geneset‑psychset combination available for training, ideal for the job, in Florian’s own opinion–if sera would possibly take a direct hand and request him. But–sera had said, a logical leap that confused him, first that there was already a Seely‑type being born fairly soon, and secondly she could never abide meeting a Seely‑type in the halls.
True, there was that particular individual in the birthlabs, to be paired with another Abban: that was a problem they well understood. But now that the issue had come up, sera declared she wouldn’t have AS‑10 assigned on the planet, let alone in her household.
Well, it was clearly a decision, one there was certainly no disputing. And absent Seely AS‑10, all other alphas of Contractable age were already committed to specific programs from infancy. There were a very few others, older, some of those quite concentrated in their own specialty, none of them socialized for a household.
So they were down to three household candidates notquite as good, one a beta, the other two gammas, the highest classification they could find that weren’t designated elsewhere–not optimum, but satisfactory, in their estimation. They’d have to mesh smoothly with Gianni and Callie, not get underfoot of sera’s security, andthe majordomo had to know when to turn a situation over to security.
That put it down to the solitary beta, who was at the top end of beta, but under‑socialized for the job.
It was frustrating. They were both up to their elbows in lists of tapes studied and certifications given, which sera could have read at a glance. But sera was either in deepstudy or, lately, on her computer, and on a motion‑sensitive trigger, so neither of them thought it good to ask sera about it.
There were other experts they could ask: they sat in Wing One, in the heart of ReseuneLabs, where such sources abounded. But that meant exposing the makeup of sera’s potential staff to people outside, which they were more than reluctant to do. The manuals of Contracted azi, containing the alterations made in that specific mindset over a lifetime–those were closely guarded, property of that azi and his Supervisor and not available in Library. But for anybody with a Base access above Three–and they were using a small subset of Base One–they could just walk though any unContracted’s manual there was.
Scary, already, in their way of thinking. They hadn’t known how accessible the unContracteds’ manuals were to people in Wing One and Admin. They were supposed to find new people who were safe. They found instead that the ones they already had hadn’t been as safe as they hoped. Somebody had been sloppy. And they ought to report that to sera–when she was herself again.
But that wouldn’t happen until they had the household running smoothly, and that meant relief in the schedule, freedom for them and Marco and Wes to leave the premises and know the apartment would be safe. That meant a good majordomo who wouldn’t go limp under pressure.
And that brought it down to five paired beta genesets in the security track. And finding out whether Denys or Giraud had ordered any special features in lower‑level, unassigned security was, again, in Florian’s estimation, something sera really needed to do, with her expertise. The best they could do was search the database they could reach for all interventions in the training, any decision that indicated a deviation from that geneset’s initial program.
They learned a bit, doing it. They learned more than they’d planned to know about where to look and what to watch for. Social tapes, sera had said to Florian, half asleep, in bed. Just be careful of those. The skill tapes don’t tend to cause problems. Social tapes are generally what to watch for.That was where spurious instructions could get in, at a very general level.
Well, at least the available betas weren’t long on social training. And they were beta‑smart, meaning they’d take tape fast, and literally, if they had to.
They ran their search from the security office inside sera’s apartment, in premises where the first Florian and the first Catlin had been the authority, in an apartment where the first Ari had lived. Two of the wall screens were the weather and the airport schedule–the Yanni matter. Two more monitored the main concourse of Wing One, downstairs, where the number and manner of people out and about the building seemed ordinary. One monitor covered the upstairs, the hall outside. That was vacant, their immediate surrounds.
A bank of other screens, constantly shifting the view, monitored the riverside, the private boat dock and the big wharves where shipments arrived in the town adjunct to Reseune. Cameras swept the town streets, with its usual traffic of azi and CITs on their own business, a bus, some few runabouts whizzing about to the hazard of pedestrians. Another set of cameras swept the broad fields and pens down in AG, where crops were burgeoning out of winter earth and pigs and chickens lived in long, safe sheds, protected, like all the town and labs, by the ring of tall precip towers that kept the world at bay.