Emergency supplies that might serve in the event of a back country wreck might be just a little redundant for an overset on the construction road, which was their most immediate peril. Florian took evident delight in crossing over the ruts of the big earthmovers’ tracks. Ari braced herself between seat and window and craned for a bouncing view as they swung another right turn around the far end of Wing One, near her current apartment, which presented blind walls to the riverside.
The newest part of the construction came into view through the front glass, walls still shrouded in forms. The new wing butted right up against the back wall of Wing One. Eventually there would be a subterranean access at that contact point, somewhere in that mess of gray pour‑forms. Right now that connection with Wing One was a maze, a jigsaw of shapes and bolts and supports. And Wing One would be open for revision, renovation, after all the chaos since Denys. There would be shops again, and restaurants, maybe even a new Wing One Lab, convenient for her use. Someday.
Suddenly, with a veer over rough ground, new foam‑construction hove into view, off‑white walls, brilliant and plain. The new wing as a whole formed a large, two‑storied U, which would join not only Wing One, but attach to Admin on the other side, giving the new construction direct access all the way from Wing One to Admin, and incidentally creating considerable interior space for roofed gardens.
That last part was her idea. Why have a U and not take advantage of that inner space? Why confine all the flowers to the distant Botany Wing? They could bring them where people could enjoy them without a trek way down to the botany labs. Incorporate them into a roofed‑over section of this wing–
Or why not small nooks of allthe wings in Reseune, while they were at it?
Economically extravagant, Yanni had called that notion, and nixed it, while letting her have her flowers in the new wing. But she thought increased productivity would pay for it over time, particularly when it increased the productivity of the best psychtechs, operators, supervisors and designers in the known universe–which was what Reseune was.
And she’d said so, and Yanni had said, “When it’s on your watch.” And that day, she’d decided, was coming. She had to think of it calmly, in terms of what she’d do, once she could–and thanks to the sudden need to use Reseune funds to keep projects working–all her plans had to be tempered with thoughts of how to pay for things.
Yanni didn’t wholly approve what she was doing. She’d put it down to the fact he was old‑way, in so many areas, including his support of the first Ari’s policies: if it was old, it was good enough until it fell apart–that was what she’d thought was a simple truth, until she’d found out he had an agenda that needed a budget…a huge budget, cannibalizing hers.
It was true–even Yanni admitted Reseune needed attention, because there was a lot falling apart. Reseune had started complete bare‑bones and in a hurry, when humans first set up a permanent habitat down here–Reseune had come first, even before Novgorod, in any operational sense. So the buildings had all grown in the same white‑walled, all‑survival style of the early colony, right through her grandmother’s time, and the first Ari’s. Yanni’s generation, previous generations–that architecture was what they knew, and it was getting old, hammered by the storms and repainted and refoamed time after time to patch things.
There hadonce been different ways of building. Elsewhere, Earth existed, as baroque as anyone could wish. Distant Pell Station was growing a forest inside its heart.
So why shouldn’tReseune have flowers? A sociological plus, flowers. Not one more huge population‑burst to factor in, dug in on an iceball and getting less and less like Reseune, or Gehenna, or the star stations.
A chance to contemplate something fractal, something to take the tension off…wasn’t a stupid idea, even if it didn’t make money in any visible way. Novgorodcould use some parks, some gardens. It wasn’t the frontier any longer. It was the place people lived, and they were getting changed, sociologically, by the walls, and the dynamic of the buildings they’d been living in, and how they fitted together. Gardens focused people into a different mode.
And the inner garden to go in thiswing was altogether her design. She’d sketched a plan or two for her someday castle, her place with flowers, even before Denys had died. She’d talked about it with Sam Whitely and Maddy Strassen and Amy Carnath in those days– those days–as if it wasn’t just last year. Just daydreaming, she’d called it.
But on the day she knew she needed urgently to set up in newer, safer spaces, she’d called on Sam, for what he knew–she’d entrusted the whole project to Sam, who was eighteen, the same as she was–Sam, backed by the resources and computer software of two major construction companies and Sam’s own gift of getting along with most everybody. He’d stood up for her through Yanni’s misgivings, and then Yanni’s assigning senior design to the project. Sam hadn’t been off‑put, and he’d doggedly stuck to their design.
Sam was, depend on it, properly respectful of older engineers, but he’d run the designs through the computers himself, and she’d gotten her tall tower with the slanted walls that the older engineers said weren’t cost‑effective. He’d had the company architects, he’d assured Yanni, cross‑check and criticize structural soundness with their specialized software, new materials said it would stand, safe and strong; and she’d personally bet the architects Sam consulted had found very little fault in what Sam put together. ReseuneSec’s labs, their only recourse for the specialized kind of construction that provided systems, had provided some black box areas, just the dimensions and access requirements for electronics that would go in under senior Admin’s direction. Those werealready in: Yanni had had technicians out here on that job before he’d left for Novgorod, all the while keeping the nature of the construction out of public gossip. The virtuals didn’t show up on regular vid channels, nobody saw what was going on back here, and it had been going on for months.
Even while the tech designers were still fussing over the details, Sam, with herorders behind him, had had the earthmovers running on the basic footprint. Starting with the basic Reseune design had helped Sam speed things along…but at the top of the U was her design, Sam’s design, inside that footprint. Maddy had gotten a word or two in about the interiors. Amy had contributed her usual cold water bath of cost and common sense, then finally thrown up her hands and said that if Yanni ever agreed to that much expense, she’d be very surprised.
But Sam had gotten his budget, andhis security‑class installers–Yanni had given him the go‑ahead for just one spectacular variation on the old theme, at the top of the U–her apartment. And then Yanni, maybe knowing she was going to be mad as hell about what he meant to do in Novgorod, and wanting to give her a toy to distract her, had approved it all and let the companies call in the resources. So their little club, their childhood clique, had found themselves building for real.
Herself, Amy and Sam, Maddy, Florian and Catlin: when they were kids, they’d gotten anywhere and been responsible for all sorts of mischief–outright sabotage of Denys’ intention to watch her, for starters. And sometimes they’d just done things for revenge, on a kid’s scale, some of them pretty vile.