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.
And today? Today Amy was Admin, born and bred–it was Amy who’d had a good deal to do with cajoling Yanni–it was Amy who’d found justification in the figures she laid on Yanni’s desk. Maddy ran an exclusive dress shop, and you’d never think shewas worth anything in a construction project; but the dress shop was a front. Maddy collected gossip–she knewthe female elite of Reseune, knew their tastes, their habits, their liaisons, and their figure flaws; and besides that, Maddy had an eye for decor, and design–and understood the use of the gossip she collected: you wanted something out of someone, you wanted a favor, the name of a contact? Maddy had the key.
And Sam–well, Sam built things. Bigger and bigger things were in the future she planned.
So their juvenile fantasy wouldcome true. They’d be together again–here, in this wing, when this place they’d all planned was done. Not for the reason they’d all planned–never thinking it was for their safety, just one grand continuation of what they’d dreamed of building for the sheer beauty of it.
When they came in, they’d bring their liaisons, their families, their staffs, everything they needed…
And damn it, she’d keep them safe, forever safe, everyone she wanted to protect and nothave vulnerable to plots and gossip and schemes and outright sabotage once she took the reins. The Centrists and the Paxers and the Abolitionists wouldn’t get to the people she loved.
The first Ari–that Ari hadn’t had personal weak spots: she’d kept very much alone through her life: Ari Senior hadn’t trusted anyone but her Florian and her Catlin. But she’dlearned how to use allies the way her predecessor never had. She’d confounded Denys, frustrated Denys–finally gotten the better of Denys.
Now she had the better of Yanni and Hicks of ReseuneSec, who actually knew what this place really was…
Inside or outside this new wing, for Yanni?
That all depended. Maybe. Maybe not, depending on how Yanni took it. And how Hicks did. And what this team he was sending her turned out to be.
“Come see,” Sam’s message yesterday had said. “We’d love it if you could come.”
So here they were, driving along beside the white walls, and the whole project becoming more and more real the closer they got, right down to the feathery pour‑marks on the new walls, where they’d freed the finished wall from the molds.
All the conduits had gone into the forms before the pour, so she’d learned. The new place had a new sensor system, a new computer installation from the basic wiring up. It had new walls without ten thousand ghosty little lucifilaments running in places that were a real archaeological problem to trace…making a security headache for Wing One and most everywhere in Reseune. Systems as arcane as Base One–which had lurked within the lab computers until the day (event‑driven, calendar‑driven, it was never clear) it assembled itself and made contact–just could not surprise her in the new wing. Base One itself would get in, intact, through a prescribed gateway, and settle itself in, while other Bases would have to stop at that gateway and announce their presence to Base One before touching System inside. She trusted Base One absolutely. She was pretty sure it would do what she asked it to do. She no longer trusted, however, the systems where she lived–she hadn’t, from before Denys died. Florian and Catlin had long worried there might be a worm in the works, where Denys and his people had done all the arranging for years. Giraudmight certainly have done things within Reseune’s systems that could spring on them without warning. They’d gotten through the first months post‑Denys without disaster–but who knew what event might trigger something untoward? Giraud’s rebirth? Denys’s rebeginning?