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 supposed to be promoting down in the capital, had been quietly dropped from the legislative agenda, none objecting.
She objected. 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.
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 not to 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 voice to command respect from Wing One’s ReseuneSec offi
cers. 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 needed an 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. That strength 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 not quite 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, and the 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.
Another screen, to the left of the view of the town, was occupied with the parsing of lines of code, the beta psychset they were currently investigating.
Three screens, on the side console, kept an electronic eye on sera’s friend Sam Whitely, at work on the construction site adjacent to—but not yet accessing—Wing One. Sam’s azi, Pavel, had a camera clipped to his collar and rarely left Sam for more than a brief errand. That afforded them a good constant view of Sam, who was not the sort to get into trouble in the first place.
The cameras gave them a view of everything and everyone they had to protect…a split screen kept an eye on Justin Warrick and his companion Grant ALX-972, in their small office over in Education, where they were spending the day—it was where they were supposed to be on Thursdays.
They didn’t, however, have one to track Warrick senior—who was on no one’s trusted list, and who was the reason they didn’t want to present the files they were working on to Justin Warrick for review.
Jordan Warrick. There was the problem that disturbed the whole house—and one reason they were anxious to improve sera’s general security. They weren’t a completely conjoined problem, Justin and Jordan. Jordan and Justin hadn’t met face to face since a notable argument some days ago. Jordan had mostly staved in his own apartment since, and had he attempted to crack a restricted level, the whole of Reseune would have twitched.
As it was, ReseuneSec just logged every keystroke, every request Jordan Warrick made of Library, and passed the collected information on. What the elder Warrick asked to access today were all generally published files two years old, so they raised no alarms. The actual content was for some specialist in Hicks’s office—ReseuneSec—to read, because they involved genetic expression, and for that maybe even ReseuneSec would have to ask one of the scientists.
Harmless? Probably. Not definitely, however.
There was also some indication the argument between the Warricks had abated somewhat: Jordan had sent a message to Justin this afternoon asking him to supper. Justin had refused to come. Another message had followed. Jordan had proposed a restaurant. They’d agreed to meet, so ReseuneSec informed them, via sera’s standing request for information about such contacts.
And if they passed a memo to sera to tell her that was going on, sera, in her current mood, would tell them back off, that Jordan Warrick was not her concern at the moment.
But then ReseuneSec, Hicks’s office, would move in on the meeting all on their own. And sera had told them to protect Justin, had she not?
It was like the other instructions this week—a scheduling problem. br />
“We could use both these sets,” Florian said to his partner, regarding the two top candidate pairs. “They could be ready soonest. We could use the extra hands. And one more set than we planned gives us backup to handle a situation at the door. There’s that. Sera won’t mind the cost.”
“Which one should be senior, then?” Catlin asked. “I say BT-384 and GJ-2720.”
“Agreed.” BT-384 and GJ-2720, at twenty-one, were younger than the other two, in fact—senior was always in terms of genetics, rank, and training, not birth-order. But the BT-384 geneset combined with the 348-3498 psychset in fact did have an older history: five of that geneset-psychset combo had been in the military: their complete records had been difficult to get. But by what they did get, all five priors had died in the Company Wars, two sets in the same action, attempting to rescue the company commander. Gallantly devoted and distinguished for courage under fire.
It would have been more commendable to have gotten themselves and their company commander out alive, in Florian’s way of thinking. Still…
“Agreed,” he said. BT-384 and his partner were both security-trained, beta and gamma in Green Barracks, where gamma was as low as they accepted. Both were older than Florian and Catlin were. GJ-2720, female, was currently engaged in demolitions instruction, in the security wing, which was an asset, and a gamma tended to be steadier than most betas in that application. Demolitions was his own field, and he had a certain bias in favor of GJ-2720.
BT-384, their high-end beta destined for majordomo, was surveillance, trained for a desk job, simple monitoring, but that meant good attention to detail, an asset.
None of their choices had at any time been in direct or traceable contact with Denys Nye, Yanni Schwartz, Giraud Nye, Jordan Warrick, Justin Warrick, or any of their staffs. No one had messed with the standard path in any recorded degree.