There had once 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’t Reseune 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. Novgorod could 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 this wing 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 were already 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 her orders 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, and his 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 she was worth anything in a construction project; but the dress shop was a front. Maddy collected gossip—she knew the 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 would come 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 not have 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’d learned 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. Giraud might 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?
Her own claim on power, when she did make it? She wanted to be in here when she made her move…safe, isolated, in control. Yanni ran Base Two at the moment: nobody but an Ari Emory and those she permitted had ever run Base One. But Base Two had been in Denys’s hands before that. And having some buried section of Base Two wake up and start actively spying—if Yanni didn’t already run those functions—that wouldn’t be good, no.
They would be in their new, secure apartment before summer ended: Sam promised it, and she had every conf
idence that would happen on schedule.
And the building had taken a big stride this morning: the gray, confusing forms that had stood at the end of the U had given way to a section of white angled planes rising stark and beautiful against the sheer natural rock of the cliffs. Florian turned the little car into the rutted and dusty area of what a sign proclaimed as Parking A, among the giant earthmovers, and Sam was waiting for them there, wearing a hard hat and orange overalls no different from any of the azi who worked with him. Sam’s square face split with a grin as they got out and walked onto the hard, rutted surface that was his particular domain.
“I hoped the pour would finally draw you out here,” Sam said, waving an expansive gesture at the walls. “There you are, people! Home sweet home!”
It was different than anything ever built at Reseune, an extravagant three-story crown at the apex of the new-born Alpha Wing. Her heart beat faster in excitement.
“We’ll be done ahead of schedule,” Sam said. “No bubbles in the pour. Went like a dream.”
That was good to hear. Bubbles in a foam wall were definitely a bad thing, and Sam meant they’d gotten all this foamwork set and hardened without sawing areas out, setting up forms again, and foaming in twice, and no problems with the design. Sam was decidedly happy with his job.
But she wanted to see. She wanted to walk inside, and make it real, not just a virtual image she could get on the computer.
“Can we get in there?” she asked.
“Right this way!” Sam led them all toward a gap in the pour, a broad area with rough notched edges. “This is just a workman’s door—you won’t be able to walk through this wall when you live here: we’ll foam it so it’s just wall, ever after.”
Reseune was like a fortress of sorts, against environmental hazards as much as for any other reason, the only lookout on this exterior side of the building once it was finished would be cameras, no doors or openings of any kind. Her apartment, at the top of the U, jutted out farthest toward the wild and the cliffs, and farthest upward, in its reinforced light-channels. The rest of the U’s ground floor would be offices, a few shops, while the upstairs was all going to be very restricted residences: her apartment would have its main door on the third floor, the way things were in Wing One second floor. But, unlike Wing One’s, her apartment and only her apartment would have an upstairs section above the third floor—that was the height of the crown, up among the angles of the walls. That would be her room, her office, her personal safe place, with Florian and Catlin by her, and their rooms, and all the things they needed, up above the world, almost even with the cliffs.
Right now, the word given out among the CIT workers was that all this construction was new labs. By the time rumor got out that it was going to be a restricted residential area, and hers in particular, the security installations would all be in, and that time was getting very close. By the time Alpha Wing System went on line (and perished immediately as Base One moved in and took over) well, it wouldn’t matter any longer, at that point, what anyone knew. They’d be defended. Everyone she loved would be defended, once System came up and Base One ruled Alpha Wing.
Sam led the way inside, over dusty concrete floors littered with foam-construction crumbles and plaster spatters. Sunlight fell in unlikely rectangles and bars from somewhere above—where not all the construction was finished, Ari supposed. Where they walked, first floor, was going to be offices and residences for wing security personnel other than her personal bodyguard, and they all would have immaculate security clearance.
Her new apartment, over their heads at the moment, would more than protect her—it would innovate. It would be all angles, and surprises like light, and living things. It would inspire her, and inspire her visitors, with things that had never existed in Reseune. Denys’ old apartment, where she had grown up, was a boxy put-together of the ubiquitous Reseune cream-colored walls and recessed lights, just boring, boring, boring—with the same color walls in every room. Oh, it had real imported wood, yes, and all sorts of luxuries like hand-knotted carpet, and bric-a-brac and china. She’d sent the whole lot to storage so that Denys Two, if he one day existed, could have it all intact when he grew up—but, God, that some mentor had to teach a little boy to like that stuffy decor!
And Ari Senior’s apartment, where she lived now, had luxury, a lot of it, and it had its graces, but it was all linear, archway into archway, brown travertine and polished floors that would skid with you if you didn’t watch the rugs, and it had sat vacant for nearly a decade and a half with Base One gone dormant, an interregnum in which someone very, very clever and skilled—like Abban, like Seely—could have gotten into the place or at the place in some clever way they had never detected, with things as small as a human hair. Illicit surveillance might not have waked up yet, because Yanni might not have full use of Base Two—which might have plunged into partial dormancy itself, awaiting some event to bring it live…some event like a young Abban logging onto System.
That wasn’t going to disturb her life. Not in Alpha Wing.
“This way” Sam said, and they followed Sam onto a construction lift. It lurched into action and lifted them up and up a narrow dim shaft to the highest level of the building. “This is your front door,” Sam said, lifting the safety bar to let them out, and waving them toward a single gap in the white, angled walls around them. Light beyond that door was getting in from somewhere up here. It had to be her design, her sun-shaft somewhere aloft, bouncing light from panel to panel.
Her apartment, this apartment, was going to be a lot of glass, and lights, and living things. Her home was going to have fish, a whole wall that was a real tank, not just a projection of virtual fish. They were going to get them all the way from Earth’s tropics—well, via the public aquarium at Pell, which was shipping them to Cyteen, which would immediately ship them down to her.
So when you sat in the living room, there would be that living wall to watch on one side, and when you were in the entry hall, there was going to be a waterfall, with real rock going down to a stone floor, with a clever trick, an air wall, Sam’s idea, to prevent the spray from getting beyond the rim of the pool.
And upstairs in her office, which was going to be right next to her bedroom, there would be living plants behind glass…she’d wanted real birds. She’d had to reconsider that, because anything you imported down to the planet that was ever capable of reproducing had to be clean, with a natural barrier between it and freedom on Cyteen, and had to be considered for the ecology they’d started to restore. The water and the sea were already a mess, that was one thing, and for another, if the tanks ever breached, the fish couldn’t walk across the lawn to get to the river. So they were all right.
So no birds. Just fish. But she could do real science with what she kept. She could do so many things…she could breed fish and get them to a public aquarium in Novgorod, where people could come and enjoy them, and know something about Earth in the process, and something about living next to an ocean.
And instantly, as they walked beyond the second wall, just short of where the security installation would be, she recognized the recess for the water-pool, just the way she’d drawn it, and saw the straight, bare form for the rock, slanting away and up and up on the left.
Everything was white and dusty from the pour. But a glance all the way up showed a series of white planes, and the sun-shafts and pressurized windows she’d asked for must already be in here, too: real daylight came into the area. There was a balcony above that overlooked it all. There were recesses here and there for the electric lighting that would brighten with a vocal command, once System was in. Beyond, in the open plan dining room, was the section of arched roof for the projection that would show the real sky, just the way it was outside—so when it rained, it would cloud over, and when it was night, there would be stars. She wanted all the contact with the planet she could possibly get, living under the umbrella of the weathermakers and precip towers as they did, and being forbidden windows tha
t really looked out on the world.
It would feel open. If it worked, they were going to do the same sky-dome in the big hall of the general public residencies. She was going to fix Reseune. It was going to be a place people wanted to be, before she was done with it. It wouldn’t be the same old utilitarian box-shape and domes, not after her.
It was all Sam again. Sam had taken her rough sketches of years and years ago and played with them in his own computer for years. Sam had lately run it all through the big computers and ended up with real measurements that were going to meet regulations and make design sense, and Sam said he was working with architects who were with him and excited about what he was doing. She’d pulled strings with Yanni to get Sam time on systems at night, and Sam had pulled shift and shift. Give him shapes and he could figure the real building down to the joins and conduits. Give him charge of the logistics, and he had a fine grasp of what had to be scheduled when, right down to dealing with the bot programmers and giving clear orders to the azi workers and the CITs.
More, Reseune Construction wanted him when he was done. They told him he was already official on staff, never mind the regs and his lack of a degree and his age—he’d done his time in tape-study that hadn’t been recorded, but they wanted him. The head of architectural design in RC, the same architect she’d aimed at Strassenberg itself, she’d hired to do the job here, too, and asked him to mentor Sam; but within the first month, RC’s chief architect had just de facto turned Sam and two of his best people loose to handle everything on-site here while he concentrated on the more esoteric technicalities of the precip towers at Strassenberg.
Fitz Fitzpatrick was the man’s name. Florian and Catlin had investigated him top to bottom, the only CIT besides Yanni to be trusted with the knowledge of what was going on here. He was actually an uncle of Amy’s; and the relationship between Fitz Fitzpatrick and Sam was absolutely the happiest of all the string-pulling she’d ever done.