“I know you’ve read the offer,” Yanni said.
“I’ve read it.” Patil said. The beginning didn’t augur well. He had his own notorious temper, he knew Patil’s reputation as a bitch, and he wasn’t going to react. They were safe here, however, from the media and less stable elements of the population, and his contacts had indicated the woman was leaning toward acceptance. Discreet, difficult to read: and that was a plus, in terms of the offer they’d made her.
“And?” he said.
“Not going to change your mind on thisproject?” she asked.
Sore spot.
“I assure you. Giraud Nye set this one in motion. It still moves.”
“The position would be Wing Director in Reseune, at Fargone.”
“Yes.”
“Inside ReseuneSpace.”
“Yes.”
“Under an azi director.”
Well, there was a nasty little tone. Prejudice on that score occasionally did come from stationers, which she had been. It even occasionally turned up in the halls of Reseune, in certain places. It grated on him, in a major way. “Oliver Strassen is a CIT now, Dr. Patil. He’s been a CIT for some time. Social as they come and I’m sure you’ll enjoy his company.”
“Supposing I take this post, I’m to have this signal honor.”
He was, for one heartbeat, not sure they wanted her anywhere near azi, let alone in charge of a program where there would be thousands. She was the best at what she did: that was one reason they’d approached her, that, along with her Centrist connections.
But she wouldn’t be dealing with that aspect of the program. She’d be presiding over a station research installation, for cover, and she’d be well‑insulated. “The deal has sat on the table for three months, Dr. Patil. We’ve answered all your questions, I trust. You’ve been free to consult certain advisors. We appreciate your discretion. Now do you have an answer for us?”
“Your influence, ser, got me hauled down onto this planet two and a half decades ago, cancelled a guaranteed program, shoved me into a teaching position, which is another honor I’d rather not have had. So now you want me to set up a lab, and I suppose you expect I should gratefully vote for you, if you stand in the next elections.”
Oh, she was absolutely everything his aides had said. Brilliant, a Special, a mind ranked as a national treasure. Specials weren’t necessarily nice people–a lot of them were downright eetee. The woman’s students either worshiped or hated her–according to their skills and personal tolerances. But they still enrolled. Nobody cared about a Special’s manners, where it came to her work.
“We haven’t said a thing about your voting your conscience, which I trust, being an ethical woman, you will do wherever you’re based. Hell, stand for Science yourself. You always could have done that.”
“Correction. Noteasy in a military bubble, where politics has kept me for decades. Equally inconvenient to do that from a Reseune Security bubble at the end of space, where you want to send me. I detest the military. I detest Reseune. And you want me to work under a local Reseune director who’s absolutely guaranteed to be a by‑the‑book rule‑follower.”
Ah. Thatwas the concept. Maybe not an entirely irrational prejudice.
“If you knew Ollie Strassen you wouldn’t hold that opinion. And I’d have thought you’d gotten tired of graduate theses. You got caught in a situation, let me remind you, I didn’t personally choose. I still support the decision, for the record, but this post I’m offering you is vastly different; and it may, I hope, make some amends for your time in purgatory. Far‑gone is a very comfortable place.”
“And I’d be under stringent security.”
“You were under that security at Beta, which has far fewer amenities than Fargone.”
“And how long would I be there? Eventually I foresee a hardscrabble station orbiting a snowball.”
“A living laboratory. Your laboratory, should you ever choose to view that world in person. But I think the proposal makes it clear–you’ll never be required to leave Fargone Station. You’ll work in a civilized, state of the art laboratory, handling everything from there…a three‑month lag in information, necessarily, six on a query tothe object of your operations and back again, but you’ll be in civilized surroundings, under perfectly innocuous cover, so long as you yourself choose to be.” Give it a few years, and he’d bet that Eversnow would draw her out to the site. Hands‑on work, a whole world for a lab, would draw Sandi Patil like an addiction: he knew her history She’d eventually get exasperated with the six‑month timelag on her results and go to Eversnow herself…if she’d take the post in the first place. And nothing he had thus far heard from her discouraged him from enlisting her. “Let me be perfectly open with you,” he said quietly. “Yes, you got an infamously bad deal during the War–”
“I got an infamously bad deal, damned right. Yanked out of my own research. Lured onto this dustball for a huge program I worked on for fifteen years–that got canceled six weeks before it implemented, largely thanks to Reseune. Pardon me if I have just a little apprehension about agreeing to another Reseune operation.”
“There’ll be no going back on this.”
Patil stared at him, dark eyes in a pale face surrounded by pale hair, and right now there was no beauty, nothing but harsh, hard assessment. “And how long will you stay in office, Proxy Councillor? And how long until this kid comes along and cancels everything I’m working on, just the way her predecessor did?”
Blunt question.
“We advance it now,” he said carefully. “We get the project implemented. That way there’ll be no profit in notgoing ahead, and there’ll be, let me remind you, nothing like the die‑off zones, nothing like woolwood. Or platytheres.”
“It’s a damn snowball!”
“It’s a Cyteen‑class planet in a million‑year deepfreeze. Remember you’ll sit at Fargone, safe and warm and in all the comforts. You can socialize with Reseune staff–or not–at your pleasure, so long as you maintain cover. And you’ll have a planet to work with, a 30‑billion‑cred budget, for the next several years, and the warming–let me breach a little security here–is advanced beyond our first projections. We’re going to jumpstart it with a few limited impacts this year, followed up by five more solar satellites as well as the research station. How fast canyou push it, if we gave you a wide‑open budget? And, once it’s that far advanced, how soon until you no longer haveto maintain cover?”
Lips went thin. But the eyes held thought. A lot of it. Fast. “Still a lot of practical unknowns with the snowball. Deep ocean. How much life is in the sea floor? How complex? You’ve got samples. The military is dialing up the heat with not a notion in hell what they’re doing, beyond polluting it with the Earth biome and making themselves a nice little salt puddle. Brilliant. Is Eversnow life going to fight back, and how hard? And what kind of a mess do we have if you change your mind on this one midway?”
“This will be a centuries‑long program…with a massive budget, on a bipartisan agreement. It incidentally gets you out from under Defense, back into Science, and gives you absolute authority about what drops onto that world–which may be some little incentive.”
Guarded look, after a furtive spark. He had her. “Maybe.”
“So do you want your name on it? Yes or no? It’s yours, if you want it.”
“No communications restrictions. Free access to Fargone, free access to Cyteen Beta by shipmail, no damn censoring of my articles for publication, once the lid comes off. And a 2,000‑standard‑kilo personal‑goods allowance.”