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 supposedto be promoting down in the capital, had been quietly dropped from the legislative agenda, none objecting.
Sheobjected. 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 notto 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 voiceto command respect from Wing One’s ReseuneSec officers. 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 neededan 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. Thatstrength 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.