She had Giraud’s butterfly. They lately had real butterflies in the Conservatory. All sorts of them. But they didn’t have a beetle.
“I absolutely love him,” she said. It had been ages since she’d spent time in the Conservatory. Reseune sprawled, from the high end, where Wing One sat, down to the town and the fields, and she hadn’t been to the Conservatory since–oh, long before the shooting that had brought Denys down, long before the world had come apart. She and Maman used to go there when she was small, to walk the garden paths and see the flowers.
The family that she had once had, had been broken by Denys’ order. Yanni’s family, too. Scattered by the same set of orders, sacrificed to the Project that was her, sent out to a distant star‑station, depriving Yanni of relatives, including stupid Jenna. She wouldn’t be surprised if Yanni did resent her. But she hoped he didn’t.
Lump‑lump‑lump, in its endless silent circle.
She dropped her napkin over it, to remove the distraction. Looked Yanni in the eyes–they were brown, direct, hard eyes.
“It doesn’t have an off switch,” Yanni said. “Except light.”
“So there’s nothing up I should know about,” she said, direct to the point, regarding Novgorod and the legislative session.
“Oh, the Paxers are kicking up the usual fuss, we didn’tget the remediation increase we wanted, and there’s talk about putting an embargo on Earth‑origin wood veneers.”
So he wasn’t going to get to the topic of secret meetings straight off. So neither did she. “It’ll only drive up the price. It won’t ever stop the demand, will it?”
“It might drive the price far beyond what the average citizen can afford. Take the mass out of mass market. Earth is claiming its woods are a sustainable resource. We’re saying they’re not, on an interstellar scale, and we’re talking about a hundred‑year embargo.”
“If Alliance doesn’t go with it–” she began. She hadn’t been interested at all in that, but a brain cell fired, and she couldn’t help it.
“Alliance is actually going with it.”
Thatrated a lift of the brows, for an item that hadn’t been to the forefront of the news at all. The Alliance kept their hands off their own forested world, at Pell, a planet called Downbelow, barred exploitation by vote of the station residents, if not the far‑flung ship‑communities that were the greatest majority of that government.
So the whole ecosystem of Downbelow was protected from intrusion–because practically speaking there was nobody but Pell Station that would mount an expedition down there. The ecological sensibilities of the Alliance capital, however, had not stopped the Alliance merchanters from buying up luxuries out of Sol System hand over fist, which they were selling, hand over fist, to Union. Since the Alliance sat halfway between Union and Sol, a ban on certain Earth products couldn’tbe meaningful without Alliance compliance, and she’d have bet Alliance, composed mostly of merchanter families, wouldn’t possibly go with it.
Uncommon that Alliance and Union both, former enemies, ended up banning something so prized by the rich. Never mind that they could easily synthesize the product. Never mind that there were very good synthetic veneers, down to the cell structure, if you wanted that. The fact a thing was realaroused a certain lust to possess, in certain moneyed circles. People would pay fortunes for what was realand Earth‑origin. Crazy, in her opinion.
“Well,” she said. “So no more wood from Earth?”
“I think it will pass in the Council of Worlds,” he said. “A lot of talk, a lot of fire and fury and discussion. The spotlight’s on the users of certain products, and no senator wants to be tagged as one of the conspicuously rich consumers. They’ve exempted historical pieces from the ban. I’ve objected that we’ll see an uncommon glut of relics coming out of Earth. And we get one other quiet little provision–the Hinder Stars Defense Treaty gets moved forward. Talks renewed.”
“That’s good.” It was.
“So,” he said, in a changing‑the‑subject tone, “how are things here?”
And still no mention of the private meetings. “Same as last week. Same as the week before.” There was some local news, not as dramatic as the ban on wood veneers. “The new wing has its foundations laid.”
“Saw that, as the plane came in. Looking quite impressive back there.”
“They’re mostly finished with the storm tunnels and accesses now–conduits are going in. Andthey finished the power plant up at the upriver site. Precip stations are about to go online.”
Not that much besides a twenty‑bed residential bunker and a machine shop stood on that remote site yet. The new building, well upriver, was in the early stages, a lot of raw earth and robots at the moment, superintended by a small azi technical crew and a supervisor, and soon to be occupied by the loneliest and craziest people on Cyteen, line‑runners on the automated precip stations.
“Fine,” he said. “And how are your studies going?”
“Oh, good enough.”
“So–” Archly. “–are we moving researchers in upriver?”
“We’re a few months from that.”
“I don’t think I’d like the climate.”
She didn’t like the implication of that, not at all. He’d sensed she was stalking him. He’d Got her. She was sure her face had reacted in some dismay. As of now, it had a frown, which she immediately purged.
“Oh? And what did you do” she asked, in her best Ari One mode, “in Novgorod?”
“You have to trust me.”
And nowwas he going to bring up those secret meetings? “Oh. I do, but I’d really like to know, and you know I’d like to know.”
“Well, I agreed with Corain on a compromise. Fargone’s hurting for jobs. His constituency atFargone is extremely important to him getting re‑elected if he’s challenged for the seat. So we put in a new lab wing. We get Centrist Party support on a rider tacked onto that bill, becauseit helps Corain’s constituency at Fargone, and, here’s the core of it: the Eversnow project gets underway.”
“Eversnow!” That hadn’t been part of the report.
“Eversnow.”
“It’s a dead project.”
“Not dead. We get a station at Eversnow, a full blown research station onEversnow, and a new lab at Fargone that’s very quietly aimed at terra‑forming, exactly as originally planned on Cyteen–the Centrists’ favorite dream–but out there, where it’s notgoing to cause us trouble.”
Her pulse rate was getting up. Her blink rate would be. And he’d read that in a second. “So we’re suddenly friends with the Centrists and we’re terraforming Eversnow, of all things. And producing alpha azi at Fargone.”
“A few.”
“We havea lab at Fargone. The Rubin Project was at Fargone.”
“Mostly terraforming research…a clearing house for what we learn on Eversnow. Ultimately–ultimately azi, yes.”
“Alpha production has never left the planet!”
“Our personnel, mind, no release of proprietary secrets. By the time we’re bringing any great number of azi into the Eversnow system, we’ll be on the planet. Azi production. Full scale by then. You’ll be putting together the sets for that population in your lifetime.”
The Eversnow deal had been dead as long as the first Ari. And Reseune had allowed a prerogative of exclusivity to lapse, enabling labs that high‑end, that capable, to run out at Fargone–with the possibility of somebody outside Reseune staff laying hands on the manuals? Bad enough they’d licensed out military thetas to BucherLabs and had thoseproblems to mop up for the next forty years of the first Ari’s career–they’d never done anything like this.