Текст книги "Regenesis"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

She walked over to the dresser, picked up Poo‑thing, poor, ignored Poo‑thing. She smoothed the fur around his button eyes, and rubbed his nose into shape. His sweater was all wrinkled. His fat tummy was still fat, and she straightened his feet a bit, and laid him back in the drawer, making room for him. He went on staring. Poo‑thing had no way to blink when she shut the drawer on him and cut out the light.

Shoved it hard the last couple of inches and sat down in her chair and cried. Sobbed, with her face in her hands, trying not to make any sound to bring Florian and Catlin back, or staff, or anybody.

I wanted a childhood,she said to herself over and over. I really wanted a childhood, just a little one, just a year, is that too much to ask? I only wanted a year, and it’s not fair, not fair, not fair! I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t ask everybody to hate me! I didn’t ask to be anything–I don’t want to be, I want to ride Horse when I want, anywhere in town, and not have to worry about people shooting me or trying to run off with me, and I want to have my friends around me and I don’t want to lose them, I don’t want to get them killed, either, and I don’t want Florian and Catlin to have to kill anybody, ever again, but they will.

I want my Uncle Yanni back. I want Maman not to be dead and Ollie to write me he’s coming back, and Valery, and everybody, I want it back the way it was before I grew up…

But it’s not going to be, is it? It’s never going to be. Ollie, maybe. Maybe Valery. They might come, if I can get them all back, all of them.

But they can’t find a teary, stupid girl when they do, can they? I can’t be stupid, or I’ll be dead, and I’ll get other people killed.

She blotted her eyes, one after the other, with the back of her hand. Sniffed. Got up and examined a reddened, unlovely face in the mirror, and got a tissue from the bath, all with a raw, unhappy feeling inside.

She didn’t quite know the girl that looked back at her, red‑eyed, red‑nosed, just human. It was the first Ari’s girl‑face, but it wasn’t the face of the portraits.

Second try with the tissue. Her makeup was a mess. She blew her nose, blowing away the evil spirits, Maman had used to say that. Maman would take a cold washcloth and wash her face and tell her cold water and a clear head would made a good start on any problem.

She did that for herself, washed her face, fixed her makeup. Sharp pain had gone to leaden hurt, just a weight remaining where the pain had been. And that was stupid. Selfish. She’d had her childhood just now, all ten minutes of it; and maybe she should take a chance and have just a little freedom before the whole load came down on her, go do those relatively safe things she could get away with doing, just because she could, before it was forevermore too late.

BOOK

TWO

BOOK TWO Section 1 Chapter i

MAY 8, 2424

Giraud Nye and his companions were steadily putting on weight. At twelve weeks, having doubled in size in the last seven days, Giraud massed 28 grams, somewhat less than a generous shot of the whiskey he’d one day love.

He had gotten fists, and fingerprints, and his general body shape was a little more human. He’d been drinking in the tank’s biosynthetic amniotic fluid, and routinely pissed it out again–proving his kidneys were starting to work, a process that would never stop, in spite of his future abuses to his body, until he did.

His intestines were growing, and began to fill his abdomen. His nerve cells were proliferating, synapses getting organized enough to react to stimuli, but unaware at any higher level–the nerves had no myelin sheath as yet, and that limited their function considerably. Consciousness was nowhere in the picture. His cells all had other jobs to do, mostly that of dividing like mad, according to the map in their nuclei. If it said cooperate, they cooperated. If it said make skin, they made skin, in its varied layers and detail. If it said make nerves, they made more nerves. There was no higher authority.

BOOK TWO Section 1 Chapter ii

MAY 5, 2424

The clothes that hung at the front of the closet, ready for wear, were appropriate for the house–not a construction site–and Ari delved deeper, on her own quest.

She was going outside. On her own. She was ducking lessons today. She’d warned Justin she would. She hadn’t forewarned anybody in ReseuneSec, however, except Florian and Catlin–hadn’t sent word to Hicks, pointedly so. They hadn’t yet gotten the new Security team–they were still taking tape, but most of all Justin and Grant were still reviewing files, and she didn’t have to worry about trusting them yet, so she wouldn’t.

Just Florian and Catlin, and a fast move, that nobody would be expecting, well, except Sam Whitely.

It was still a scary venture–the first time to be really out in open country It was the very first time since they’d shot their way into Wing One that she’d really gone outside.

The makeup was scant, and the clothes she’d picked out had once served for riding–when she’d been able to get to Horse. The weight she’d lost since Denys died meant she could put her fingers in the waist of the once nicely fitting denims. The seat was a little less than fitted, now, but Sam wouldn’t care, out on the behind‑the‑building construction site, out under the cliffs that ringed Reseune. The sweater, at least, was meant to be loose.

Comfortable, and part of her life when Denys had been her protection, and Denys had fussed over her and worried about her breaking her neck–she’d almost believed the old miser had cared, from time to time. On a day like this, she could almost believe something had just occasionally stirred in Denys’s wizened little heart.

He’d say, if he were here, Don’t be a fool. Stay in.

He’d really say something if he knew the information Florian and Catlin were gathering up, and the net they were beginning to weave through the Wing, and around people whose whereabouts they needed to know, constantly.

But today she was going out on her own, not because it was policy, but because it was her chance to do it and she could do it and she would do it.

She was really going outside the safe bounds. A risk, and worth every minute of it. And she was going to scare hell out of Hicks’ office, and probably Yanni was going to blow up and yell, but she was going to do it anyway…just flexing the constraints, just making sure what her freedom of movement was like. She’d make ReseuneSec twitch, and she’d do it again, and someday, on the day she chose, it wouldn’t be a lark.

It wasn’t as if the new construction wasn’t constantly available to Base One in virtuality: she’d seen the new wing grow, day by day. But this, she’d decided, was theday. The whole site had, for the first month, been an ugly brown flat of disturbed earth, aswarm with bots twenty‑four/ seven, following their preprogrammed dig plan, tearing up the landscape and installing lines and conduits–a secret communion between them and the design specs, with rarely a human involved, except to watch it happen. Yanni had given his agreement– Yanniknew what it was, but if Yanni had kept his word, nobody but Yanni knew, not even ReseuneSec.

In the second month, human workers had moved in, installing, with robot assistance, a flat barrenness of ground‑forms, while still more bots scrambled this way and that on spider‑legs, measuring and installing connectors.

Last week, the vertical forms had arrived from upriver, fresh from their use up at Strassenberg, and the site had sudden risen up and up into a confusion of those huge prefab pour‑forms and their requisite braces, everything fitted together with a system of bolts and clamps into a configuration that had nothing to do with Strassenberg: the forms were capable of that.

The main pour had been three days ago. This morning the forms had come down at the apex of the wing, and the featureless new walls stood clear and white in the camera‑view.

Which was no longer enough for her satisfaction, or Sam’s. She hadn’t seen her friends in forever. She’d wanted to call Amy and Maddy out–but that was just too much noise.

“Sera.” Catlin arrived in the bedroom. “Florian is on his way back with the runabout. We can meet him at the curb.”

“Excellent.” Enthusiasm tingled through her. She escaped the bedroom, walked briskly, with Catlin just in the lead, down the hall, through the living room, to the front hall, and out the door to the general corridor.

Escape, for sure. She’d dreamed initially, mere cloud‑castles, of taking Horse out of pasture, bringing him up to Wing One where he’d never been, and simply riding around the end of the building alone and unexpected, but the runabout Florian quickly suggested in Horse’s stead was the practical thing. The safe thing. The thing that wouldn’t bring Yanni storming down on Hicks, and Hicks down on the venture midway with a flock of ReseuneSec agents. A car–that was fairly ordinary. Nobody would think a car was a break for a few hours’ freedom.

Downstairs. Down another corridor, and toward the glass doors that led to the outside. Florian pulled the runabout into view at the curb just as they passed the inner glass doors of Wing One. Door security in the section, ReseuneSec, caught by surprise, jumped to attention, properly opened the outer doors for them as they arrived, and one of the two guards, doubtless in communication with Florian, went outside quickly to open the passenger‑side doors of the runabout, probably thinking they were going down to the labs.

Catlin opted for the front seat, beside Florian–there was a heavy rifle waiting there, and she shifted it to sit down, burdened with her own armament. Ari, carrying not so much as a pocketbook, simply tucked up comfortably in the rear seat, and the instant she had settled and the doors had shut, Florian took off with a snap and an immediate jolt.

Right over the curb near the flower bed and onto the lawn just beyond the building edge–a track not meant to be taken. Florian clearly enjoyed himself in taking them at breakneck speed downslope across the neat grass of the lawn, and, by a sharp right, onto the construction road between Wing One and the river. The landscape bounced crazily. Ari grabbed onto the seat and laughed, wondering what ReseuneSec thought of the maneuver. But no one gave immediate chase, Catlin talked to someone, answering questions, and Ari watched the moving scenery–lazy brown river on the left, the robot‑mowed grasses on the right, where the riverside lawn still remained sacrosanct from the passage of the big earthmovers–

Terran, that lawn. Nothing from Cyteen’s native life got onto Reseune’s territory, except what drifted ashore via the river, and that only‑touched the shore–and died. Such seeds and fragments of woolwood and other deadly things that somehow got past diversion gates in the river itself met a determined last line of defense down there. Dedicated robot sweepers zapped intrusion to cinder, sniffer‑pigs found anything that took root, and a coffer dam and a high‑tech filtration system kept the river water on one side and routed their own runoff back to their own use. All that effort prevented Terran life from getting out any more than they could help nowadays, and most of all it kept low‑level Cyteen life from getting in.

They passed the dim arc of the coffer dam in the river, and swung around the long side of Wing One. Their course still ran well within the safe perimeter of the precip towers that sat up on the cliffs above their little valley, and on matching cliffs across the wide Novaya Volga. There wasn’t any real fear of a perimeter collapse, in these days of triple redundancy in Reseune’s atmospheric bubble; but the runabout, designed for the outback, with its six tires and a pressure seal on its doors, was nevertheless well‑equipped for that eventuality, with breathing tanks and emergency suits right under the seats: a small yellow sticker advised of that resource, should the sirens sound.

Emergency supplies that might serve in the event of a back country wreck might be just a little redundant for an overset on the construction road, which was their most immediate peril. Florian took evident delight in crossing over the ruts of the big earthmovers’ tracks. Ari braced herself between seat and window and craned for a bouncing view as they swung another right turn around the far end of Wing One, near her current apartment, which presented blind walls to the riverside.

The newest part of the construction came into view through the front glass, walls still shrouded in forms. The new wing butted right up against the back wall of Wing One. Eventually there would be a subterranean access at that contact point, somewhere in that mess of gray pour‑forms. Right now that connection with Wing One was a maze, a jigsaw of shapes and bolts and supports. And Wing One would be open for revision, renovation, after all the chaos since Denys. There would be shops again, and restaurants, maybe even a new Wing One Lab, convenient for her use. Someday.

Suddenly, with a veer over rough ground, new foam‑construction hove into view, off‑white walls, brilliant and plain. The new wing as a whole formed a large, two‑storied U, which would join not only Wing One, but attach to Admin on the other side, giving the new construction direct access all the way from Wing One to Admin, and incidentally creating considerable interior space for roofed gardens.

That last part was her idea. Why have a U and not take advantage of that inner space? Why confine all the flowers to the distant Botany Wing? They could bring them where people could enjoy them without a trek way down to the botany labs. Incorporate them into a roofed‑over section of this wing–

Or why not small nooks of allthe wings in Reseune, while they were at it?

Economically extravagant, Yanni had called that notion, and nixed it, while letting her have her flowers in the new wing. But she thought increased productivity would pay for it over time, particularly when it increased the productivity of the best psychtechs, operators, supervisors and designers in the known universe–which was what Reseune was.

And she’d said so, and Yanni had said, “When it’s on your watch.” And that day, she’d decided, was coming. She had to think of it calmly, in terms of what she’d do, once she could–and thanks to the sudden need to use Reseune funds to keep projects working–all her plans had to be tempered with thoughts of how to pay for things.

Yanni didn’t wholly approve what she was doing. She’d put it down to the fact he was old‑way, in so many areas, including his support of the first Ari’s policies: if it was old, it was good enough until it fell apart–that was what she’d thought was a simple truth, until she’d found out he had an agenda that needed a budget…a huge budget, cannibalizing hers.

It was true–even Yanni admitted Reseune needed attention, because there was a lot falling apart. Reseune had started complete bare‑bones and in a hurry, when humans first set up a permanent habitat down here–Reseune had come first, even before Novgorod, in any operational sense. So the buildings had all grown in the same white‑walled, all‑survival style of the early colony, right through her grandmother’s time, and the first Ari’s. Yanni’s generation, previous generations–that architecture was what they knew, and it was getting old, hammered by the storms and repainted and refoamed time after time to patch things.

There hadonce 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’tReseune 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. Novgorodcould 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 thiswing 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 werealready 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 herorders 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, andhis 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 shewas worth anything in a construction project; but the dress shop was a front. Maddy collected gossip–she knewthe 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 wouldcome 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 nothave 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’dlearned 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. Giraudmight 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 confidence 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, herapartment 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.

Herapartment, this apartment, was going to be a lot of glass, and lights, and living things. Herhome 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.