Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  The storm passed overhead. On the monitor, a ray of sun hit the tower, in the gray, glistening world outside.

  A private plane, glistening white, came in wheels-down for a landing on a puddled runway. The tail emblem, the Infinite Man of ReseuneLaboratories, was distinctive. It was Reseune One.

  Yanni was back.

  Chapter ix

  April 25, 2424

  1748 H

  “How was Novgorod?” Ari asked purposely, over the shrimp cocktail. “Quiet?”

  “Agreeably so, actually,” Yanni said. He had never yet asked the reason for the dinner invitation.

  Not uncommon for Yanni. Yanni Schwartz gave very little away, and he’d always accorded the same privilege of reticence to her, since she had been on his good list, or thought she was. He was on rejuv, of course, dyed his hair, was eightyish and looked forty, except that most people that looked forty weren’t forty. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a strong face. She liked that face. And it made her feel better that he showed up on time and didn’t act guilty at all—as if he was going to have a reason to give her. Oh, she so hoped he had a reason. Something in her unknotted just because he’d come in and met her cheerfully, without a flinch.

  He’d brought her a trinket from the capital. Giraud used to do that, and this one, when she unwrapped it, looked even to be from the same company as some of Giraud’s gifts. It was a desk sitter, a little glass globe with a holo insect that crawled in a circle so long as you set it in the light. He had handed it to her before they sat down at table and she had it by her plate. It kept running, brilliant green armor and serrated jaws, round and round.

  The gift-giving urge in Yanni was new. She noted that.

  One thing was sure: Yanni had thought about her when he was in Novgorod, and Yanni had never particularly curried favor: he’d always been fair, and expected it in return. Now that he was here, at her table, she could actually quit fluxing and remember Yanni, not the reports she’d found in System. Maybe he had brought her the thing just because it tickled his fancy, and made him think of her.

  In her opinion, that was the way family ought to be. She’d almost begun to think of him that way. Until this last week.

  “I love the bug,” she said.

  “Beetle,” he said. “A Glorious Beetle.”

  “Well, he is, but is that his name?”

  “Plusiotis gloriosa. Native to the western hemisphere of Earth.”

  “He’s really that green?”

  Yanni took a little advert card from his coat pocket and set it in the middle of the table, between them and facing her. “You can actually get a collection of insects. The butterflies were obviously the big item. But you have one of those, I remembered. I thought you’d rather have the beetle.”

  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’t get 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.”

  That rated 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’t be be 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 real aroused a certain lust to possess, in certain moneyed circles. People would pay fortunes for what was real and 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. And they 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 a
t 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 now was 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 at Fargone 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, because it 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 on Eversnow, 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 not going 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 have a 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 those problems to mop up for the next forty years of the first Ari’s career— they’d never done anything like this.

  And terraforming? That was a dead issue.

  “None of this is in the news,” she said calmly.

  “None of it is going to be in the news. It’s under deep cover, disguised as that azi lab.”

  “But, damn it, Yanni.” She kept her voice down, kept the whole situation under control, holding the lid on. “I assume you’ve got a very, very good reason. What happened to the remediation budget?”

  “It’ll wait a year.”

  “While we create a terraforming lab out at Fargone?”

  “Yes,” Yanni said, head-on, “It was the first Ari’s project. It got scrapped.”

  “The first Ari isn’t alive now. I am. And I have an opinion. You didn’t ask me. Where are my budget items, Yanni?”

  “Next year.”

  “We have two labs full of scientists we’re going to have to fund till next year and I’m making a heavy hit on budget as it is!”

  “I know that.”

  “So you could have talked about this. Eversnow, for God’s sake! And an alpha lab! What else?”

  “We manage the lab, top to bottom. Our personnel run it, no training of local techs to do anything: they’ll all be Reseune people, born here, trained here, retiring here, ultimately.”

  Yanni’s voice was so quiet, so reasonable. He wasn’t that way with a lot of people. But he knew he’d sneaked this one past her, and he was presenting a case in which she was going to have the say. She’d be in charge when this thing came into full bloom, and Yanni—Yanni would be gone by then, at least gone from Admin, and back in the lab.

  That thought settled her heart rate a tick or two. She didn’t want that, yet.

  And she thought about what he was doing. He’d been meeting with Corain, of all people. Corain didn’t meet with Science. “So.” she said, “and Citizens voted for it.”

  “Jobs,” Yanni said. “A lot of jobs. Council knows what it’s for. We’re just not advertising it for the media yet.”

  “They know, and they voted for this.”

  “Everybody but Internal Affairs and State. Two nays. I’m sure you know.”

  She knew. Corain had gone along. Jobs, Yanni said. Jobs at Far-gone. Elder Ari had warned her about unrest in the population—the Citizens Bureau, which Corain represented. Ari had warned her about unhappiness—at Fargone, at Pan-Paris, which wasn’t on the expansion routes; both flashpoints, fobs had been scarce, opportunities scant since the War. Fargone was supposed to be in for major expansion when the military had planned to go ahead with Eversnow; she knew that was the history of it at that star.

  And then peace had happened, and the project had stalled—people elsewhere hadn’t thought terraforming anything was a good idea; and then the first Ari had died, and it had stayed a dead issue for twenty years.

  But the Eversnow collapse had had an effect, politically. Fargone Station’s independence tilt, voting sometimes with the Expansionists, sometimes with the Centrists, and bargaining hard for its vote, had been a factor in the Defense election that had put Vladislaw Khalid in—her least favorite Bureau head in her own lifetime.

  And that unrest, of people feeling trapped and dead-ended, was still out there at Fargone and Pan-Paris, in the electorate of Citizens, in Defense. It spread even through the Science Bureau, out there: the Expansionists had just squeaked through its traditional majority in the last election Science had had.

  That was dangerous, even if it was just one star-station.

  She had an inkling all of a sudden where Yanni was leading with this little surprise, and it wasn’t stupid: it was an answer to the kind of problems Yanni had faced in his tenure as Proxy Councillor for Science and head of the Expansionist Party. Give Fargone a major project, jobs, prosperity—and mutate Fargone’s maverick electorate into one more in line with Reseune, who’d be running the project. Setting a whole new population-burst of azi out there, who would, over time, migrate to freed-man status at Fargone and then, supposedly, at Eversnow Station, azi who’d teach their own CIT children their opinions—

  And Corain was going along with it? She felt her week-long Mad cool off just a degree. Defense still had a strong interest in Eversnow. It was going to be a problem to pry their fingers off it, and Yanni was trying to work with them… had Yanni thought of that?

  “We set up an alpha-capable lab at Fargone,” Yanni was saying quietly, and she began to track it, “but the locals are naturally immediately thinking of CIT-use, ordinary CIT births, and that’s what they know. Corain hasn’t mentioned Eversnow in his own arguments, or at least it hadn’t leaked by this morning. But Council has something to gain from this bill. Fargone’s going to be the stepping-off point for Eversnow, which will become more and more economically important to Fargone voters and to the Citizens Bureau. But most of all, to us. Not just a new city. A new planet. For us, a whole new genetic resource. A whole new population to birth and set up. Corain’s agreeing to cooperate with us on the Hinder Stars Defense Treaty, but we agreed to drop the remediation funding increase for this session, for this project. Seed money. Corain gains jobs and votes and he gets funding without a tax increase. But ultimately we gain everything.”

  The damned thing was an appalling daisy chain of favors exchanged. She suddenly had a much wider window into the content of the mysterious meetings, and here was Yanni—stolid, just-the-facts Yanni, non-activist through her whole life—advancing an outrageously ambitious Expansionist agenda the first Ari had contemplated and slowed down on, toward the end of her life, as too much, too far.

  In Yanni’s plan, they acquired not just Eve
rsnow as a base, but the string of stars beyond it; that was the thing. The strand that had been, without Eversnow, unattainable. Defense wanted that: she could see it.

  And the Centrists, particularly numerous in the Citizens Bureau, whose whole platform had always been to have Union’s power to stay clustered tightly around Cyteen, were suddenly going along with Eversnow? The first Ari had started out supporting terraforming at Cyteen, her mother Olga’s project, and then pulled the rug from under that once rejuv manufacture became a vital industry. The Centrists, wanting to expand population, not territory, had been outraged. They’d seen it as a ploy to keep Cyteen mostly desert, carved up into Administrative Territories, notably Reseune’s protective reserves, where CITs couldn’t get a foothold. They’d been furious and called Eversnow a pie-in-the-sky piece of politics that was going to give Reseune one more protectorate and never would benefit the average CIT.

  And now the Centrists, who had been so fundamentally opposed to that project at the edge of space, were suddenly willing to give up their campaign to terraform Cyteen and concentrate on Eversnow.

  The universe had changed in a week.

  And she didn’t know enough. Eversnow had been a problem she’d planned to postpone for decades.

  A world locked in a snowball effect. A world without a spring for millions of years—with, however, the strong likelihood that there was still life there, genetically unique, locked in rocks in the sub-basement of a frozen ocean.

  In the first Ari’s day, with all of humankind busy blowing each other up in the War, the Expansionists and the military had both been hot to seed Eversnow for their own reasons—their hedge on a bet, if the Alliance had hit Cyteen. But Centrists hadn’t wanted to spend money there at all, and a few Centrist-leaning scientists had argued they needed to preserve and study that world for a few decades.

  Too late, by then. An early Defense Bureau project had already broken the freeze, or begun to break it. artificially, with solar heat, and tipped the balance toward a melt… how that had ever turned out, she didn’t know in any detail. Earth-origin phytoplankton reportedly bloomed in certain areas, thanks to Defense.