Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  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

  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.

  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 the day. 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—Yanni knew 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 t
o 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 all the 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 had once 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’t Reseune 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. Novgorod could 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 this wing 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 were already in: Yanni had had technicians out here on that job before he’d l
eft 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 her orders 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, and his 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 she was worth anything in a construction project; but the dress shop was a front. Maddy collected gossip—she knew the 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.