Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  I suppose I’m going to move in poor old Patrick Emory. He’s not that old, he’s just dull and a little odd, but then he’s my only living real relative but one, so for once in his life somebody’s going to be nice to him. And my aunt… God, my Aunt Victoria. She’s probably going to refuse to move, but there’s room if she wants to. I won’t leave her out. Nobody would dare do that. But I hope she’ll tell me go to hell, too. She’s still offended I exist, and she’d gladly pull the plug on Giraud, never mind Denys. And I think she’s immortal.

  I hope Valery comes. I so much want to see him.

  But there’ll be room, too, in that wing, for people that aren’t born yet.

  You, maybe. I’ve no idea who’ll bring you up. Amy would be one of the best. But that’s, I hope, a long, long time from now.

  Chapter iii

  July 3, 2424

  1405 H

  There wasn’t much to pack, and staff handled most of it. For herself, Ari just put together a bag that held her essential makeup, her current notebooks, her study tapes, anything security-sensitive, and Poo-thing—poor raggedy Poo-thing couldn’t make the transition to a new life in the bottom of some box.

  She took her bag on her shoulder. She met Florian and Catlin, who had also packed their personal items—many of them lethal, she was quite sure, or at least classified, and this time when they went out to go to the new wing, they didn’t take the runabout. they took the ordinary mid-hall lift down, the three of them, and walked into the ell that had always been a dead end. keyed their way through a door that had only opened this morning, to a reception by her security—Rafael himself was on duty— and then to a lift that you had to have a key for.

  The lift took them up to the upstairs hall of the new wing.

  And it was marvelous. A gray carpeted floor had a ribbon of bright blue rippling down the middle and along the edges—weaving and interweaving not so much that one wanted to follow that path, but providing a hint of cheerful whimsy she would lay bets was Sam’s personal notion, not Maddy’s.

  She hadn’t seen it in its final preparation. She deliberately hadn’t seen it in the month and a half Maddy and Sam had been doing all the work here. Her paintings—the first Ari’s—stayed where they were, in Ari’s apartment, to wait there until her successor made a decision, and by the time it was her successor’s successor in question, the first Ari’s apartment would probably become irrelevant, to that centuries-from-now world, its content just scattered where it made sense to go.

  But the artwork on the first Ari’s walls had been only a fraction of the collection. Paintings in the modern mode were spaced along the walls of this corridor, turning the gray and white expanse into segments you could say belonged to the green painting, or the red one—nothing of the sterile black and gray and white surrounds of Wing One. Alpha Wing, still smelling of paint and plaster and the attendant moisture, was a different world, a profound change from where she’d always lived. Very, very unlike anything Denys would approve.

  And the double doors that each gave access to various apartments down the hall—they weren’t black, or beige, or one of twenty variations on white: one pair of doors, apartment 10, was red, 9 was blue, and 8 was bright green.

  Her own doors, at the end of the hall, were as blue-green as new Cy-teen leaves, and when Florian unlocked them, they gave way silently onto her waterfall, bubbling and flowing down a wall that could have been natural rock, and making a soft sound to welcome them.

  The miniature brook, lighted underneath the glass, ran right across under the stonework hall floor, and meandered off into the living room. She followed it there, and just stopped and set down her bag, and looked around her and up at the tank, the immense tank that sparkled with ripples and moved with small living fish and shadowed with living rocks and waving sea life. That watery wall reflected off the unbreakable glass that topped the cross-floor river, so that the river underneath her feet was brown rock and flowing fresh water, and when she looked across the room, the glass top of the river reflected the Earth-ocean that was the wall.

  The ocean suddenly vanished. It was directional glass, and Florian demonstrated the wall control, “if sera wants to have it plain,” Florian said, “it will vanish. The light is still on, on the other side. Sam sent us the instructions.”

  She looked away, turning slowly. Paintings. Framed colors, on the severe stone walls. The master artisans of Earth.

  Part of the living room wall was garden behind glass—the wall that divided the living room from the dining room turned out transparent, with that kind of glass, just like the other. It could turn opaque at the flick of a switch, making the wall something else, making the dining room or the living room a private, undistracted area at need.

  And the living room, even with the furniture, was big enough for several large sets of people to sit and talk at once—in some privacy. The water-sound permeated the space, luxurious, and peaceful. Florian switched both walls back to transparency, and the ocean and the garden were instantly back.

  It was everything Sam had promised. It was magical, top to bottom. She’d wanted to be surprised, and she was overwhelmed. Florian and Catlin looked around as she did, their own baggage left in the foyer.

  Catlin asked, “Are you happy with it, sera?”

  “Very. Very.”

  And there was no Sam. She’d thought he might be here to meet her, but he wasn’t, which was like him—just to have his work make its own declaration. He’d done it all: everything was going to be fresh, from the dinner plates in the dining room—rose-colored pottery, mostly—to the couches, blue, just as she’d asked, but they turned out a grayed blue that went better with the stonework and the water and the plants behind the glass.

  It all just fit. a harmony of sound and color that reached right into the senses. It was hers, in a way no place she had ever been had been hers. Maddy had helped do this. So had Amy, in the organizational sense, finding all the pieces Sam wanted. They’d given her this wonderful place, and she loved them. And Yanni was going to talk about the cost, but she’d told them—do it with their own places. Do it everywhere. Make it right.

  She was happy, she decided. Really, really happy. She’d been so scared it wouldn’t feel right to her, and it wouldn’t he home.

  But it was. It was home even when she’d never been here before.

  Chapter iv

  July 3, 2424

  1628 H

  Through with work for the day. Dinner over at Antonio’s, one of their older haunts, over in the main wing, and home again, or that was the direction they were going, in Justin’s intentions—himself and Grant, homeward bound for an entertainment vid they’d looked forward to, and with every intention of spending a quiet evening with absolutely nothing pressing to do.

  But the door security at Wing One said, as they came through into the Wing: “Just a moment, ser. There’s a message for you.”

  Message from whom was the instant question. Jordan or Yanni were the two fast guesses.

  It turned out to be a note which the guard called up on his handheld with a few button-pushes, and it started out, “Justin, don’t be mad.”

  That was Ari. He didn’t even need to read the next line to be sure it was going to be something he wouldn’t like, a bad surprise about Jordan, or—

  “Your stuff has all been moved. Most of it, anyway, and the rest will be by the time you get back. Don’t worry about a thing If you want anything else from the apartment that didn’t get transferred, you can get it—just ask security.

  “Go down to the storm tunnels the usual way, go to your left, to where there used to be a dead end, in C corridor. There’s a big door there today. To get to the new wing, just use your regular keycard and walk through the doors. Security on the other side will let you in, give you your new keycards, and tell you where to go. I really hope you like it. Love, Ari.”

  Love? Love? was it?

  And moved?

  “Thank you.” he said to the guard.


  “You’re welcome, ser.”

  They walked on. He reached the point of decision, at the corner by the lift, and said, “I suppose there’s no real reason to go to our apartment, is there?”

  “I suppose the vid will show up eventually,” Grant said. “It probably got switched over to the new system anyway.”

  “We’d better try the route,” Justin said. “Find out what we’re into.”

  They took the lift down to the tunnels. C corridor had always had a nook in it. They’d seen it on a fairly frequent basis since they’d come to Wing One. Two days ago he’d swear it had still had a nook in it.

  Today it had a clean new doorway with a card slot and no labeling whatsoever except: id and keycard required.

  He shoved his card in. The door opened. They went through. Another guard, in the glass-enclosed foyer, sat at a desk. The guard said pleasantly, “Justin Warrick, Grant ALX. Your keys. Your apartment is upstairs on the third floor, number 2. Your office will be on the first floor, number 28. Take the lift.”

  “My keycard,” he said, and the guard returned it. “Use the new card in the lift, ser.”

  “Right,” he said, and he and Grant went into the lift. Grant hit 3, and they rose fast.

  “With authority,” Grant commented. And the door let them out into a corridor with gray carpet—gray carpet, with a ripple of blue threading down its length. Abstract pictures hung at intervals, each one a bright color that played off the last one.

  The place smelled of paint and plaster. And they walked. It was ghostly quiet. Deserted.

  “Are we the only ones here, I wonder?” he asked.

  “Not a sound,” Grant said.

  “I can understand the suddenness,” he said. “Her security requirements. But, God…”

  “It is certainly a surprise,” Grant said.

  On the analogy of other moves, it would likely be thorough… and might include the rented vid. If there was a vending chit forgotten at the bottom of a drawer, he had every confidence that it was going to be swept up, installed in a neat box of “we don’t know where this goes” items, but it would be there. Anything that seemed like personal property was likely going with them.

  It wouldn’t, however—a stray and irritated thought, from experience— include the electronic list in the minder, all his phone numbers and addresses. He remembered the color-coded office supplies.

  And his minder file was precisely the sort of thing a security operation was going to peel out and go over with a microscope before they gave it back to him—but if he asked nicely they might stream it onto the new minder, in the new place, for his convenience.

  That prospect annoyed him, in advance of the event, no matter that there wasn’t a thing in it he cared if they knew.

  “They’ve moved our office again,” Grant commented.

  “And, damn it all, we just got the pictures hung!”

  “They might move them, too,” Grant said. “Or not. Maybe they’ve provided some.”

  High-handed security touched off old twitches, no question, visions of little rooms and endless questions.

  But this Ari was not the enemy, and she was keeping herself alive, and presumably taking care of those she deemed close to her. It was just one more step toward a life that, nervous as it made him, wasn’t going to be the quiet life he’d tried to make for himself and Grant. It wasn’t going to be inconspicuous, or safe—probably he lacked all power to do any damned thing in his career henceforward but serve as her backup, checker, and sounding board, but hell, he wasn’t ambitious. He’d survived this far. That had, all along, been the name of the game. Never mind the job classification. Never mind personal aspirations. Just stay alive.

  They walked. Doors on the left and right, very widely spaced. “Big apartments,” he said to Grant. There was number 10, 8, 6—all evens in this hall. And a corner.

  Number 1, a blue-green door, occupied an enormous stretch of hall, and right across from it—

  “Number 2,” Grant said.

  There was a red door on the right, number 4, then, occupying the middle, number 2, a bright green one, and beyond that, finishing that corridor before another bend, gold number 3 and blue number 5.

  “Right across from her,” he said tentatively. “Who are 3, 4 and 5, I wonder?”

  “I have no notion,” Grant said, and used his new keycard on the door. It shot open.

  The lights came on, brightened overhead, a high-ceilinged corridor with the illusion of mid-afternoon sky overhead—it drew the eye up, in total startlement, made one think, nervously, that it was a skylight.

  But it went on brightening. There was the sound of water splashing, somewhere. And down the hall, beneath it—statuary, and pictures, old ones, classic ones.

  Living room at the left. New furniture. Medium green couch. Abstract carpet pattern in rust browns. Classy. Goldtone metal edge on the coffee table in front of it. Big wall sculpture in brass and rust brown enamel, an explosion of angles. He just stood there, half-blocking Grant’s entry, until he realized that fact and walked all the way in.

  Dining room, beyond that, in brass and glass, tiled floor like stone. A stream of water ran noisily down one wall, with a splashing sound that carried into the living room and the foyer.

  “My God,” he said.

  “Rather pleasant place,” Grant said.

  “We don’t possibly earn this much,” he said.

  “It seems we do now,” Grant said. “And I’m sure, for whatever reason, we’re worth it to someone.”

  He drew a breath, headed back through the apartment to the bedroom.

  Correction: bedrooms. There were three, one green, one rust and reds, one blue. And an office or study, in lighter green.

  “What in hell are we supposed to do here?” Justin asked, turning from one bedroom to the other, in the hall. “Is it multiple choice?”

  “This must be the main one,” Grant said, and walked into the largest-looking bedroom, the blue one.

  Justin followed. Beyond was a bathroom beyond the size a public gym might need. Sunken tub. Shower. Exercise equipment. He didn’t even go in. He just turned full circle, saw a bed in a mirrored nook, mirrored ceiling.

  “Good God.” He was embarrassed.

  Grant walked over and touched the switches by the bed. Room lights went down. Water ripple made the whole area look underwater. “Dramatic,” Grant said.

  It was. Grant stood bathed in that light. He was still moderately appalled, as Grant apparently hit another switch. It became firelight, playing games on the bed, and in the mirrors on either hand.

  Third was flashing neon. A blare of music.

  Grant cut it off, startled, and, after two tries, went back to firelight. It was an interesting aesthetic effect. It might be, if nerves could quit insisting the building might be afire.

  “I think she means well,” Grant said.

  “I can’t imagine where they got this thing,” he said. “God, what does she think we are?”

  He walked midroom, where there was a bureau. A vase of fresh flowers of mixed colors sat propping a note card.

  Dear Justin, it read, I hope you like it. I hope it’s not too gaudy, but you’d said all along you wanted color. You’re safe here. Staff will do cleaning once a day, or oftener if you need them: you don’t have to maintain anything, or cook if you don’t want to. The minder has the call button. Wing staff will clean for you: they’re all going to be high security. And there’s going to be a restaurant downstairs on 1 sometime next week, so they’ll cater for you, at any hour: I wouldn’t presume to install domestic staff for you, but if you and Grant decide you need some, and Wing staff isn’t enough, you only have to ask. Guards assigned, specifically to Apartment 2 security are Mark BM-18 and Gerry BG-22—they’re general Alpha Wing security, but they’re two you passed on, and if there’s a general emergency, their first priority is you and Grant, so know who they are, and they’ll just look out for you in general. Your accesses are a subset of Base One, o
fficially now, registered that way, so you don’t have to pretend to be Callie or Theo any more. All Library is open to you, and any security situation in the Wing will be at least as transparent to you as to any of my staff except my bodyguard, if you just query Base One, so if you ever get worried you or Grant can access it immediately from any handheld anywhere in Reseune. I know you’re careful with codes.

  Have I ever mentioned you and Grant kept me honest when I was a kid? You still do. You never flattered me, never lied to me. Please talk to me first if you ever have a problem. That means you’ll never cross up something I’m doing. Meanwhile I just feel safer and more comfortable if you’re across the hall. I don’t know why that is, but it’s so.

  The minder is primed with all the Alpha Wing service numbers as well as all your old ones. You can go anywhere you ever went. Just guard those keycards with your lives.

  Grant, keep him out of trouble. I love you both so much. And I’ll be so happy if you like this place, but you can change anything you want to change, anything at all.

  Ari.

  He walked back, sat down on the side of the bed. Just sat, and looked up at Grant, thinking—they’d never get back to their plain, ordinary apartment, their little place where they’d been alternately safe and scared as hell.

  This place wasn’t the ongoing penance of the posh black and white apartment. It was comfortable. Extravagant beyond belief. “It’s nice,” Grant said.