Chapter Excerpt

It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts where humanity had as yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored except by orbiting radar. Ariane Emory gazed down at it from the window. She kept to the passenger compartment now. Her eyesight, she had had to admit it, was no longer sharp enough, her reflexes no longer fast enough for the jet. She could go up front, bump the pilot out of the chair and take the controls: it was her plane, her pilot, and a wide sky. Sometimes she did. But it was not the same.

Only the land was, still most of the land was. And when she looked out the window, it might have been a century ago, when humankind had been established on Cyteen less than a hundred years, when Union was unthought of, the War only a rumbling discontent, and the land looked exactly like this everywhere.

Two hundred years ago the first colonists had come to this unlikely star, made the beginnings of the Station, and come down to the world.

Forty-odd years later the sublight ships were coming in, few and forlorn, to try to convert their structure and their operations to faster-than-light; and time sped up, time hurtled at translight speeds, change came so fast that sublight ships met ships they took for alien—but they were not: it was worse news for them. They were human. And the game was all changed.

The starships went out like seeds from a pod. The genetics labs upriver at Reseune bred humanity as fast as it could turn them out from the womb-tanks, and every generation bred others and worked in labs breeding more and more, till there were people enough, her uncle had said, to fill the empty places, colonize the world, build more star-stations: Esperance. Fargone. Every place with its own labs and its own means to breed and grow.

Earth had tried to call her ships back. It was all too late. Earth had tried to tax and rule its colonies with a hard hand. That was very much too late.

Ariane Emory remembered the Secession, the day that Cyteen declared itself and its own colonies independent; the day the Union began and they were all suddenly rebels against the distant motherworld. She had been seventeen when the word came down from Station: We are at war.

Reseune bred soldiers, then, grim and single-minded and intelligent, oh yes: bred and refined and honed, knowing by touch and reflex what they had never seen in their lives, knowing above all what their purpose was. Living weapons, thinking and calculating down one track. She had helped design those patterns.

Forty-five years after the Secession the war was still going on, sometimes clandestine, sometimes so remote in space it seemed a fact of history—except at Reseune. Other facilities could breed the soldiers and the workers once Reseune had set the patterns, but only Reseune had the research facilities, and it had fought the war in its own dark ways, under Ariane Emory's directorate.

Fifty-four years of her life . . . had seen the Company Wars over, humanity divided, borders drawn. The Earth Company Fleet had held Pell's Star, but the merchanters of the newly formed Alliance had taken Pell and declared it their base. Sol had tried to ignore its humiliating defeat and go off in another direction; the remnant of the old Company Fleet had turned to piracy and still raided merchanters, no different than they had ever done, while Alliance and Union alike hunted them. It was only hiatus. The war was cold again. It went on at conference tables where negotiators tried to draw lines biology did not, and make borders in boundless, three-dimensional space—to keep a peace that had never, in all Ariane Emory's life, existed.

All of that might not have been yet. It might have been a hundred years ago, except that the plane was sleek and fine, not the patch-together that had run cargo between Novgorod and Reseune: in those days everyone had sat on bales of plastics and containers of seed and whatever else was making the trip.

Then she had begged to sit by the dusty windows and her mother had said to put her sunscreen on, even so.

Now she sat in a leather seat with a drink at her elbow, in a jet snugly warm inside, immaculately maintained, with a handful of aides talking business and going over their notes, a noise just barely enough to get past the engines.

No traveling nowadays without a clutter of aides and bodyguards. Catlin and Florian were back there, quiet as they were trained to be, watching her back, even here, at 10,000 meters and among Reseune staff whose briefcases were full of classified material.

Much, much different from the old days.

Maman, can I sit by the window?

She was anomalous, child of two parents, Olga Emory and James Carnath. They had founded the labs at Reseune, had begun the process that had shaped Union itself. They had sent out the colonists, the soldiers. Their own genes had gone into hundreds of them. Her quasi-relatives were scattered across lightyears. But so were everyone's, these days. In her lifetime even that basic human thinking had changed: biological parentage was a trivial connection. Family mattered, the larger, the more extended . . . the safer and more prosperous.

Reseune was her inheritance. Hence this jet, not a commercial airliner. No hired plane, either, and no military jet. A woman in her position could call on all these things; and still preferred mechanics who were part of the Household, a pilot whose psych-patterns she was sure of, bodyguards who were the best of Reseune's designs.

The thought of a city, the subways, life among the clerks and techs and cooks and laborers who jostled one another and hurried about their schedules to earn credit . . . was as frightening to her as airless space. She directed the course of worlds and colonies. The thought of trying to buy a meal in a restaurant, of fighting crowds to board a subway, of simply being on a topside street where traffic roared and people were in motion on all sides—filled her with an irrational panic.

* * *

She did not know how to live outside Reseune. She knew how to arrange a plane, check out the flight plans, order her luggage, her aides, her security, every little detail—and found a public airport an ordeal. A serious flaw, granted. But everyone was due a phobia or two and these things were far from the center of her worries. It was not likely that Ariane Emory would ever face a Novgorod subway or a station's open dock.

It was a long, long while before she saw the river and the first plantation. A thin ribbon of road, finally the domes and towers of Novgorod, a sudden, remarkably sudden metropolis. Under the jet's wings the plantations widened, the towers of electronic screens and precipitators shadowed the fields and traffic crawled along the roads at ground-bound pace.

Barges chained down the Volga toward the sea, barges and pushers lined the river dockage past the plantations. There was still a lot of the raw and industrial about Novgorod, for all the glitter of the new. This side of it had not changed in a hundred years, except to grow bigger, the barges and the traffic becoming ordinary instead of a rare and wonderful sight.

Look, madman, there's a truck.

The blue of woolwood thicket blurred by under the wing. Pavement and the end-stripes of the runway flashed past.

The tires touched smoothly and the jet came rolling to a stop, for a left turn toward the terminal.

A little panic touched Ariane Emory at this stage, despite the knowledge that she would never get to the crowded hallways. There were cars waiting. Her own crew would handle the baggage, secure the jet, do all these things. It was only the edge of the city; and the car windows would permit vision out, but none in.

All those strangers. All that motion, random and chaotic. In the distance she loved it. It was her own creation. She knew its mass motions, if not its individual ones. At a distance, in the aggregate, she trusted it.

At close range it made her hands sweat.

* * *

Cars pulling up and a flurry of hurrying guards in the security entrance of the Hall of State said that it was no mere senatorial arrival. Mikhail Corain, on the balcony outside the Council Chamber, flanked by his own bodyguards and aides, paused and looked down on the echoing stone lower floor, with its fountain, its brass railings on the grand stairway, its multiple star-emblem in gold on the gray stone wall.

Imperial splendor for imperial ambitions. And the chief architect for those ambitions made her entrance. The Councillor from Reseune, in company with the Secretary of Science. Ariane Carnath-Emory with her entourage, late, dependably late, because the Councillor was damned confident of her majority, and only deigned to visit the Hall because the Councillor had to vote in person.

Mikhail Corain glared and felt that speeding of his heart that his doctors had told him to avoid. Calm down, they were wont to say. Some things are beyond your control.

Meaning, one supposed, the Councillor from Reseune.

Cyteen, by far the most populous of the entities in the Union, had consistently managed to capture two seats in the executive, in the Council of Nine. It was logical that one of them was the Bureau of Citizens, which meant labor and farming and small business. It was not logical that the electors in the sciences, far and wide cross the lightyears Union reached, with a dozen eminently qualified potential candidates, persisted in returning Ariane Emory to the halls of government.

More than that. To a position which she had held for fifty years, fifty damned years, during which she had bribed and browbeaten interests on Cyteen and every station in Union and (rumored but never proved) in Alliance and Sol as well. You wanted something done? You asked someone who could get the Councillor of Science to arrange it. What were you willing to pay? What would you take in trade?

And the damned Science electorate, made up of supposed intellects, kept voting her in, no matter what the scandals that attached to her, no matter that she virtually owned Reseune labs, which was legally equal to a planet in Union's government, which did things within its walls that countless investigations had tried (and failed, on technicalities) to prove.

Money was not the answer. Corain had money. It was Ariane Emory herself. It was the fact that most of the population of Cyteen, most of the population of Union itself, had come in one way or another from Reseune; and those who did not, used tapes . . . that Reseune devised.

Which that woman . . . devised.

To doubt the integrity of the tapes was paranoid. Oh, there were a few who refused to use them; and studied higher math and business without them, and never took a pill and never lay down to dream what the masses clear across Union dreamed, knowledge pouring into their heads, as much as they could absorb, there in a few sessions. Drama—experienced as well as seen . . . at carefully chosen intensity. Skills—acquired at a bone and nerve level. You used the tapes because your competition would, because you had to excel to get along in the world, because it was the only way to know things fast enough, high enough, wide enough, and the world changed and changed and changed, in any human lifespan.

The Bureau of Information vetted those tapes. Experts reviewed them. There was no way any subliminals could get past them. Mikhail Corain was not one of the lunatic fringe who suspected government com-tapping, Alliance poisoning of cargoes, or mind-enslaving subliminals in the entertainment tapes. That sort of purist could refuse rejuv, die old at seventy-five, and live off public works jobs because they were self-taught know-nothings.

But damn it, damn it, that woman kept getting elected. And he could not understand it.

There she was, getting a little stoop to the shoulders, allowing a little streak of gray to show in the black hair, when anyone who could count knew she was older than Union, on rejuv and silver-haired under the dye. Aides swarmed round her. Cameras focused on her as if there was no other center to the universe. Damn bony bitch.

You wanted a human being designed like a prize pig, you asked Reseune. You wanted soldiers, you wanted workers, you wanted strong backs and weak minds or a perfect, guaranteed genius, you asked Reseune.

And senators and Councillors alike came to bow and scrape and mouth politenesses—Good God, someone had brought her flowers.

Mikhail Corain turned away in disgust, plowed himself a way through his aides.

Twenty years he had been sitting as head of the minority party in the Nine, twenty years of swimming against the tide, gaining a little now and again, losing all the big ones, the way they had lost the latest. Stanislaw Vogel of the Trade electorate had died, and with the Alliance violating the treaty as fast as they could arm their merchant ships, the Centrists ought to have been able to carry that seat. But no. The Trade electorate elected Ludmilla deFranco, Vogel's niece. Moderate, hell, deFranco was only steering a careful course. She was no less an Expansionist than her uncle. Something had changed hands. Someone had been bought, someone had tilted Andrus Company toward deFranco, and the Centrists had lost their chance to install a fifth member in the Nine and gain the majority of the executive for the first time in history.

It was a crushing disappointment.

And there, there in the hall downstairs, in the middle of the sycophants and all the bright young legislators, was the one who had pulled the strings money could not pull.

Political favor, then. The unprovable, untraceable commodity.

On that, the fate of the Union hinged.

He entertained the most terrible fantasy, not for the first time, that somehow, on the steps outside, some lunatic might run up with a gun or a knife and solve their problem at one stroke. He felt a profound disturbance at that thought. But it would reshape the Union. It would give humankind a chance, before it was everlastingly too late.

One life—weighed very little in those scales.

He drew deep breaths. He walked into the Council chambers and made polite conversation with the few who came to commiserate with the losers. He gritted his teeth and walked over to pay his polite congratulations to Bogdanovitch, who, holding the seat of the Bureau of State, chaired the Council.

Bogdanovitch kept his face absolutely bland, his kindly, white-browed eyes the image of everyone's grandfather, full of gentility and civility. Not a trace of triumph. If he had been that good when he negotiated the Alliance settlement, Union would own the codes to Pell. Bogdanovitch was always better at petty politics. And he was another one who lasted. His electorate was all professional, the consuls, the appointees, immigration, the station administrators—a minuscule number of people to elect an office which had started out far less important than it had turned out to be. God, how had the framers of the Constitution let themselves play creative games with the political system? The 'new model,' they had called it; 'a government shaped by an informed electorate.' And they had thrown ten thousand years of human experience out the hatch, a damned bunch of social theorists, including, including Olga Emory and James Carnath, back in the days when Cyteen had five seats of the Nine and most of the Council of Worlds.

"Tough one, Mikhail," Bogdanovitch said, shaking his hand and patting it.

"Well, will of the electorate," Corain said. "Can't quarrel with that." He smiled with absolute control. "We did get the highest percentage yet."

Someday, you old pirate, someday I'll have the majority.

And you'll live to see it.

"Will of the electors," Bogdanovitch said, still smiling, and Corain smiled till his teeth ached, then turned from Bogdanovitch to Jenner Harogo, another of that breed, holding the powerful Internal Affairs seat, and Catherine Lao, who held the Bureau of Information, which vetted all the tapes. Of course.

Emory came sailing in and they left him in mid-sentence to go and join her claque. Corain exchanged a pained look with Industry, Nguyen Tien of Viking; and Finance, Mahmud Chavez of Voyager Station, Centrists both. Their fourth seat, Adm. Leonid Gorodin, was over in a grim confluence of his own uniformed aides. Defense was, ironically, the least reliable—the most prone to reassess his position and shift into the Expansionist camp if he conceived near-term reasons. That was Gorodin, Centrist only because he wanted the new Excelsior-class military transports kept in near space where he could use them, not, as he put it, 'out on our backside while Alliance pulls another damn embargo. You want your electorates hammering at your doors for supplies, you want another hot war, citizens, let's just send those carriers out to the far Beyond and leave us depending on Alliance merchanters....'

Not saying, of course, that the Treaty of Bell, which had agreed that the merchanters' Alliance would haul cargo and build no warships; and that Union, which had built a good many of those haulers, would maintain its fleet, but build no ships to compete with the merchanters . . . was a diplomatic buy-off, a ransom to get supply flowing again. Bogdanovitch had brought that home and even Emory had voted against it.

The stations had passed it. The full General Council had to vote on it, and it got through by a hair's breadth. Union was tired of war, that was all, tired of disrupted trade, scarce supplies.

Now Emory wanted to launch another wave of exploration and colonization out into the deep Beyond.

Everyone knew there was trouble out there to find. What Sol had run into on the other side of space proved that well enough. It had brought Sol running back to the Alliance, begging for trade, begging for markets. Sol had neighbors, and its reckless poking about was likely to bring trouble in the Alliance's back door and right to Union space. Gorodin hammered on that point constantly. And demanded a larger share of the budget for Defense.

Gorodin's position was weakest. He was vulnerable to a vote of confidence. They could lose him, if he failed to get the ships the Fleet wanted, in the zones that mattered.

* * *

And the news from the Trade electorate was a blow, a severe one. The Centrists had thought they had won this one. They had truly thought they had a chance of stopping Emory, and all they could do now was force a point of order, persuade the Council that no vote ought to be taken on the Hope project, since it involved ship appropriations and a major budget priority decision, until deFranco could get in from Esperance and assume her seat.

Or . . . they could break the quorum and send it to a vote in the Council of Worlds. Emory's cabal would flinch at that. The representatives were far more independent, especially Cyteen's large bloc, who were mostly Centrist. Let them get their teeth into a bill of this complexity not already hammered out by the Nine, and they would be at it for months, sending up changes the Nine would veto, and round and round again.

Let Gorodin have another try at persuading the Expansionists to delay the vote. Gorodin was the one on the fence, the one with the medals, the war hero. Throw him at them, see if he could swing them. If not, the Centrists would walk, all four of them. It had political cost, profound cost, to break the quorum and close the meeting.

But time was what they needed, time to get to key lobbyists, time to see if they could pull a few strings and see if deFranco, when she arrived, could be persuaded to be the moderate she proclaimed herself—or at least tilt to the Centrist side on a bill that critical to her constituency. She might, might, vote to table.

Councillors drifted toward their seats. Emory's group came up last. Predictably.

Bogdanovitch rapped with the antique gavel.

"Council is in session," Bogdanovitch said, and proceeded to the election results and the official confirmation of Ludmilla deFranco as Councillor for the Bureau of Trade.

Moved and seconded, Catherine Lao and Jenner Harogo. Emory sat expressionless. She never made routine motions. The bored look on her face, the slow revolutions of the stylus in her long-nailed fingers, proclaimed a studied patience with the forms.

No discussion. A polite, pro forma round of ayes, officially recorded.

"Next item of business," Bogdanovitch said, "acceptance of Denzill Lal voting proxy for sera deFranco until her arrival."

Same routine. Another bored round of ayes, a little banter between Harogo and Lao, small laughter. From Gorodin, Chavez, Tien, no reaction. Emory noticed that: Corain saw her laugh shortly and take in that silence with a sidelong glance. The stylus stopped its revolutions. Emory's glance was wary now, sharp as she glanced Corain's way and gave a slow, slight smile, the kind that might mitigate an accidental meeting of eyes.

But the eyes were not smiling at all. What will you do? they wondered. What are you up to, Corain?

There were not that many guesses, and a mind of Emory's caliber would take a very little time to come up with them. The stare lingered, comprehended, threatened like a blade in fence. He hated her. He hated everything she stood for. But, God, dealing with her was like an experience in telepathy: he stared flatly, returning the threat, quirked a brow that said: You can push me to the brink. I'll carry you over it. Yes, I will do it. Fracture the Council. Paralyze the government.

The half-lidding of her eyes, the fondness of her smile said: Good strike, Corain. Are you sure you want this war? You may not be ready for this.

The fondness of his said: Yes. This is the line, Emory. You want crisis, right when two of your precious projects are coming up, and you can have it.

She blinked, slid a glance to the table and back again, the smile tight, the eyes hooded. War, then. A widening of the smile. Or negotiation. Watch my moves, Corain: you'd make a serious mistake to make this an open breach.

I'll win, Corain. You can stall me off. You can force elections first, damn you. And that will waste more time than waiting on deFranco.

"The matter of the Hope Station appropriations," Bogdanovitch said. "First scheduled speaker, sera Lao...."

A signal passed between Emory and Lao. Corain could not see Lao's face, only the back of her blonde head, the trademark crown of braids. Doubtless Lao's expression was perplexed. Emory signaled an aide, spoke into his ear, and that aide's face tightened, mouth gone to a thin line, eyes mirroring dismay.

The aide went to one of Lao's aides, and Lao's aide went and whispered in her ear. The move of Lao's shoulders, the deep intake of breath, was readable as her now profiled, frowning face.

"Ser President," Catherine Lao said, "I move we postpone debate on the Hope Station bill until sera deFranco can take her seat in person. Trade is too profoundly affected by this measure. With all respect to the distinguished gentleman from Fargone, this is a matter that ought to wait."

"Seconded," Corain said sharply.

A murmur of dismay ran among the aides, heads leaning together, even Councillors'. Bogdanovitch's mouth was open. It took him a moment to react and tap the gavel for decorum.

"It has been moved and seconded that debate on the Hope Station will be postponed until sera deFranco takes her seat in person. Is there discussion?"

It was perfunctory, Emory complimenting the proxy, the gentleman from Fargone, agreeing with Lao.

Corain made the request for the floor solemnly to concur with Lao. He might have made some light banter. Sometimes they did, Expansionists with Centrists, with irony under it, when matters were settled.

This one was not. Emory, damn it, had stolen his fire and his issue, given him what he demanded, and looked straight at him when he had uttered the tedious little courtesy to Denzill Lal, and taken his seat.

Watch me closely, that look said. That will cost.

The vote went round, unanimous, Denzill Lal voting proxy in the vote that took the Hope appropriations bill out of his hands.

"That concludes the agenda," Bogdanovitch said. "We had allotted three days for debate. The next bill on the calendar is yours, sera Emory, number 2405, also budget appropriations, for the Bureau of Science. Do you wish to re-schedule?"

"Ser President, I'm ready to proceed, but I certainly wouldn't want to rush a measure through without giving my colleagues adequate time to prepare debate. I would like to move it up to tomorrow, if my distinguished colleagues have no objection."

A polite murmuring. No objections. Corain murmured the same

"Sera Emory, would you like to put that in the form of a motion?"

Seconded and passed.

Motion to adjourn.

Seconded and passed.

The room erupted into more than usual disorder. Corain sat still, felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder and looked up at Mahmud Chavez's face. Chavez looked relieved and worried at the same time.

What happened? that look said. But aloud: "That was a surprise."

"My office," Corain said. "Thirty minutes."

Lunch was a matter of tea and sandwiches couriered in by aides. The meeting had grown beyond the office and filled the conference room. In paranoia, the military aides had gone over the room for bugs and searched other aides and the scientists for recorders, while Adm. Gorodin sat glumly silent through everything, arms folded. Gorodin had been willing to go along with the walkout. Now things had slid sideways, and the admiral was glowering, anxious, silent, as it developed they had cornered Emory on the Hope corridor budget and might have an ultimatum on their hands. "It's information we're after," Corain said, and took a glass of mineral water from an aide. In front of him, in front of all of them and most of the aides, eight hundred pages of exposition and figures that constituted the Science budget, in hard-copy, with certain items underlined: there were Centrists inside the Science Bureau, and there were strong rumors of sleepers in the bill. There always were. And every year no few of them involved Reseune. "The damn place doesn't ask for budget itself, the only thing we've got on it is the gross tax returns, and why in hell does Reseune want to get Special Person status for a twenty-year-old chemist on Fargone? Who in hell is Benjamin P. Rubin?"

Chavez sorted papers on his table, took one that an aide slid under his hand and gnawed at his lip, following the aide's finger down the paper. "A student," Chavez said. "No special data."

"Is there any way it's part of the Hope project? By any stretch of the imagination?"

"It's at Fargone. It's on the route."

"We could ask Emory," Chavez said sourly.

"We damn well may have to, on the floor, and take whatever documentation she comes up with."There were dour looks all around. "We're beyond jokes," Gorodin said.

Lu, the Secretary of Defense, cleared his throat. "There is a contact we might trust, at least a chain of contacts. Our recent candidate for Science—"

"He's a xenologist," Tien objected.

"And a personal friend of Dr. Jordan Warrick, of Reseune. Dr. Warrick is here. He came in as part of Councillor Emory's advance staff. He's asked, through Byrd, for a meeting with, mmnn, certain members of Science."

When Lu spoke with that much specificity, he was often saying more than he could officially say in so many words. Corain looked straight at him, and Gorodin was paying full attention. The admiral had come in from military operations, would go back to military operations and leave the administrative details of the Bureau of Defense to the Secretary and his staff: it was axiomatic—Councillors might be the experts in their respective fields, but the Secretaries ran the apparatus and the department heads knew who was sleeping with whom.

"Byrd among them?"

"Very likely," Lu said primly, and shut his mouth.

Mark that one down, Corain thought.

"Is that an old friendship?" Tien asked in a low voice.

"About twenty years."

"How safe is that for Warrick?" Gorodin asked. "What are we jeopardizing?"

"Very little," Lu said. "Certainly not Warrick's friendship with Emory. Warrick himself has his own offices, rarely enters hers, and vice versa. In fact there's considerable hostility there. He's demanded autonomy inside Reseune. He has it. There are no Centrists in Reseune. But Warrick is—not an Emory partisan. He's here, in fact, to consult with the Bureau on a transfer."

"He's one of the Specials," Corain said, for those not from Cyteen, and not, perhaps, entirely aware who Warrick was. A certified genius. A national treasure, by law. "Forty-odd years old, no friend of Emory's. He's had a dozen chances to leave and found his own facilities, and she keeps blocking it in the Bureau, cut him off at every turn." He had made a personal study of Reseune and Emory. It was only reasonable. But some pieces of information were not as available as others, and Lu's tracing of connections was one of them. "Byrd can contact him?"

"Schedules have gone amok," Lu said softly, in his scholarly way. "Of course things have to be rearranged all along the agenda. I'm sure some can be done. Do you want me to mark that down?"

"Absolutely. Let's break this up. Get the staffs to working."

"That leaves us meeting in the morning," Tien said.

"My staff will be here," Corain said, "very late tonight. If anything comes up that we have to—" He shrugged. "If anything comes up, of the nature—you understand, something of a need to know nature—" Walk-out was not a word they used openly, and not all the staff present knew that that was in the offing, particularly the clerks. "My staff will contact you directly."

And quietly, catching Gorodin and Lu as the rest of them drifted out to offices and staff meetings in their own Bureaus and departments:

"Can you get Warrick?"

"Lu?" Gorodin said, and Lu, with a lift of clerkly shoulders:

"I should think."

© 1999 by C.J. Cherryh