Cyteen: The Betrayal by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online

not sure, suddenly, that it was not Emory. A man could grow insane, dealing with the potential in the Specials, especially those Specials who dealt with perception itself.
    One had to trust someone sometime. Or nothing got done.
     
    iii.
     
    “The first bill on the agenda is number 2405, for the Bureau Science. Ariane Emory sole sponsor, regarding the regular appropriations for the Bureau of Science, under the provisions of Union Statute 2595, section 2… .”
    Emory looked Corain’s way. Well? that half-lidded stare said. Will you defy me, over something so routine?
    Corain smiled. And let the bitch worry.
    The gavel hammered down, again early: “We are in recess,” Bogdanovitch said. The murmuring in the Council chamber was subdued.
    Ariane Emory drew a whole breath, finally. The first stage was passed. Rubin had his status, barring a veto from the Council of Worlds, and there would be none. Corain might orchestrate a double-cross, but he would save it for something important. Something Corain considered important. The Hope Station project could serve as a decoy until then. DeFranco might want to abstain. But she would not, when the heat came on.
    Aides surged doorward, accompanying their Councillors. The press was, thank God, held downstairs, away from the chamber as long as there was no adjournment. A two-hour lunch and consideration of the dispensation of the rest of the Science permissions afterward, a tedious long list of permissions which, in the way of a good many things in a government which had started small and cozy and grown into an administrative monster within a single lifespan, the executive Nine were supposed to clear, but which in fact had devolved to the Secretarial level and which had become routine approval.
    Still, she would not breathe easy until that clearance was given-until the obfuscated facts of permission to use a geneset from a living Special went through in the list of Reseune projects that required routine permissions.
    There had been, each year, an attempt to cancel the whole Science permissions grant from the floor of General Council. Every year the Abolitionists or some other lunatic group got up a proposal to outlaw azi and to outlaw human experimentation. Every year the Council of Worlds sensibly voted it down. But there was that lunatic element, which the Centrists could in some attempt to exert leverage against the Hope project-use against the Science bill. If the fringes and the Centrists did combine on an issue in that body, it came dangerously close to a plurality against the Expansionist party.
    She was worried. She had worried ever since her informers told her that the Centrists were talking walkout. Corain’s sudden willingness to deal bothered her.
    And if it would not have raised the issue of an unseemly haste, she would gladly have urged the chair to put the Science bill up before noon. As it was, obstacles were falling too fast, things were going too well, everything was sliding on oil. What had looked to be a lengthy session would end in a record three days, sending the Nine back to their civilian lives for at least another six months.
    It had been intended as a means to speed up government, that the Nine would meet and pass all measures that impacted their various spheres of interest, then leave the staff of the Bureaus and the elected representatives of the Council of Worlds and the various senates and councils to handle the routine and the ordinary administrative detail.
    In fact, the Nine, being top professionals, were very efficient. They met briefly, did their job, and went away again to be what they were-but some of them exerted an enormous control over the Bureaus they oversaw, wielding power that the framers of the constitution had not entirely foreseen, no more than they had foreseen Reseune’s work in the war, or the fact that population would become what it was, or the defection of Pell from both Sol and Union, and the developments that had entrained. The