Regenesis by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page A

battling rejuv failure herself, another election they were going to suffer, but she was at the session, holding out on painkillers, Reseune’s old friend. “I’m scheduled to talk with Corain this evening. But don’t give any interviews until after the vote. It’ll look bad.”
    Spurlin had no sense of humor. At all. “Your man at Fargone. The azi…”
    “CIT,” Yanni corrected him.
    “Ex-azi. Emory’s man. Is he up to handling the security aspects of this? And what will he be telling the girl?”
    “I have less doubt of Ollie Strassen than I do of anyone else involved in this undertaking, ser. And he doesn’t communicate with young Emory, never has. We have very efficient management out there. Check your records.”
    “So now you have a program.”
    “We will have a program.” Yanni gave a small shrug. He wasn’t really comfortable with Spurlin. The privacy screen made his sinuses ache. And he was anxious to have the meeting done, in token of which he drank half the very expensive cup of coffee at one go. “Patil will be drawing her own complement from Beta Station, perfectly current with the research. So you’ll have plenty of sources who’ll talk to you very nicely, I’m sure.”
    A brow lifted. Spurlin looked marginally happier with that thought: the military fairly well ran Beta, and that was insystem, definitely familiar territory, familiar channels. “So you get your new lab.”
    “And you get a planet,” Yanni said wryly.
    “ Humanity gets a planet,” Spurlin said. That was the theory. Humanity couldn’t live on Pell without supplementals, and the fungi were lethal over time. Humanity couldn’t actually live on Cyteen—if the weather-makers and the precip towers ever failed, they were all dead in a day. Humanity did too damned well at surviving on Gehenna, and if all of them could turn up dead in a day, it would make everybody sleep easier at night. They hoped eventually to do better at Eversnow—a viable planet, one they could entirely terraform and render completely habitable, right down to the oxygen balance— and where people could come and go without turning themselves into such deeply acculturated specialists they couldn’t integrate with spacefaring society.
    And not the only such planet, hereafter: once they’d proven the case and established the precedent for terraforming a marginal world, once they’d gotten past the emotional nonsense that bacteria counted as life on a world, young Emory would see the benefit.
    That meant activation of the Arks, a use for the stored genetics. A new Eden.
    A reserve Earth, in case the unthinkable ever happened.
    “I have Patil’s name on the contract,” Yanni said. “But first out there and setting up at Fargone Station…will be ReseuneSec.”
    That didn’t make Spurlin happy, but Yanni said it anyway: “ReseuneSec, for a Reseune installation. We’ll establish connections, set up the labs. Our setup won’t bother your military ‘hospital’ there in the least. But where it regards our tech and birthlabs, we don’t admit anybody but Reseune personnel. That never changes.”
    “I wouldn’t expect it to,” Spurlin said, and, as if the admission were physically painful, added: “Good. We’re happy We can back this.”
    If we’re elected, was the unspoken context. And Science was backing him as far as it dared. “Thank you, ser,” Yanni said.
    “I take it you’re going to call on Jacques, upstairs. Give him my regards. And Khalid.”
    There it was. The direct challenge.
    “I’ll of course send the proposal up to station,” Yanni said. “And of course present it to Councillor Jacques. But I’m very glad to have this particular discussion face to face.”
    Meaning Jacques was all but an afterthought, and the face to face he’d chosen had been with Spurlin, not Khalid. That had to please Spurlin.
    “Good luck in the vote,” Yanni said. He didn’t mention the name Emory. “Will of the people. Civilized understandings.