May 5, 2424.

The clothes that hung at the front of the closet, ready for wear, were appropriate for the housenot a construction siteand 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 Catlinhadn"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 n.o.body would be expecting, well, except Sam Whitely.

It was still a scary venturethe 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 ridingwhen 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 neckshe"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 h.e.l.l 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 conduitsa secret communion between them and the design specs, with rarely a human involved, except to watch it happen. Yanni had given his agreementYanni knew what it was, but if Yanni had kept his word, n.o.body but Yanni knew, not even ReseuneSec.

In the second month, human workers had moved in, installing, with robot a.s.sistance, 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 Stra.s.senberg, 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 Stra.s.senberg: 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 carthat was fairly ordinary. n.o.body would think a car was a break for a few hours" freedom.

Downstairs. Down another corridor, and toward the gla.s.s doors that led to the outside. Florian pulled the runabout into view at the curb just as they pa.s.sed the inner gla.s.s 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 pa.s.senger-side doors of the runabout, probably thinking they were going down to the labs.

Catlin opted for the front seat, beside Florianthere 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 edgea track not meant to be taken. Florian clearly enjoyed himself in taking them at breakneck speed downslope across the neat gra.s.s 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 gra.s.ses on the right, where the riverside lawn still remained sacrosanct from the pa.s.sage of the big earthmovers Terran, that lawn. Nothing from Cyteen"s native life got onto Reseune"s territory, except what drifted ash.o.r.e via the river, and that only-touched the sh.o.r.eand 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s, walls still shrouded in forms. The new wing b.u.t.ted 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 s.p.a.ce for roofed gardens.

That last part was her idea. Why have a U and not take advantage of that inner s.p.a.ce? 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 universewhich 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 couldand thanks to the sudden need to use Reseune funds to keep projects workingall 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 apartthat 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 trueeven 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 generationsthat 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 Stra.s.sen and Amy Carnath in those daysthose daysas 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 s.p.a.ces, she"d called on Sam, for what he knewshe"d entrusted the whole project to Sam, who was eighteen, the same as she wa.s.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 a.s.signing 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 a.s.sured 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 left 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, n.o.body 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-cla.s.s installersYanni had given him the go-ahead for just one spectacular variation on the old theme, at the top of the Uher apartment. And then Yanni, maybe knowing she was going to be mad as h.e.l.l 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 mischiefoutright 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 bredit was Amy who"d had a good deal to do with cajoling Yanniit 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 gossipshe 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 designand 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 Samwell, Sam built things. Bigger and bigger things were in the future she planned.

So their juvenile fantasy would come true. They"d be together again here, in this wing, when this place they"d all planned was done. Not for the reason they"d all plannednever thinking it was for their safety, just one grand continuation of what they"d dreamed of building for the sheer beauty of it.

When they came in, they"d bring their liaisons, their families, their staffs, everything they needed . . .

And d.a.m.n it, she"d keep them safe, forever safe, everyone she wanted to protect and not have vulnerable to plots and gossip and schemes and outright sabotage once she took the reins. The Centrists and the Paxers and the Abolitionists wouldn"t get to the people she loved.

The first Arithat Ari hadn"t had personal weak spots: she"d kept very much alone through her life: Ari Senior hadn"t trusted anyone but her Florian and her Catlin. But .sited learned how to use allies the way her predecessor never had. She"d confounded Denys, frustrated Denys finally gotten the better of Denys.

Now she had the better of Yanni and Hicks of ReseuneSec, who actually knew what this place really was . . .

Inside or outside this new wing, for Yanni?

That all depended. Maybe. Maybe not, depending on how Yanni took it. And how Hicks did. And what this team he was sending her turned out to be.

"Come see," Sam"s message yesterday had said. "We"d love it if you could come."

So here they were, driving along beside the white walls, and the whole project becoming more and more real the closer they got, right down to the feathery pour-marks on the new walls, where they"d freed the finished wall from the molds.

All the conduits had gone into the forms before the pour, so she"d learned. The new place had a new sensor system, a new computer installation from the basic wiring up. It had new walls without ten thousand ghosty little lucifilaments running in places that were a real archaeological problem to trace . . . making a security headache for Wing One and most everywhere in Reseune. Systems as arcane as Base Onewhich had lurked within the lab computers until the day (event-driven, calendar-driven, it was never clear) it a.s.sembled itself and made contactjust could not surprise her in the new wing. Base One itself would get in, intact, through a prescribed gateway, and settle itself in, while other Bases would have to stop at that gateway and announce their presence to Base One before touching System inside. She trusted Base One absolutely. She was pretty sure it would do what she asked it to do. She no longer trusted, however, the systems where she livedshe hadn"t, from before Denys died. Florian and Catlin had long worried there might be a worm in the works, where Denys and his people had done all the arranging for years. Giraud might certainly have done things within Reseune"s systems that could spring on them without warning. They"d gotten through the first months post-Denys without disasterbut who knew what event might trigger something untoward? Giraud"s rebirth? Denys"s rebeginning?

Her own claim on power, when she did make it? She wanted to be in here when she made her move . . . safe, isolated, in control. Yanni ran Base Two at the moment: n.o.body but an Ari Emory and those she permitted had ever run Base One. But Base Two had been in Denys"s hands before that. And having some buried section of Base Two wake up and start actively spyingif Yanni didn"t already run those functionsthat wouldn"t be good, no.

They would be in their new, secure apartment before summer ended: Sam promised it, and she had every confidence that would happen on schedule.

And the building had taken a big stride this morning: the gray, confusing forms that had stood at the end of the U had given way to a section of white angled planes rising stark and beautiful against the sheer natural rock of the cliffs. Florian turned the little car into the rutted and dusty area of what a sign proclaimed as Parking A, among the giant earthmovers, and Sam was waiting for them there, wearing a hard hat and orange overalls no different from any of the azi who worked with him. Sam"s square face split with a grin as they got out and walked onto the hard, rutted surface that was his particular domain.

"I hoped the pour would finally draw you out here," Sam said, waving an expansive gesture at the walls. "There you are, people! Home sweet home!"

It was different than anything ever built at Reseune, an extravagant three-story crown at the apex of the new-born Alpha Wing. Her heart beat faster in excitement.

"We"ll be done ahead of schedule," Sam said. "No bubbles in the pour. Went like a dream."

That was good to hear. Bubbles in a foam wall were definitely a bad thing, and Sam meant they"d gotten all this foamwork set and hardened without sawing areas out, setting up forms again, and foaming in twice, and no problems with the design. Sam was decidedly happy with his job.

But she wanted to see. She wanted to walk inside, and make it real, not just a virtual image she could get on the computer.

"Can we get in there?" she asked.

"Right this way!" Sam led them all toward a gap in the pour, a broad area with rough notched edges. "This is just a workman"s dooryou won"t be able to walk through this wall when you live here: we"ll foam it so it"s just wall, ever after."

Reseune was like a fortress of sorts, against environmental hazards as much as for any other reason, the only lookout on this exterior side of the building once it was finished would be cameras, no doors or openings of any kind. Her apartment, at the top of the U, jutted out farthest toward the wild and the cliffs, and farthest upward, in its reinforced light-channels. The rest of the U"s ground floor would be offices, a few shops, while the upstairs was all going to be very restricted residences: her apartment would have its main door on the third floor, the way things were in Wing One second floor. But, unlike Wing One"s, her apartment and only her apartment would have an upstairs section above the third floorthat was the height of the crown, up among the angles of the walls. That would be her room, her office, her personal safe place, with Florian and Catlin by her, and their rooms, and all the things they needed, up above the world, almost even with the cliffs.

Right now. the word given out among the CIT workers was that all this construction was new labs. By the time rumor got out that it was going to be a restricted residential area, and hers in particular, the security installations would all be in, and that time was getting very close. By the time Alpha Wing System went on line (and perished immediately as Base One moved in and took over) well, it wouldn"t matter any longer, at that point, what anyone knew. They"d he defended. Everyone she loved would be defended, once System came up and Base One ruled Alpha Wing.

Sam led the way inside, over dusty concrete floors littered with foam-construction crumbles and plaster spatters. Sunlight fell in unlikely rectangles and bars from somewhere abovewhere not all the construction was finished, Ari supposed. Where they walked, first floor, was going to be offices and residences for wing security personnel other than her personal bodyguard, and they all would have immaculate security clearance.

Her new apartment, over their heads at the moment, would more than protect herit would innovate. It would be all angles, and surprises like light, and living things. It would inspire her, and inspire her visitors, with things that had never existed in Reseune. Denys" old apartment, where she had grown up. was a boxy put-together of the ubiquitous Reseune cream-colored walls and recessed lights, just boring, boring, boring with the same color walls in every room. Oh, it had real imported wood, yes, and all sorts of luxuries like hand-knotted carpet, and bric-a-brac and china. She"d sent the whole lot to storage so that Denys Two. if he one day existed, could have it all intact when he grew upbut, G.o.d, that some mentor had to teach a little boy to like that stuffy decor!

And Ari Senior"s apartment, where she lived now, had luxury, a lot of it, and it had its graces, but it was all linear, archway into archway, brown travertine and polished floors that would skid with you if you didn"t watch the rugs, and it had sat vacant for nearly a decade and a half with Base One gone dormant, an interregnum in which someone very, very clever and skilledlike Abban, like Seelycould have gotten into the place or at the place in some clever way they had never detected, with things as small as a human hair. Illicit surveillance might not have waked up yet, because Yanni might not have full use of Base Twowhich might have plunged into partial dormancy itself, awaiting some event to bring it live . . . some event like a young Abban logging onto System.

That wasn"t going to disturb her life. Not in Alpha Wing.

"This way" Sam said, and they followed Sam onto a construction lift. It lurched into action and lifted them up and up a narrow dim shaft to the highest level of the building. "This is your front door," Sam said, lifting the safety bar to let them out, and waving them toward a single gap in the white, angled walls around them. Light beyond that door was getting in from somewhere up here. It had to be her design, her sun-shaft somewhere aloft, bouncing light from panel to panel.

Her apartment, this apartment, was going to be a lot of gla.s.s, and lights, and living things. Her home was going to have fish, a whole wall that was a real tank, not just a projection of virtual fish. they were going to get them all the way from Earth"s tropicswell, via the public aquarium at Pell, which was shipping them to Cyteen, which would immediately ship them down to her.

So when you sat in the living room, there would be that living wall to watch on one side, and when you were in the entry hall, there was going to be a waterfall, with real rock going down to a stone floor, with a clever trick, an air wall, Sam"s idea, to prevent the spray from getting beyond the rim of the pool.

And upstairs in her office, which was going to be right next to her bedroom, there would be living plants behind gla.s.s . . . she"d wanted real birds. She"d had to reconsider that, because anything you imported down to the planet that was ever capable of reproducing had to be clean, with a natural barrier between it and freedom on Cyteen, and had to be considered for the ecology they"d started to restore. The water and the sea were already a mess, that was one thing, and for another, if the tanks ever breached, the fish couldn"t walk across the lawn to get to the river. So they were all right.

So no birds. Just fish. But she could do real science with what she kept. She could do so many things . . . she could breed fish and get them to a public aquarium in Novgorod, where people could come and enjoy them, and know something about Earth in the process, and something about living next to an ocean.

And instantly, as they walked beyond the second wall, just short of where the security installation would be, she recognized the recess for the water-pool, just the way she"d drawn it, and saw the straight, bare form for the rock, slanting away and up and up on the left.

Everything was white and dusty from the pour. But a glance all the way up showed a series of white planes, and the sun-shafts and pressurized windows she"d asked for must already be in here, too: real daylight came into the area. There was a balcony above that overlooked it all. There were recesses here and there for the electric lighting that would brighten with a vocal command, once System was in. Beyond, in the open plan dining room, was the section of arched roof for the projection that would show the real sky, just the way it was outsideso when it rained, it would cloud over, and when it was night, there would be stars. She wanted all the contact with the planet she could possibly get, living under the umbrella of the weathermakers and precip towers as they did, and being forbidden windows that really looked out on the world.

It would feel open. If it worked, they were going to do the same sky-dome in the big hall of the general public residencies. She was going to fix Reseune. It was going to be a place people wanted to be, before she was done with it. It wouldn"t be the same old utilitarian box-shape and domes, not after her.

It was all Sam again. Sam had taken her rough sketches of years and years ago and played with them in his own computer for years. Sam had lately run it all through the big computers and ended up with real measurements that were going to meet regulations and make design sense, and Sam said he was working with architects who were with him and excited about what he was doing. She"d pulled strings with Yanni to get Sam time on systems at night, and Sam had pulled shift and shift. Give him shapes and he could figure the real building down to the joins and conduits. Give him charge of the logistics, and he had a fine grasp of what had to be scheduled when, right down to dealing with the bot programmers and giving clear orders to the azi workers and the CITs.

More, Reseune Construction wanted him when he was done. They told him he was already official on staff, never mind the regs and his lack of a degree and his agehe"d done his time in tape-study that hadn"t been recorded, but they wanted him. The head of architectural design in RC, the same architect she"d aimed at Stra.s.senberg itself, she"d hired to do the job here, too, and asked him to mentor Sam; but within the first month, RC"s chief architect had just de facto turned Sam and two of his best people loose to handle everything on-site here while he concentrated on the more esoteric technicalities of the precip towers at Stra.s.senberg.

Fitz Fitzpatrick was the man"s name. Florian and Catlin had investigated him top to bottom, the only CIT besides Yanni to be trusted with the knowledge of what was going on here. He was actually an uncle of Amy"s; and the relationship between Fitz Fitzpatrick and Sam was absolutely the happiest of all the string-pulling she"d ever done.

And here was the result of it. The planes of the walls evolved one into another as they all walked through. "That"s my fish wall!" she exclaimed, spotting the deep recess, delighted, and Sam beamed and blushed a bit.

"The gla.s.s is here. That was big. The build for the tank will be among the last. I"ll be looking to experts" specs on that."

"I"ve got the data you want," she said. She was seeing a tank filled with water, where now there was only white. "I want to learn it myself, but I"m going to be Contracting a specialist in salt aquaculture to actually do the running long-term. He"ll help you set it up. His name"s Chris BCN-3. He was supposed to be on the Beta Station production tanks. He"s seventeen, still taking tape, but he"s getting info on Earth exotics and he"s through enough already to help you, this week if you need him: he"s going to be supering all the watery technicalswith a couple of a.s.sistants if he turns out to need them."

"Wouldn"t hurt at all. I"m anxious to get the pumps arranged. Any of your other staff you"ll want to tour through, or consult during the build, you let me know. The kitchens might be an issue."

"Florian and Catlin are on it. They"ll get you a list of people we might have come here to walk around at certain stages. Security. Operations. Kitchen, in particular. We"re getting staff. They aren"t cleared into the house yet."

"A few here might be helpful," Florian said, behind them. "Not many though. We won"t inundate you with advice."

A laser must be running. A burned stench wafted through. Something metal fell, distant, and the impact of something the size of the runabout echoed off the walls.

Sam tapped his hardhat. "Must"ve dropped a wrench out there. This area"s safe. Down the main corridor, they"re doing some light work in the ceiling today."

"The supers are all on our list," Catlin said. It was a question, regarding the CITs onsite.

"Always," Sam said, unruffled. "Security never lapses. They don"t even take an inside lunch break: the azi crew is deepset against discussing their work off-duty, so d.a.m.ned enthusiastic I have to make them take breaksthey all know what they"re doing is unique, and they"re excited. So are the rest of us. to tell the truth. Want to see the latest?" He walked them to a serpentine line marked on the floor, which ran to the edge of the living room. "I want to S-curve a meter-deep channel through the flooring. A water channel, clear top, lighted underneath, with rock."

"I love it!" Ari exclaimed. "A river."

"Well, a stream. It"ll share its water source with the waterfall, not the tank. Fresh water. Complete loop. There"s a submersible pig to clean it and zap the algae."

"Pig." She envisioned the ones that sniffed native life that got onto the grounds.

Sam"s eyes danced. They were brown, unpretentious as the rest of him.

He so loved knowing something technical that she didn"t. "A machine-pig. A cleaner bot. Same as they use for regular water-systems, standard piece of equipment, actually. That"s what they call it. It ought to work."

"Pig." She liked that word. It conjured the working pigs that patrolled the grounds and kept them safe. "Do it, if you think it"ll work. I like your river, Sam. I love it!"

"It just came to me when I was walking through here. We can have a pump at the top of the loop, right where the waterfall is, keep the water really moving."

"Oh, don"t tell me everything! I just want to be astonished when I see it!"

They toured the downstairs bathroom, a modern installation that played a little off the waterfall concept, with sealed stone, but the fixtures were all modern. And there was a second scissor-lift to take them up to the second floora scary little step across vacant s.p.a.ce, and onto solid foamcrete.

At one end of that hall, beside the as yet rail-less balcony, was Florian and Catlin"s suite, which was going to have a gym, and a workshop, and a library of its own. Other staff quarters would be right below it.

"Much more convenient," was Florian"s only comment. But their eyes were bright. They were happy and easy with Sam. they always had been.

And then her room, her huge bedroom, with a cozy nook for a bed, and a living-sky ceiling, and a gla.s.sed-in area for the divider from her office, where her terrarium would be, and her wardrobe, and her bath, which had an in-floor tub, and a mister, and its own little salon, plus a little exercise room of her own ... it was everything, all in one. It was all her imagination wrapped up in a design of white plaster at the moment, and she went out onto the unrailed balconyFlorian and Catlin were there in a heartbeatbut not too far toward the edge, just looking down at all of the living and dining area below.

She might have to take over Reseune early. She might not have the years she wanted.