Cyteen: The Betrayal Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 something 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-” Walkout 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.”
     
    ii.
    He was an ordinary enough man who showed up in the Hall of Slate conference room, wearing a brown casual suit, carrying a briefcase that looked as if it had been sent through baggage once too often. Corain would not have picked him out of any crowd: a brown-haired, handsome, athletic sort, not looking quite his forty-six years. But bodyguards would have attended this man until military police took him under their own wing, and very likely servants had all but dressed him and staffers intended him on ordinary business. By no means would Jordan Warrick have come by commercial carrier or a baggage department gotten its hands on that briefcase. .
    Emory was a Special. There were three at Reseune, the highest number at any single installation. One was this man, who devised and debugged psych tape structures, so they said, in his head. Computers ordinarily did that kind of work. When an important enough tape program had to be built or debugged, they gave it to Jordan Warrick’s staff, and when a problem was more than any or all of them could handle it went to Warrick himself. That was as much as Corain understood. The man was a certified genius and a Ward of the State. Like Emory. Like the other dozen Special Persons.
    And presumably if Emory wanted to accord that status to a twenty-year-old chemist on Fargone, and, the rumor said, open an office there to attach him to Reseune staff, and seemed to imply she attached a priority to that project that made it worth something in the scales right along with her cherished colonial push, there was a damned good reason for it.
    “Ser Lu,” Warrick said, shaking Lu’s offered hand. “Adm. Gorodin. A pleasure.” And a worried look but an overall friendly one as he looked toward Corain and offered his hand. “Councillor. I hadn’t expected you.”
    Corain’s heart did a little skip-and-race. Danger, it said. Warrick, he reminded himself, was not one of those bright types who operated in some foggy realm of abstract logic completely detached from humanity: he was a psychsurgeon, manipulation was his work, and he was quite in his element stripping people down