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better than talking into the camera. She’d keyboarded and coded since she could remember and did this part without thinking too much about the process, at least in replicating routines she’d lifted from the files that had taught her. The hands flew very fast as she linked modules, which was like taking chunks of thinking, like building blocks, and dragging them all together into a coherent program. Her moves dictated what would flow from that first session, and moved the defcons Ari Senior had created for her own tapes into position to protect and assess and seal that session from anyone’s future deletion—even her own later second thoughts. That was the way it worked—at least on the level she worked at, inside Base One. She needed to be better than she was, but she was good enough for this. She wouldn’t be able to get in and tamper, no matter if she had better thoughts later. If she interfered with what she was now, she couldn’t get her successor to be who she would be…
    How was that for klein-bottle thinking?
Chapter iv
BOOK ONE
Section 1
Chapter iv
    A PRIL 22, 2424
1121 H
    Pre-lunch meeting, in a small conference room, not on the agenda: Dr. Sandur Patil, Yanni Schwartz was notified, had entered the Bureau of Science, was downstairs at the moment, and on her way up.
    It wasn’t an extraordinary event: a professor registered in Science entered the offices of that bureau in Novgorod. But it was uncommon that such a visit would reach the attention of the Proxy Councillor for Science, and more unusual still that it would bring said Councillor to put on his coat and head down the hall to the back entry to an anonymous conference room.
    In the capital, in an environment rife with media ferrets and political gossips, Yanni Schwartz found time, personally, to meet with Patil by a circuitous route. Technically she was one of his constituents, since Dr. Sandi Patil was a scientist, still registered to vote in Science, and he was Proxy Councillor of that Bureau…de facto Councillor. Lynch, erstwhile Secretary of Science, had been Proxy Councillor when Giraud died; Lynch had become Councillor for Science by succession, with the right to appoint a new Proxy Councillor: Yanni. So Yanni sat and voted in sessions, even though Lynch was in the city: it was a valid vote unless Lynch should rise up and repudiate it, which Lynch wasn’t going to do, being a timid sort; and the office staved, de facto, in Reseune, where it had always been.
    And being Director of Reseune as well as Proxy Councillor—Yanni wielded a certain power as head of the Expansionist Party, which meant what he did politically was usually policy-setting in that party.
    That was why, if any of the reporters outside the building had seen him meeting with Sandi Patil, it would have drawn notice—Dr. Patil being a particular darling of the Centrist cause, adored by the radical fringe of that group, though the majority of those registered in Science were Expansionist. She had voted against Giraud Nye, that was a near certainty. Now she arrived and proceeded as if she had business somewhere in the mundane administrative offices downstairs, some matter of records or certifications…then took the lift straight up to the administrative third floor, where a good Centrist was decidedly in foreign territory.
    Yanni entered the conference room: his azi companion, Frank, was with him, but Frank went on through to the foyer. He had no other security present, unusual, in itself, for a Director of Reseune. His visitor, upward bound, didn’t have a wire or a bug: the moment she walked into the lift, Frank had made sure she was clean. She likely would expect someone like Frank to sit in on the meeting, but she had seemed skittish of this dealing, Yanni was forewarned of that, so he stationed Frank in the anteroom and settled alone at the head of the conference table, waiting—about, he trusted, to find out what Patil thought of the offer she’d gotten three months