C. J. Cherryh - Union Alliance - Cyteen

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C.J. Cherryh - Cyteen
Verbal Text from:
THE HUMANE REVOLUTION
"The Company Wars": #1
Reseune Educational Publications: 4668-1368-1 approved for 80+
Imagine all the variety of the human species confined to a single world, a
world sown with the petrified bones of human ancestors, a planet dotted with
the ruins of ten thousand years of forgotten human civilizations—a planet on
which at the time human beings first flew in space, humans still hunted a
surplus of animals, gathered wild plants, farmed with ancient methods, spun
natural yarns by hand and cooked over wood fires.
Earth owed allegiance to a multitude of chairmen, councillors, kings,
ministers and presidents; to parliaments and congresses and committees, to
republics, democracies, oligarchies, theocracies, monarchies, hegemonies and
political parties which had evolved in profusion for thousands of years.
This was the world which first sent out the starprobes.
Sol Station existed, a much more primitive Sol Station, but altogether self-
sustaining; and favored with a system of tax remission in return for
scientific benefit, it launched a number of ambitious projects, including the
first large-engine star-probe, and ultimately the first crewed pusher-ship
cluster toward the near stars.
The first of the pusher-modules was of course the venerable Gaia, which was to
deliver the Alpha station-component at the star known at that time as
Barnard's, and leave thirty volunteer scientists and technicians in what in
those days meant inconceivable isolation. They would build their station out
of the star's expected system-clutter of rock and ice, perform scientific
research and maintain long-distance communication with Earth.
The first concept had been disposable pushers, hardly more than robotic
starprobes; but human passengers mandated an abort-and-return capacity which,
considering all the possibilities for disaster, was negotiated finally to mean
a full-return capacity. That led to the notion of a crewed pusher-module to
stay at Barnard's should the star prove impossibly deficient in raw materials
necessary for self-sufficiency of the Alpha module, in which event Gaia might
remain for a number of years, then strip the station to the essential core and
return the mission to Earth. If the star proved a viable home for the station,
Gaia would remain only a year or so until the Alpha Station module was fully
functioning and stable in its orbit. Then it would return to Sol with its tiny
complement of crew and surrender the Gaia module to a second mission, which
would, after refitting, go out again with such supplies as trace minerals and
materials which the infant station might not have available. Equally important
with the supplies, those early pioneers theorized, was the human link, the
reassurance of face-to-face contact with other human beings across what in
those days was an inconceivably lonely expanse of space.
Earth, with years' advance warning via the constant data-flow from Gaia and
Alpha Station that the mission was abundantly successful and that Gaia was
returning, trained a replacement crew and dutifully prepared the return
mission.
But the crew of Gaia, subject to relativistic effects, running into an
information stream indicating greater and greater changes in the Earth they
had left, had become more at home in the ship than in the mainstream of a
Terran culture gone very alien to them. Their sojourn on Sol Station was
intensely unhappy, and they re-occupied Gaia by a surprise move which
immensely disconcerted station authorities, but which finally won them their
ship and relegated the replacement crew to waiting on the next pusher-craft.
Other crews of further missions reached the same decision, regarding
themselves as permanent voyagers. They considered their small ships as home,
had children aboard, and as star stations and attendant pushers multiplied,
asked of Earth and the stations only fuel, provisions, and the improvement of
their ships with larger compartments, more advanced propulsion—whatever had
become available since their last docking.
Star-stations at half a dozen stars linked themselves by the regular passage
of such ships. But in the isolation of those days in which messages traveled
at mere light-speed and ships traveled slower still, every station was at
least four or five years time-lagged from every other human habitation, be it
ship or station, and learned to exist in these strangely fluxing time-
referents which were impossibly alien to the general population of Earth.
The discovery of intelligent life on the planet at Pell's Star, the star Earth
once called Tau Ceti, was more than ten years old by the time the word of it
reached Earth. The dealing of human beings with the Downers was more than two
decades advanced by the time Earth's elaborate instructions could arrive at
Pell; and it was much longer before Terran scientists could reach Pell, up the
long route that led them station by station into a human culture almost as
foreign to them as were the Downers.
As it is difficult from our viewpoint to imagine Earth of that time, it was
virtually impossible for Earth to comprehend the reasoning of spacers who
refused to leave their ships and who, in their turn, found the (to them)
teeming corridors of Sol Station chaotic and terrifying. It was virtually
impossible even for Sol Station to understand the life of their contemporaries
in the deep Beyond—contemporaries whose culture was built on history and
experiences and legendry that had much more to do with the hardships of life
in remote stations and famous ships, than with events in a green and chaotic
world they saw only in pictures.
Earth, beset with overpopulation and political crises largely attributable to
its ancient rivalries, had nevertheless flourished while it was the focus of
human development. The unexpected rush of stationers to new construction at
Pell, following the prospect of abundant biostuffs, a native population
primitive and friendly, and exploitable free-orbiting resources, became a
panic flood. Stations between Earth and Pell shut down, disrupting the trade
of the Great Circle, and creating economic chaos on Earth and Sol Station.
Earth reacted by attempting to regulate—across a ten-year time lag: Terran
politicians could not readily conceive of the economic strength the remaining
stations might achieve, given the unification of population that rush to Pell
had created. The concentration of population and the discovery of vast
resources combined with the psychological impetus to exploration . . . meant
that Earth's now twenty-year-old instructions arrived in a situation in such
rapid flux even a month's lag would have been significant.
Earth found itself increasingly isolate, subject to internal pressures from a
faltering trade system, and in a desperate and ill-advised action imposed a
punitive tariff which led to smuggling and an active black market; which in
turn led to a sudden fall-off of trade. Earth's response was the declaration
of most-favored-status for certain ships; which led in turn to armed
hostilities between ships from Earth and ships which had not been built by
Earth and which did not hold any allegiance to its convolute and wildly
varying politics.
Further, Earth, convinced that emigration of scientists and engineers from Sol
System was feeding the spacer cultures with the best and brightest and robbing
Earth of its best talent, slammed down an emigration ban not only on travel
from Earth and Sol Station, but on further moves of citizens in certain
professions from station to station.
Gaia made her last trip to Earth in 2125, and left, vowing never to return.
A general wave of rebellion and mutiny swept through the stars; stations were
mothballed and deserted; probes and missions sought further stars not only
with economic motive now—but because there were more and more people anxious
to move outward, seeking political freedom before restrictions came down.
Viking Station and Mariner sprang into existence as stationers found even Pell
too vulnerable to Earth's influence and as Pell's now established economy
afforded less opportunity for highly profitable initial-phase investment.
By 2201 a group of dissident scientists and engineers sponsored by financial
interests on Manner founded a station at Cyteen, about a world vastly
different from Pell. The brilliant work of one of those scientists combined
with the economic power of Cyteen's new industries sent the first faster-than-
light probe out from Cyteen in 2234, an event which altered the time-scale of
spaceflight and forever changed the nature of trade and politics.
Cyteen's early years were characterized not only by a burst of growth and
invention unparalleled in human history, but, ironically, by the resurrection
of long disused technologies out of ship archives: combustion engines,
gravity-dependent processing, all to save soft-landing the enormous mass-
requirements of a full-scale terrestrial development. In addition, there were
new on-planet technologies specific to Cyteen, to create pockets of breathable
atmosphere in the otherwise deadly environment—all this effort because Cyteen
represented a major biological opportunity for the human species. It had no
intelligent indigenes. It did have a varied and entirely alien ecosystem—
virtually two ecosystems, in fact, because of the extreme isolation of its two
continents, differing significantly from each other but vastly different from
Earth and Pell.
It was a biologist's paradise. And it offered, by its absence of intelligent
life, the first new cradle of terrestrial human civilization since Earth
itself.
It was not politics alone which led to the Company Wars. It was the sudden
acceleration of trade and population mobility, it was the stubborn application
of outmoded policies by Terran agencies out of touch with the governed, and
finally it was the loyalty of a handful of specially favored Terran merchanter
captains attempting to maintain a fading trade empire for a motherworld which
had become only peripheral to human space.
It was a doomed effort. Cyteen, no longer alone in the Beyond, but mother-
world itself to Esperance, Pan-pans, and Fargone Stations, declared its
independence from the Earth Company in 2300, an action which, reported now
with the speed of the Faster-Than-Lights, prompted Earth to build and dispatch
armed FTLs to bring the dissident stations back into line.
Merchanters quickly fled the routes nearer Pell, thus reducing the
availability of supplies, while Earth itself, even with FTL technology, was by
no means able to supply the mass requirement of its fleet over such distances.
Over a span of years the Earth Company fleet degenerated to acts of piracy and
coercion which completely alienated the merchanters, always the Earth
Company's mistake.
The formation of the merchanters' Alliance at Pell established the second
mercantile power in the Beyond and put an end to Earth's attempt to dictate to
its scattered colonies.
Surely one of the more ironical outcomes of the War, the Treaty of Pell and
the resulting economic linkages of three human societies, drawing on three
vastly different ecosystems, now exist as the driving forces in a new economic
structure which transcends all politics and systems.
Trade and common interests have proven, in the end, more powerful in human
affairs than all the warships ever launched.
CHAPTER 1
i
It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts
where humanity had as yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as
moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored except by orbiting radar. Ariane
Emory gazed down at it from the window. She kept to the passenger compartment
now. Her eyesight, she had had to admit it, was no longer sharp enough, her
reflexes no longer fast enough for the jet. She could go up front, bump the
pilot out of the chair and take the controls: it was her plane, her pilot, and
a wide sky. Sometimes she did. But it was not the same.
Only the land was, still most of the land was. And when she looked out the
window, it might have been a century ago, when humankind had been established
on Cyteen less than a hundred years, when Union was unthought of, the War only
a rumbling discontent, and the land looked exactly like this everywhere.
Two hundred years ago the first colonists had come to this unlikely star, made
the beginnings of the Station, and come down to the world.
Forty-odd years later the sublight ships were coming in, few and forlorn, to
try to convert their structure and their operations to faster-than-light; and
time sped up, time hurtled at translight speeds, change came so fast that
sublight ships met ships they took for alien—but they were not: it was worse
news for them. They were human. And the game was all changed.
The starships went out like seeds from a pod. The genetics labs upriver at
Reseune bred humanity as fast as it could turn them out from the womb-tanks,
and every generation bred others and worked in labs breeding more and more,
till there were people enough, her uncle had said, to fill the empty places,
colonize the world, build more star-stations: Esperance. Fargone. Every place
with its own labs and its own means to breed and grow.
Earth had tried to call her ships back. It was all too late. Earth had tried
to tax and rule its colonies with a hard hand. That was very much too late.
Ariane Emory remembered the Secession, the day that Cyteen declared itself and
its own colonies independent; the day the Union began and they were all
suddenly rebels against the distant motherworld. She had been seventeen when
the word came down from Station: We are at war.
Reseune bred soldiers, then, grim and single-minded and intelligent, oh, yes:
bred and refined and honed, knowing by touch and reflex what they had never
seen in their lives, knowing above all what their purpose was. Living weapons,
thinking and calculating down one track. She had helped design those patterns.
Forty-five years after the Secession the war was still going on, sometimes
clandestine, sometimes so remote in space it seemed a fact of history—except
at Reseune. Other facilities could breed the soldiers and the workers once
Reseune had set the patterns, but only Reseune had the research facilities,
and it had fought the war in its own dark ways, under Ariane Emory's
directorate.
Fifty-four years of her life. . . had seen the Company Wars over, humanity
divided, borders drawn. The Earth Company Fleet had held Pell's Star, but the
merchanters of the newly formed Alliance had taken Pell and declared it their
base. Sol had tried to ignore its humiliating defeat and go off in another
direction; the remnant of the old Company Fleet had turned to piracy and still
raided merchanters, no different than they had ever done, while Alliance and
Union alike hunted them. It was only hiatus. The war was cold again. It went
on at conference tables where negotiators tried to draw lines biology did not,
and make borders in boundless, three-dimensional space—to keep a peace that
had never, in all Ariane Emory's life, existed.
All of that might not have been yet. It might have been a hundred years ago,
except that the plane was sleek and fine, not the patch-together that had run
cargo between Novgorod and Reseune: in those days everyone had sat on bales of
plastics and containers of seed and whatever else was making the trip.
Then she had begged to sit by the dusty windows and her mother had said to put
her sunscreen on, even so.
Now she sat in a leather seat with a drink at her elbow, in a jet snugly warm
inside, immaculately maintained, with a handful of aides talking business and
going over their notes, a noise just barely enough to get past the engines.
No traveling nowadays without a clutter of aides and bodyguards. Catlin and
Florian were back there, quiet as they were trained to be, watching her back,
even here, at 10,000 meters and among Reseune staff whose briefcases were full
of classified material.
Much, much different from the old days.
Maman, can I sit by the window?
She was anomalous, child of two parents, Alga Emory and James Carat. They had
founded the labs at Reseune, had begun the process that had shaped Union
itself. They had sent out the colonists, the soldiers. Their own genes had
gone into hundreds of them. Her quasi-relatives were scattered across
lightyears. But so were everyone's, these days. In her lifetime even that
basic human thinking had changed: biological parentage was a trivial
connection. Family mattered, the larger, the more extended ... the safer and
more prosperous.
Reseune was her inheritance. Hence this jet, not a commercial airliner. No
hired plane, either, and no military jet. A woman in her position could call
on all these things; and still preferred mechanics who were part of the
Household, a pilot whose psych-patterns she was sure of, bodyguards who were
the best of Reseune's designs.
The thought of a city, the subways, life among the clerks and techs and cooks
and laborers who jostled one another and hurried about their schedules to earn
credit. . . was as frightening to her as airless space. She directed the
course of worlds and colonies. The thought of trying to buy a meal in a
restaurant, of fighting crowds to board a subway, of simply being on a topside
street where traffic roared and people were in motion on all sides—filled her
with an irrational panic.
She did not know how to live outside Reseune. She knew how to arrange a plane,
check out the flight plans, order her luggage, her aides, her security, every
little detail—and found a public airport an ordeal. A serious flaw, granted.
But everyone was due a phobia or two and these things were far from the center
of her worries. It was not likely that Ariane Emory would ever face a Novgorod
subway or a station's open dock.
It was a long, long while before she saw the river and the first plantation. A
thin ribbon of road, finally the domes and towers of Novgorod, a sudden,
remarkably sudden metropolis. Under the jet's wings the plantations widened,
the towers of electronic screens and precipitators shadowed the fields and
traffic crawled along the roads at ground-bound pace.
Barges chained down the Volga toward the sea, barges and pushers lined the
river dockage past the plantations. There was still a lot of the raw and
industrial about Novgorod, for all the glitter of the new. This side of it had
not changed in a hundred years, except to grow bigger, the barges and the
traffic becoming ordinary instead of a rare and wonderful sight.
Look, maman, there's a truck.
The blue of woolwood thicket blurred by under the wing. Pavement and the end-
stripes of the runway flashed past.
The tires touched smoothly and the jet came rolling to a stop, for a left turn
toward the terminal.
A little panic touched Ariane Emory at this stage, despite the knowledge that
she would never get to the crowded hallways. There were cars waiting. Her own
crew would handle the baggage, secure the jet, do all these things. It was
only the edge of the city; and the car windows would permit vision out, out
none in.
All those strangers. All that motion, random and chaotic. In the distance she
loved it. It was her own creation. She knew its mass motions, if not its
individual ones. At a distance, in the aggregate, she trusted it. At close
range it made her hands sweat.
Cars pulling up and a flurry of hurrying guards in the security entrance of
the Hall of State said that it was no mere senatorial arrival. Mikhail Corain,
on the balcony outside the Council Chamber, flanked by his own bodyguards and
aides, paused and looked down on the echoing stone lower floor, with its
fountain, its brass railings on the grand stairway, its multiple star-emblem
in gold on the gray stone wall.
Imperial splendor for imperial ambitions. And the chief architect for those
ambitions made her entrance. The Councillor from Reseune, in company with the
Secretary of Science. Ariane Carnath-Emory with her entourage, late,
dependably late, because the Councillor was damned confident of her majority,
and only deigned to visit the Hall because the Councillor had to vote in
person.
Mikhail Corain glared and felt that speeding of his heart that his doctors had
told him to avoid. Calm down, they were wont to say. Some things are beyond
your control.
Meaning, one supposed, the Councillor from Reseune.
Cyteen, by far the most populous of the entities in the Union, had
consistently managed to capture two seats in the executive, in the Council of
Nine. It was logical that one of them was the Bureau of Citizens, which meant
labor and farming and small business. It was not logical that the electors in
the sciences, far and wide across the lightyears Union reached, with a dozen
eminently qualified potential candidates, persisted in returning Ariane Emory
to the halls of government.
More than that. To a position which she had held for fifty years, fifty damned
years, during which she had bribed and browbeaten interests on Cyteen and
every station in Union and (rumored but never proved) in Alliance and Sol as
well. You wanted something done? You asked someone who could get the
Councillor of Science to arrange it. What were you willing to pay? What would
you take in trade?
And the damned Science electorate, made up of supposed intellects, kept voting
her in, no matter what the scandals that attached to her, no matter that she
virtually owned Reseune labs, which was legally equal to a planet in Union's
government, which did things within its walls that countless investigations
had tried (and failed, on technicalities) to prove.
Money was not the answer. Corain had money. It was Ariane Emory herself. It
was the fact that most of the population of Cyteen, most of the population of
Union itself, had come in one way or another from Reseune; and those who did
not, used tapes . . . that Reseune devised.
Which that woman . . . devised.
To doubt the integrity of the tapes was paranoid. Oh, there were a few who
refused to use them; and studied higher math and business without them, and
never took a pill and never lay down to dream what the masses clear across
Union dreamed, knowledge pouring into their heads, as much as they could
absorb, there in a few sessions. Drama—experienced as well as seen. . . at
carefully chosen intensity. Skills—acquired at a bone and nerve level. You
used the tapes because your competition would, because you had to excel to get
along in the world, because it was the only way to know things fast enough,
high enough, wide enough, and the world changed and changed and changed, in
any human lifespan.
The Bureau of Information vetted those tapes. Experts reviewed them. There was
no way any subliminals could get past them. Mikhail Corain was not one of the
lunatic fringe who suspected government com-tapping, Alliance poisoning of
cargoes, or mind-enslaving subliminals in the entertainment tapes. That sort
of purist could refuse rejuv, die old at seventy five, and live off public
works jobs because they were self-taught know-nothings.
But damn it, damn it, that woman kept getting elected. And he could not
understand it.
There she was, getting a little stoop to the shoulders, allowing a little
streak of gray to show in the black hair, when anyone who could count knew she
was older than Union, on rejuv and silver-haired under the dye. Aides swarmed
round her. Cameras focused on her as if there was no other center to the
universe. Damn bony bitch.
You wanted a human being designed like a prize pig, you asked Reseune. You
wanted soldiers, you wanted workers, you wanted strong backs and weak minds or
a perfect, guaranteed genius, you asked Reseune.
And senators and Councillors alike came to bow and scrape and mouth
politenesses—Good God, someone had brought her flowers.
Mikhail Corain turned away in disgust, plowed himself a way through his aides.
Twenty years he had been sitting as head of the minority party in the Nine,
twenty years of swimming against the tide, gaining a little now and again,
losing all the big ones, the way they had lost the latest. Stanislaw Vogel of
the Trade electorate had died, and with the Alliance violating the treaty as
fast as they could arm their merchant ships, the Centrists ought to have been
able to carry that seat. But no. The Trade electorate elected Ludmilla
deFranco, Vogel's niece. Moderate, hell, deFranco was only steering a careful
course. She was no less an Expansionist than her uncle. Something had changed
hands. Someone had been bought, someone had tilted Andrus Company toward
deFranco, and the Centrists had lost their chance to install a fifth member in
the Nine and gain the majority of the executive for the first time in history.
It was a crushing disappointment.
And there, there in the hall downstairs, in the middle of the sycophants and
all the bright young legislators, was the one who had pulled the strings money
could not pull.
Political favor, then. The unprovable, untraceable commodity.
On that, the fate of the Union hinged.
He entertained the most terrible fantasy, not for the first time, that
somehow, on the steps outside, some lunatic might run up with a gun or a knife
and solve their problem at one stroke. He felt a profound disturbance at that
thought. But it would reshape the Union. It would give humankind a chance,
before it was everlastingly too late.
One life—weighed very little in those scales.
He drew deep breaths. He walked into the Council chambers and made polite
conversation with the few who came to commiserate with the losers. He gritted
his teeth and walked over to pay his polite congratulations to Bogdanovitch,
who, holding the seat of the Bureau of State, chaired the Council.
Bogdanovitch kept his face absolutely bland, his kindly, white-browed eyes the
image of everyone's grandfather, full of gentility and civility. Not a trace
of triumph. If he had been that good when he negotiated the Alliance
settlement, Union would own the codes to Pell. Bogdanovitch was always better
at petty politics. And he was another one who lasted. His electorate was all
professional, the consuls, the appointees, immigration, the station
administrators—a minuscule number of people to elect an office which had
started out far less important than it had turned out to be. God, how had the
framers of the Constitution let themselves play creative games with the
political system? The 'new model,' they had called it; 'a government shaped by
an informed electorate.' And they had thrown ten thousand years of human
experience out the hatch, a damned bunch of social theorists, including,
including Olga Emory and James Carnath, back in the days when Cyteen had five
seats of the Nine and most of the Council of Worlds.
"Tough one, Mikhail," Bogdanovitch said, shaking his hand and patting it.
"Well, will of the electorate," Corain said. "Can't quarrel with that." He
smiled with absolute control. "We did get the highest percentage yet."
Someday, you old pirate, someday I'll have the majority.
And you'll live to see it.
"Will of the electors," Bogdanovitch said, still smiling, and Corain smiled
till his teeth ached, then turned from Bogdanovitch to Jenner Harogo, another
of that breed, holding the powerful Internal Affairs seat, and Catherine Lao,
who held the Bureau of Information, which vetted all the tapes. Of course.
Emory came sailing in and they left him in mid-sentence to go and join her
claque. Corain exchanged a pained look with Industry, Nguyen Tien of Viking;
and Finance, Mahmud Chavez of Voyager Station, Centrists both. Their fourth
seat, Adm. Leonid Gorodin, was over in a grim confluence of his own uniformed
aides. Defense was, ironically, the least reliable—the most prone to reassess
his position and shift into the Expansionist camp if he conceived near-term
reasons. That was Gorodin, Centrist only because he wanted the new Excelsior-
class military transports kept in near space where he could use them, not, as
he put it, 'out on our backside while Alliance pulls another damn embargo. You
want your electorates hammering at your doors for supplies, you want another
hot war, citizens, let's just send those carriers out to the far Beyond and
leave us depending on Alliance merchanters. . . .'
Not saying, of course, that the Treaty of Pell, which had agreed that the
merchanters' Alliance would haul cargo and build no warships; and that Union,
which had built a good many of those haulers, would maintain its fleet, but
build no ships to compete with the merchanters . . . was a diplomatic buy-off,
a ransom to get supply flowing again. Bogdanovitch had brought that home and
even Emory had voted against it.
The stations had passed it. The full General Council had to vote on it, and it
got through by a hair's breadth. Union was tired of war, that was all, tired
of disrupted trade, scarce supplies.
Now Emory wanted to launch another wave of exploration and colonization out
into the deep Beyond.
Everyone knew there was trouble out there to find. What Sol had run into on
the other side of space proved that well enough. It had brought Sol running
back to the Alliance, begging for trade, begging for markets. Sol had
neighbors, and its reckless poking about was likely to bring trouble in the
Alliance's back door and right to Union space. Gorodin hammered on that point
constantly. And demanded a larger share of the budget for Defense.
Gorodin's position was weakest. He was vulnerable to a vote of confidence.
They could lose him, if he failed to get the ships the Fleet wanted, in the
zones that mattered.
And the news from the Trade electorate was a blow, a severe one. The Centrists
had thought they had won this one. They had truly thought they had a chance of
stopping Emory, and all they could do now was force a point of order, persuade
the Council that no vote ought to be taken on the Hope project, since it
involved ship appropriations and a major budget priority decision, until
deFranco could get in from Esperance and assume her seat.
Or ... they could break the quorum and send it to a vote in the Council of
Worlds. Emory's cabal would flinch at that. The representatives were far more
independent, especially Cyteen's large bloc, who were mostly Centrist. Let
them get their teeth into a bill of this complexity not already hammered out
by the Nine, and they would be at it for months, sending up changes the Nine
would veto, and round and round again.
Let Gorodin have another try at persuading the Expansionists to delay the
vote. Gorodin was the one on the fence, the one with the medals, the war hero.
Throw him at them, see if he could swing them. If not, the Centrists would
walk, all four of them. It had political cost, profound cost, to break the
quorum and close the meeting.
But time was what they needed, time to get to key lobbyists, time to see if
they could pull a few strings and see if deFranco, when she arrived, could be
persuaded to be the moderate she proclaimed herself—or at least tilt to the
Centrist side on a bill that critical to her constituency. She might, might,
vote to table.
Councillors drifted toward their seats. Emory's group came up last.
Predictably.
Bogdanovitch rapped with the antique gavel.
"Council is in session," Bogdanovitch said, and proceeded to the election
results and the official confirmation of Ludmilla deFranco as Councillor for
the Bureau of Trade.
Moved and seconded, Catherine Lao and Jenner Harogo. Emory sat expressionless.
She never made routine motions. The bored look on her face, the slow
revolutions of the stylus in her long-nailed fingers, proclaimed a studied
patience with the forms.
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分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：692 页 大小：1.34MB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-06

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