Free Cyteen: The Betrayal by C. J. Cherryh Page A

light.”
    “Military can beat her.”
    “A worry. But Harogo’s a much higher card, on his own station, and he’s bringing home the second biggest construction project Fargone’s ever lusted after. First being the Hope corridor, of course. There won’t be a hitch. If the Centrists try anything with Rubin, Harogo can fry them, no question. We’d love that kind of ammunition. Did you see the clip? Rubin’s a wide-eyed innocent. Pure science and total vulnerability. I thought that came across rather well.”
    “They can throw that back at us too,” Giraud said.
    “We can rely on Harogo, I think. At certain times, you have to let a thing go.”
    “Even Warrick?”
    “If they want him by then.”
     
    ii
     
    Ari smiled gently across the table, across the salad with vinaigrette, product of their own gardens, and dusted it liberally with a spoonful of Keis, synthetic cheese, a salted yeast, actually: spacer’s affectation. Her mother had used it. Ari still liked the tang of it, and imported it downworld at some little trouble.
    Most of the Family abhorred it.
    It was the formal dining hall: one long table for the Family, and a large U-shaped table around the outside for the azi who were closer than relatives, and somewhat more numerous, about two to one.
    Herself at the head: that had been the case since the day uncle Geoffrey died. To her right, Giraud Nye, to her left his brother Denys; then Yanni Schwartz right side, left again, his sister Beth; and across from her, Beth’s son by Giraud Nye, young Suli Schwartz, long-nosed and thin-faced, and looking preoccupied as usual: sixteen and bored; left next, and right and right again, Petros Ivanov and his two sisters Irene and Katrin, then Katrin’s current passion the dark-skinned Morey Carneth-Nye; old Jane Strassen looking like a dowager empress in black and an ostentatious lot of silver; daughter Julia Strassen in green, a truly amazing décolletage; dear cousin Patrick Carnath-Emory, who was far more Carnath than Emory, and absolutely butter-fingered-he was already mopping his lap; Patrick’s daughter Fideal Carnath, olive-skinned and lovely, and her thirty-two-year-old son Jules who they had thought was Giraud’s until they ran the genetics and found it was, of all people, Petros’. Then Robert Carnath-Nye mill his daughter young Julia Carnath; and of course, endmost, Jordan and Justin Warrick, who looked exactly like father and son, unless you had known Jordan thirty years ago and knew that they were twins.
    Vanity, vanity.
    Jordan had had his passages. (Who had not?) But when it came to bestowing his heredity he had not trusted nature. Or women. It was the temptation to godhood, perhaps. Or the belief that he, being a Special, was bound to produce another.
    A replicate citizen was not azi. There were considerable legal differences between young Justin, say, and elegant, red-haired Grant, at the second rank of tables, so, so close in all respects … born in the same lab, an insignificant day apart. But Justin, dark-haired, square-jawed, and, at a handsome, broad-shouldered seventeen, so very much Jordan’s younger image … was CIT 976-88-2355 PR, that all-important Citizen prefix and that expensive Parental Replicate suffix-replicate except for the little accidents like the break in Jordan’s nose, the little scar on Justin’s chin, and oh, indeed, the personality, and the ability. When Justin was a mote in a womb-tank, the Bok project had already failed-but (Ari was amused) Jordan had entertained notions that his tapes and his genes could overcome all odds.
    The lad was bright. But he was not Jordan. Thank God.
    Grant’s number, on the other hand, was ALX-972, experimental: a design of her own, aesthetic in the extreme, and with an excellent antecedent-another Special geneset, but, for certain legal reasons, she had corrected a genetic fault, incidentally expressing a few aesthetic recessives, to an extent that the legitimate descendants of a certain