a little about the air quality on Cyteen
[from Cyteen]
There was very little green in Planys. Precip towers did their best to keep the plants alive, but it was still raw and new here, still mostly red rock and blue scrub and woolwood. Ankyloderms were the predominant phylum of wildlife on this continent, as platytheres were in the other, in the unbridged isolation that had given Cyteen two virtually independent ecologies-except, always, woolwood and a few other windborne pests that propagated from virtually any fiber that got anywhere there was dirt and moisture.
Flora reinforced with absorbed silicates and poisonous with metals and alkaloids, generating an airborne profusion of fibers carcinogenic in Terran respiratory systems even in minute doses: the plants would kill you either in minutes or in years, depending on whether you were fool enough to eat a leaf or just unlucky enough to get an unguarded breath of air. The carbon monoxide in the air was enough to do the job on its own. But the only way to get killed by the fauna was to stand in its path, and the only way it ever died, the old joke ran, was when two of equal size met head to head and starved to death.
It was easy to forget what Cyteen was until you touched the outback.
And there was so profound a sense of desolation about this place. You looked away from the airport and the buildings, and it was Cyteen, that was all, raw and deadly.
Jordan lived in this place.
There was no taking the suits off until they got to Planys Annex, and the garage, and another airlock, where you had to brush each other off with some violence while powerful suction fans made the cheap suits rattle and flutter. You had to lift and stretch the elastic straps to get any fiber out of them, then endure a hosing down in special detergent, lock through, strip the suits and step up onto a grating without touching the outside surfaces-while the decontamination crew saw to your baggage.
[from Regenesis]
On the vid screen at her elbow, a thunderstorm built and broke above the sprawling establishment that was Reseune, thunder that vibrated through the building around her. The tall precip towers that rimmed the cliffs above the river had talked to the weathermakers in orbit, and between them they'd loosed a lair-sized storm, taking the potential that was up there and making the spate of rain happen now rather than later, when the scheduled flight was due.
Just a small convenience. The weathermakers did nothing in this instance but hurry things a few hours and make sure that Yanni Schwartz, inbound from Novgorod, would land meticulously on time.
Reseune was tiny on the surface of the world that was Cyteen-a white dot from the perspective of Cyteen Station, seat of the Union Senate, which dealt with the wide universe. She'd seen her world-well, half of it-well, at least the mid-continental Novaya Volga valley, which was the highway down to Novgorod, to Swigert Bay, and the wide ocean.
Mostly the world outside the human zones was desert. The native life saw to that.
Excepting woolwood forests, which loosed deadly strands human lungs never wanted to meet.
Excepting the mud flats and ocean beaches near human habitation, which frothed with an unwholesome stew of dieoff-you really didn't want to smell it.
Terran stuff had early on gotten into the oceans, a bright idea that the modern generation was working to remediate. Purer Reseune water flowed down to the oceans on this continent these days-gone were the days when raw sewage had run down the river, deliberately loosed into Swigert Bay and outward, killing native life, breeding wildly, and creating that lovely yellow dieoff froth on the beaches.
In the early days, the driving colonial notion of how to manage Cyteen had been changing air and land, ridding the world of native species, creating a new Earth for humankind. Then they'd found that the native life-or part of it-could prolong a human life for decades. Now, the plan was carefully managed enclaves, and in a small program-too small a program, in Ari's view-PlanysLabs and ReseuneLabs alike tried to save what they'd begun too hastily to destroy.
The first Ari had had a lot to do with that change of purpose . . . and the growth of the rejuv industry. Through that, and control of the azi system, she'd built the economic power of Reseune, and, using its dominance in the Bureau of Science, gained immense political power.
Yanni Schwartz wielded that power now, being Proxy Councillor for Science. And down in Novgorod, where the planetary legislature sat, the Bureaus of Science, Defense, Information, and Trade, habitual allies, had all joined with Mikhail Corain's Citizens Bureau to authorize an azi-production lab at Fargone. She'd heard the news. She'd gotten it before the official broadcast. Budget items she'd seen as headed for easy passage, which was what Yanni was supposed to be promoting down in the capital, had been quietly dropped from the legislative agenda, none objecting.
She objected. And she was pissed as hell.