Regenesis

Had it started out a partnership, Abban with Seely? It wasn’t in the manuals, which had been maintained by Giraud’s mother, for starters. It would have been Giraud’s mother who had failed to record that small detail: she was the expert that had run them, at the start.

A weird arrangement between the brothers–seven years separated in birth, but so, so close lifelong that they were part of each other and neither ever married or had a relationship…and a mother who didn’t keep complete records of azi under her management, who had, possibly, a secret few pages to those manuals that she didn’t enter into the record. For what logical reason?

Some furtive sense of protection of her boys, a layer of security’ that would always tie them together?

To judge by the rest of the world, Reseune had some real odd family co

So Geoffrey Nye had had two sons that were as different as different came, seven years apart and yet as joined as anybody could be who wasn’t cloned. They were natural‑born, those two– thatwas unusual, in Reseune’s administration. They’d had a mother who’d actually lived married to their father, so normal by Novgorod standards you could expect Giraud and Denys to turn out as normal as anybody could ever be. But their mother had been a psych operator, and Denys’ Rezner scores had been off the high end of genius. God knew what she’d tried on her own sons, promoting that intellect–she’d wanted Giraud to come up to Denys’ level–but she never could turn one into the other. And then she’d died, along with her husband, in a boating accident, and not a common one. The boat had caught fire, out on the Novaya Volga, where you just didn’t open the cabin to the outside atmosphere. It had been pretty nasty.

And maybe it was because she was so tired tonight, maybe it was because Ya

“Then you pick them!” she said peevishly. “ Doit. You set the number. You know what’s needed better than I do. Just pickthem, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, sera,” Florian said and went away ever so quietly. That didn’t make her feel better at all, but she was still raw‑nerved and she didn’t want to talk to anybody.

They weren’t that badly off with the staff they had, if they’d just had a better cook. There’d been a time this winter when Florian had been making di

It wasn’t a staff: it was a collection, and yes, it needed seeing to, and yes, the cook had burned supper two nights in a row the first week they’d had him and last night delayed an entire hour putting together pork sandwiches–provoking Catlin to suggest armed force might hasten di

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