“Dr. St. Kitts, your two o’clock appointment is here with Dr. Harvison,” the voice interrupted her reading.
So much of modern botany involved maintaining a good search engine algorithm, to look for key words so you could filter out ninety-eight percent of the latest research findings, in order to focus on the things that would actually help you. For Rainier, despite how well she’d fine-tuned her searches, she still had to dedicate up to an hour reading, every single day, just to stay on top of things. Today, that had already stretched to two.
“Rainier?” the young man on the comm repeated.
“Coming,” she said as she surfaced from the magazine.
The University of Uelkal had just isolated a new mutation of rust threatening several varieties of grain crops, and she had been trying to track down all the places the blight had been identified to date. She wasn’t sure where she and her cohorts might find the money to introduce a new breeding program to thwart it, though. Every planet was its own microcosm of genetic variance, and diseases moved around almost as quickly as humans did, in spite of every effort to isolate diseases.
Bananas had been like that, once upon a time. Perfect clones copied over and over, until a disease wiped them all out and botanists had to start over with a different breed. How many species of bananas had gone extinct, mono-cultured clones at such risk, before humanity finally accepted that bananas should be bred for seeds, and their generational variance and diversity celebrated?
Of course, as she stood up from the comfortable sofa, Rainier’s eyes fell on the tree outside the window of her office, framed in an inner courtyard. Anne Smith had first identified that particular breed on her farm, and then grafted it onto another tree to preserve it. How many generations, how many centuries had passed, and they still grafted Granny Smith’s apples onto a different root stock, across thousands of planets?
Rainier shrugged. Botany was both her love and her life. Making new things for people to enjoy and stay fed, while always racing to stay one step ahead of the diseases that came with them.
She set her reader down on her desk, atop a pile of documents to read and edit, and checked the calendar again. She hadn’t remembered having an appointment this afternoon, just a lab she needed to supervise in a few hours, and a lecture later to a group of local farmers looking for new breeds of mustard they could grow as a cover crop around fruit trees, both as a secondary cash source and to keep weeds down.
Hmm. Yes. New appointment. Ah. Forwarded by Dr. Harvison first thing this morning and automatically accepted by the rules engine, since she had time free. The guest was a name she didn’t know, but anything that got MacWilliam out of his office to meet with someone probably meant money in some form. Or at least the potential for it.
Perhaps new funding for a lab, or scholarships? Something. The university was perpetually broke, and MacWilliam had warned them to prepare for another round of budget cuts, next fiscal year.
Rainier let go of a heavy sigh. She didn’t like dealing with people. Plants were far more predictable, even random breeders like apple trees.
Hopefully, it would be over quickly and she could return to her quiet lab and check in on her plants.
The second floor conference room Rainier entered was specifically set up to have the best view of the research forest on the south side of the campus. Ancient, heirloom varieties of things that could be used as a source, if you needed to start from a known point when breeding outwards.
Humans had once used all manner of technologies to modify plants and animals, back before they understood the risks. A wheat crop that was immune to pesticides and only digestible to ninety percent of people was still likely to poison a vast swath of humanity. Ten percent of a trillion humans was a big number.
And using viruses to inject new genes into things might have been brilliant technical engineering, but no squid ever bred with a cow. And the chances of the outcomes being entirely beneficial were low.
Thus, the University of Uelkal was an agronomy institute. Back to the old days of breeding by carefully selecting for traits on children plants, rather than playing God and hoping for the best when rolling the dice. Using that forest of carefully-selected bushes and trees across the road.
Some fool always tried something exciting, but with ten thousand worlds to inhabit, there were always going to be successes and failures. Fortunately, the stupidity of that approach was also illegal on most worlds, and not just ostracized by reputable scientists.
Rainier channeled her inner anger at sociopathic botanists, the narcissists with God complexes, and focused all that loathing on this room she hated and all it stood for, rather than the two men inhabiting it. Too much money had been spent here, on expensive carpets, pictures and art, and a table made from a single slab of wood, two meters wide and five long.
Just decorating this space three years ago had been enough cash that the university could have endowed a chair of botany for a decade, or provided a dozen full scholarships to bright kids. Money wasted on pretty things, rather than useful.
But she understood the need. MacWilliam, the university president, was forever caught up in the hustle, calling old graduates and pleading for money, selling naming rights to anything and everything he could. Whatever would bring in the drachmas to keep this institute afloat.
Rainier half-expected to see corporate logos appear on the sides of her Erlenmeyer flasks, one of these days. She didn’t dare suggest it aloud. MacWilliam might do it.
She smiled at the university president as he rose, as politely as she could, even if friendly might be a bit too far today. MacWilliam Harvison was a tall, buff man, with broad shoulders, a flat stomach, and a ready smile. He was a genial fellow, if a bit shallow. Rainier had always found him something of a smarmy con man, but at least he was on their side, an administrator forever hustling others to keep the school going.
She supposed he was even handsome, if you were into that sort of thing. Happily, she and Emma had been married long before the man came along, so he’d never tried to work his charms on her.
Ick.
Still, she shook his hand and forced a polite smile.
“Dr. Harvison,” she said gracefully, forcing her feelings about MacWilliam and this room to the back of her mind.
The other man had risen at the same time as Dr. Harvison. He held out his hand for her to shake as Rainier’s head turned to smile at him.
She felt the bottom of her world drop out.
She knew this man. Had met him three years ago, during one of the annual missions to Svalbard and the Doomsday Vault.
Rainier felt him take her hand and saw the broad smile on his face.
“Dr. St. Kitts,” he said pleasantly. “A pleasure to meet you.”
Rainier’s mind stuttered for a second, leaving her standing there dumbly nodding and shaking his hand.
“I’m sorry,” her brain finally caught up. “I’ve forgotten your name. Silly me.”
“Quite all right, Dr. St. Kitts,” he said. “I am Dr. Javier Aritza, from King’s College, on Altai.”
He said it with such conviction that she almost believed him.
The newcomer was shorter than Dr. Harvison, but bulkier, broader through the chest in a way of a man who works out regularly with a mission, rather than just jogging, like MacWilliam did. The eyes were the same as they had been then, even if the hair was coming in much more gray now.
He had been clean-shaven then, but was sporting a precise Van Dyke today, also salt and pepper colored.
“Shall we sit?” MacWilliam interrupted.
Rainier let herself be placed opposite this newcomer, protected, as much as that was possible, by two meters of polished oak intervening.
The man smiled at her, calmly waiting as she tried to match him.
Yes, she remembered him. Had looked him up after she had escaped his grasp. Studied the man after she had made it safely home.
She had no idea what kind of a cover a Dr. Javier Aritza might be, or why he wanted to talk to her in an official capacity, but she remembered the man.
Oh, yes, she remembered him all right.
On Svalbard, he had introduced himself as Navarre, the pirate.