Cetaganda

'I already know enough to destroy you,' Miles added earnestly. 'Tell me enough to save you!'

Her sculpted chin rose in bleak decision. When she blessed him with her outward attention at last, it was total and terrifying. 'It was a long-standing disagreement.' He strained to hear, to keep his head clear, to concentrate on the words and not just on the enchanting melody of her voice. 'Between the Celestial Lady and the Emperor. My Lady had long thought that the haut gene bank was too centralized, in the heart of the Celestial Garden. She favored the dispersal of copies, for safety. My Lord favored keeping it all under his personal protection—for safety. They both sought the good of the haut, each in their own way.'

'I see,' Miles murmured, encouraging her with as much delicacy as he could muster. 'All good guys here, right.'

'The Emperor forbade her plan. But as she neared the end of her life . . . she came to feel that her loyalty to the haut must outweigh her loyalty to her son. Twenty years ago, she began to have copies made, in secret.'

'A large project,' Miles said.

'Huge, and slow. But she brought it to fruition.'

'How many copies?'

'Eight. One for each of the planetary satraps.'

'Exact copies?'

'Yes. I have reason to know. I have been the Celestial Lady's supervisor of geneticists for five years, now.'

'Ah. So you are something of a trained scientist. You know about . . . extreme care. And scrupulous honesty.'

'How else should I serve my Lady?' she shrugged.

But you don't know much, I'll bet, about covert ops chicanery. Hm. 'If there are eight exact copies, there must be eight exact Great Keys, right?'

'No. Not yet. My Lady was saving the duplication of the key to the last moment. A matter of—'

'Control,' Miles finished smoothly. 'How did I guess?'

A faint flash of resentment at his humor sparked in her eyes, and Miles bit his tongue. It was no laughing matter to haut Rian Degtiar.

'The Celestial Lady knew her time was drawing near. She made me and the Ba Lura the executors of her will in this matter. We were to deliver the copies of the gene bank to each of the eight satrap governors upon the occasion of her funeral, which they would be certain to all attend together. But . . . she died more suddenly than she had expected. She had not yet made arrangements for the duplication of the Great Key. It was a problem of considerable technical and cipher skill, as all of the Empire's resources went into its original creation. Ba Lura and I had all her instructions for the banks, but nothing for how the key was to be duplicated and delivered, or even when she had planned this to happen. The Ba and I were not sure what to do.'

'Ah,' Miles said faintly. He dared not offer any comment at all, for fear of impeding the free flow, at last, of information. He hung on her words, barely breathing.

'Ba Lura thought … if we took the Great Key to one of the satrap governors, he might use his resources to duplicate it for us. I thought this was a very dangerous idea. Because of the temptation to take it exclusively for himself.'

'Ah . . . excuse me. Let me see if I follow this. I know you consider the haut gene bank a most private matter, but what are the political side-effects of setting up new haut reproductive centers on each of Cetaganda's eight satrap planets?'

'The Celestial Lady thought the empire had ceased to grow at the time of the defeat of the Barrayar expedition. That we had become static, stagnant, enervated. She thought … if the empire could only undergo mitosis, like a cell, the haut might start to grow again, become re-energized. With the splitting of the gene bank, there would be eight new centers of authority for expansion.'

'Eight new potential Imperial capitals?' Miles whispered.

'Yes, I suppose.'

Eight new centers . . . civil war was only the beginning of the possibilities. Eight new Cetagandan Empires, each expanding like killer coral at their neighbors' expense … a nightmare of cosmic proportions. 'I think I can see,' said Miles carefully, 'why perhaps the Emperor was less than enthused by his mother's admittedly sound biological reasoning. Something to be said on both sides, don't you think?'

'I serve the Celestial Lady,' said the haut Rian Degtiar simply, 'and the haut genome. The Empire's short- term political adjustments are not my business.'

'So all this, ah, genetic shuffling . . . would the Cetagandan Emperor, by chance, regard this as treason on your part?'

'How?' said the haut Rian Degtiar. 'It was my duty to obey the Celestial Lady.'

'Oh.'

'The eight satrap governors have all committed treason in it, though,' she added matter-of-factly.

'Have committed?'

'They all took delivery of their gene banks last week at the welcoming banquet. Ba Lura and I succeeded in that part of the Celestial Lady's plan, at least.'

'Treasure chests for which none of them have keys.'

'I … don't know. Each of them, you see . . . the Celestial Lady felt it would be better if each of the satrap governors thought that he alone was the recipient of the new copy of the haut gene bank. Each would strive better to keep it secret, that way.'

'Do you know—I have to ask this.' I'm just not sure I want to hear the answer. 'Do you know to which of the eight satrap governors Ba Lura was trying to take the Great Key for duplication, when it ran into us?'

'No,' she said.

'Ah,' Miles exhaled in pure satisfaction. 'Now, now I know why I was set up. And why the Ba died.'

Fine lines appeared on her ivory brow as she stared at him.

'Don't you see it too? The Ba didn't hit us Barrayarans on the way out. It hit us on the way back.

Your Ba was suborned. Ba Lura did take the key to one of the satrap governors, and received in return not a true copy, because there was no time for the extensive decoding required, but a decoy. Which the Ba then was sent to deliberately lose to us. Which it did, although not, I suspect, in quite the manner it had originally planned.' Almost certainly not as planned.

He found himself pacing, keyed up and hectic. He ought not to limp before her, it brought attention to his deformities, but he could not keep still. 'And while everybody is off chasing Barrayarans, the satrap governor quietly goes home with the only real copy of the Great Key, getting a large jump-start on the haut-competition. After first arranging the Ba's reward for its double-treason, and incidentally eliminating the only witness to the truth. Oh. Yes. It works. Or it would have worked, if only . . . the satrap governor had remembered that no battle-plan survives first contact with the enemy.' Not when the enemy is me. He stared into her eyes, willing her to believe in him, striving not to melt. 'How soon can you analyze this Great Key, and support or explode these theories?'

'I will examine it immediately, tonight. But whatever has been done to it, my examination will not tell me who did it, Barrayaran.' Her voice grew glacial with this thought. 'I doubt you could have created a true duplicate, but a non-working forgery is certainly within your capabilities. If this one is false—where is the real one?'

'It seems that is just what I must discover, milady, to, to clear my name. To redeem my honor in your eyes.' The intrinsic fascination of an intellectual puzzle had brought him to this interview. He'd thought curiosity was his strongest driving force, till suddenly his whole personality had become engaged. It was like being under— no, like becoming an avalanche. 'If I can discover this, will you …' what? Look favorably upon his suit? Despise him for an outlander barbarian all the