carton.
'Now 81. 45 kilos of newts into that shipping canister,' she instructed. It came out even, leaving them with three cartons and a canister as before.
'Will you please tell me what we're doing?' Ethan begged.
'Turning a rather difficult problem into a much simpler one. Now instead of an extremely incriminating drum full of dead downsider, all we have to get rid of is 80 or so kilos of stunned newts.'
'But we haven't got rid of the body,' Ethan pointed out. He stared down into the bright waters. 'Are you going to dump the newts back in?' he asked hopefully. 'Can they swim all right, stunned?'
'No, no, no!' said Quinn, looking quite shocked. 'That would unbalance the system! It's very finely tuned. The whole point of this exercise is to keep the computer records straight. As for the body—you'll see.'
'All set?' called the tech as they floated out of the access port, canister, cartons and all stacked on the pallet.
'No, darn it,' said Quinn. 'I realized when I was about halfway through that I'd grabbed the wrong size shipping canister. I'll have to come back later. Look, give me the receipt and I'll still run this load down to Disposal for you. I want to look up Teki there anyway.'
'Oh, sure, all right,' said the tech, brightening. 'Thanks.' He punched up the records, put them on a data disk, and handed it over. Commander Quinn retreated with all seemly haste.
'Good.' She slumped as the airseal doors slid shut behind them, the first hint of weariness Ethan had seen in her. 'I'll get to oversee the final act myself.' She added to Ethan's bewildered look, 'We could have just left them to go down to Disposal on the regular schedule, but I kept having this horrible vision of a last-minute order arriving from Transients' Lounge and Dale opening a carton to fill it….'
'An order for newts?' Ethan floundered.
She snickered. 'Yes, but up there they're sold to the downsiders as Premium Fresh Frog Legs, on the restaurant menus. We stiff 'em for a sweet price, too.'
'Is—is that, er, ethical?'
She shrugged. 'Gotta make a profit somewhere. Snob appeal keeps the demand up. You can hardly give the wee beasties away on the Stationer side, everybody's so sick of them. But Biocontrol refuses to diversify the weed-grazers on account of the system working at max efficiency for oxygen generation as is. And everyone has to agree, the oxygen comes first. The newts are just a by-product.'
They re-mounted the float pallet and drifted off down the corridor. Ethan glanced sideways at the mercenary woman's abstracted profile. He must try…
'What kind of genetics project?' he asked suddenly. 'Millisor's thing, I mean. Don't you know any more about it than that?'
She spared him a thoughtful glance. 'Human genetics. And in truth, I know very little more than that. Some names, a few code words. God only knows what they were up to. Making monsters, maybe. Or raising supermen. The Cetagandans have always been a bunch of aggressive militarists. Maybe they meant to raise battalions of mutant super-soldiers in vats like you Athosians and take over the universe or something.'
'Not likely,' remarked Ethan. 'Not battalions, anyway.'
'Why not? Why not clone as many as you want, once you've made the mold?'
'Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants—although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don't you see, that's just the beginning. It's nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet's economic resources. Food of course—housing—education, clothing, medical care—it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, non-productive army.'
Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. 'How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they're not necessarily impoverished, either.'
Ethan, diverted, said 'Really? I don't see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.'
Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. 'Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren't added in. They're counted as free.'
Ethan stared. 'What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don't the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?'
'I believe,' her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness, 'they call it women's work. And the supply usually exceeds the demand—non-union scabs, as it were, undercutting the market.'
Ethan was increasingly puzzled. 'Are not most women combat soldiers, then, like you? Are there men Dendarii?'
She hooted, then lowered her voice as a passer-by stared. 'Four-fifths of the Dendarii are men. And of the women, three out of four are techs, not troops. Most military services are skewed that way, except for ones like Barrayar that have no women at all.'
'Oh,' said Ethan. After a disappointed pause he added, 'You are an atypical sample, then.' So much for his nascent Rules of Female Behavior….
'Atypical.' She was still a moment, then snorted. 'Yeah, that's me all over.'
They passed through an archway framing airseal doors labeled ECOBRANCH: RECYCLING. Ethan ate his carrot as they threaded the corridors, stripping off roots and top and, after a glance around his immaculate white surroundings, stuffing them back in his pocket. By the time he had crunched down the last mouthful they arrived at a door marked ASSIMILATION STATION B: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
They entered a brightly-lit chamber lined with banks of intimidating-looking monitors. A lab bench and sink in the center seemed half-familiar to Ethan, for it was jammed with equipment for organic analysis. A number of color-coded conduits with access ports—for sampling?—crowded one end of the room. The other end was entirely occupied by a strange machine connected to the larger system by pipes; Ethan could not begin to guess its function.
A pair of legs in pine-green trousers with sky-blue piping were sticking out between a couple of the conduits. A high-pitched voice muttered unintelligibly. After a few more savage sibilants there was a clang and the whine of a sealing mechanism, and the legs' owner wriggled out and stood.
She wore plastic gloves to her armpits, and was clutching an unidentifiable crumpled metal object perhaps a third of a meter long that dripped vile-smelling brown liquid. F. Helda, read the nametag over her left breast pocket, Biocontrol Warden. Her face was red and angry, and terrified Ethan. Her voice cleared,'—unbelievable stupid downsider jerks …' She broke off as she saw Ethan and his companion. Her eyes narrowed and her frown deepened. 'Who are you? You don't belong in here. Can't you read?'
Dismay flashed in Quinn's eyes. She recovered and smiled winningly. 'I just brought down the newt cull from Atmosphere. A little favor for Dale Zeeman.'
'Zeeman should do his own work,' the ecotech woman snapped, 'not entrust it to some ignorant downsider. I'll write him up for this—'
'Oh, I'm Stationer born and bred,' Quinn assured her hastily. 'Let me introduce myself—Elli Quinn's the name. Maybe you know my cousin Teki—he works in this department. As a matter of fact, I rather thought he'd be here.'
'Oh,' said the woman, only slightly mollified. 'He's in A Station. But don't you go over there now, they're cleaning the filters. He won't have time to chat until after the system is back up. Work shifts are not the place for personal visiting, you know—'
'What in the world is that?' Quinn diverted her lecture with a nod at the metal object.
Ecotech Helda's clutch tightened on the tortured metal as if she might strangle it. Her chill toward her unauthorized visitors struggled with her need to vent her rage, and lost. 'My latest present from Transients' Lounge. You wonder how illiterates can afford space travel—damn it, even illiterates have no excuse, the rules are demonstrated on the holovid! It was a perfectly good emergency oxygen canister, until some asshole stuffed it down an organics disposer. He must have had to smash it flat first to fit it in. Thank the gods it was discharged, or it might have blown out a pipe. Unbelievable stupidity!'
She stalked across the room to fling it into a bin with a number of other obviously non-organic bits of trash. 'I hate downsiders,' she growled. 'Careless, dirty, inconsiderate animals…' She stripped off the gloves and
