tops of comfortable-looking boots of some butter-soft leather. 'Excuse me. If you're Dr. Ethan Urquhart of Athos, I've been looking all over for you.'
'Why?'
'I hoped you might help me. Please, sir, don't go—' he held out a hand as Ethan flinched away. 'You don't know me, but I'm very interested in Athos. My name is Terrence Cee.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
After a moment's stunned silence Ethan sputtered, 'What do you want of Athos?'
'Refuge, sir,' said the young man. 'For I'm surely a refugee.' Tension rendered his smile false and anxious. He grew more urgent as Ethan backed away slightly. 'The census courier's manifest listed one of your titles as ambassador-at-large. You can give me political asylum, can't you?'
'I—I—' Ethan stammered. 'That was just something the Population Council threw in at the last minute, because no one was sure what I'd find out here. I'm not really a diplomat, I'm a doctor.' He stared at the young man, who stared back with a kind of beaten hunger. The automatic part of Ethan totted up the symptoms of fatigue Cee presented: grey in the hollows of his skin, bloodshot sclera, a barely observable tremula in his smooth corded hands. A horrid realization shook Ethan. 'Look, uh—you aren't by chance asking me to protect you from Ghem- colonel Millisor, are you?'
Cee nodded.
'Oh—oh, no. You don't understand. It's just me, out here. I don't have an embassy or anything like that. I mean, real embassies have security guards, soldiers, a whole intelligence corps—'
Cee's smile twisted. 'Does the man who arranged Okita's last accident really need them?'
Ethan stood with his mouth open, his utter dismay robbing him of reply.
Cee went on. 'There are many of them—Millisor can command the resources of Cetaganda against me— and I'm alone. The only one left. The sole survivor. Alone, it isn't a question whether they'll kill me, only how soon.' His beautiful structured hands opened in pleading. 'I was sure I'd eluded them, and it was safe to double back. Only to find Millisor—the fearless vampire hunter himself!—' the young man's mouth thinned in bitterness, 'squatting across the last gateway. I beg you, sir. Grant me asylum.'
Ethan cleared his throat nervously. 'Ah—just what do you mean by 'vampire hunter'?'
'It's how he views himself,' Cee shrugged. 'To him all his crimes are heroics, for the good of Cetaganda, because somebody has to do the dirty work—his exact thought, that. He's proud to do it. But he doesn't have to nerve himself to do the dirty work on me. He hates and fears me worse than any hell, in his secretive little soul—ha! As if his secrets were more vital or vile than anyone else's. As if I gave a damn for his secrets, or his soul.'
Wanly, Ethan recognized the seasick symptoms of talk at cross-purposes again. He stretched for some bottom to this floating conversation. 'What are you?'
The young man drew back, his face suddenly shuttered with suspicion. 'Asylum. Asylum first, and then you can have it all.'
'Huh?'
The suspicion turned to despair before Ethan's eyes. The excitement that hope had lent Cee evaporated, leaving a bleak dryness. 'I understand. You see me as they do. A medical monstrosity, put together from graveyard bits, cooked in a vat. Well,' he inhaled resolution, 'so be it. But I'll have vengeance on Ghem-captain Rau, at least, before my death. That much I swear to Janine.'
Ethan seized upon the one intelligible item in all this, and with as much dignity he could muster said, 'If by a 'vat' you are referring to a uterine replicator, I'll have you know I was incubated in a uterine replicator myself, and it is every bit as good as any other method of generation. Better. So I'll thank you not to insult my origins, or my life's work.'
Some of the same floating confusion that Ethan was sure must be in his own face crossed Cee's. Why not. Misery, Ethan thought with acid satisfaction, loves company.
The young man—boy, really, for take away the aging effects of exhaustion upon him and he was surely younger than Janos—seemed about to speak, then shook his head and turned away.
Necessity, thought Ethan frantically, is the uterine replicator of invention. 'Wait!' he cried. 'I grant you the asylum of Athos!' He might as well have promised the remission of Cee's sins as well, since he had about as much power to effect one as the other. But Cee turned back anyway, hope flaring again in his blue eyes, hot like a gas jet. 'Only, ' Ethan went on, 'you have to tell me where you took the ovarian cultures the Population Council ordered from Bharaputra Laboratories.'
It was Terrence Cee's turn to stand in open-mouthed dismay now. 'Didn't Athos receive them?'
'No.'
The breath hissed from the blond man's mouth as though he had been struck in the stomach. 'Millisor! He must have got them! But no—but how—he could not conceal—'
Ethan cleared his throat gently. 'Unless you think your Colonel Millisor would spend seven hours interrogating me—quite unpleasantly—as to their whereabouts for a practical joke, I don't think so.'
It was actually quite refreshing to see somebody else look as agitated as he felt, Ethan thought. Cee turned to his new protector, his arms spread wide in bewilderment.
'But Dr. Urquhart—if you don't have them, and I don't have them, and Millisor doesn't have them—where'd they go?'
Ethan thought he finally understood Elli Quinn's stated dislike of being on the damned defensive. He'd had a belly full of it himself. Dump enough shit on it, he thought savagely, and even the fragile seed of resolution in his timid heart might blossom into something greater. He smiled pleasantly at the blond young man. Cee really did look like a shorter, thinner Janos. It was the coloration that did it. But Cee's mouth held no hint of the petulance that sometimes marred Janos's when set in anger or weariness.
'Suppose,' suggested Ethan, 'we pool our information and find out?'
Cee gazed up at him—he was several centimeters shorter than Ethan—and asked, 'Are you truly Athos's senior intelligence agent?'
'In a sense,' murmured Athos's only agent of any description, 'yes.'
Cee nodded. 'It would be a pleasure, sir.' He took a deep breath. 'I must have some purified tyramine, then. I used the last of my supply on Millisor three days ago.'
Tyramine was an amino acid precursor of any number of endogenous brain chemicals, but Ethan had never heard of it as a truth drug. 'I beg your pardon?'
'For my telepathy,' said Cee impatiently.
The floor seemed to drop away under Ethan. Far, far away. 'The whole psionics hypothesis was definitively disproved hundreds of years ago,' he heard his own voice say distantly. 'There is no such thing as mental telepathy.'
Terrence Cee touched his forehead in a gesture that reminded Ethan of a patient describing a migraine.
'There is now,' he said simply.
Ethan stood blinded by the dawning of a new age. 'We are standing,' he croaked at last, 'in the middle of a bleeding public mallway in one of the most closely monitored environments in the galaxy. Before Colonel Millisor leaps out a lift tube, don't you think we'd better, uh, find some quieter place to talk?'
'Oh. Oh, yes, of course, sir. Is your safe house nearby?'
'Er… Is yours?'
The young man grimaced. 'As long as my cover identity holds.'
Ethan gestured invitingly, and Cee led off. Safe house, Ethan decided, must be a generic espionage term for any hideout, for Cee took him not to a home but to a cheap hostel reserved for transients with Stationer work permits. Here were housed clerks, housekeepers, porters, and other lower-echelon employees of the service sector whose function Ethan could only guess at, such as the two women in bright clothing and gaudy make-up almost Cetagandan in its unnatural coloration, who started to accost Cee and himself and shouted some unintelligible insult after them when they brushed hastily by.
