Cee's quarters were a near-clone of Ethan's own neglected Economy Cabin, plain and cramped. Ethan wondered rather fearfully if Cee were reading his mind right now—apparently not, for the Cetagandan expatriate gave no sign of realizing his mistake yet.
'I take it,' said Ethan, 'that your powers are intermittent.'
'Yes,' replied Cee. 'If my escape to Athos had gone as I'd originally planned, I meant never to use them again. I suppose your government will demand my services as the price of its protection, now.'
'I—I don't know,' answered Ethan honestly. 'But if you truly possess such a talent, it would seem a shame not to use it. I mean, one can see the applications right away.'
'Can't one, though,' muttered Cee bitterly.
'Look at pediatric medicine—what a diagnostic aid for pre-verbal patients! Babies who can't answer, Where does it hurt? What does it feel like? Or for stroke victims or those paralyzed in accidents who have lost all ability to communicate, trapped in their bodies. God the Father,' Ethan's enthusiasm mounted, 'you could be an absolute savior!'
Terrence Cee sat down rather heavily. His eyes widened in wonder, narrowed in suspicion. 'I'm more often regarded as a menace. No one I've met who knew my secret ever suggested any use for me but espionage.'
'Well—were they espionage agents themselves?'
'Now that you mention it—yes, for the most part.'
'So, there you are. They see you as what they would be, given your gift. '
Cee gave him a very odd look, and smiled slowly. 'Sir, I hope you're right.' His posture became less closed, some part of the tension uncoiling in his lean muscles, but his blue eyes remained intent upon Ethan. 'Do you realize that I am not a human being, Dr. Urquhart? I'm an artificial genetic construct, a composite from a dozen sources, with a sensory organ squatting like a spider in my brain that no human being ever had. I have no father and no mother. I wasn't born, I was made. And that doesn't horrify you?'
'Well, er—where did the men who made you get all your other genes? From other people, surely?' asked Ethan.
'Oh, yes. Carefully selected strains, all politically purified.' Wormwood could not have set Cee's mouth in a tighter line.
'So,' said Ethan 'if you count back, let me see, four generations, every human being is a composite from as many as sixteen different sources. They're called ancestors, but it comes to the same thing. Your mix was just marginally less random, that's all. Now, I do know genetics. With the exception of that new organ you claim, I can flat guarantee the 'just marginally. ' That is not the test of your humanity.'
'So what is the test of humanity?'
'Well—you have free will, obviously, or you could not be opposing your creators. Therefore you are not an automaton, but a child of God the Father, answerable to Him according to your abilities,' Ethan catechized.
If Ethan had sprouted wings and flapped up to the ceiling Cee could not be staring at him in more shaken astonishment. It seemed as though these perfectly obvious facts had never before been presented to him.
Cee strained forward. 'What am I to you, then, if not a monster?'
Ethan scratched his chin reflectively. 'We all remain children of the Father, however we may otherwise be orphaned. You are my brother, of course.'
'Of course… ?' echoed Cee. His legs and arms drew in, making his body a tight ball. Tears leaked between his squeezed eyelids. He scrubbed his face roughly on his trouser knee, smearing the tears' reflective sheen across his flushed face. 'Damn it,' he whispered, 'I'm the ultimate weapon, the super agent. I survived it all. How can you make me weep now?' Suddenly savage, he added, 'If I find out you're lying to me, I swear I will kill you.'
In another man's mouth they might have seemed empty words. Coming from Cee's ragged edginess, the threat was stomach-knotting. 'You're obviously extremely tired,' Ethan, alarmed, offered in solace. Cee had not yet quite regained his self-control, though he was clearly trying, breathing carefully as a yogi. Ethan hunted around the room and handed him a tissue. 'And I'd think looking at the world through Millisor's eyes, if that's what you've been doing lately, would be something of a strain.'
'You've got that straight,' choked Cee. 'I've had to go in and out of his mind since this thing,' he made the migraine gesture again, 'got fully developed in my head when I was thirteen years old.'
'Ick,' said Ethan, in heartfelt candor. 'Well, that's it, then.'
Cee emitted a surprised laugh that did more for his self-control than the breathing exercise had. 'How can you know?'
'I don't know anything about how your telepathy works, but I've met the man.' Ethan rubbed his lips thoughtfully. 'How old are you?' he asked suddenly.
'Nineteen.'
There was no adolescent defiance in the reply. Cee was merely stating a fact, as if his youth had never been an object in any test put to him. The insight chilled Ethan, like sighting the tip of an iceberg. 'Ah—I don't suppose you'd care to tell me a little more about yourself? Speaking as your Immigration Officer, as it were.'
The work had been based on a natural mutation of the pineal gland, Terrence Cee explained. How the migrant witch-woman, deformed, impoverished, and quite mad, had first caught the attention of Dr. Faz Jahar, Cee did not know. But she had been swept from her slum hovel into the university laboratory of the alert young medico. Jahar knew somebody who knew somebody who knew a high-ranking army Ghem-lord and could make him look and listen; and so Jahar tapped a researcher's dream, unlimited secret government funding. The madwoman vanished into classified oblivion, and was never seen alive again. To be sure, none of her previous acquaintances ever inquired after her.
Cee's recitation was cool and distant now, on-track, as something practiced too many times and overtrained. Ethan was not sure if the previous breakdown or current excess of Cee's self-control was more unnerving.
The telepathy complex was refined in vitro, twenty generations in five years. The first three human experiments to have it spliced into their chromosomes died before they ever outgrew their uterine replicators. Four more died in infancy and early childhood of inoperable brain cancers, three of some subtler failure to thrive.
'Is this disturbing you?' Cee, glancing up, inquired of Ethan.
Ethan, greenish-white and curled into a corner, said 'No… go on.'
The specifications of the matrix genetic blueprints—Ethan would have called them children—were made more rigid. Jahar tried again. L-X-10-Terran-C was the first survivor. His early test results proved ambiguous, disappointing. Funding was cut. But Jahar, after so much human sacrifice, refused to give up.
'I suppose,' said Cee, 'Faz Jahar was as much of a parent as I ever had. He believed in me—no. He believed in his own work, within me. When the nurses and the extra technicians were dropped out of his budget, he tutored me himself. He even tutored Janine.'
'Who is Janine?' asked Ethan after a moment, as Cee fell silent.
'J-9-X-Ceta-G was—my sister, if you will,' said Cee at last. His inward gaze did not meet Ethan's eyes. 'Although we shared few genes besides those for the pineal receptor organ. She was the only other survivor among Jahar's early creations. Or perhaps she was my wife. I'm not sure if Jahar intended her from the beginning as a co- progenitor of his new model human, or if she was merely an experimental trifle—he encouraged sex between us, as we grew older—but she was never trained as an intelligence agent. Millisor always thought of her as a sort of potential brood-mare for some nest of spylets—he had these secret, sexually-charged fantasies about her….' Ethan was relieved when Cee broke off, sparing him a guided tour of Millisor's questionable sexuality.
Dr. Faz Jahar's fortunes took an abrupt upward turn when Terrence Cee hit puberty. Completion of his brain growth and change in his biochemical balance at last activated the frustratingly quiescent organ. Cee's telepathic abilities became demonstrable, reliable, repeatable.
There were limitations. The organ could only be kicked into a state of electrical receptivity upon the ingestion of high doses of the amino acid tyramine. Receptivity faded as Cee's body metabolized the excess and returned him to his original biochemical balance. Telepathic range was limited to a few hundred meters at best. Reception was blocked by any barrier that interfered with the electrical signals emitted by the target brains.
Some minds could be experienced more clearly than others, some could barely be picked up at all even when Cee was actually touching his target's body. This seemed to be a problem of fit, or match, between sender and receiver, for some minds that registered as no more than a formless, mushy sense of life to Terrence came through in hallucinatory clarity—subvocalization, sensory input, the stream of conscious thought, and all—to Janine,
