'Nothing yet,' he said. His hand unconsciously rubbed his neck. Ethan diagnosed incipient headache. 'Dr. Urquhart, are you quite sure that no part of the shipment of ovarian cultures Athos received could have been what Bharaputra sent?'
Ethan felt he'd answered that question a thousand times. 'I unpacked it myself, and saw the other boxes later. They weren't even cultures, just raw dead ovaries.'
'Janine—'
'If her, um, donation was cultured for egg cell production—'
'It was. They all were.'
'Then it wasn't there. None were.'
'I saw them packed myself,' said Cee. 'I watched them loaded at the shuttleport docks on Jackson's Whole.'
'That narrows down the time and place they could have been switched, a little,' observed Quinn. 'It had to have been on Kline Station, during the two months in warehouse. That only leaves, ah, 426 suspect ships to trace.' She sighed. 'A task, unfortunately, quite beyond my means.'
Cee swirled burgundy in a plastic cup, and drank again. 'Beyond your means, or simply of no interest to you?'
'Well—all right, both. I mean, if I really wanted to trace it, I'd let Millisor do the legwork, and just follow him. But the shipment is only of interest because of that one gene complex in one culture which, if I understand things correctly, you also contain. A pound of your flesh would serve my purposes just as well—better. Or a gram, or a tube of blood cells…' she trailed off, inviting Cee to pick up on the hint.
Cee sidestepped. 'I can't wait for Millisor to trace it. As soon as his team catches up on their backlog, they'll find me here on Kline Station.'
'You have a little margin yet,' she pointed out. 'I'll wager they're going to waste quite a few man-hours following poor innocent Teki around while he does the housework. Maybe it'll bore them to death,' she hoped, 'sparing me the bother of completing a certain odious task I promised House Bharaputra.'
Cee glanced at Ethan. 'Doesn't Athos want the shipment back?'
'We'd written it off. Although retrieving it would save purchasing another, I'm afraid it would be a false economy if Millisor followed it to Athos with an army at his back and genocide on his mind. He's so obsessed with this idea that Athos must have it—I'd actually like to see him find the damned thing, just to be sure Athos was rid of him.' Ethan gave Cee an apologetic shrug. 'Sorry.'
Cee smiled sadly. 'Never apologize for honesty, Dr. Urquhart.' He went on more urgently. 'But don't you see, the gene complex cannot be allowed to fall back into their hands. Next time they'll be more careful to make their telepaths true slaves. And then there will be no limits to the corruptions of their use.'
'Can they really make men without free will?' said Ethan, chilled. The old catch-phrase, 'Abomination in the eyes of God the Father' seemed illuminated with real and disquieting meaning. 'I must say I don't like that idea, followed to its logical conclusion. Machines made of flesh… '
Quinn spoke lazily from the bed in a tone, Ethan was becoming aware, that concealed fast-moving thought. 'Seems to me the genie's out of the bottle anyway, whether Millisor gets the stuff back or not. Millisor thinks in terms of counter-intelligence from a lifetime of habit. He's only going through so much exercise to be sure nobody else gets it. Now that Cetaganda knows it can be done, they'll duplicate the research in time. Twenty-five years, fifty years, whatever it takes. By then maybe there had better be a race of free telepaths to oppose them.' Her eyes probed Cee as if already locating a good spot for a biopsy.
'And what makes you think your Admiral Naismith's employer would be any improvement over the Cetagandans?' asked Cee bitterly.
She cleared her throat. The telepath had been reading her mind ever since he'd started asking questions, Ethan realized, and she already knew it. 'So, send a duplicate tissue sample of yourself to every government in the galaxy if you like.' She grinned wolfishly. 'Millisor would have a stroke, giving you your revenge and getting Athos off the hook at the same time. I like efficiency.'
'To make a hundred races of slaves?' asked Cee. 'A hundred mutant minorities, all feared and hated and controlled by whatever ruthless force seems necessary to their uneasy captors? And hunted to their deaths when that control fails?'
Ethan had never found himself clinging to a cusp of human history before. The trouble with the position, he found, was that in whatever direction you looked there fell away a glassy, uncontrollable slide down to a strange future you would then have to live in. He had never wanted to pray more, nor been less sure that it would do any good.
Cee shook his head, drank again. 'For myself, I'm done with it. No more. I'd have walked into the fire three years ago, but for Janine.'
'Ah,' said Quinn. 'Janine.'
Cee looked up with piercing eyes. Not nearly drunk, Ethan thought. 'You want a pound of flesh, mercenary? That's the price that will buy it. Find me Janine.'
Quinn pursed her lips. 'Mixed in, you say, with the rest of Athos's mail-order brides. Tricky.' She wound a strand of hair around her finger. 'You realize, of course, that my mission here is finished. I've done my job. And I could stun you where you sit, take my tissue sample, and be gone before you came to.'
Cee stirred uneasily. 'So?'
'So, just so you realize that.'
'What do you want of me?' Cee demanded. Anger edged his voice. 'To trust you?'
Her lips thinned. 'You don't trust anybody. You never had to. Yet you demand that others trust you.'
'Oh,' said Cee, looking suddenly enlightened. 'That.'
'You breathe one word of that,' she smiled through clenched teeth, 'and I'll arrange an accident for you like Okita never dreamed of.'
'Your Admiral's personal secrets are of no interest to me,' said Cee stiffly. 'They're hardly relevant to this situation anyway.'
'They're relevant to me,' Quinn muttered, but she gave him a small nod, conditional acceptance of this assurance of privacy.
Every sin that Ethan had ever committed or contemplated rose unbidden to his mind. He took Quinn's unspoken point. So, evidently, did Cee, for he turned the subject by turning to Ethan.
Ethan suddenly felt terribly naked. Everything that he least wanted to be caught thinking about seemed to race through his consciousness. Cee's marvelous physical attractiveness, for example, the nervous intelligent leanness of him, the electric blue eyes—Ethan damned his own weakness for blonds, and yanked his thoughts back from a slide to the sexual. Watching himself be mentally undressed in Ethan's thoughts would hardly impress Cee with Ethan's cool diplomatic medical professionalism. Ethan envied Quinn's bland, unfailing control.
But it could be worse. He could think about just how gossamer-thin was the shield of Athos's protection he had supposedly thrown over Cee, on the basis of which the telepath had revealed so damagingly much. How betrayed was Cee going to feel when he discovered that the asylum of Athos consisted of Ethan's wits, period? Ethan reddened, utterly ashamed, and stared at the floor.
He was going to lose Cee to Quinn and the glamour of the Dendarii Mercenaries before he even got a chance to tell him about Athos—the beautiful seas, the pleasant cities, the ordered communes and the patchwork terraformed farmlands, and beyond them the vast wild desolate wastes with their fascinating extremes of climate and people—the saintly, if grubby, contemplative hermits, the outlaw Outlanders… Ethan pictured himself taking Cee sailing on the South Province coast, checking the underwater fences of his father's fish farm—did Cetaganda have oceans?—salt sweat and salt water, hot hard work and cold beer and blue shrimp afterward.
Cee shivered, as a man forcing himself awake from some bright but dangerous narcotic dream. 'There are oceans on Cetaganda,' he whispered, 'but I never saw them. My whole life was corridors.'
Ethan's red went to scarlet. He felt transparent as glass.
Quinn, watching him, emitted a sour chuckle of perfect understanding. 'I predict your talent will not make you popular at parties, Cee.'
Cee appeared to pull himself back on track by force of will. Ethan was relieved.
'If you can give me asylum, Dr. Urquhart, why not Janine's seed as well? And if you can't protect her, how do you figure to…'
