by Timothy Zahn
I looked at Bayta. Her face looked a little pinched. “How bad is it?” I asked. “Better question: what are they doing about it?”
“They will begin by taking samples of the fetal tissue and of the fluid in the birth sac,” Aronobal said. “Unfortunately, until this is settled we cannot begin work on Ms. German’s own problems.”
“Which are what exactly?” I asked. “I’ve never gotten a straight answer on that.”
Aronobal sighed, a soft whinnying thing. “She has at least four genetic disorders,” she said. “Possibly more—we have not yet done a complete mapping. Any one of the flaws could prove fatal to her over the next thirty years. Together, they are a virtual promise that her life will be cut tragically short.”
“Can you fix her?”
“We believe so,” she said. “But our knowledge of Humans and Human genetic structure is still woefully incomplete. That is indeed one reason she was invited to Proteus Station: to see whether we could map her genetic flaws and correct them.”
“But that’s now on hold?”
“It is the only safe way,” Aronobal said. “The work on Ms. German is extensive and deep, with the potential to put additional stress on the child. Were he healthy it would be a simple matter of screening out the treatment chemicals and monitoring his condition. But until we know what is causing these other anomalies we cannot risk any action that might precipitate his death.”
“And Ms. German cares about that?” I asked. “As I understand it, this child is the product of a vicious attack on her. Yet she still wants it to live?”
“We want it to live,” Wandek put in firmly. “Despite what some Human cultures believe, all sentient life is sacred and must be protected and nurtured to the fullest extent of our abilities.”
“Very noble,” I said, watching him closely. “Yet the baby is Ms. German’s, not yours. Doesn’t she have a say in the matter? Especially since the baby is now getting in the way of her own treatment?”
Wandek drew himself up, his blaze mottling again. “The baby will be protected,” he said curtly. “We have not—” He broke off. “All sentient life is sacred,” he repeated.
“Of course,” I said, ducking my head humbly. I’d gotten what I’d been looking for. Time to backpedal. “Naturally, I agree. It’s just that there are many regions on Earth, with laws that vary widely from place to place.”
“This is the Filiaelian Assembly, not Earth,” Wandek said frostily, the mottling of his blaze slowly fading back to normal. “Only Filiaelian law has any bearing.”
“Of course,” I said again as I turned back to Aronobal. “Any idea how long the tests on Ms. German’s baby will take?”
“No,” Aronobal said. “If you like, I can put your name and comm number on the list of those to be informed of progress.”
“I’d appreciate that.” I gave her my number and Bayta’s and watched as she keyed them into her comm. “Can you tell me who we talk to about getting accommodations somewhere in this sector?” I asked when she’d finished.
“That has already been arranged,” Wandek said. “Speak with the receptionist at the door where we entered.”
“Thanks.” I started to turn away. “Oh. Does she happen to speak English?”
“You Humans,” Wandek said, his tone more resigned than angry. “So many of you seem to believe the galaxy must necessarily accommodate your needs and desires.”
“Yes, we’re funny that way,” I agreed. “Does she speak English, or doesn’t she?”
Wandek made an impatient-sounding rumble deep in his throat. “I will send an English-speaker to meet you at her desk,” he said, pulling out his comm. “I must return now to my work.”
“And I to observe the work on Ms. German’s child,” Aronobal added.
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you. Both of you.”
Whatever else one might say about Wandek, he definitely got fast results. By the time we reached the receptionist’s desk there was a young Filly in a pale green outfit already waiting for us. “You are the Human Compton?” he asked.
“Yes,” I acknowledged.
“Come with me,” he said, walking toward one of the corridors and motioning for us to follow. “Your quarters have been assigned.”
“Are they near Ms. German’s?” I asked, making no move to follow. “They have to be near Ms. German’s.”
“Your quarters have been assigned,” he repeated. “Come with me.”
He headed down the corridor, not checking to see if we were following or not. Taking Bayta’s arm, I headed us off after him.
We retraced our steps out of the dome, down the ramp to the traffic corridor, along the glideway, and back to Terese’s room. The door our guide led us to was two doors farther down. “Here,” he said, gesturing toward a plate beside the door. “It is already keyed to your nucleics.”
“Thank you,” I said. I touched my hand to the plate, and with a soft click the door slid open. With my watchdogs crowding at my sides, I went inside.
And stopped. The room was a photocopy of Terese’s, right down to the color scheme on the blankets on the bed.
The single, barely double-size bed.
One.
I felt the movement of air as Bayta came in and stopped beside Doug. “Cozy,” I commented.
She didn’t say anything. But I suspected that she wasn’t looking at me just as hard as I wasn’t looking at her.
I should have expected this, of course. I hadn’t, but I should have. One of the Modhri’s best and most insidious methods of infiltration was through something called thought viruses: subtle suggestions—sometimes not so subtle—that were passed telepathically from a Modhran walker to an uninfected person. Usually the suggestion was geared to get the victim to touch a piece of Modhran coral, which would get a polyp hook into his bloodstream and eventually grow him an internal Modhran colony of his own.
The most horrific part of the technique was the fact that thought viruses transmitted best between those who already had emotional attachments. That meant friends, allies, confidants, and coworkers.
And lovers.
I stared at the single bed, feeling a cold and angry sweat breaking out on the back of my neck. Did the Modhri think Bayta and I were lovers? We weren’t, and weren’t likely to go that route any time soon, either—we both knew how thought viruses worked, and neither of us was stupid enough to increase our risks that way. We’d shared only a single kiss, and even that had been driven more by lingering fear and pain and exhaustion than anything else.
Even now, I still wasn’t sure how much of that kiss had been affection on Bayta’s part and how much had simply been that same shared fear and exhaustion coming through. In many ways, the deepest core of Bayta’s mind was still a mystery to me.
But she and I had been living and fighting side by side for a long time now, and the Modhri certainly knew enough about human biology to know we were ripe for that kind of attachment if we weren’t there already. Apparently, he was hoping a little nudge might be enough to push us the rest of the way.
Well, he could just keep hoping.
I turned to the Filly, waiting expectantly in the corridor like a dit-rec comedy bellhop expecting a tip. “Unacceptable,” I told him. “This room is designed for one. We are two.”
It was clearly not the response he’d been expecting. He drew back a little, his eyes darting uncertainly from me to the room to me again. “Call your superiors,” I said. “Tell them we need a larger room or a second room in this same area.”
“Yes, of course,” he said, finally unfreezing enough to pull out his comm. {The Human wants a larger room,} he reported to whoever picked up at the other end. He listened a moment—{No, he also wishes it to be near the Human Ms. German.} There was another pause, and I watched his blaze for signs of emotional distress. But the blaze remained unchanged. {I’ll tell him,} he said, and shut down the comm. “There is a second room available,” he told us. “But it is on the other side of the medical dome,
the inward side.”
I looked at Bayta. The far side of the medical dome would put whichever of us took that room over half a kilometer away from Terese. More importantly, it would put us that same half kilometer away from each other. “I’m afraid—”
“Would you show it to us, please?” Bayta asked.
“Certainly,” the Filly said. “Follow me.”
He led the way to the glideway, and we wended our way back to the dome. The receptionist looked up as we passed, but neither she nor our guide said anything to each other. The Filly led us into the dome, past the building where they were presumably still working on Terese and her unborn baby, and out into the corridor on the far side. Two corridors later, he stopped at another door. “This is the one,” he said, gesturing to it.
I nodded. “Open it.”
“It is not yet keyed to your nucleics.”
“I realize that,” I said patiently. “That’s why I asked you to use your passkey.”
For a moment he hesitated, perhaps wondering if he was supposed to admit he even had a passkey. Then, silently, he pulled a card from inside his tunic and waved it past the touch plate. The door slid open, and he gestured us through.
The room, as I’d expected, was exactly like the other two we’d already seen. “This is good,” Bayta said briskly, turning to block the Filly as he started to come in behind us. “We’ll take both rooms. How long will it take to key the lock to our nucleics?”
“I will call a room server immediately,” the Filly said, clearly relieved that the awkward situation had been resolved. “It will be ready within the hour.”
“Thank you,” Bayta said, putting a hand on his shoulder and easing him gently but inexorably all the way out into the corridor. “We’ll wait here until that’s been done.”
The Filly started to say something else, seemed to change his mind, and merely nodded. He was pulling out his comm when the door slid shut in his face.
I looked at Bayta. “You’re kidding,” I said.
“Why not?” she countered, starting along the edge of the room, her eyes darting everywhere. “I stay near Terese where I can watch over her. You stay here, where you can slip into the medical building when no one’s looking and figure out what they’re up to.”
“And what happens if they do come after Terese, with me a good fifteen minutes away?” I asked. Bayta was heading toward the bed, so I went in the opposite direction, circling the room toward the computer desk.
“They aren’t going to hurt her,” Bayta said. She reached the bed and knelt down to peer at its underside. “They’d hardly bring her across the galaxy for that.”
“Unless she isn’t the one they actually care about,” I said, running my fingers beneath the computer desk.
Bayta paused long enough in her examination of the bed to throw a frown at me. “What do you mean?”
“In a minute,” I said, studying the edge where the desk met the wall. If the Fillies hadn’t had time to code the lock to our DNA, they probably hadn’t had time to install any listening devices, either, or at least nothing so subtle that we couldn’t spot it.
Of course, the fact that I wasn’t all that familiar with Filly bugging devices theoretically meant that one of their normal, non-stealthy versions might still be able to slip past us. But listening devices shared certain characteristics, and I figured I had a fair chance of finding anything they might have put in here.
Bayta was clearly on that same wavelength. One of the hazards of having hung around with me all this time, I supposed. We completed our respective sweeps, meeting halfway around the room. Then, again by unspoken but clearly mutual agreement, we both continued on, each of us now checking the areas the other had already searched.
We finished without finding anything. I had no doubt that the other room, the one they’d planned for us, was bugged to the ceiling. But this one seemed safe enough, at least for the moment. “Of course, it’s only an assumption that they didn’t already have the lock coded for us,” I reminded Bayta as she sat down on the edge of the bed and I settled into the computer desk chair facing her. “Our helpful native guide might have used that passkey just to throw us off.”
“I don’t think so,” Bayta said. “I touched the pad on my way in, and there was no click.”
“Maybe that was because the door was already open.”
She shook her head. “The first room door was also already open when I touched the pad there, but it still clicked. Why don’t you think they care about Terese?”
I hesitated. Bayta had already shown she had a soft spot for the young and helpless, first with Rebekah Beach back on New Tigris and then for Terese herself aboard the super-express. I wasn’t at all sure how she was going to react to my current suspicion. “Here’s the score as I see it at the moment,” I said. “You remember, back on the super-express, we speculated the attack on Terese might have been staged as an excuse to get her to Proteus Station?”
Bayta’s lip twitched. “Yes.”
“I’ve been thinking about how to prove that,” I said. “So a while ago, when Aronobal brought up the fact that the baby was in trouble, I tossed out the possibility that Terese might want to abort him. Did you notice Wandek’s reaction?”
Bayta nodded. “He was very upset.”
“He was more than just upset,” I said. “The way his nose blaze was going, it was clear the whole idea made him furious.” I paused. “As furious as if the baby was his own.”
Bayta stared at me. “Are you saying,” she said slowly, “that the baby isn’t Human?”
“No, of course—” I broke off. I most certainly hadn’t been saying that. All I’d been saying, actually, was that Wandek was treating the baby like it was certified Filiaelian property.
But now that I thought about it, why not? With the Filly obsession with genetic manipulation, why the hell not? “We need to talk to Terese,” I said grimly. “Find out exactly what happened to her.”
“She won’t talk to you,” Bayta said. The color had come back into her cheeks, and a quietly simmering anger into her eyes. “When do you want me to do it?”
I started to glance at my wrist, then remembered that Hchchu had taken my watch. “No time like the present,” I said, standing up. “Let’s go see how much longer they’re going to keep her. Maybe you can take her out to dinner.”
I wasn’t sure my watchdogs would let me into Terese’s examination building a second time, particularly now that we didn’t have an official or even an implied invitation. But they apparently decided that since we’d been inside once, we now had legal run of the place. That could be very useful down the line.
Unfortunately, that was all we got for our trouble. Aronobal intercepted us outside Terese’s room and told us that the girl’s tests were going to run at least two more hours, and that once they were over she would probably be spending the night in the building under observation instead of going back to her room. She did promise, though, to pass on Bayta’s offer of a dinner invitation for future consideration.
“Now what?” Bayta asked as we emerged again into the crisp pseudo-Alpine air.
“We wait for them to be done with her,” I said, running my fingers across the building’s wall and looking up at the eaves. I’d seen other varieties of malleable materials, but this one took the cake for looking and feeling solid. “Just because Aronobal says we can’t talk to her doesn’t mean we actually can’t. You want to grab some dinner while they’re working?”
“Let’s not go too far away,” she said. “Just because Dr. Aronobal says it’ll take two hours doesn’t mean it actually will.”
I eyed her. Bayta was on fire, all right. A slow, simmering fire, maybe, but Bayta on fire was not to be trifled with. It almost made me pity whoever had done whatever the hell they’d done to Terese. Almost. “You want to camp out here at the door, or shall we be a little more subtle?”
Bayta looked around the dome. “Let’s see if we can get into one of the other buildings,” sh
e suggested. “Maybe we can sit by a window and watch for them to bring her out.”
I looked down at Doug, remembering all those sharp teeth. “As long as you’re willing to take no for an answer,” I said.
“Of course.” Bayta pointed to a building near the edge of the dome. “That one doesn’t look very busy. Let’s try it.” Without waiting for an answer she headed off. Ty, apparently figuring that Doug already had me adequately covered, trotted off alongside her.
“Fine,” I murmured as I trailed after her. Bayta on fire was Bayta on fire, but a little healthy caution wouldn’t be out of line, either. Maybe she hadn’t had a good look into the watchdogs’ mouths and didn’t know about all the teeth. Or maybe the prospect of being ripped limb from limb simply didn’t bother her. I made a mental note to see if the entertainment center in her quarters carried any of the versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
We were nearly to the building when I heard someone call my name.
I turned around. It was Emikai, striding toward us with a determined expression on his face. Fanned out in a moving wedge behind him were four more Fillies wearing the same gray-and-black jumpsuits as the ones who’d hauled me out of the entry bay four hours ago. “Uh-oh,” Bayta muttered.
“Steady,” I cautioned her. I stood still, keeping my arms at my sides, as they came up to us. “I greet you, Logra Emikai,” I said, nodding to him. “I’m rather surprised to see you still here. I’d have thought that having delivered Ms. German safely to Proteus you’d be on your way elsewhere.”
“My way is now here,” he said. “My contract has been bought by Chinzro Hchchu. I will remain until he dismisses me.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “And you don’t like that?”
“I was an enforcement officer,” he reminded me. “My personal preferences are of no account.” He gestured to the Jumpsuits still grouped behind him. “But that is of no account. I have come to tell you that you are summoned. The preliminary hearing on your trial is about to begin.”
