Ethan of Athos b-6

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "L. Bharaputra & Sons Biological Supply House, Jackson's Whole", the shipping label read. "Contents: Frozen Tissue, Human, Ovarian, 50 units. Stack with heat exchange unit clear of obstruction. This End Up."

  "We got them!" Ethan cried in delight and instant recognition, clapping his hands.

  "At last," grinned Desroches. "The Population Council's going to have one hell of a party tonight, I'll bet—what a relief! When I think of the hunt for suppliers—the scramble for foreign exchange—for a while I thought we were going to have to send some poor son out there personally to get them."

  Ethan shuddered, and laughed. "Whew! Thank the Father nobody had to go through that." He ran a hand over the big plastic box, eagerly, reverently. "Going to be some new faces around here."

  Desroches smiled, reflective and content. "Indeed. Well—they're all yours, Dr. Urquhart. Turn your routine lab work over to your techs and get them settled in their new homes. Priority."

  "I should say so!"

  Ethan set the carton tenderly on a bench in the Culture Lab, and adjusted the controls to bring the internal temperature up somewhat. There would be a wait. He would only thaw twelve today, to fill the culture support units waiting, cold and empty, for new life. Soberly, he touched the darkened panel behind which the CJB-9 had dwelt so long and fruitfully. It made him feel sad, and strangely adrift.

  The rest of the tissue must wait for thawing until Engineering installed the bank of new units along the other wall. He grinned, thinking of the frantic activity that must now be disrupting that department's placid routine of cleaning and repairs. Some exercise would be good for them.

  While he waited, he carried his new journals to the comconsole for a scan. He hesitated. Since his promotion to department head last year, his censorship status had been raised to Clearance Level A. This was the first occasion he'd had to take advantage of it; the first chance to test the maturity and judgement supposed necessary to handle totally uncut, uncensored galactic publications. He moistened his lips, and nerved himself to prove that trust not misplaced.

  He chose a disk at random, stuck it into the read-slot, and called up the table of contents. Most of the two dozen or so articles dwelt, predictably but disappointingly, on problems of reproduction in vivo in the human female, hardly apropos. Virtuously, he fought down an impulse to peek at them. But there was one article on early diagnosis of an obscure cancer of the vas deferens, and better still one encouragingly titled, "On An Improvement In Permeability Of Exchange Membrances In The Uterine Replicator." The uterine replicator had originally been invented on Beta Colony—long famous for its leading-edge technologies—for use in medical emergencies. Most of its refinements still seemed to come from there, even at this late date, a fact not widely appreciated on Athos.

  Ethan called up the entry and read it eagerly. It mostly seemed to involve some fiendishly clever molecular meshing of lipoproteins and polymers that delighted Ethan's geometric reason, at least on the second reading when he finally grasped it. He lost himself for a while in calculations about what it would take to duplicate the work here at Sevarin. He would have to talk to the head of Engineering….

  Idly, as he mentally inventoried resources, he called up the author's page. "On An Improvement…" came from a university hospital at some city named Silica—Ethan knew little of off-planet geography, but it sounded appropriately Betan. What ordered minds and clever hands must have come up with that idea….

  "Kara Burton, M. D., Ph. D., and Elizabeth Naismith, M. S. Bioengineering…" He found himself looking suddenly, on screen, at two of the strangest faces he had ever seen.

  Beardless, like men without sons, or boys, but devoid of a boy's bloom of youth. Pale soft faces, thin-boned, yet lined and time-scored; the engineer's hair was nearly white. The other was thick-bodied, lumpy in a pale blue lab smock.

  Ethan trembled, waiting for the insanity to strike him from their level, medusan gazes. Nothing happened. After a moment, he unclutched the desk edge. Perhaps then the madness that possessed galactic men, slaves to these creatures, was something only transmitted in the flesh. Some incalculable telepathic aura? Bravely, he raised his eyes again to the figures in the screen.

  So. That was a woman—two women, in fact. He sought his own reaction; to his immense relief, he seemed to be profoundly unaffected. Indifference, even mild revulsion. The Sink of Sin did not appear to be draining his soul to perdition on sight, always presuming he had a soul. He switched off the screen with no more emotion than frustrated curiosity. As a test of his resolution, he would not indulge it further today. He put the data disk carefully away with the others.

  The freezer box was nearly up to temperature. He readied the fresh buffer solution baths, set them super-cooling to match the current temperature of the box's contents. He donned insulated gloves, broke the seals, lifted the lid.

  Shrink wrap? Shrink wrap?

  He peered down into the box in astonishment. Each tissue sample should have been individually containerized in its own nitrogen bath, surely. These strange grey lumps were wrapped like so many packets of lunch meat. His heart sank in terror and bewilderment.

  Wait, wait, don't panic—maybe it was some new galactic technology he hadn't heard of yet. Gingerly, he searched the box for instructions, even rooting down among the packets themselves. Nothing. Look and guess time.

  He stared at the little lumps, realizing at last that these were not cultured tissue at all, but the raw material itself. He was going to have to do the growth culturing personally. He swallowed. Not impossible, he reassured himself.

  He found a pair of scissors, cut open the top packet, and dropped its contents, plop, into a waiting buffer bath. He contemplated it in some dismay. Perhaps it ought to be segmented, for maximum penetration of the nutrient solution—no, not yet, that would shatter the cellular structure in its frozen state. Thaw first.

  He poked through the others, driven by growing unease. Strange, strange. Here was one six times the size of the other little ovoids, glassy and round. Here was one that looked revoltingly like a lump of cottage cheese. Suddenly suspicious, he counted packets. Thirty-eight. And those great big ones on the bottom—once, during his youthful army service, he had volunteered for K. P. in the butcher's department, fascinated by comparative anatomy even then. Recognition dawned like a raging sun.

  "That," he hissed through clenched teeth, "is a cow's ovary!"

  The examination was intense, and thorough, and took all afternoon. When he was done, his laboratory looked like a first-year zoology class had been doing dissections all over it, but he was quite, quite sure.

  He practically kicked open the door to Desroches' office, and stood hands clenched, trying to control his ragged breathing.

  Desroches was just donning his coat, the light of home in his eye; he never turned off the holocube until he was done for the day. He stared at Ethan's wild, disheveled face. "My God, Ethan, what is it?"

  "Trash from hysterectomies. Leavings from autopsies, for all I know. A quarter of them are clearly cancerous, half are atrophied, five aren't even human for God's sake! And every single one of them is dead."

  "What?" Desroches gasped, his face draining. "You didn't botch the thawing, did you? Not you—I"

  "You come look. Just come look," Ethan sputtered. He spun on his heel, and shot over his shoulder, "I don't know what the Population Council paid for this crud, but we've been screwed."

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Maybe," the senior Population Council delegate from Las Sands said hopefully, "it was an honest error. Maybe they thought the material was intended for medical students or something."

  Ethan wondered why Roachie had dragged him along to this emergency session. Expert witness? Another time, he might have been awed by his august surroundings; the deep carpeting, the fine view of the capital, the long polished ripple-wood table and the grave, bearded faces of the elders reflected in it. Now he was so angry he barely noticed them. "That doesn't explain why there were 38 in a
box marked 50," he snapped. "Or those damned cow ovaries—do they imagine we breed minotaurs here?"

  The junior representative from Deleara remarked wistfully, "Our box was totally empty."

  "Faugh!" said Ethan. "Nothing so completely screwed up could be either honest or an error—' Desroches, looking exasperated, motioned him down, and Ethan subsided. "Gotta be deliberate sabotage," Ethan continued to him in a whisper.

  "Later," Desroches promised. "We'll get to that later."

  The chairman finished recording the official inventory reports from all nine Rep Centers, filed them in his comconsole, and sighed. "How the hell did we pick this supplier, anyway?" he asked, semi-rhetorically.

  The head of the procurement subcommittee dropped two tablets of medication into a glass of water, and laid his head on his arms to watch them fizz. "They were the lowest bidder," he said morosely.

  "You put the future of Athos in the hands of the lowest bidder?" snarled another member.

  "You all approved it, remember?" replied the procurement head, stung into animation. "You insisted on it, in fact, when you found the next bidder would only send thirty for the same price. Fifty different cultures promised for each Rep Center—you practically peed yourself with glee, as I recall—"

  "Let us keep these proceedings official, please," the chairman warned. 'We have no time to waste either apportioning or evading blame. The galactic census ship breaks orbit in four days, and is the only vector for our decisions until next year."

  "We should have our own jump ships," remarked a member. "Then we wouldn't be treed like this, at the mercy of their schedule."

  "Military's been begging for some for years," said another.

  "So which Rep Centers do you want to trade in to pay for them?" asked a third sarcastically. "We and they are the two biggest items in the budget, next to the terraforming that grows the food for our children to eat while they're growing up—do you want to stand up and tell the people that their child-allotment is to be halved to give those clowns a pile of toys that produce nothing for the economy in return?"

  "Nothing until now," muttered the second speaker cogently.

  "Not to mention the technology we'd have to import—and what, pray tell, are we going to export to pay for it? It took all our surplus just to—"

  "So make the jump ships pay for themselves. If we had them, we could export something and obtain enough galactic currency to—"

  "It would directly contravene the purposes of the Founding Fathers to seek contact with that contaminated culture," interjected a fourth man. "They put us at the end of this long pipeline in the first place precisely to protect us from—"

  The chairman tapped the table sharply. "Debates on larger issues belong in the General Council, gentlemen. We are met today to address a specific problem, and quickly." His flat, irritated tone did not invite contradiction. There was a general stirring and shuffling of notes and straightening of spines.

  The junior member from Barca, poked by his senior, cleared his throat. "There is one possible solution, without going off-planet. We could grow our own."

  "It's exactly because our cultures won't grow any more that we—" began another man.

  "No, no, I understand that—none better," said the Barca man, a Chief of Staff like Deroches, hastily. "I meant, ah…" he cleared his throat again. "Grow some female fetuses of our own. They need not even be brought to term, quite. Then raid them for ovarian material and, er, begin again."

  There was a revolted silence around the table. The chairman looked like a man sucking on a lemon. The member from Barca shrank in his seat.

  The chairman spoke at last. "We're not that desperate yet. Although it may be well to have spoken what others will surely think of eventually."

  "It needn't be public knowledge," the Barca man offered.

  "I should hope not," agreed the chairman dryly. "The possibility is noted. Members will mark this section of the record classified. But I point out, for all, that this proposal does not address the other, perennial problem faced by this Council, and Athos: maintaining genetic variety. It had not pressed on our generation—until now—but we all knew it had to be faced in the future." His tones grew more mellow. "We would be shirking our responsibilities to ignore it now and let it be dumped on our grandsons in the form of a crisis."

  There was a murmur of relief around the table, as logic safely propped emotional conviction. Even the junior member from Barca looked happier.

  "Quite."

  "Exactly."

  "Just so—"

  "Better to kill two chickens with one stone, if we can—"

  "Immigration would help," put in another member, who doubled, one week a year, as Athos's Department of Immigration and Naturalization. "If we could get some."

  "How many immigrants came on this year's ship?" asked the man across from him.

  "Three."

  "Hell. Is that an all-time low?"

  "No, year before last there were only two. And two years before that there weren't any." The Immigration man sighed. "By rights we ought to be flooded with refugees. Maybe the Founding Fathers were just too thorough about picking a planet away from it all. I sometimes wonder if anyone out there has heard of us."

  "Maybe the knowledge is suppressed, by, you know—them."

  "Maybe the men trying to get here are turned away at Kline Station, " opined Deroches. "Maybe only a few are allowed to trickle in."

  "It's true," agreed the immigration man, "the ones we do get tend to be a little—well—strange."

  "No wonder, considering they're all products of that, uh, traumatic genesis. Not their fault."

  The chairman tapped the table again. "We shall continue this later. We are agreed, then, to pursue our first choice of an off-planet supply of cultured tissue—"

  Ethan, still fuming, steamed into speech. "Sirs! You're not thinking of going back to those scalpers—" Desroches pulled him firmly back into his seat.

  "From some more reputable source," the chairman finished smoothly, with an odd look at Ethan. Not disapproval; a sort of smiling, silky smugness. "Gentlemen delegates?"

  A murmur of approval rose around the table.

  "The ayes have it; it is so moved. I think we also agree not to make the same mistake twice; no more sight-unseen purchases. It follows that we must now choose an agent. Dr. Desroches?"

  Desroches stood. "Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have, given some thought to this problem. Of course, the ideal purchasing agent must first of all have the technical know-how to evaluate, choose, package, and transport the cultures. That narrows the possible choices considerably, right there. He must also be a man of proven integrity, not merely because he will be responsible for nearly all the foreign exchange Athos can muster this year—"

  "All of it," the chairman corrected quietly. "The General Council approved it this morning."

  Desroches nodded, "And not only because the whole future of Athos will depend on his good judgement, but also that he have the moral fibre to resist, er, whatever it is out there that, ah, he may encounter."

  Women, of course, and whatever it was they did to men. Was Roachie volunteering, Ethan wondered? He certainly knew the technical end. Ethan admired his courage, even if his self-description was bordering on the swelled-headed. Probably needed it, to psyche himself up. Ethan did not begrudge it. For Desroches to leave his two sons, on whom he doted, behind for a whole year…

  "He should also be a man free of family responsibilities, that his absence not put too great a burden on his designated alternate," Desroches went on.

  Every bearded face around the table nodded judiciously.

  "—and finally, he should be a man with the energy and conviction to carry on regardless of the obstacles fate or, uh, whatever, may throw in his path." Desroches' hand fell firmly to Ethan's shoulder; the expression of smug approval on the chairman's face broadened to a smile.

  Ethan's half-formed words of congratulation and commiseration froze in his throat. Running
through his formerly-teeming brain was only one helpless, recycling phrase: I'll get you for this, Roachie….

  "Gentlemen, I give you Dr. Urquhart." Desroches sat, and grinned cheerily at Ethan. "Now stand up and talk," he urged.

  The silence in Desroches' ground car on the drive back to Sevarin was long and sullen. Desroches broke it a little nervously. "Are you willing to admit you can handle it yet?"

  "You set me up for that," growled Ethan at last. "You and the chairman had it all cooked up in advance."

  "Had to. I figured you'd be too modest to volunteer."

  "Modest, hell. You just figured I'd be easier to nail if I wasn't a moving target."

  "I thought you were the best man for the job. Left to its own devices, God the Father knows what the committee would have picked. Maybe that idiot Frankin from Barca. Would you want to put the future of Athos in his hands?"

  "No," Ethan began to agree reluctantly, then hardened. "Yes! Let him get lost out there."

  Desroches grinned, teeth glinting in the feint tinted light from the control panel. "But the social duty credits you'll be getting—think of it! Three sons, a decade's accumulation in the normal course of events, earned in just one year. Generous, I think."

  Ethan had a sudden poignant vision of a holocube for his own desk, filled with life and laughter. Ponies indeed, and long holidays sailing in the sunshine, passing on the subtleties of wind and water as his father had taught him, and the tumble, noise, and chaos of a home teeming with the future…. But he said glumly, "If I succeed, and if I get back. And anyway, I have enough social duty credits for a son and a half. It would have meant a hell of a lot more if they'd coughed up enough credits to qualify my designated alternate. '

  "If you'll forgive my frankness, people like your foster brother are just the reason social duty credits may not be transferred," said Desroches. "He's a charming young man, Ethan, but even you must admit he's totally irresponsible."

  "He's young," argued Ethan uneasily. "He just needs a bit more time to settle."