Part 19 (2/2)
”Oh. Fine.” Lunzie wandered around the office as Sa.s.sinak ordered the meal, looking at the pictures and the crystal fish. ”That's my favorite,” said Sa.s.sinak of the fish. ”After the desk. This thing is my great hunk of self-indulgence.”
”Doesn't seem to have hurt you much,” said Lunzie, with a bite to it.
Sa.s.sinak laughed. ”I saw it fifteen years ago, saved for seven years. The place makes them one at a time and won't start one on credit. They spent two years building it, and then for five years it sat in storage until I had a place to put it.”
”Umm.” Lunzie's eyes slid across hers, then came back.
”As near as I can make it, that Thek conference lasted four and a half hours,” Sa.s.sinak said, running her finger around her damp collar. She'd loosen it once lunch had been served. Right now she had to loosen up Lunzie. She held up the bottle. ”Wouldn't you recommend another shot. Doctor Mespil. Purely medicinal, of course.”
”If this old fool can prescribe a similar dose for herself?” Lunzie's smile was little more natural as Sa.s.sinak filled both their gla.s.ses with a generous tot.
”Thanks.”
Before they'd finished savoring the brandy, two stewards brought trays heaped with food: thinly sliced sandwiches, two bowls of soup, bowls of fried delicacies, fresh fruit obviously bartered from the Iretans.
Lunzie shook her head. ”You Fleet people! And I always thought a military life in s.p.a.ce was austere!”
”It can be.” Sa.s.sinak tasted her soup and nodded. Another one of her favorite cook's creative successes. The stewards smiled and withdrew. Now Sa.s.sinak loosened her tunic. ”There are certain . . . mmm . . . perks that come with rank and age.”
”Mostly rank, I'd guess. I'm happy for you, Sa.s.s, you seem to have earned a lot of respect, and you're clearly suited to your life.”
For some reason this made Sa.s.sinak vaguely uneasy. ”Well ... I like it. Always have. It's not all this pleasant, of course.”
”No? Have you seen combat often?”
”Often enough. Cruise before this one, we were boarded. Someone even took a potshot at me.”
That caught Lunzie with her spoon stopped halfway to her mouth, and she put it down safely in the soup before asking more.
”Boarded? I didn't know that happened in ... I mean, a Fleet cruiser?”
”That's exactly the reaction of the Board of Inquiry. It seemed like a good idea at the time, though, Lunzie.” Far from being upset by her great-great-great as a listener, Sa.s.sinak discovered a certain catharsis easing tension, almost as beneficial as medication. And just the thread of a new thought, bearing on the information the Thek had extracted. ”My Exec had a s.h.i.+pload of slaves to get out of that system ASAP.” She told Lunzie the whole story, backing and filling as necessary.
”And you'd been a slave . . . you knew ...” Lunzie murmured softly.
There was more understanding in that tone than Sa.s.sinak could well stand; she changed the subject again, surprised to find herself mentioning another problem.
”Yes, and as for crew loyalty, by and large you're right. But not entirely. For instance,” and Sa.s.sinak leaned back in her chair, regarding her guest with a measuring glance, ”right now, I'm fairly sure that we have an informer aboard: someone in the pay of any one of those prestigious names we've been made privy to. Dupaynil and I have scanned and dissected the records of everyone on board and it hasn't done us a bit of good. We can't find tampering or inconsistencies or service lapses. But we have got a saboteur. My crew 're all starting to suspect each other. You can imagine what that does to morale!” Lunzie nodded, eyes sharpening. ”The timid ones came to me, wanting me, of all things, to arrest our heavyworlders. As if heavyworlders were the Jonahs.” She noticed Lunzie's startled expression. ”And the next thing will be some political movement or other. There has to be a way to find the rotter, but I confess I'm stymied. And I particularly want the b.u.g.g.e.r found before any hint of what we've discovered here on Ireta can possibly leak.”
Lunzie began peeling a fruit, letting the rind curl below her fingers. ”Would you like me to look through the files - the uncla.s.sified stuff, I mean? Maybe an outside eye? Sort of singing for my lunch, as it were?”
”Singing for your lunch?”
”Never mind. If you don't trust an outsider ...”
”Oh, I trust you - G.o.ds below, my own great-great-great-grandmother.” Sa.s.sinak caught herself on the rim of a hiccup, and decided that she was the least bit cozy from the brandy. ”You could look through my bottom drawers if you wanted. But what can you find that Dupaynil and I haven't found?”
”I dunno. But being older ought to do some good, if being younger can't.”
At this, they locked glances and giggled. Fresh eyes, Lunzie's eyes, made no sense, and very good sense, and they were both more relaxed than necessary. Two hours later, poring over the personnel files, they had sobered but were no nearer solving Sa.s.sinak's problem.
”I didn't think you needed this many people to run a cruiser,” said Lunzie severely. ”It would be easier to check a smaller crew.”
”Part of that great life I have as a cruiser captain.”
”Right. One more engineering technician, grade E-4, and I'm going to ...” Suddenly she paused, and frowned. ”Hold it! Who's this?”
Sa.s.sinak called up the same record on her own screen. ”Prosser, V. Tagin. He's all right; I've checked him out, and so has Dupaynil.” She glanced again at the now-familiar file. Planet of origin: Colony Makstein-VII, so - matotype: height range 1.7 - 2 meters, weight range 60 - 100 kg, eye color: blue/gray, skin: red/yellow/black ratio 1:1:1, type fair, hair type: straight, fine, light-brown to yellow to gray. Longheaded, narrow pelvis, 80% chance missing upper outer incisors. She screened Prosser's holo, and saw a 1.9 meter, 75-kilogram male with gray eyes in a longish pale face under straight fine, fair hair. By his dental chart, he was missing the upper outer incisors, and his blood type matched. ”There's nothing off in his file, and he's well-within the genetic index description. His eyes are too close together, but that's not a breach of Security. What's wrong with him?”
”He's impossible, that's what.”
”Why?”
Lunzie looked across at her, a completely serious look. ”Did you ever hear of clone colonies?”
”Clone colonies?” Sa.s.sinak stared at her blankly. She had neither heard of such a thing nor seen a reference to it. ”What's a clone colony?”
”What databases do you have onboard? Medical, I mean? I want to check something.” Lunzie had gone tense suddenly, alert, almost vibrating with what she wouldn't explain - yet.
”Medical? Ask Mayerd. If that's not enough, I can even get you access to Fleet HQ by FTL link.”
”I'll ask Mayerd. They were talking about covering it up, and if they did - ” Lunzie didn't go on; Sa.s.sinak didn't push her. Time enough.
Lunzie was on the internal corn, talking to Mayerd about medical databases, literature searches, and specific medical journals, in a slang Sa.s.sinak could hardly follow. ”What do you mean. Essentials of Cell Reference isn't publis.h.i.+ng? Oh - well, that's a stupid reason to change t.i.tles . . . Well, try Bioethics Quarterly, out of Amperan University Press, probably volume 73 to 77 . . . nothing? Ceiver and Petruss were the authors . . . Old Mackelsey was the editor then, a real demon on stuff like this. Of course I'm sure of my reference: as far as I'm concerned it was maybe two years ago.” Finally she clicked off and looked at Sa.s.s, a combination of smugness and concern. ”You've got a big problem, great-great-great-granddaughter, bigger than you thought.”
”Oh? I need any more?”
”Worse than one saboteur. Someone's been wiping files. Not just your files. All files.”
”What exactly do you mean?” It was the first time she'd used her command voice in Lunzie's presence and she was glad to see that it was effective. It didn't, she noticed, scare Lunzie, but it did get a straight answer out of her.
”You never heard of clone colonies, nor has Mayerd who ought to have. I was a student on an Ethics Board concerning such a colony.” Lunzie paused just a moment before continuing. ”Some bright researchers had decided that it would be a possibility to have an entire colony sharing one genome: one colony made up exclusively of clones.”
”But that can't work,” Sa.s.sinak said, recalling what she knew of human genetics. ”They'd inbreed, and besides you need different abilities, mixtures ...”
Lunzie nodded. ”Humans are generalists. Early human societies had no specialization except s.e.xual. You can't build a large, complicated society that way, but a specialized colony, maybe. They thought they could. Anyway, in terms of the genetic engineering needed for certain environments, it would be a lot cheaper to engineer one, and then clone, even given the expense of cloning. And once they'd cleared the generation-limit problem, and figured out how to insert the other s.e.x without changing anything else, it would be stable. If you know there are no dangerous recessives, then inbreeding won't cause trouble. Inbreeding merely raises the probability that, if such harmful genes exist, they will combine. If they don't exist, they can't combine.”
”I see. But I'm not sure I believe.”
”Wise. The Ethics team didn't either. Because I'd been around, so to speak, when that first colony was set up and because I'd worked in occupational fields, I had the chance to give an opinion on the ethical and practical implications. One of a panel of two hundred or so. We saw the clones, well, holos of them, and the research reports. I thought the project was dangerous, to both the clones and to everyone else. For one thing, in the kind of environment the clones were designed for, I thought random mutations would be far more frequent than the project suggested. Others thought the clones should be protected: the project had a fierce security rating anyway, but apparently it went a step further and all references were wiped.”
”What does that have to do with Prosser, V. Tagin?”
Lunzie looked almost disgusted, then relented. ”Sa.s.sinak, that colony was on Makstein VII. Everyone in it - everyone had the same genome and the same appearance. Exactly the same appearance. I saw holos of members of that colony. Your Mr. Prosser is not one of the clones, though he's been given the somatypes.”
”Given?”
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