Ethan of Athos (18 page)

Rau slowed down abruptly, cased the counter, spotted Teki, and drifted down the display aisle breathing deeply and quietly. He fetched up on the opposite side of the contraceptive rack from Quinn. She must have given him one of her dazzling smiles, for a startled answering smile was jerked involuntarily from his lips before he retreated across the room and away from her distracting face.

The pharmacist returned at last and fed Teki's credit card to the computer which, working properly now, tasted it and gave it back with a demure burp. Teki gathered up his package and left. Rau was not more than four paces behind him.

Teki wandered slowly down the arcade, with many a furtive glance toward the empty balcony on the far end. He finally seated himself by the standard fountain-and-green-plants display in the middle, and waited a good long time. Rau seated himself nearby, pulled out a hand-viewer, and began to read. Quinn window-shopped interminably.

Teki glanced at the balcony, checked his chromometer in frustration, and stared down the arcade at Quinn, who took no apparent notice of him. After a few more minutes of fuming foot-tapping, Teki got up and started to leave.

“Oh, sir,” called Rau, smiling. “You forgot your package!” He held it up invitingly.

“Gods fly away with you, Teki!” Quinn whispered fiercely under her breath. “I said no ad libs!”

“Oh. Er -- thank you.” Teki took the package back from death's polite hand, and stood a moment blinking indecisively. Rau nodded and returned to his hand-viewer. Teki sighed aggrievedly and trudged back up the arcade to the dispensary.

“Excuse me,” Teki called to the pharmacist. “But is it tyramine or tryptophan that's the sleep aid?”

“Tryptophan,” said the pharmacist.

“Oh, I'm sorry. It was the tryptophan I wanted.”

There was a slightly murderous silence. Then, “Quite, sir,” said the pharmacist coldly. “Right away.”

“It wasn't a total loss,” said Quinn, pulling out her earrings and attaching them carefully to their holders in the monitor case. “At least I confirmed that Rau is hiding out in Millisor's listening post. But I'd kinda figured that anyway.”

She added the hair clip, sealed the case, and slipped it into her jacket. Hooking a chair under herself with one foot, she sat with her elbows on Terrence Cee's little fold-out table. “I suppose they'll follow Teki around for the next week, now. So much the better, I like to see my adversaries overworked. Just so he doesn't try to call me, nothing can go wrong.”

Nothing can go right, either, thought Ethan with a sideways look at Terrence Cee's face. Cee had been almost hopeful when the tyramine seemed within their grasp. Now he was closed and cold and suspicious once again.

Quite aside from his own ill-advised pledge to protect Cee, Ethan could not walk away from this frenetic tangle as long as Millisor remained a threat to Athos. And whatever their separate ends might be, Cee's and Quinn's and his own, the untangling would surely take all their combined resources.

“I suppose I could try to steal some,” said Quinn unenthusiastically, evidently also conscious of Cee's renewed frigidity. “Although Kline Station is not the easiest place for that sort of tactic...” she trailed off in thought.

“Is there any particular reason it has to be purified tyramine?” Ethan asked suddenly. “Or do you just need so many milligrams of tyramine in your bloodstream, period?”

“I don't know,” said Cee. “We always just used the tablets.”

Ethan's eyes narrowed. He rummaged the little wall-desk nearby for a note panel, and began to tap out a list.

“What now?” asked Quinn, craning her neck.

“A prescription, by God the Father,” said Ethan, tapping on in growing excitement. “Tyramine occurs naturally in some foods, you know. If you choose a menu with a high concentration of it -- Millisor can't possibly have every food outlet on the Station bugged -- nothing illegal about going grocery shopping, is there? You'll probably have to hit the import shops for a lot of this, I don't think much of it is room service console standard fare.”

Quinn took the list and read it, her eyebrows rising. “All of this stuff?”

“As much as you can get.”

“You're the doctor,” she shrugged, getting to her feet. Her smile grew lopsided. “I think Mr. Cee is going to need one.”

Two hours of strained silence later, Quinn returned to Cee's hostel room lugging two large bags.

“Party time, gentlemen,” she called, dumping the bags on the table. “What a feast.”

Cee quailed visibly at the mass 'of edibles.

“It -- seems rather a lot,” remarked Ethan.

“You didn't say how much,” Quinn pointed out. “But he only has to eat and drink until he switches on.” She lined up claret, burgundy, champagne, sherry, and dark and light beer bulbs in a soldierly row. “Or passes out.” Around the liquids in an artistic fan she placed yellow cheese from Escobar, hard white cheese from Sergyar, two kinds of pickled herring, a dozen chocolate bars, sweet and dill pickles. “Or throws up,” she concluded.

The hot fried chicken liver cubes alone were native produce from the Kline Station culture vats. Ethan thought of Okita and gulped. He picked up a few items and blanched at the price tags.

Quinn caught his grimace, and sighed. “Yes, you were right about having to hit the import shops. Do you have any idea how this is going to look on my expense account?” She bowed Terrence Cee toward the smorgasbord. “Bon appetit.”

She kicked off her boots and lay down on Cee's bed with her hands locked behind her neck and an expression of great interest on her face. Ethan pulled the plastic seal off a liter squeeze bottle of claret, and helpfully offered up the cups and utensils the room service console produced.

Cee swallowed doubtfully, and sat down at the table. “Are you sure this will work, Dr. Urquhart?”

“No,” said Ethan frankly. “But it seems like a pretty safe experiment.”

An audible snicker drifted from the bed. “Isn't science wonderful?” said Quinn.

For courtesy's sake Ethan shared the wine, although he gave the chicken livers, pickles, and chocolate a pass. The claret was rotgut despite its price, although the burgundy was not bad and the champagne -- for dessert -- was quite tasty. A slightly gluey disembodiment warned Ethan that courtesy had gone for enough. He wondered how Cee, still dutifully nibbling and sipping across the table, was holding up.

“Can you feel anything yet?” Ethan inquired of him anxiously. “Can I get you anything? More cheese? Another cup?”

“A spacesick sack?” asked Quinn helpfully. Ethan glared at her, but Cee merely waved away the offers, shaking his head.

“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.