"Ah," Miles said faintly. He dared not offer any comment at all, for fear of impeding the free flow, at last, of information. He hung on her words, barely breathing.
"Ba Lura thought ... if we took the Great Key to one of the satrap governors, he might use his resources to duplicate it for us. I thought this was a very dangerous idea. Because of the temptation to take it exclusively for himself."
"Ah . . . excuse me. Let me see if I follow this. I know you consider the haut gene bank a most private matter, but what are the political side-effects of setting up new haut reproductive centers on each of Cetaganda's eight satrap planets?"
"The Celestial Lady thought the empire had ceased to grow at the time of the defeat of the Barrayar expedition. That we had become static, stagnant, enervated. She thought ... if the empire could only undergo mitosis, like a cell, the haut might start to grow again, become re-energized. With the splitting of the gene bank, there would be eight new centers of authority for expansion."
"Eight new potential Imperial capitals?" Miles whispered.
"Yes, I suppose."
Eight new centers . . . civil war was only the beginning of the possibilities. Eight new Cetagandan Empires, each expanding like killer coral at their neighbors' expense ... a nightmare of cosmic proportions. "I think I can see," said Miles carefully, "why perhaps the Emperor was less than enthused by his mother's admittedly sound biological reasoning. Something to be said on both sides, don't you think?"
"I serve the Celestial Lady," said the haut Rian Degtiar simply, "and the haut genome. The Empire's short-term political adjustments are not my business."
"So all this, ah, genetic shuffling . . . would the Cetagandan Emperor, by chance, regard this as treason on your part?"
"How?" said the haut Rian Degtiar. "It was my duty to obey the Celestial Lady."
"Oh."
"The eight satrap governors have all committed treason in it, though," she added matter-of-factly.
"Have committed?"
"They all took delivery of their gene banks last week at the welcoming banquet. Ba Lura and I succeeded in that part of the Celestial Lady's plan, at least."
"Treasure chests for which none of them have keys."
"I ... don't know. Each of them, you see . . . the Celestial Lady felt it would be better if each of the satrap governors thought that he alone was the recipient of the new copy of the haut gene bank. Each would strive better to keep it secret, that way."
"Do you know—I have to ask this." I'm just not sure I want to hear the answer. "Do you know to which of the eight satrap governors Ba Lura was trying to take the Great Key for duplication, when it ran into us?"
"No," she said.
"Ah," Miles exhaled in pure satisfaction. "Now, now I know why I was set up. And why the Ba died."
Fine lines appeared on her ivory brow as she stared at him.
"Don't you see it too? The Ba didn't hit us Barrayarans on the way out. It hit us on the way back. Your Ba was suborned. Ba Lura did take the key to one of the satrap governors, and received in return not a true copy, because there was no time for the extensive decoding required, but a decoy. Which the Ba then was sent to deliberately lose to us. Which it did, although not, I suspect, in quite the manner it had originally planned." Almost certainly not as planned.
He found himself pacing, keyed up and hectic. He ought not to limp before her, it brought attention to his deformities, but he could not keep still. "And while everybody is off chasing Barrayarans, the satrap governor quietly goes home with the only real copy of the Great Key, getting a large jump-start on the haut-competition. After first arranging the Ba's reward for its double-treason, and incidentally eliminating the only witness to the truth. Oh. Yes. It works. Or it would have worked, if only . . . the satrap governor had remembered that no battle-plan survives first contact with the enemy." Not when the enemy is me. He stared into her eyes, willing her to believe in him, striving not to melt. "How soon can you analyze this Great Key, and support or explode these theories?"
"I will examine it immediately, tonight. But whatever has been done to it, my examination will not tell me who did it, Barrayaran." Her voice grew glacial with this thought. "I doubt you could have created a true duplicate, but a non-working forgery is certainly within your capabilities. If this one is false—where is the real one?"
"It seems that is just what I must discover, milady, to, to clear my name. To redeem my honor in your eyes." The intrinsic fascination of an intellectual puzzle had brought him to this interview. He'd thought curiosity was his strongest driving force, till suddenly his whole personality had become engaged. It was like being under—no, like becoming an avalanche. "If I can discover this, will you ..." what? Look favorably upon his suit? Despise him for an outlander barbarian all the same? "... let me see you again?"
"I don't . . . know." Reminded, her hand drifted to the control on her float-chair for the concealing force-screen.
No, no, don't go. ... "We must have some way of communicating," he said hastily, before she could disappear again behind that faintly humming barrier.
Her head tilted, considering this. She drew a small comm link from her robes. It was undecorated, utilitarian, but like the nerve disruptor he'd taken from Ba Lura perfectly designed in what Miles was beginning to recognize as the haut style. She whispered a command into it. In a moment, the androgynous ba appeared from its guard post beside the pond. Did its eyes widen just slightly, to see its mistress without her shell?
"Give me your comm link, and wait outside," haut Rian Degtiar ordered.
The little ba nodded, and turned the device over to her without question, and withdrew silently.
She held the comm link out to Miles. "I use this to communicate with my senior servitors, when they run errands outside the Celestial Garden for me. Here."
He wanted to touch her, but scarcely dared. He instead extended his cupped hands toward her like a shy man offering flowers to a goddess. She dropped the comm link into them gingerly, as into the hands of a leper. Or an enemy.
"Is it secured?" he dared to ask.
"Temporarily."
In other words, it was the lady's private line only as long as no one in higher-level Cetagandan security troubled to break in. Right. He sighed. "It won't work. You can't send signals into my embassy without causing my superiors to ask a whole lot of questions I'd rather not answer just now. And I can't give you my comm link either. I'm supposed to turn it in, and I don't think I can get away with telling them I lost it." Reluctantly, he handed the link back to her. "But we have to meet again somehow." Yes, oh yes. "If I'm going to be risking my reputation and maybe my life on the validity of my reasoning, I'd like to prop it up with a few facts." One fact was almost certain. Someone with enough wit and nerve to murder one of the most senior Imperial servitors under the nose of Cetaganda's own emperor would hardly balk at threatening a decidedly un-senior female Degtiar. The thought was obscene, hideous. A Barrayaran scion's diplomatic immunity would be an even more useless shield, no doubt, but that was merely the price of the game. "I think you could be in grave danger. It might be better to play along for a bit—don't reveal to anyone you have obtained this key from me. I have a funny feeling I'm not following his script, y'see." He paced nervously back and forth before her. "If you can find out anything at all about Ba Lura's real activities in the few days before it died—don't run afoul of your own security, though. They have to be following up on the Ba's death."