Lunzie began peeling a fruit, letting the rind curl below her fingers. “Would you like me to look through the files - the unclassified 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 - gods below, my own great-great-great-grandmother.” Sassinak 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 Sassinak’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?”
Sassinak 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?” Sassinak 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; Sassinak 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 Sassinak could hardly follow. “What do you mean. Essentials of Cell Reference isn’t publishing? Oh - well, that’s a stupid reason to change titles… 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 Sass, 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,” Sassinak 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 sexual. 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 sex 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. “Sassinak, 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?”
“The Index entries were written to cover the appearance of the clones should any of them travel, while indicating a range of values as if they were from a limited but normal colonial gene pool. His somatype has been faked, Sassinak. That’s why you didn’t catch it. No one would, who didn’t know about clone colonies in general and Makstein VII in particular. And you couldn’t find out because it’s not in the files anymore.”
“But someone knows,” said Sassinak, hardly breathing for the thought of it. “Someone knew to fake his ID that way…”
“I wonder if your clever Lieutenant Commander Dupaynil could ask Mr. Prosser where he actually does come from?” Lunzie said in a drawl as she examined her fingertips, a mannerism which made Sassinak blink for it was much her own.