She frowned. "I don't know what you mean by 'scientifically.' Some people were interested in them, yes. They even brought some small things back to study—I remember Pelly had a piece of metal he showed me once."
Viktor inhaled sharply. "Can I see the things? Are they in a museum?"
But Nrina only laughed when he tried to explain what a museum was like, from his fading memories of the Los Angeles Art Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits. "Keep all those dirty things around? But why, Viktor? No one should keep trash. We'd just be choking on our own old worn-out things! No, I'm sure they were studied at the time. No doubt there are assay reports and probably pictures of them somewhere—you can use the desk to see what they look like, and I think a few people like Pelly might have a few little bits for curios. But we certainly don't have a place where we keep such things, and besides—"
She looked suddenly harsh, almost as though both frightened and angry. "Besides," she finished, "those hideous metal things are dangerous. That's why no one lands there anymore. People got killed there!"
And then, reluctantly, she went to the desk and showed him what had happened, more than a century before. A ship landing on Nebo. People coming out of it, grotesque in metallized film suits to keep out the heat and helmets to give them air to breathe; they approached one of the mauve pyramids, half-buried in the shifting sands of Nebo. They were trying to drill a way in—
And then it exploded.
Of the pyramid itself nothing at all was left; it simply was vaporized. No more of the people. A few fragments of nearby objects, blasted in the explosion, littered the sands.
When he looked up he saw that Nrina had averted her eyes. "Turn it off," she ordered. "Those people were killed."
He surrendered. She came closer, smiling down at him. "That's better," she said softly, leaning against his shoulder.
He didn't resist. He didn't encourage her either. "All right, Nrina, I see what happened, but it doesn't tell me anything. What are those machines?"
"But no one knows that, Viktor," she said patiently. "And it isn't very interesting."
"It is to me! I want to know what they were there for—who built them—how they work. All this 'what' stuff is very interesting, of course, but can't I ever find out a 'why'?"
"Why what, Viktor?" she asked kindly, stroking his stubbly cheek. "Wouldn't you like to grow a beard? Most men do, if they can."
"No, I don't want to grow a beard. Please don't change the subject. I mean I want to know why things happen—the theoretical explanation behind the things I see."
"I don't think those words mean anything," she said, frowning. "I understand 'theory,' of course. That is the background of genetics, the rules that tell us what to expect when, for instance, we strip a certain nucleotide out of a gene and patch in another."
"Yes, exactly! That's what I mean! What I'm looking for is something on astronomical theory."
Nrina shook her head. "I have never heard of any 'astronomical' theories, Viktor."
When Viktor came home from a ramble Nrina was waiting for him. "I have something to show you," she said mysteriously, pleased with herself. "Come into my room."
There she surprised him. She opened a compartment in the wall. It revealed itself as a little cage, with something moving beyond the wire mesh. Nrina reached into it and drew out something tiny and soft.
It moved comfortably in her hand. "Tell me, Viktor," she said, hesitating as though worried at what his answer might be. "Have you ever seen one of these things before?"
"Of course I have!" He let her give him the furry little thing. "It's a kitten!"
"Exactly," she said triumphantly, observing as he stroked its fur. "Does it enjoy that?" she inquired.
"Most cats do. Where did you get it? I thought they were extinct!"
She looked gratified. "Indeed they were," she said, graciously acknowledging the remarkable nature of her feat. "I made it. There were some frozen specimens of feline sperm Pelly found when he brought you back." Experimentally she stroked the kitten as Viktor had done. Viktor could hear nothing, but the nerve endings of his hand informed him of the creature's silent, tiny purr. "It's always a worry," she said, "when you don't have any female genetic material for a new species. Oh, it's easy enough to structure an artificial ovum, but when the animal is something you've never seen before you have to wonder if you've got it exactly right."
Viktor stroked the soft, wriggly little thing and handed it back to her. "I'd say that looks like the rightest little kitten I've ever seen," he pronounced.
She accepted the compliment gracefully. "I'm going to give it to a little boy I know." Carefully she returned it to its cage, closing the door.
Viktor shook his head, marveling. "I knew you designed children. I knew you created intelligent gorillas—"
"Gillies, Viktor."
"—intelligent gillies for servants. I didn't know you could make just about anything you could imagine."
She considered that for a moment. "Oh, not anything," she decided. "Some things are physically impossible—or, anyway, I could make them, but they wouldn't survive. But this is the most interesting part of my work, Viktor. It's why anyone bothers to go to Newmanhome, really. There's a whole biota in those freezers on Newmanhome, you know. We don't know half of what's there. Even when there's a label we can't always be sure of what's inside, because they got pretty sloppy about keeping records for a while. So when I have a chance I match up sperm and ova—when I can—or find some related genetic material that I can tinker into being cross-fertile. Like this."
"Do you sell them, like a pet store?"
"I don't know what a pet store is, and I certainly don't 'sell' them, any more than I sell the babies. If someone wants them I get credit for my time." She sighed. "It doesn't always work. Sometimes I can't find a match or even make one; a lot of the specimens are spoiled, and it's terribly hard to reconstitute them. And then, even when we do get an interesting neonate, we can't always feed them. Especially the invertebrates; some of them are really specialized in diet, they just won't eat what we try to give them. So they die." She grinned. "Babies are a lot easier."
That was probably true, Viktor reflected, since the real human fetuses never appeared in Nrina's laboratory as born babies. Gestation and birthing weren't her problems. What she produced was a neat little plastic box, thermally opaque so it didn't need either warming or cooling for forty-eight hours or so, containing a fertilized ovum and enough nutrient fluid to keep it alive until the proud parents could put it in their own incubator. "Don't you ever want to see the real babies?" Viktor asked her curiously.
"What for?" Nrina asked, surprised at the question. "Babies are very messy creatures, Viktor. Oh, I like to hear how they turn out and I'm always glad to get pictures of them—every artist wants to see how his work turns out. But the only ones I ever wanted to be around for more than a day were my own." Then she was surprised again at the expression on his face. "Didn't you know? I've had two children. One of them was just a favor to her father, so I didn't keep her very long. He wanted something to remember me by, you see. Her name's Oclane and, let's see, she must be fourteen or fifteen by now. She's on Moon Joseph, but she comes to visit me sometimes. She's a pretty little girl. Very bright, of course. I think she looks a lot like me."
"I didn't know," Viktor said, hastily revising his internal image of Nrina. He had thought of her as many things, but never as a mother—not even as one of those mothers of the present new-fangled variety, who picked out specifications for their offspring and never went through the uncouth bother of pregnancy. Then he remembered her words. "You said you had two children. What about the other one?"