Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [298]
Pel was clearly not pleased to go on, but she understood the depth of a debt that could not be paid off with such trivialities as medals and ceremonies. "The ba, it seems," she said slowly, "desired more than Lisbet's vision. It planned a new empire—with itself as both emperor and empress. It stole the haut children of Rho Ceta not just as a core population for its planned new society, but as . . . mates. Consorts. Aspiring to even more than Fletchir Giaja's genetic place, which, while part of the goal of haut, does not imagine itself the whole. Hubris," she sighed. "Madness."
"In other words," breathed Miles, "the ba wanted children. In the only way it could . . . conceive."
Ekaterin's hand, which had drifted to his shoulder, tightened.
"Lisbet . . . should not have told it so much," said Pel. "She made a pet of this ba. Treated it almost as a child, instead of a servitor. Hers was a powerful personality, but not always . . . wise. Perhaps . . . self-indulgent in her old age, as well."
Yes—the ba was Fletchir Giaja's sibling, perhaps the Cetagandan emperor's near-clone. Elder sibling. Test run, and the test judged successful—and decades of observant service in the Celestial Garden thereafter, with the question always hovering—so why was not the ba, instead of its brother, given all that honor, power, wealth, fertility?
"One last question. If you will. What was the ba's name?"
Pel's lips tightened. "It shall be nameless now. And forevermore."
Erased. Let the punishment fit the crime.
Miles shivered.
* * *
The luxurious lift van banked over the palace of the Imperial Governor of Rho Ceta, the sprawling complex shimmering in the night. The vehicle began to drop into the vast dark garden, laced with veins of lights along its roads and paths, which lay to the east of the buildings. Miles stared in fascination out his window as they swooped down, then up over a small range of hills, trying to guess if the landscape was natural, or artificially carved out of Rho Ceta's surface. Partly carved, at any rate, for on the opposite side of the rise a grassy bowl of an amphitheater sheltered in the slope, overlooking a silky black lake a kilometer across. Beyond the hills on the lake's other side, Rho Ceta's capital city made the night sky glow amber.
The amphitheater was lit only by dim, glowing globes lavishly spread across its width: a thousand haut lady force bubbles, set to mourning white, damped to the barest visible luminosity. Among them, other pale figures moved softly as ghosts. The view turned from his sight as the driver of the van swung it about and brought it down to a gentle landing a few meters inward from the lake shore at one edge of the amphitheater.
The van's internal lighting brightened just a little, in red wavelengths designed to help maintain the passengers' dark adaptation. In the aisle across from Miles and Ekaterin, ghem-General Benin turned from his window. It was hard to read his expression beneath the formalized swirls of black-and-white face paint that marked him as an Imperial ghem-officer, but Miles took it for pensive. In the red light, his uniform glowed like fresh blood.
All in all, and even taking into account his sudden close personal introduction to Star Crèche bioweapons, Miles wasn't sure if he'd have cared to trade recent nightmares with Benin. The past weeks had been exhausting for the senior officer of the Celestial Garden's internal security. The child-ship, carrying Star Crèche personnel who were his special charge, vanishing en route without a trace; garbled reports leaking back from Guppy's scrambled trail hinting not only at breathtaking theft, but possible biocontamination from the Crèche's most secret stores; the disappearance