Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [43]
"That was always your problem, Leo," said Van Atta rather venomously. "You always get your head balled up in the little details, and miss the big picture."
Leo shook his head to clear it, grasped for the lost thread of his original argument. "Nevertheless, the Cay Project's viability—" he paused abruptly, seized by a breathtaking inspiration as delicate as a soap bubble. The stroke of a pen. Could freedom be won with the stroke of a pen? As simply as that? He gazed at Apmad with a new intensity, two orders of magnitude more at least. "Tell me, ma'am," he said carefully, "what happens if the Cay Project's viability is disproved?"
"We shut it down," she said simply.
Oh, the tales out of school he might tell—and sink Brucie-baby forever as an added bonus—Leo's nerves thrilled. He opened his mouth to pour out destruction—
And closed it, sucked on his tongue, regarded his fingernails, and asked instead casually, "And what happens to the quaddies then?"
The Ops VP frowned as if she'd bitten into something nasty: that hidden tension again, the most expression Leo had yet seen upon her face. "That presents the most difficult problem of all."
"Difficult? Why difficult? Just let them go. In fact," Leo strove to conceal his rising excitement behind a bland face, "if GalacTech would let them go immediately, before the end of this fiscal year, it could still take whatever it chooses to calculate as its investment in them as a tax loss against Rodeo's profits. One last fling, as it were, one last bite out of Orient IV." Leo smiled attractively.
"Let them go where? You seem to forget, Mr. Graf, that the bulk of them are still mere children."
Leo faltered. "The older ones could help take care of the younger ones, they already do, some. . . . Perhaps they could be moved for a few years to some other sector that could absorb the loss from their upkeep—it couldn't cost GalacTech that much more than a like number of workers on pensions, and only for a few years. . . ."
"The company retirement pension fund is self-supporting," Gavin the accountant observed elliptically. "Roll-over."
"A moral obligation," Leo offered desperately. "Surely GalacTech must admit some moral obligation to them—we created them, after all." The ground was shifting under his feet, he could see it in her unsympathetic face, but he could not yet discern in what direction the tilt was going.
"Moral obligation indeed," agreed Apmad, her hands clenching. "And have you overlooked the fact that Dr. Cay created these creatures fertile? They are a new species, you know; he dubbed them Homo quadrimanus, not Homo sapiens race quadrimanus. He was the geneticist, we may presume he knew what he was talking about. What about GalacTech's moral obligation to society at large? How do you imagine it will react to having these creatures and all their problems just dumped into its systems? If you think they overreact to chemical pollution, just imagine the flap over genetic pollution!"
"Genetic pollution?" Leo muttered, trying to attach some rational meaning to the term. It sounded impressive.
"No. If the Cay Project is proved to be GalacTech's most expensive mistake, we will containerize it properly. The Cay workers will be sterilized and placed in some suitable institution, there to live out their lives otherwise unmolested. Not an ideal solution, but the best available compromise."
"St