Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [127]
Idly, as he mentally inventoried resources, he called up the author's page. "On An Improvement . . ." came from a university hospital at some city named Silica—Ethan knew little of off-planet geography, but it sounded appropriately Betan. What ordered minds and clever hands must have come up with that idea. . . .
"Kara Burton, M.D., Ph.D., and Elizabeth Naismith, M.S. Bioengineering . . ." He found himself looking suddenly, on screen, at two of the strangest faces he had ever seen.
Beardless, like men without sons, or boys, but devoid of a boy's bloom of youth. Pale soft faces, thin-boned, yet lined and time-scored; the engineer's hair was nearly white. The other was thick-bodied, lumpy in a pale blue lab smock.
Ethan trembled, waiting for the insanity to strike him from their level, medusan gazes. Nothing happened. After a moment, he unclutched the desk edge. Perhaps then the madness that possessed galactic men, slaves to these creatures, was something only transmitted in the flesh. Some incalculable telepathic aura? Bravely, he raised his eyes again to the figures in the screen.
So. That was a woman—two women, in fact. He sought his own reaction; to his immense relief, he seemed to be profoundly unaffected. Indifference, even mild revulsion. The Sink of Sin did not appear to be draining his soul to perdition on sight, always presuming he had a soul. He switched off the screen with no more emotion than frustrated curiosity. As a test of his resolution, he would not indulge it further today. He put the data disk carefully away with the others.
The freezer box was nearly up to temperature. He readied the fresh buffer solution baths and set them super-cooling to match the current temperature of the box's contents. He donned insulated gloves, broke the seals, lifted the lid.
Shrink wrap? Shrink wrap?
He peered down into the box in astonishment. Each tissue sample should have been individually containerized in its own nitrogen bath, surely. These strange gray lumps were wrapped like so many packets of lunch meat. His heart sank in terror and bewilderment.
Wait, wait, don't panic—maybe it was some new galactic technology he hadn't heard of yet. Gingerly, searched the box for instructions, even rooting down among the packets themselves. Nothing. Look and guess time.
He stared at the little lumps, realizing at last that these were not cultured tissue at all, but the raw material itself. He was going to have to do the growth culturing personally. He swallowed. Not impossible, he reassured himself.
He found a pair of scissors, cut open the top packet, and dropped its contents, plop, into a waiting buffer bath. He contemplated it in some dismay. Perhaps it ought to be segmented, for maximum penetration of the nutrient solution—no, not yet, that would shatter the cellular structure in its frozen state. Thaw first.
He poked through the others, driven by growing unease. Strange, strange. Here was one six times the size of the other little ovoids, glassy and round. Here was one that looked revoltingly like a lump of cottage cheese. Suddenly suspicious, he counted packets. Thirty-eight. And those great big ones on the bottom—once, during his youthful army service, he had volunteered for K.P. in the butcher's department, fascinated by comparative anatomy even then. Recognition dawned like a raging sun.
"That," he hissed through clenched teeth, "is a cow's ovary!"
The examination was intense, and thorough, and took all afternoon. When he was done, his laboratory looked like a first-year zoology class had been doing dissections all over it, but he was quite, quite sure.
He practically kicked open the door to Desroches' office, and stood hands