Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [135]
This made no sense. Maybe it was only their souls, not their brains, that were so different? The one article he'd been sure was a man's work turned out to be by a Betan hermaphrodite, a sex which hadn't even existed when the Founding Fathers had fled to Athos, and where did they fit in? He lost himself, for a while, imagining the flap in Athosian Customs should such a creature present itself for entry, as the bureaucrats tried to decide whether to admit its maleness or exclude its femaleness—it would probably be referred to a committee for about a century, by which time the hermaphrodite would have conveniently solved the problem by dying of old age. . . .
Kline Station Customs were made nearly equally tedious by the most thorough microbiological inspection and control procedure Ethan had ever seen. Kline Station, it appeared, cared not if you were smuggling guns, drugs, or political refugees, as long as your shoes harbored no mutant fungi. Ethan's terror and—he admitted to himself—ravenous curiosity had mounted to a fever when he was at last permitted to walk through the flex tube from the courier into the rest of the universe.
The rest of the universe was disappointing at first glance, a dingy chilly freighter docking bay. The mechanical working side of Kline Station, to be sure, like the backside of a tapestry that probably made a fine show from some more intended perspective. Ethan puzzled over which of a dozen exits led to human habitation. The ship's crew was obviously busy, or out of sight; the microbial inspection team had dashed off as soon as its task was done, like as not to another job. A lone figure was leaning casually against a wall at the mouth of an exit ramp in the universal languid pose of idleness watching work. Ethan approached it for directions.
The crisp gray-and-white uniform was unfamiliar to Ethan, but obviously military even without the clue of the sidearm on the hip. Only a legal stunner, but it looked well-cared-for and not at all new. The slim young soldier looked up at Ethan's step, inventoried him, he felt, with one glance, and smiled politely.
"Pardon me, sir," Ethan began, and halted uncertainly. Hips too wide for the wiry figure, eyes too large and far apart above a small chiseled nose, jaw thin-boned and small, beardless skin fine as an infant's—it might have been a particularly elegant boy, but . . .
Her laughter pealed like a bell, entirely too loud for the reddening Ethan. "You must be the Athosian," she chuckled.
Ethan began to back away. Well, she didn't look like the middle-aged scientists portrayed in the Betan Journal. It was a perfectly natural mistake, surely. He had resolved earlier to avoid speaking to women as much as humanly possible, and here he was already— "How do I get out of here?" he mumbled, darting cornered glances around the docking bay.
She raised her eyebrows. "Didn't they give you a map?"
Ethan shook his head nervously.
"Why, that's practically criminal, turning a stranger loose in Kline Station without a map. You could go out looking for the commode and starve to death before you found your way back. Ah ha, the very man I'm looking for. Hi! Dom!" she hailed a courier crewman just now crossing the docking bay with a duffle slung over his shoulder. "Over here!"
The crewman changed course, his annoyance melting into the look of a man eager to please, if slightly puzzled. He stood straighter than Ethan had ever seen him, sucking in his gut. "Do I know you, ma'am—I hope?"
"Well, you ought to—you sat next to me in disaster drill class for two years. I admit it's been a while." She ran a hand through her dark cropped curls. "Picture longer hair. C'mon, the re-gen didn't change my