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Ethan had never found himself clinging to a cusp of human history before. The trouble with the position, he found, was that in whatever direction you looked there fell away a glassy, uncontrollable slide down to a strange future you would then have to live in. He had never wanted to pray more, nor been less sure that it would do any good.

Cee shook his head, drank again. "For myself, I'm done with it. No more. I'd have walked into the fire three years ago, but for Janine."

"Ah," said Quinn. "Janine."

Cee looked up with piercing eyes. Not nearly drunk, Ethan thought. "You want a pound of flesh, mercenary? That's the price that will buy it. Find me Janine."

Quinn pursed her lips. "Mixed in, you say, with the rest of Athos's mail-order brides. Tricky." She wound a strand of hair around her finger. "You realize, of course, that my mission here is finished. I've done my job. And I could stun you where you sit, take my tissue sample, and be gone before you came to."

Cee stirred uneasily. "So?"

"So, just so you realize that."

"What do you want of me?" Cee demanded. Anger edged his voice. "To trust you?"

Her lips thinned. "You don't trust anybody. You never had to. Yet you demand that others trust you."

"Oh," said Cee, looking suddenly enlightened. "That."

"You breathe one word of that," she smiled through clenched teeth, "and I'll arrange an accident for you like Okita never dreamed of."

"Your Admiral's personal secrets are of no interest to me," said Gee stiffly. "They're hardly relevant to this situation anyway.

"They're relevant to me," Quinn muttered, but she gave him a small nod, conditional acceptance of this assurance of privacy.

Every sin that Ethan had ever committed or contemplated rose unbidden to his mind. He took Quinn's unspoken point. So, evidently, did Cee, for he turned the subject by turning to Ethan.

Ethan suddenly felt terribly naked. Everything that he least wanted to be caught thinking about seemed to race through his consciousness. Cee's marvelous physical attractiveness, for example, the nervous intelligent leanness of him, the electric blue eyes—Ethan damned his own weakness for blonds, and yanked his thoughts back from a slide to the sexual. Watching himself be mentally undressed in Ethan's thoughts would hardly impress Gee with Ethan's cool diplomatic medical professionalism. Ethan envied Quinn's bland, unfailing control.

But it could be worse. He could think about just how gossamer-thin was the shield of Athos's protection he had supposedly thrown over Cee, on the basis of which the telepath had revealed so damagingly much. How betrayed was Cee going to feel when he discovered that the asylum of Athos consisted of Ethan's wits, period? Ethan reddened, utterly ashamed, and stared at the floor.

He was going to lose Cee to Quinn and the glamour of the Dendarii Mercenaries before he even got a chance to tell him about Athos—the beautiful seas, the pleasant cities, the ordered communes and the patchwork terraformed farmlands, and beyond them the vast wild desolate wastes with their fascinating extremes of climate and people—the saintly, if grubby, contemplative hermits, the outlaw Outlanders . . . Ethan pictured himself taking Cee sailing on the South Province coast, checking the underwater fences of his father's fish farm—did Cetaganda have oceans?—salt sweat and salt water, hot hard work and cold beer and blue shrimp afterward.

Cee shivered, as a man forcing himself awake from some bright but dangerous narcotic dream. "There are oceans on Cetaganda," he whispered, "but I never saw them. My whole life was corridors."

Ethan's red went to scarlet. He felt transparent as glass.

Quinn, watching him, emitted a sour chuckle of perfect understanding. "I predict your talent will not make you popular at parties, Cee."

Cee appeared to pull himself back on track by force of will. Ethan was relieved.

"If you can give me asylum, Dr. Urquhart, why not Janine's seed as well? And if you can't protect her, how do you figure