Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [38]
"Ah," Miles said faintly. He dared not offer any comment at all, for fear of impeding the free flow, at last, of information. He hung on her words, barely breathing.
"Ba Lura thought . . . if we took the Great Key to one of the satrap governors, he might use his resources to duplicate it for us. I thought this was a very dangerous idea. Because of the temptation to take it exclusively for himself."
"Ah . . . excuse me. Let me see if I follow this. I know you consider the haut gene bank a most private matter, but what are the political side-effects of setting up new haut reproductive centers on each of Cetaganda's eight satrap planets?"
"The Celestial Lady thought the empire had ceased to grow at the time of the defeat of the Barrayar expedition. That we had become static, stagnant, enervated. She thought . . . if the empire could only undergo mitosis, like a cell, the haut might start to grow again, become re-energized. With the splitting of the gene bank, there would be eight new centers of authority for expansion."
"Eight new potential Imperial capitals?" Miles whispered.
"Yes, I suppose."
Eight new centers . . . civil war was only the beginning of the possibilities. Eight new Cetagandan Empires, each expanding like killer coral at their neighbors' expense . . . a nightmare of cosmic proportions. "I think I can see," said Miles carefully, "why perhaps the Emperor was less than enthused by his mother's admittedly sound biological reasoning. Something to be said on both sides, don't you think?"
"I serve the Celestial Lady," said the haut Rian Degtiar simply, "and the haut genome. The Empire's short-term political adjustments are not my business."
"So all this, ah, genetic shuffling . . . would the Cetagandan Emperor, by chance, regard this as treason on your part?"
"How?" said the haut Rian Degtiar. "It was my duty to obey the Celestial Lady."
"Oh."
"The eight satrap governors have all committed treason in it, though," she added matter-of-factly.
"Have committed?"
"They all took delivery of their gene banks last week at the welcoming banquet. Ba Lura and I succeeded in that part of the Celestial Lady's plan, at least."
"Treasure chests for which none of them have keys."
"I . . . don't know. Each of them, you see . . . the Celestial Lady felt it would be better if each of the satrap governors thought that he alone was the recipient of the new copy of the haut gene bank. Each would strive better to keep it secret, that way."
"Do you know—I have to ask this." I'm just not sure I want to hear the answer. "Do you know to which of the eight satrap governors Ba Lura was trying to take the Great Key for duplication, when it ran into us?"
"No," she said.
"Ah," Miles exhaled in pure satisfaction. "Now, now I know why I was set up. And why the ba died."
Fine lines appeared on her ivory brow as she stared at him.
"Don't you see it too? The ba didn't hit us Barrayarans on the way out. It hit us on the way back. Your ba was suborned. Ba Lura did take the key to one of the satrap governors, and received in return not a true copy, because there was no time for the extensive decoding required, but a decoy. Which the ba then was sent to deliberately lose to us. Which it did, although not, I suspect, in quite the manner it had originally planned." Almost certainly not as planned.
He found himself pacing, keyed up and hectic. He ought not to limp before her, it brought attention to his deformities, but