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On a space station, we see Nicole, the quaddie, in something like her natural environment as she floats in a null-gee bubble. In null-gee, she can play her two-sided hammer dulcimer using all four hands at once, with virtuoso skill. Quaddies use a cup-shaped anti-gravity float chair when they visit planets and one-gee space habitats. They control it with their lower hands, leaving their upper hands and arms free.

The plot in Cetaganda keys on computer technology. Lois lets the surprisingly decent Cetagandans suffer the utter folly of having a single point of failure of their most important resource.

The Cetagandans are masters of chemistry and especially genetics. The ghem compete with genetic wizardry on plants and animals. The haut only work with human genetics. They gene-engineer their race as they work for something higher than human and it looks like they're making progress. All haut children are engineered from the single master gene bank.

In the Emperor's Celestial Garden's Star Crèche is a frozen genetic sample of every haut who has ever lived—in randomized order. There are hundreds of thousands of samples. But there is only one master-index Key with no backups. "It is a matter of . . . control," said haut Rian Degtiar, Handmaiden of the Star Crèche.

The previous Empress decided that the haut race was getting stagnant and new competition and expansion was needed. So she ordered the gene bank to be duplicated and distributed to the governors of the eight Cetagandan planets to make eight new, competing centers of expansion. But the one, master, Great Key is not yet duplicated and distributed. Instead, it is stolen.

The Celestial Gardens, home to the Emperor and the haut, is permanently covered by a force dome six kilometers across requiring an entire power plant to maintain it. The haut-women's float chairs use force bubbles for safety and privacy, as the haut-women are never seen by those unworthy. Even a penthouse rooftop garden has its own force dome and the Empress's cremation is contained inside a force bubble.

Little things that show up include marvelous perfumes, technically enabled art and sensitized asterzine, the fabric that can be formable, dyeable, and totally inert until it comes in contact with the liquid catalyst, at which point it explodes.

Ethan of Athos begins on Athos, an all-male planet which gets away from the sin of women's influence over men by using the uterine replicator and cultured ovarian tissues. But a couple of hundred years after the colony's founding, the ovarian tissue cultures are dying of old age.

An attempt to buy ovarian tissue cultures on the market has returned junk tissues, the real ones never having been sent or having been stolen along the way. Ethan Urquhart, a senior reproductive doctor, is sent out into the galaxy to buy new ovarian cultures. Kline Station is the first stop on the route from Athos to the rest of the galaxy.

Dendarii Commander Elli Quinn follows Cetagandan agents from Jackson's Whole to Kline Station in pursuit of something biological but she doesn't know what. The Cetagandans are pursuing tissues that are a result of a decades-long research project to develop spies who are telepathic. Losing the cultures might lead their enemies to develop telepathic spies. They think the valuable samples have been sent to Athos, so they capture and question Ethan.

Tiny electronic bugs and tracers are used by the spies in the story, including Quinn. The Cetagandans use fast-penta and other interrogation drugs. One produces high firing rates of sensory nerves and another, applied to the skin, produces agony but leaves no marks.

Kline Station is in an otherwise empty solar system with six wormholes. The station is a transshipment and trading center with over a hundred thousand permanent residents and sometimes a quarter that many transients.

Safety is paramount. Quinn quips that some places have religions, we have safety drills. The biocontrol cops have immense power to make break-in searches and decontaminations as they see