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outward attention at last, it was total and terrifying.
"It was a long-standing disagreement." He strained to hear, to keep his head
clear, to concentrate on the words and not just on the enchanting melody of
her voice. "Between the Celestial Lady and the Emperor. My Lady had long
thought that the haut gene bank was too centralized, in the heart of the
Celestial Garden. She favored the dispersal of copies, for safety. My Lord
favored keeping it all under his personal protection-for safety. They both
sought the good of the haut, each in their own way."
"I see," Miles murmured, encouraging her with as much delicacy as he could
muster. "All good guys here, right."
"The Emperor forbade her plan. But as she neared the end of her life... she
came to feel that her loyalty to the haut must outweigh her loyalty to her
son. Twenty years ago, she began to have copies made, in secret."
"A large project," Miles said.
"Huge, and slow. But she brought it to fruition."
"How many copies?"
"Eight. One for each of the planetary satraps."
"Exact copies?"
"Yes. I have reason to know. I have been the Celestial Lady's supervisor of
geneticists for five years, now."
"Ah. So you are something of a trained scientist. You know about... extreme
care. And scrupulous honesty."
"How else should I serve my Lady?" she shrugged.
But you don't know much, I'll bet, about covert ops chicanery. Hm. "If there
are eight exact copies, there must be eight exact
Great Keys, right?"
"No. Not yet. My Lady was saving the duplication of the key to the last
moment. A matter of-"
"Control," Miles finished smoothly. "How did I guess?"
A faint flash of resentment at his humor sparked in her eyes, and Miles bit
his tongue. It was no laughing matter to haut Rian
Degtiar.
"The Celestial Lady knew her time was drawing near. She made me and the Ba
Lura the executors of her will in this matter.
We were to deliver the copies of the gene bank to each of the eight satrap
governors upon the occasion of her funeral, which they would be certain to all
attend together. But... she died more suddenly than she had expected. She had
not yet made arrangements for the duplication of the Great Key. It was a
problem of considerable technical and cipher skill, as all of the Empire's
resources went into its original creation. Ba Lura and I had all her
instructions for the banks, but nothing for how the key was to be duplicated
and delivered, or even when she had planned this to happen. The Ba and I were
not sure what to do."
"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
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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 he could not keep still. "And
while everybody is off chasing Barrayarans, the satrap governor quietly goes
home with the only real
copy of the Great Key, getting a large jump-start on the haut-competition.
After first arranging the Ba's reward for its double-
treason, and incidentally eliminating the only witness to the truth. Oh. Yes.
It works. Or it would have worked, if only... the satrap governor had
remembered that no battle-plan survives first contact with the enemy." Not
when the enemy is me. He stared into her eyes, willing her to believe in him,
striving not to melt. "How soon can you analyze this Great Key, and support or
explode these theories?"
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