"Lovely. Do continue, sorry, I can tolerate hearing about the place if we're going to end it."

"Where was I - right, being taunted by Ryoval. His sport was briefly interrupted by a call from one of his minions about a recent acquisition savaging a customer, but then he went right back to baiting us with a series of increasingly nasty comments about what he might choose to do with me or Bel or Nicol or derivatives thereof if he had us in his power. I had to haul on Bel's arm to prevent an outbreak of violence; Fell had us very politely thrown out of his party."

That's not to say Miles wasn't also affected by the nasty comments. Ryoval's crack about the dog-and-dwarf act had him in blackout rage for a second, too angry to think or see. But he kept his head a little better than Bel did.

"Several things ensued. One was that Nicol visited our ship and convinced Bel to agree to rescue her somehow from Baron Fell, details pending. Another... well. The person I was supposed to be rescuing from House Bharaputra contacted me ahead of time, in contravention of the established plan. He explained that one of the things he'd meant to take with him to meet his new employers was a set of gene samples representing some of his most important recent work. He'd concealed those samples in a specimen he'd been working on, a prototype of a genetically engineered super-soldier, but the specimen had just been sold. To Baron Ryoval. Our rescuee was a bit frantic about the loss of his work, and guilt-ridden about the life of his specimen, which was apparently destined to be short and horrible even before the creature passed into Ryoval's hands; he wanted the samples extracted and the creature destroyed. I recalled that conversation I'd overheard, and said I'd take care of it. Then I called Ryoval's establishment and asked for the person I'd heard speaking with him about it. I expressed reserved interest in acquiring the rumored super-soldier, and Manager Deem was eager to get rid of the thing, and it looked like everything was going to work out very tidily, and then Ryoval interrupted the call."

It's so annoying when something goes wrong with an otherwise perfect plan.

"He must've realized that however I affected disinterest, I wouldn't have touched his organization with a long stick if I wasn't desperate. So he said that I could take the creature off his hands for the low price of three gene samples: one of me, one of Bel, one of Nicol. Then he told me I had twenty-four hours to make my decision, and ended the call. I reminded Bel that people get hurt on commando raids, and Bel pointed out that somebody was likely to get hurt if I tried to take those gene samples, and so we took several of those hours to plan and carry out a raid on Ryoval's biologicals facility. I led the team. I wouldn't usually, but... for some things you need every edge you can get. The rest of the team was discovered on the way in, but managed to talk their way out - I was hiding in the ceiling at the time, unable to contribute, though I did get a beautiful view of Ensign Murka innocently pretending to have thought he was sneaking into a brothel rather than a research lab."

It was amazing. He promoted Murka for it afterward.

"I decided to keep going, see what I could find out before I snuck out again; the second try was bound to be harder. Well, I had good luck and bad. Good luck: I found and interrogated the local security chief. Bad luck: he managed to hit a silent alarm before I got him, and my interrogation lasted about thirty seconds before his goons burst in and captured me. When he recovered from the fast-penta, he was hopping mad. Told me that if I was so eager to meet this creature, he'd help me out, and then he dumped me in the sub-basement where he'd had it locked up with no food for days as a punishment for its misbehaviour."

An uncomfortable and terrifying climb down a cold metal ladder into the nearly unrelieved darkness, barefoot and unarmed.

"That part turned out to be good luck again. See, from the moment I'd been hearing about this super-soldier prototype, everyone had been talking about it as though it was some kind of animal. I expected to be mauled by a wild beast - but instead, when I showed up, he spoke to me. Asked for food and water. I gave him half a ration bar out of my pocket and found a water pipe for him to break open. It's surprising how often that plumbing interlude on Kyril Island comes in handy. Anyway, he was a person, and I can work with people. I recruited him on the spot. They'd been calling him 'Seven'; I offered to come up with something more namelike, and ended up picking Asterion after an old story involving a part-man part-beast trapped in a maze. We explored the sub-basement looking for exits. There was a door, but we didn't have the tools to open it; we eventually found a ladder going up the inside of a support column, and followed it up to a lab somewhere in the middle of the building. Picked up a few tools there. And then I noticed the three huge walk-in freezers at the back of the room..."

He recalls the moment of stunned realization.

"Somehow we'd managed to stumble on Baron Ryoval's treasure chest. The collection of gene samples that he drew from in creating his products. I spoofed the data feeds and showed Asterion how to dial up the temperature controls to heat-sterilization levels, and then we really had to get out, because the next time anyone took a close look at those freezers, Baron Ryoval would be very angry with us and that would be a very bad time to still be within his reach in any capacity. Recruit-trainee Asterion had to carry me twenty-seven kilometers through the snow before we found a public comconsole to call for pickup, but we got safely back to the Ariel, where Bel was in the middle of a three-way negotiation with Fell and Ryoval, trying to get me ransomed."

At the destruction of the gene library he projects very forceful, rather vicious glee. And at the revelation that the specimen was a person-

"Your scientists can create new species? And do it?"

"In theory, yeah. I don't know how far that sort of thing has actually gone. There's plenty of bizarre variants of humanity being produced on Jackson's Whole, Asterion wasn't the only one, and I don't know at what point they start counting as a separate species."

"Even the Valar cannot do that."

"Really? That seems bizarre."

"It's supposed to be only Eru. It does not make much sense as a limitation."

"It really doesn't! Creating life is a perfectly mundane process, at least in the cosmology I'm used to."

"Maybe none of the created intelligences have souls? But that's not consistent with the relevant stories either, in the stories they don't have minds..."

"And I don't honestly know where you'd draw the line between the way your average galactic makes children, the way the ghem make children, the way the haut make children, and the way the Jacksonians make - products. I don't see a clear division anywhere in there between things that seem likely to produce souls and things that don't. I'm also not sure what a soul is, technically speaking, but I've been told I appear to have one, sort of?"

"Yes, just - not like ours? I think maybe outside our universe with no Eru to personally intervene things wouldn't work the way they do here, at all."

"Clearly."

"Which is good news."

"I'm... inclined to agree, I think."

"Jackson's Whole needs to be scoured to the ground but not in the way Angband does."

"Yeah. Most of the people on Jackson's Whole who don't have a choice about being on Jackson's Whole could escape given the right opportunities, and would prefer it to being atomized, in my estimation."

"That's something, at least."

"Anyway. The other thing that happened on our way out is - for this I have to go into another of the horrible things about Jackson's Whole. I don't think I've explained cloning before, have I? Artificially creating a twin of an existing person. It's a widespread but not widely-used technology; most people do not want belated twins of themselves or anyone they know. But it has useful secondary applications, because it's possible to clone only parts of a person - a new heart, new lungs, that sort of thing, if the original organ is damaged enough to need replacing. Well and good. And then you come to Jackson's Whole, where there are no laws against unethical medical practice. The current state of the art in human life extension, for those without any morals to speak of, is to grow an entire clone, then have one's own brain transplanted into the clone's body, discarding the clone's brain as waste material."

And the clones' bodies are made to grow at double the normal rate, so each clone is ten years old, a child by anyone's standards, when they are killed to make way for their creators. It's horrible.

"..."

"Ryoval was already on his second body when we met him, but Fell was still in his first - he'd ordered a clone from House Bharaputra, waited the ten years, and then somebody'd assassinated the kid before Fell could get to him. A fact which abruptly gained relevance when Ryoval learned the condition of his freezers and called me up to rave about how much he was looking forward to torturing me to death - in between threats, he found the time to accuse me of being in league with assorted local interests, and his accusations came together into a pretty clear picture. As I've implied, Fell and Ryoval don't like each other much. If Ryoval was to be believed, and I couldn't imagine he might be lying in that state, he'd paid off Bharaputra to have Fell's clone killed, and now he thought that either Bharaputra had gotten greedy and sent me to steal some choice gene samples from his library - making Asterion a deliberately planted agent - or Fell had caught on and sent me to deliver retribution. I taunted him a little, then called Fell and traded my new information for Nicol's freedom. And then we ran away."

"... well. I am impressed at your ability to achieve so many of your objectives with so little planning."

"Thank you! It's one of my most cherished talents."

It might be nice if once in a while he achieved an objective with planning, but in fairness, that does happen. It's just that the times when he has to improvise are much more memorable.

"Rightly so, I think, though it's hard to distinguish a talent in that from absurdly good luck."

"The skill element is sometimes detectable. If I'd been slower on the uptake at any point during that whole adventure, it wouldn't have turned out nearly so well. I had to be paying attention to that call Ryoval took in the middle of provoking Bel at the party, I had to put it together with what I heard from the doctor who was fleeing Bharaputra - Asterion took the news that I'd been sent to kill him very well, by the way, and graciously allowed the ship's medic to retrieve those hidden gene samples from him; he stuck with the Dendarii and he's been thinking of training under the fleet surgeon, except... ah, one of the tradeoffs made in his creation was lifespan. All the other prototypes in his batch died of old age before they were twenty-five. He has maybe a decade left, maybe two if he's lucky, and that's... not really enough time to pursue the career in medicine that he wants."

"Aging is a ridiculous injustice, yes. And I was not actually claiming to be unable to distinguish your talent from fortune; you can do it reliably, however bizarre each instance seems."