"Who all did he tell?  Did he ever meet with all of you?"

"George and Eiko and me, at first.  There was one later meeting with all of us, when we planned the rally—George Suwabi and me, Seiichiro, Lee Kang, Rumi Khosla, and Eiko Tennoji."

Those last names were all too familiar to Miles from his researches.  "Let me guess.  You decided to make a public announcement of the secret at the rally, where things went so wrong."

Her gaze flicked up from her lap to go knife-narrow at him.  "It wasn't our people who made the trouble.  We were hit by a counter-rally—a collection of thugs from the N.H.L.L.  They were supposed to have stayed at the other end of the park, that night.  We couldn't afford to rent a hall, and neither could they."

"Was it really the N.H.L.L., or could it have been a gang hired to impersonate them?"

"It was really them—I recognized a couple of the fellows involved.  Locals."

"Mm, they might still have been employed for the task.  Set upon you."

Her head tilted in consideration and half-agreement.  "The police broke up the fight.  There seemed to be an awful lot of police for the size of the scuffle, and they arrived very quickly.  As if they'd already been warned.  I saw several people with bleeding heads, or pushed to the ground."  The memory seemed distressing; to her, it was literally only yesterday, Miles was reminded.  "That's not the kind of protest we ever were.  I think the N.H.L.L. is like the other side of the coin, literally, from the cryocorps.  The N.H.L.L. frets about the money they don't have, the cryocorps fret about money they do have, and neither one cares about anyone's lives but their own."

A shrewd judgment, Miles thought.  "May we come back to Dr. Leiber?"  And his secret.  "He does seem to have been the key man, in several senses."

She regarded him and seemed to come to a decision.  "I suppose if you are some sort of bizarre cryocorp spy, you already know.  And know that I know."  So what more is there to lose? hung unspoken.

"For what it's worth, I already have a big pointer in the fact that Dr. Leiber researched preservation solution chemistry for NewEgypt Cryonics."