“. . . but I’ve accepted that as true,” Murdoch was saying, and she had missed the point, being more intent on an incomplete fetus of odd proportions floating behind a screen of transparent plaz.

She looked at Murdoch. “Accepted what? I’m sorry, I was . . . I mean, there’s so much to see.”

“Plasteel by the kilometer, tanks and fluids, pseudo-bodies, pseudo-minds . . .” He waved his hand in frustration.

She realized that Murdoch was in a particularly manic mood and this bothered her. She felt the need to suppress unspoken questions about that odd fetus floating behind the screen of plasma glass.

“So you’ve accepted all this,” she said. “So what?”

“We birth here. We conceive people here, nurture them fetally, extract them, send some shipside for training . . . Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we can’t bring natural births groundside, too?”

“What Ship decides is for good reason, for the good of . . .”

“. . . of Shipmen everywhere. I know. I’ve heard it as often as you have. But Ship did not decide. Nowhere in the records can anyone—even you, the best Search Technician we have, so I’m told—find where Ship has demanded that all births take place shipside. Nowhere.”

Without knowing how she knew it, Legata realized he was repeating Lewis’ words verbatim. This was not Murdoch’s manner of speaking. Why was she supposed to hear this? Was it part of Oakes’ scheme to do away with the shipside obstetrics force, the Natali?

“But we are required to WorShip,” she said. “And what greater WorShip can we have than to entrust Ship with our children? It makes sense, too . . .”

“It makes sense, it has logic,” he agreed. “But it is not a direct command. And it makes a good deal of our work here in Lab One unnecessarily limited. Why, we could . . .”

“Own this world? Morgan says you can do it anyway.”

There, let him chew on that. Morgan, not The Boss, not Doctor Oakes.

Murdoch dropped her hand and the flush of elation washed out of his cheeks.

He knows we’re on holo, she thought, and I’ve mined his act.

It occurred to her then that Murdoch had been playing to another audience, to Oakes. If the emergency at the Redoubt over on Black Dragon turned out fatal for Lewis . . . yes, they would need a replacement. She imagined Oakes’ attention on them later from some metallic scanner shipside. But she wanted Murdoch to squirm a bit more. She took his hand and said, “I’d like to see The Garden.”

Her statement was only half-true. She had seen the catalogues which Oakes kept securely locked away, the wide selection of E-clones grown to special purposes here—any purpose, it seemed. Fewer than a dozen people shipside were even aware that such a process existed. And here at Colony, Lab One was a complex of its own, secreted away from the rest of the buildings, its purpose shrouded in the mystique of its name.