Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

then-Prime Minister Vorkosigan, and therefore his aide, had attended in public support of his wife’s manifold medical projects there.
    Tan led him off to get suited up in some disposable paper garments, and then ushered him through the double doors at the end of the corridor. There, Jole found himself in a brightly lit clinical laboratory—busy lab benches cluttered with equipment under filtering vent hoods, a dozen absorbed techs bent over scanner stations. It reminded him a little of his tactics room, except that no one here seemed in the least bored. All the meticulously moving hands were smooth and gloved and steady.
    The work stations on the first bench, featuring some especially rapt techs, were devoted to what Jole thought was the heart of the matter, fertilization. A couple of tightly temperature-controlled storage chambers held the culture dishes with early cell divisions. The lab stations on next bench over were devoted to what Dr. Tan dubbed quality control , gene scanning and repair. A second bank of warming cupboards continued the next stage of closely observed development, and then a last bench was devoted to implanting the ratified embryos and their placentas in the uterine replicators that would house them for the next nine months.
    Through the next door, Tan relieved his guest of his crinkly paper overalls and hat, and guided him through a series of chambers devoted to the banks of replicators themselves, stacked five high. Panels of readouts monitored their progress. Pleasant music alternated with assorted natural sounds over speakers hidden somewhere. Individual jacks allowed soft, piped-in recordings of parental voices, speaking or reading. Jole found it creepily cheerful. Or cheerfully creepy, he wasn’t sure which. He reminded himself that all those arrayed containers held individual people’s—or couples’—most ardent hopes for the future. The next generation of Sergyarans. In fifteen years, all those disturbing biological blobs would be out on Kareenburg’s streets, wearing strange fashions, listening to annoying music, and disagreeing politically with their beleaguered parents. In twenty-five years, they’d be taking on tasks that he couldn’t presently imagine, though he guessed a few would be right back here working in this rep center, or its successor. Or offering up their own gametes for what the Vicereine dubbed the genetic lottery .
    Could his own children be among them?
    Why, yes, they could.
    “Can conceptions—babies—ever get mixed up?” There were stories about such mishaps…Many of them passed along, Cordelia had pointed out, by people with irrational objections to the rep centers.
    Dr. Tan smiled at him in a pained fashion. “Our techs are extremely conscientious, but to soothe the doubts of the, shall we say, biologically less educated, the genetics of any infant can be checked against that of its parents with a few cheek swabs and three minutes on the scanner at the time they take delivery. Or at any prior time, actually, amniocentesis being a trivial procedure with a replicator. The service is offered for free—or rather, included at no extra charge.” He added after a moment, “We get that question a lot, from you Barrayarans. The Vicereine once told me to point out that our error rate is provably statistically lower than that of the natural method, but the late Viceroy advised me that it might not be taken in good part.”
    “I see,” said Jole. He tried to come up with a few more suitably technical questions that would redeem his Barrayaran IQ in this man’s eyes. Jole enjoyed Sergyar’s sprinkling of galactic immigrants, on the whole, but he had to admit that they could sometimes also be remarkably annoying. He managed not to blurt out his own history as a natural, un-gene-cleaned body birth, in attempted proof of what, he could not say.
    The fact came up shortly, however, when Dr. Tan took him back out to another room off the reception area, and left him to