Her companion’s elegant gengineering was almost Cetagandan in its subtlety-but the Cetagandans didn’t make human novelties as such. Their aesthetic boundaries in that material were very strict, not to mention restricted, reserved for more serious and long-range goals. Now, animals-when Cetagandans were working with animal or plant genomes, or worse, both at once, all bets were off. He shuddered in memory. He would be glad to cross Cetagandans off his list, renegade or otherwise. He would be ecstatic.

Ivan peered around the dim living room. He was not, he assured himself, tied up in a small, dark place. It was a spacious, dark place, and not pitch-dark in any case, given the ambient urban glow from the window. And on the third floor, well aboveground. He sighed, and remembered to keep wriggling his weary feet. The nasty plastic ropes securing his ankles to the chair legs did seem to be slowly stretching. Perhaps he should have tried harder to escape, earlier. But the two women had been taking him right where he’d wanted to go, inside, for just the purpose he’d come, to talk. True, he’d been envisioning friendly chat, not hostile interrogation, but what was that quote Miles was so fond of? Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake. Not that they were enemies, necessarily. He hoped. By could have stood to be clearer on that point, in retrospect.

The next most likely suspect on the body modification front was, of course, the planet and system of Jackson’s Whole, an almost equally unsavory hypothesis supported, alas, by any number of small hints the two women had let fall.

Jackson’s Whole did not have a unified planetary government-in fact, it claimed to have no government at all. Instead, it was ruled by a patchwork of Great Houses-116 of ’em the last Ivan had heard, but the number shifted in their internecine competitions-and countless Houses Minor. They tended not to hold large, unified territories on the planet’s surface, but rather, interpenetrated more like competing companies. Granted, the system, or lack of it, did make it less likely for the Jacksonians to pull together for, say, a major military invasion of their neighbors. But a person who had no House allegiance or employment there was a very unprotected person indeed.