"Yeah, I know you're good-but that much?"

"I have my ways," Paulie said smugly. Quieter: "Don't worry, I kept it low-key. First up are the public filings, SEC stuff, all hard copy. The downloads I did in a cybercafe, using an anonymous Hotmail account I never access from home. To pay for the searches, I got an account with a special online bank: they issue one-time credit card numbers you can use to pay for something over the Net. The idea is, you use the number once, the transaction is charged to your account at the bank, then the number goes away. Anyone wants to trace me, they're going to have to break the bank's security first, okay?"

"You've been getting very good at the anonymous stuff," Miriam said admiringly.

"Listen, knowing whose toes you might be treading on kind of incentivized me! I'm not planning on taking any risks. Look, at first sight it all looks kosher-I mean, the clinic is just a straightforward reproductive medicine outfit, specializing in fertility problems, and the company you fingered, Applied Genomics, is a respectable pharmaceutical outfit. They manufacture diagnostic instruments, specializing in lab tests for inborn errors of metabolism: simple test-tube stuff that's easy to use in the field. They've got a neat line in HIV testing kits for the developing world, that kind of thing. You were right about a connection, though. Next in the stack after the filings, well, I found this S.503(c) charity called the Humana Reproductive Assistance Foundation. Applied Genomics pays a big chunk of money to HRAF every year and none of the shareholders have ever queried it, even though it's in six or sometimes seven figures. HRAF in turn looks pretty kosher, but what I was able to tell is that for the past twenty years they've been feeding money to a whole bundle of fertility clinics. The money is earmarked for programs to help infertile couples have children-what is this, Miriam? If it's another of your money-laundering leads, it looks like a dead end."

"It's not a money-laundering lead. I think it really is a fertility clinic." The drinks arrived and Miriam paused to take a tablet and wash it down with freshly squeezed orange juice. "It's something else I ran across, okay?"

Paulette glanced away.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap. Been having a shitty time lately."

"You have?" Paulette shook her head, then looked back at Miriam. "Things haven't been so rosy here, either."

"Oh no. You go first, okay?"

"Nah, it's nothing. Man trouble, no real direction. You've heard it all before." Paulie backed off and Miriam eyed her suspiciously.

"You're tap-dancing around on account of Roland, aren't you? Well, there's no need to do that. I've-I've gotten used to it." Miriam glanced down as the waitress slid a platter of bruschetta onto the table in front of her. "It doesn't get any better, but it gets easier to deal with the, with the…" She gave up and picked up a piece of the bread, nibbling on it to conceal her sudden spasm of depression.

Paulette stared at her. "So call me an insensitive cow, but what else is eating you?" she asked.

"It's"-Miriam waved a hand, her mouth full-"reproductive politics. You'd think they'd figure I'm too old for it but no, you're never too old for the Clan to start looking for something to do with your ovaries. Fallout from the civil war they had a few decades ago: they don't have enough world-walkers, so the pressure is on those they do have to breed like a bunny. But I didn't have the story completely straight before. You know all the stuff about arranged marriages I told you? I should have asked who did the arranging. It turns out to be the old ladies, everyone's grandmother. There's a lot of status tied up in it, and it seems I got a whole bunch of folks ticked off at me just because I exist. To make matters worse, Ma's turned strange on me-she's gone native, even seems to be playing along with the whole business. I think she's being blackmailed, crudely, over her medication. The king, his mother's part of the Clan, he's trying to set up the younger son, who is a basket case into the bargain-brain damage at an early age-and he's got me in his sights. And the elder son seems to have decided to hate me for some reason. Don't know if it's connected, but there's more." Miriam took another mouthful of orange juice before she could continue.

"I ran across this secret memo, from the director of the Gerstein Center to Angbard, of all people, talking about the results of some project that Applied Genomics is funding. And I smell a rat. A great, big, dead-and-decomposing-under-the-front-stoop, reproductive politics rodent. Angbard is paying for in-vitro fertilization treatments. Meanwhile everybody keeps yammering about how few world-walkers there are and how it's every woman's duty to spawn like a rabbit, and then there's this stuff about looking for W-star heterozygotes. Carriers for some kind of gene, in other words. And I just learned of a genetic test that's become available in the past year, god knows from where, that can tell if someone's a carrier or an active world-walker. You fill in the dotted lines, Paulie-you tell me I'm not imagining things, okay?" Miriam realized her voice had risen, and she looked around hastily, but the restaurant was busy and the background racket was loud enough to cover her.

Paulette stared at her, clutching her bread knife in one fist as if it were the emergency inflation toggle on a life jacket. "I've never heard such a…!" She put the knife down, very carefully. "You're serious."

"Oh yes." Miriam took another bite of bruschetta. It tasted of cardboard, despite the olive oil and chopped tomato. "What would be the point of being flippant?"

Paulette picked up her bruschetta and nibbled at it. "That is so monumentally paranoid that I don't know where to begin. You think Angbard is paying for IVF for these families and using donors from the Clan." She thought for a minute. "It wouldn't work, would it? They wouldn't be world-walkers?"

"Not as I understand it, no." Miriam finished her starter. The din and clatter of the restaurant was making her headache worse. "But they'd have a huge pool of, in effect, outer family members. Half of them female. Thousands, adding many hundreds more every year. Suppose-how long has this been going on for? How long has HRAF been going?"

"I don't know." Paulette looked uncomfortable. "Sixteen years?"

"Okay. Suppose. Imagine HRAF is about creating a pool of outer family people living in the United States who don't know what they are. In, say, another five years they start hitting age twenty-one. Six hundred… call it three hundred women a year. HRAF have their details. They send them all letters asking if they're willing to accept money to be surrogate mothers. What does a surrogate cost-ten, twenty thousand bucks? Maybe nine out of ten will say no, but that leaves thirty women, each of whom can provide a new world-walker every year-or walkers, you're not going to tell me that the Gerstein Center isn't going to dose them with clomiphene, to try for twins or triplets. Call it fifty new world-walkers per year. Say half of the surrogate mothers agree to continue for four years, and you've got, let's see, a hundred and twenty five new world-walkers per annual cohort from Angbard's breeding program. Paulie, there are only about a thousand world-walkers in the Clan! In just eight years, half the world-walkers will come from this scheme-in twenty years, they'll outnumber the Clan's native-born world-walkers, even if the average Clan female produces four world-walking children." She drank the rest of her orange juice.

"It's like that movie, The Boys from Brazil," Paulie murmured. "Cloning up an army of bad guys and making sure they're raised loyal to the cause." She looked uncomfortable. "Miriam, I met Angbard. He isn't the type to do that."

"Um. No." Miriam stared at her plate. All of a sudden she didn't feel hungry. "Charming, ruthless, and manipulative, I'll grant you. Liable to back a conspiracy to create a test-tube master race? I'm-I don't see it either. Except, I saw that memo! With my own eyes! If it's real, it looks like there's something really smelly going on at that clinic. And I need to get a handle on it."