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Again, Wang-mu held her tongue. However, she also refrained from deepening her bow. She had assumed the humble posture of a servant at the beginning of this conversation, but she would not now humiliate herself in the desperate kowtow of a penitent. Even the humblest of us have our pride, and I know, Mistress Qing-jao, that I have caused you no harm, that I am more faithful to you now than you are to yourself.
Qing-jao turned back to her terminal and typed in the first project name, which was "UNGLUING," a literal translation of the word descolada. "This is all nonsense anyway," she said as she scanned the documents and charts that had been sent from Lusitania. "It is hard to believe that anyone would commit the treason of communicating with Lusitania only to receive nonsense like this. It is all impossible as science. No world could have developed only one virus that was so complex that it could include within it the genetic code for every other species on the planet. It would be a waste of time for me even to consider this."
"Why not?" asked Wang-mu. It was all right for her to speak now-- because even as Qing-jao declared that she was refusing to discuss the material, she was discussing it. "After all, evolution produced only one human race."
"But on Earth there were dozens of related species. There is no species without kin-- if you weren't such a stupid rebellious girl you would understand that. Evolution could never have produced a system as sparse as this one."
"Then how do you explain these documents from the people of Lusitania?"
"How do you know they actually come from there? You have only the word of this computer program. Maybe it thinks this is all. Or maybe the scientists there are very bad, with no sense of their duty to collect all possible information. There aren't two dozen species in this whole report-- and look, they're all paired up in the most absurd fashion. Impossible to have so few species."
"But what if they're right?"
"How can they be right? The people of Lusitania have been confined in a tiny compound from the beginning. They've only seen what these little pig-men have shown them-- how do they know the pig-men aren't lying to them?"
Calling them pig-men-- is that how you convince yourself, my mistress, that helping Congress won't lead to xenocide? If you call them by an animal name, does that mean that it's all right to slaughter them? If you accuse them of lying, does that mean that they're worthy of extinction? But Wang-mu said nothing of this. She only asked the same question again. "What if this is the true picture of the life forms of Lusitania, and how the descolada works within them?"
"If it were true, then I would have to read and study these documents in order to make any intelligent comment about them. But they aren't true. How far had I taken you in your learning, before you betrayed me? Didn't I teach you about gaialogy?"
"Yes, Mistress."