"Okay. That leaves Kety or Rond," he says. "I couldn't manage to eliminate either of them with the lines of investigation available to me... by the way," he turns to Linyabel, "the ghem-colonel in charge of investigating Ba Lura's murder spoke with me yesterday. He wanted to know what we talked about, the first - and as far as he knows, the only - time we met. I said you asked me a lot of confusingly vague questions that I thought might have something to do with a genetic interest in my... anomalies. Which are not in fact genetic," he emphasizes. "Teratogenic damage only - prenatal poisoning, from an assassination attempt on my parents. I hope he hasn't managed to corner you in the meantime and gotten a different story out of you...?"