Hah. Oh, if only you knew the sorts of time-bombs that lurked in my genes, dear Amai. You certainly wouldn't be twinkling at me like that. Though he's always wondered whether gene-cleaning would actually purge the Vorrutyer line of its curses of madness. Would a Betan scientist be able to pluck it out of some future children, the way they plucked out dwarfism and the cat's mouth and having too many fingers? Or would it hide from their gaze, the way that it always hid from the mothers whose job it was to slice out mutation from the family tree? Ah, well. He doesn't say anything to her - he just bows, an openly pleased smile on his face at her flattery.

"It seems terribly likely," Byerly agrees. Amai-the-scientist is not charmed and intrigued by barbarian savagery, he's learned; she doesn't have a fascination with the exoticism of an unmanipulated genome. She'll be far more positively inclined towards someone who is at their maximum potential. "She's an uncommonly beautiful girl, is she not? Come from a father who was decently handsome, but not particularly remarkable. She's clever, too. Still, it's a curious sort of experiment, isn't it? Can a particularly experienced and distinguished eye - " A bow to Amai - "Differentiate the remarkable-but-unrefined from those who were given gifts by their progenitors?"