Read Ethan of Athos for Free Online

twisted in sardonic resignation. “You can have the lightflyer, when I leave.”
    Janos paused, shocked white. “Leave? Ethan, I never meant --”
    “Oh. Not that kind of leave. This has nothing to do with you. I forgot I hadn't told you yet -- the Population Council's sending me on some urgent business for them. Classified. Top secret. To Jackson's Whole. I'll be gone at least a year.”
    “Now who doesn't care?” said Janos angrily. “Off for a year without so much as a by-your-leave. What about me? What am I supposed to do while you're ...” Janos's voice plowed into silence. “Ethan -- isn't Jackson's Whole a planet? Out there? With -- with -- them on it?”
    Ethan nodded. “I leave in four -- no, three days, on the galactic census ship. You can have all my things. I don't know -- what's going to happen out there.”
    Janos's chiseled face was drained sober. In a small voice he said, “I'll go clean up.”
    Comfort at last, but Ethan was asleep in his chair before Janos came out of the bathroom.

Chapter Three
    Kline Station was an accretion of three hundred years; even so Ethan was unprepared for the size of it, and the complexity. It straddled a region of space where no less than six fruitful jump routes emerged within a reasonable sublight boost of each other. The dark star nearby hosted no planets at all, and so Kline Station rode a slow orbit far out of its gravity well, cresting the Stygian cold.
    Kline Station had been full of history even when Athos was first settled; it had been the jumping-off point for the Founding Fathers' noble experiment. A poor fortress, but a great place to do business, it had changed hands a number of times as one or another of its neighbors sought it as a guardian of its gates, not to mention a source of cash flow. Presently it maintained a precarious political independence based on bribery, determination, suppleness in business practice, and a stiffness in internal loyalty bordering on patriotism. A hundred thousand citizens lived in its mazy branches, augmented at peak periods of traffic by perhaps a fifth as many transients.
    So much Ethan had learned from the crew of the census courier. The crew of eight was all male not, Ethan found, out of regular rule or respect for the laws of Athos, but from the disinclination of female employees of the Bureau to spend four months on the round-trip voyage without a downside leave. It gave Ethan a little breather, before being plunged into galactic culture. The crew was courteous to him, but not so encouraging as to break through Ethan's own timid reserve, and so he had spent much of the two months en route in his own cabin, studying and worrying.
    As preparation, he'd decided to read all the articles by and about women in his Betan Journals of Reproductive Medicine. There was the ship's library, of course, but its contents certainly had not been approved by the Athosian Board of Censors, and Ethan was not really sure what degree of dispensation he was supposed to have on this mission. Better to stock up on virtue, he reasoned glumly; he was probably going to need it.
    Women. Uterine replicators with legs, as it were. He was not sure if they were supposed to be inciters to sin, or sin was inherent in them, like juice in an orange, or sin was caught from them like a virus. He should have paid more attention during his boyhood religious instruction, not that the subject had ever been anything but mysteriously talked around. And yet, when he'd read one Journal edited of names as a scientific test, he'd found the articles indistinguishable as to the sex of the author.
    This made no sense. Maybe it was only their souls, not their brains, that were so different? The one article he'd been sure was a man's work turned out to be by a Betan hermaphrodite, a sex which hadn't even existed when the Founding Fathers had fled to Athos, and where did they fit in? He lost himself, for a while, imagining the flap in Athosian Customs should such a creature