“What?”
“It’s nothing. I just had an image of the pretty senator in a set of muddy overalls and a straw hat. Could you imagine?”
“No. Why are you?”
“Because exposure to NAT could do this.”
“NAT?”
Helen clucked her tongue. “I forget sometimes how young you are. NAT was a very popular insecticide several decades ago. It’s nasty stuff. A lot of the farms in Saxony and La Verde didn’t know the risks when they first started using it. They just knew that it was cheap and worked very, very well. It wasn’t too long before reports flooded into the government regulators. It turned out that NAT triggers fertility issu
es in men. It also causes high rates of birth defects in pregnant women, asthma problems in children, breathing problems in the elderly, and a slew of other unpleasantness.
“You can imagine the outcry when the Saxony and La Verde senates engaged scientists to study the problem. The High and Low Council of Judges in Unity banned every farm in the country from using NAT a few years later. That was years ago, of course. I was still at university when it hit the press, but I remember the highborn farming families didn’t argue the issue. Too many of them had seen the effects firsthand. Most of them had already ditched it for what they knew to be safe, either because they were moral enough not to use it or because it was too expensive to pay their slaves’ medical bills. I doubt anyone would touch it these days, since there are safer insecticides that won’t bring the Farmers’ Bureau down on your head for interclass abuse.”
“Where would someone get a hold of NAT today?”
Helen shrugged. “A university? A research center? I’m sure that someone, somewhere, is trying to design a safer alternative. Dr. Rubio would know. She worked with Dr. Ana Rodriguez, the biochemist who first recognized how NAT interacts in the body. Dr. Rubio was part of her team until she switched from grad school to med school. When we interviewed her for the clinic, she told us all about the work she did in Dr. Rodriguez’s lab. Apparently, it prompted her to go into reproductive health. She even brought along several of her journal articles.”
“What were the articles about?”
“Standard stuff. Mouse models. Finding the pathways NAT triggers when it’s absorbed in the body. Logging the frequency of different outcomes on reproductive health. Most of Dr. Rubio’s work was with mice. I bet that girl can perform a rodent autopsy in her sleep.” She chuckled, then glanced at Lila’s face. “Although I doubt that’s the sort of thing you want to hear about a person after they’ve had their hands inside you.”
Lila ignored the mental image, or at least she tried. “I did ask Dr. Rubio about the senator’s file. She was strangely silent about NAT.”
Helen pursed her lips. “Well, who would think that a senator had been exposed to an insecticide?”
“The Massons own a vineyard.”
“Yes, but even if they used NAT illegally, Senator Dubois would have had to work in it for at least a year or two before it affected his fertility. Worked, mind you, not just visited.”
“I didn’t tell Dr. Rubio the file belonged to a senator.”
The doctor ejected the star drive from her computer. “It’s not NAT, Lila. If it was, other symptoms would have shown up in his physical.”
Lila tucked the star drive into her pocket. “What do you think about Dr. Rubio?”
“If you’re referring to her earlier behavior, I find it odd, yet unsurprising, that she followed your mother’s instructions with the fertility shots. It goes against basic medical ethics. There’s no reason to give fertility injections to a woman on the same day that she’s had her CUT reversed, and plenty of reasons not to. Even if Dr. Rubio believed your mother about your supposed fertility issues, then she would be required to do a full workup on you beforehand. I don’t care if she thought her job was on the line—”
“Dr. Rubio is working for my mother. Just say it.”
Helen rubbed at her eyes and nodded. “It’s likely, especially since she was the one to call me about switching shifts. I intend to lodge a formal complaint with the ethics board about your case.”
“Highborn intrigue is not worth the trouble. I should have paid better attention and not put myself in that—”
“She abused her calling, Lila. I won’t stand for it.”
“So you’ll let the press embarrass Senator Dubois?”
Helen drummed her fingers on the table. “Fine. I’ll let you handle it. Find a reason to fire her. I don’t want her working in my clinic.”
“Your clinic?” Lila grinned. “I’ll have to look into her financials to ensure the hospital is not liable for any risk. Her wife’s records too. Who did she marry to get into the family?”
“Emily. They eloped last year. That’s why you don’t remember a wedding. I think Emily did it just to spite Georgina.”
Lila’s jaw dropped, which was something she prided herself on rarely happening. “But she’s—”
“Don’t say old. I swear to the oracles, if you say old, I will punch your nose, prime or not,” Helen promised without taking a breath. “She is my age. She’s mature. She’s experienced, regardless of how silly and vapid she might be, but she’s not old. There is merely an age disparity between the pair that highlights Emily’s maturity.”