"Miss Mina, I'm hoping you can help us out, here," said Miles-san. "All these men are different Dr. Leibers who live around greater Northbridge. We've already eliminated the female Dr. Leibers, trusting none has made a trip to Beta Colony lately." His mouth twisted up at some joke that Jin didn't understand, although Roic did, judging from his short smile. "Do any of them look like the man you overheard talking to your mommy, that night? Or, do any of them definitely not look like him?"

Mina peered anxiously at the scans. "It was a long time ago. I don't really remember."

"Do you remember anything at all? Was your Dr. Leiber young, or old?"

"Oh, old."

"Gray hair?"

"No, black. I do remember that much. I'm not too good at telling grownups' ages. But he was real old. Thirty, maybe?"

Miles-san and Vorlynkin exchanged a look; the consul's lips twitched, but he didn't say anything.

"So, old but not gray." Miles-san tapped the vid controls, and the two gray-haired men vanished. The other two looked rather alike, with similar haircuts, except one's face was bonier and the other's more round.

"When I was a wee little kid," remarked Roic, watching over their shoulders, "there was a time I thought that any skinny old man I saw was my grandfather. It was pretty confusing."

"Nevertheless," said Miles-san. "Jin, do you remember ever seeing either of these two men in your mother's company? Even if you weren't introduced?"

Jin shook his head.

After a long hesitation, Mina pointed at bony-face. "That one. Maybe. The other one seems too fat."

"He might have gained weight," Jin offered helpfully, getting into the spirit of this.

"Show her scans of a hundred fellows," said Roic, "or even ten, and I doubt she'd be able to tell, m'lord. You're leading your witness."

"If we had to look at the entire pool of elderly gents of thirty on Kibou, that would doubtless be true," said Miles-san. "Fortunately, we have some other sorting constraints." He pointed at round-face. "This Dr. Leiber is an obstetrician at a replicator clinic in a northern suburb." His finger swung to bony-face. "This Dr. Leiber is a biochemist working for NewEgypt Cryonics. Given that Mina's witness does not positively eliminate him, that combination puts him at the top of my to-do list."

"What happened to your theory that the fellow must have fled?" asked Roic. "This Leiber doesn't look much like an activist. I mean-good salary, stock options, cryo-insurance. A company man, belike."

Miles-san sat back and rubbed his chin. "That is a problem, true. Maybe I was wrong, before."

Roic gave him a head-tilt, which induced a fleeting grin on Miles-san's face for no reason that Jin could see.

Johannes and Raven-sensei had finished their task at the table and taken over the satellite comconsole. Now Raven-sensei said, "Ah! Is there a face scan of her? I have fingerprints and footprints for back-up, but-no, we're not going to need them, are we."

Miles-san shoved his chair back with his feet and swung around. "What have you found over there?"

Roic bent and peered. "Aye, that does look like our woman, doesn't it? Look at her cheek bones. And her ears. And that same mole above her left eyebrow. This scan must have been taken pretty near the time she was frozen."

"Can't say as I'd noticed her ears…" Miles-san grabbed his cane and stood up to get a better view.

Jin wriggled in to look, too. Comparing the picture of the live, smiling woman with that still, alien figure they'd seen on the treatment table made him queasy all over again. Would his mother look all strange like that if she died for real?

"Good, this file has it all," said Raven-sensei. "Biographical data, medical history, date of cryoprep…?well, her contract and her financial data would seem to be cross-referenced elsewhere. Alice Chen, poor unlucky woman. I suppose I'm glad to know her name."

"That was fast work," said Miles-san. "Good job."

"These patron data bases are pretty open to the public," said Johannes, though he straightened a little at the praise. "Anyone from lawyers to academics doing demographic studies to medical researchers to just genealogists scouting their family trees can get in." He sat back, staring into the screen of data the vid plate had flung up. "Looks like she was frozen about forty-five years ago. That's lucky. You get back more than about a century and the data banks tend to have holes, from one cause or another."

"Yeah, when I was, uh, working in my prior career, this planet used to be a favored source for untraceable false ID's," said Miles-san. "It was the only reason I'd ever heard of the place, before this investigation." He squinted and pointed to a line. "What the devil's that unpronounceable polysyllable?"

Raven-sensei looked. "Debilitating blood disease. Might have been why she chose to freeze a bit early."

"Cause of death, do you think?"

Raven-sensei shook his head. "No, it shouldn't have affected her revival. She would have needed treatment later, though."

"Could she have had it? Effective treatment, that is?"

"Oh, yes, that one's under control these days."

"So what," said Miles-san, "was a woman frozen nearly half a century ago doing in Lisa Sato's cryo-drawer with Lisa Sato's ID tag on her foot? It's plain she didn't get there by herself. While someone could have just cooked the drawer file numbers in the data banks, that damn tag pretty much guarantees it must have been a physical switch."

"Where are your Madame Chen's remains now, by the way?" said Consul Vorlynkin. "They really ought to be returned to her next of kin at some point. There may be an inheritance tied up, or who knows what. And her death is recent enough that someone still alive may have an emotional interest in her fate." He hesitated. "Not that I'm looking forward to the lawsuits."

"She's tucked away downstairs at Madame Suze's, for now," said Raven-sensei. "Tenbury helped out."

"Will she keep?" asked Miles-san.

"Indefinitely."

Miles-san opened his hand to Vorlynkin. "Keep she must, till I've untangled all this. But hold that thought. So, now we have two ends, our straying dead lady and Dr. Leiber. It remains to follow them up and see if they meet in the middle. Was she frozen by NewEgypt, by the way?"

Johannes scrolled down. "By one of the cryocorps that NewEgypt later took over, I think."

"On that same site?"

"I don't think it was built out there yet, forty-five years back." Johannes bent to a flurry of searches. "Ah, here we go. The place she was originally kept seems to have been decommissioned about ten years ago. Torn down. They moved her out to the new facility at the Cryopolis then."

"That would certainly have made it easy for someone to swap her out," said Miles-san. "Especially if the swapper was already on the inside, like an employee. I'm thinking Madame Chen was chosen at random. Who they wanted was Lisa Sato."

"Are you saying somebody stole Mommy?" asked Mina, a quaver in her voice.

"It's beginning to look that way…" Miles-san narrowed his eyes at the vid screen.

Vorlynkin's grip on his shoulder and exasperated head-jerk toward Mina returned Miles-san's attention to her. She looked like she was trying not to cry.

Miles-san made quick revision. "Although you have to figure, whoever took her had to care about her. You don't steal something you don't value. Suggests they would be careful with her."

Grownup lies? On the whole, Jin liked that Miles-san didn't talk down to him and Mina, but this was all just too weird.

As Mina failed to look encouraged, Miles-san babbled on, "After all, the portable cryochamber I was in was lost for a time, but it all came out right in the end."

"Lost from your side's point of view," said Raven-sensei. "From our point of view, it was found."