CHAPTER NINETEEN

   With breath, came pain.
   He was in a hospital bed. That much he knew even before opening his eyes, from the discomfort, the chill, and the smell. That seemed right. Vaguely, if unpleasantly, familiar. He blinked, to discover that his eyes were plastered with goo. Scented, translucent, medical goo. It was like trying to see through a pane of glass covered with grease. He blinked some more, and achieved a limited focus, then had to stop and catch his breath from the effort.
   There was something terribly wrong with his breathing, labored panting that didn't provide enough air at all. And it whistled. The whistling came from a plastic tube down his throat, he realized, trying to swallow. His lips were dry and cracked; the tube blocking his mouth prevented him from moistening them. He tried to move. His body sent back shooting aches and pains, burning through every bone. There were tubes going into, or perhaps out of, his arms. And his ears. And his nose.
   There were too damn many tubes. That was bad, he realized dimly, though how he knew he could not have said. With a heroic effort, he tried to raise his head and see down his body. The tube in his throat shifted painfully.
   Ridges of ribs. Belly gaunt and sunken. Red welts radiated all over his chest, like a long-legged spider crouched just beneath his skin, its body over his sternum. Surgical glue held together jagged incisions, multiple scarlet scars looking like a map of a major river drainage delta. He was pocked with monitor-pads. More tubes ran from places orifices ought not to be. He caught a glimpse of his genitalia, lying in a limp discolored lump; there was a tube from there, too. Pain from there would be subtly reassuring, but he couldn't feel anything at all. He couldn't feel his legs or feet, either, though he could see them. His whole body was covered thickly with the scented goo. His skin was peeling in nasty big pale flakes, stuck in the stuff. His head fell back on a pad, and black clouds boiled in his eyes. Too many damn tubes. Bad . . .
   He was in a muzzy, half-awake state, floating between confusing dream-fragments and pain, when the woman came.
   She leaned into his blurred vision. "We're taking the pacer out, now." Her voice was clear and low. The tubes had gone away from his ears, or maybe he'd dreamed them. "Your new heart will be beating and your lungs working all on their own."
   She bent over his aching chest. Pretty woman, of the elegantly intellectual type. He was sorry he was dressed only in goo, in front of her, though it seemed to him that he had carried on with even less to wear, once. He could not remember where or how. She did something to the spider-body lump; he saw his skin part in a thin red slit and then be sealed again. She seemed to be cutting out his heart, like an antique priestess making sacrifice, but that could not be, for his labored breathing continued. She'd definitely taken out something, for she placed it on a tray held by her male assistant.
   "There." She watched him closely.
   He watched her in return, blinking away the distortions of the ointment. She had straight, silky black hair, bound in a knot_more of a wad, actually_on the back of her head. A few fine strands escaped to float around her face. Golden skin. Brown eyes with a hint of an epicanthic fold. Stubby, stubborn black lashes. The bridge of her nose was coolly arched. A pleasant, original face, not surgically altered to a mathematically perfect beauty, but enlivened by an alert tension. Not an empty face. Somebody interesting was in there. But not, alas, somebody familiar.
   She was tall and slim, dressed in a pale green lab smock over other clothes. "Doctor," he tried to guess, but it came out a formless gurgle around the plastic in his mouth.
   "I'm going to take that tube out now," she told him. She pulled something sticky from around his lips and cheeks_tape? More dead skin came with it. Gently, she drew out the throat-tube. He gagged. It was like un-swallowing a snake. The relief of being rid of it almost made him pass out again. There was still some sort of tube_ oxygen?_blocking his nostrils.
   He moved his jaw, and swallowed for the first time in ... in ... Anyway, his tongue felt thick and swollen. His chest hurt terribly. But saliva flowed; his dry mouth re-hydrated. One did not really appreciate saliva till one was forced to do without it. His heart beat fast and light, like bird wings fluttering. It did not feel right, but at least he felt something.
   "What's your name?" she asked him.
   The subliminal terror he had been studiously ignoring yawned black beneath him. His breath quickened in his panic. Despite the oxygen, he could not get enough air. And he could not answer her question. "Ah," he whispered. "Ag . . ." He did not know who he was, nor how he had come by this huge burden of hurt. The not-knowing frightened him far more than the hurt.
   The young man in the pale-blue medical jacket snorted, "I think I'm going to win my bet. That one's coagulated behind the eyeballs. All short circuits back there." He tapped his forehead.
   The woman frowned in annoyance. "Patients don't come popping up out of cryo-stasis like a meal out of a microwave. It takes just as much healing as if the original injury hadn't killed them, and more. It will be a couple of days before I can even begin to evaluate his higher neural functions."
   Still, she pulled something sharp and shiny from the lapel of her jacket, and moved around him, touching him and watching a monitor readout on the wall above his head. When his right hand jerked back at a prick, she smiled. Yeah, and when my prick jerks up at a right hand, I'll smile, he thought dizzily.
   He wanted to speak. He wanted to tell that blue fellow to take a wormhole jump to hell, and take his bet with him. All that came out of his mouth was a hollow hiss. He shuddered with frustration. He had to function, or die. That, he was bone-sure of. Be the best or be destroyed.
   He didn't know where this certainty came from. Who was going to kill him? He didn't know. Them, some faceless them. No time to rest. March or die.
   The medical duo left. Driven by the obscure fear, he began to try to exercise, isometrics in his bed. All he could move was his right arm. Attracted by his thrashing as reported by his monitor pads, the youth came back and sedated him. When the darkness closed in again, he wanted to howl. He had very bad dreams, after that; any content would have been welcome to his bewildered brain, but all he could remember when he woke was the badness.
   An interminable time later, the doctor returned to feed him. Sort of.
   She touched a control to raise the head of his bed, saying chattily, "Let's try out your new stomach, my friend."
   Friend? Was he? He needed a friend, no question.
   "Sixty milliliters of glucose solution_sugar water. The first meal of your life, so to speak. I wonder if you have enough basic muscle control to suck on a straw yet?"
   He did, once she touched a few drops of liquid to his lips to get him started. Suck and swallow, you couldn't get much more basic than that. Except that he couldn't drink it all.
   "That's all right," she rippled on. "Your stomach's not fully grown yet, you see. Neither were your heart or lungs. Lilly was in a hurry to have you awake. All your replacement organs are a bit undersized for your body, which means they're going to be working hard, and won't grow as fast as they did in the vat. You're going to be short of breath for quite a while. Still, it made it all easier to install. More elbow room for me, which I appreciated."
   He wasn't quite sure if she was talking to him, or just to herself, as a lonely person might talk to a pet. She took the cup away and came back with a basin, sponges, and towels, and began washing him, section by section. Why was a surgeon doing nursing care? dr. R. durona, read the name on the breast pocket of her green coat. But she seemed to be doing a neurophysiological examination at the same time. Checking her work?
   "You were quite a little mystery, you know. Delivered to me in a crate. Raven said you were too small to be a soldier, but I picked out enough camouflage cloth and nerve disrupter shield-netting, along with the forty-six grenade fragments, to be quite sure you weren't just a bystander. Whatever you were, that needle-grenade had your name on it. Unfortunately, not in writing." She sighed half to herself. "Who are you?"
   She did not pause for an answer, which was just as well. The effort of swallowing the sugar water had exhausted him again. An equally pertinent question was, Where was he, and he was peeved that she, who must surely know, didn't think to tell him. The room was an anonymous high-tech medical locale, without windows. On a planet, not a ship.
   How do I know that? A vague picture of a ship, in his head, seemed to shatter at his touch. What ship? For that matter, what planet?
   There ought to be a window. A big window, framing a high hazy city-scape with a rapid river cutting through it. And people. There were people missing, who ought by rights to be here, though he could not picture them. The mix of generic medical familiarity and particular strangeness tied his guts in knots.
   The cleaning-cloths were icy, grating, but he was glad to be rid of the goo, not to mention all the disgusting crud stuck in it. He felt like a lizard, shedding his skin. When she was done, all the dead white flakes were gone. The new skin looked very raw.
   She rubbed depilatory cream over his face, which seemed redundant, and stung like hell. He decided he liked the sting. He was starting to relax, and enjoy her ministrations, embarrassingly intimate though they were. She was returning him at least to the dignity of being clean, and she did not feel like an enemy. Some sort of ally, at least on the somatic level. She cleaned his face of cream, beard, and a good deal of skin, and also combed his hair, though unfortunately, like his skin, his hair too seemed to be coming out in alarming clumps.
   "There," she said, sounding satisfied. She held a large hand-mirror up to his face. "See anybody you recognize?" She was watching him closely, he realized, noting his eyes focus and track.
   That's me? Well ... I suppose I can get used to it. Red skin stretched over its frame of bones. Jutting nose, a sharp chin . . . the grey eyes looked bizarrely hung-over, their whites solid scarlet. His dark hair was patchy, like a bad case of mange. He'd .really been hoping for something much better-looking.
   He tried to speak, to ask. His mouth moved but, like his thoughts, too disconnectedly for coherence. He puffed air and spittle. He couldn't even swear, which made him want to swear even more, which rapidly degenerated into a gurgling snarl. She hastily took the mirror away and stood staring at him in worry.
   Steady on. If he kept thrashing around, they'd probably hit him with another dose of sedative, and he didn't want that. He lay back panting helplessly. She lowered the bed again, dimmed the lights, and made to leave. He managed a moan. It worked; she came back.
   "Lilly called your cryo-chamber Pandora's box," she murmured reflectively. "But I thought of it as the enchanted knight's crystal coffin. I wish it were as easy as waking you with a kiss."
   She bent over, eyelids fluttering half-closed, and touched her lips to his. He lay very still, half-pleased, half-panicked. She straightened, watched him another moment, and sighed. "Didn't think it would work. Maybe I'm just not the right princess."
   You have a very strange taste in men, milady, he thought dizzily. How fortunate for me. . . .
   Feeling hopeful of his future for the first time since recovering consciousness, he lay quietly, and let her go. Surely she would come back. Before, he had passed out, or been knocked out; this time natural sleep came to him. He didn't exactly like it_ if I should die before I wake_but it served his body's craving, and blotted out the pain.
   Slowly, he gained control of his left arm. Then he made his right leg twitch. His beautiful lady came back and fed him more sugar water, but with no more sweet kisses for dessert. By the time he compelled his left leg to twitch, she came back again, but this time there was something terribly wrong.
   Dr. Durona looked ten years older, and had grown cool. Cold. Her hair was parted in the middle and hung down in two smooth wings, chopped off at jaw-length, with threads of silver gleaming in the ebony. Her hands on his body, helping him to sit up, were dryer, colder, more severe. Not caressing.
   I've gone into a time-warp. No. I've been frozen again. No. I'm taking too long to recover, and she's pissed at me for making her wait. No ... Confusion clogged his throat. He'd just lost the only friend he had, and he didn't know why. I have destroyed our joy. . . .
   She massaged his legs, very professionally, provided him with a loose patient gown, and made him stand up. He almost passed out. She put him back to bed and left.
   When she came back the next time, she'd changed her hair yet again. This time it was grown long, held back tightly bound in a silver ring on the back of her head, and flowing down in a blunt-ended horse-tail with wide silver streaks running through it. She'd aged another ten years, he swore. What's happening to me? Her manner was a little softened, but nothing so happy as at first. She walked him across the room and back, which drained him totally, after which he slept again.
   He was deeply distressed when she returned once more in her cold, short-haired incarnation. He had to admit, she was efficient getting him up and moving. She barked at him like a drill sergeant, but he walked, and then he walked unassisted. She steered him outside of his room for the first time, to where a short hallway ended in a sliding door, and then back.
   They'd just turned for another circuit when the door at the end hissed open, and Dr. Durona came through. She was in her horsetail morph. He stared at the wing-haired Dr. Durona beside him, and almost burst into tears. It's not fair. You're confusing me. Dr. Durona strode up to Dr. Durona. He blinked back the water in his eyes, and focused on their name tags. Wing-hair was Dr. C. Durona. Horse-tail was Dr. P. Durona. But where's my Dr. Durona? I want Dr. R.
   "Hi, Chrys, how's he doing?" asked Dr. P.
   Dr. C. answered, "Not too badly. I've just about worn him out for this therapy-session, though."
   "I should say so_" Dr. P. moved to help catch him as he collapsed. He could not make his mouth form words; they came out choked sobs. "Over-done it, I'd say."
   "Not at all," said Dr. C., supporting his other side. Together they steered him back to bed. "But it looks like mental recovery is going to come after physical recovery, in this one. Which is not good. The pressure's on. Lilly's getting impatient. He has to start making connections soon, or he'll be no use to us."
   "Lilly is never impatient," chided Dr. P.
   "She is this time," said Dr. C. grimly.
   "Will the mental recovery really follow?" She helped him lie back without falling.
   "Anyone's guess. Rowan has guaranteed us the physical. Tremendous job, that. There's plenty of electrical activity in his brain, something has to be healing."
   "Yes, but not instantly," came a warmly amused voice from the hallway. "What are you two doing to my poor patient?"
   It was Dr. Durona. Again. She had long fine hair bunched in a messy wad on the back of her head, pure ebony dark. He peered worriedly at her name tag as she approached, smiling. Dr. R. Durona. His Dr. Durona. He whimpered in relief. He wasn't sure he could take much more confusion, it hurt more than the physical pain. His nerves seemed more shattered than his body. It was like being in one of his bad dreams, except that his dreams were much nastier, with more blood and dismemberment, not just a green-coated woman standing all around a room arguing with herself.
   "P.T. stands for Physical Torture," Dr. C. quipped.
   That explained it. ...
   "Come back and torture him again later," Dr. R. invited. "But_gently."
   "How hard dare I push?" Dr. C. was intent, serious, standing with her head cocked, making notes on a report panel. "Urgent queries are coming down from above, you know."
   "I know. Physical therapy no oftener than every four hours, till I give you the go-ahead. And don't run his heart rate above one-forty."
   "That high?"
   "An unavoidable consequence of its still being undersized."
   "You have it, love." Dr. C. snapped her report panel closed and tossed it to Dr. R., then marched out; Dr. P. wafted after her.
   His Dr. Durona, Dr. R., came to his side, smiled, and brushed his hair out of his eyes. "You're going to need a haircut soon. And new growth is starting on the bare patches. That's a very good sign. With all that happening on the outside of your head, I think there has to be something happening on the inside, hey?"
   Only if you counted spasms of hysteria as activity ... a tear left over from his earlier burst of terror escaped his eye at a nervous blink. She touched its track. "Oh," she murmured in sympathetic worry, which he found suddenly embarrassing. I am not ... I am not ... I am not a mutant. What?
   She leaned closer. "What's your name?"
   He tried. "Whzz . . . d'buh . . ." His tongue would not obey him. He knew the words, he just couldn't make them come out. "Whzz . . . yr nine?"
   "Did you repeat me?" She brightened. "It's a start_"
   "Ngh! Whzz yr nine?" He touched her jacket pocket, hoping she wouldn't think he was trying to grope her.
   "What . . . ?" She glanced down. "Are you asking what's my name?"
   "Gh! Gh!"
   "My name is Dr. Durona."
   He groaned, and rolled his eyes.
   ". . . My name is Rowan."
   He fell back onto his head-pad, sighing with relief. Rowan. Lovely name. He wanted to tell her it was a lovely name. But what if they were all named Rowan_no, the sergeantly one had been called Chrys. It was all right. He could cut his Dr. Durona out of the herd if he had to; she was unique. His wavering hand touched her lips, then his own, but she didn't take the hint and kiss him again.
   Reluctantly, only because he didn't have the strength to hold her, he let her pull her hand from his. Maybe he had dreamed that kiss. Maybe he was dreaming all of this.
   A long, uncertain time passed after she left, but for a change he did not doze off. He lay awake, awash in disquieting, disconnected thought. The thought-stream carried odd bits of jetsam, an image here, what might be a memory there, but as soon as his attention turned inward to examine it, the flow of thoughts froze, and the tide of panic rose again. Well, and so. Let him occupy himself otherwise, only watching his thoughts at an angle, obliquely; let him observe himself reflected in what he knew, and play detective to his own identity. If you can't do what you want, do what you can. And if he couldn't answer the question, Who was he?, he might at least take a crack at Where was he? His monitor pads were gone; he was no longer radio-tagged.
   It was very silent. He slipped out of bed and navigated to the door. It opened automatically onto the short hallway, which was dimly lit by night-strips at floor level.
   Including his own, there were only four rooms off the little corridor. None had windows. Or other patients. A tiny office or monitor-station was empty_no. A beverage cup steamed on the countertop next to a switched-on console, its program on hold. Somebody would be back soon. He nipped past, and tried the only exit door, at the corridor's end; it too opened automatically.
   Another short corridor. Two well-equipped surgeries lined it. Both were shut down, cleaned tip, night-silent. And windowless. A couple of storage rooms, one locked, one not. Two palm-locked laboratories; one had a bank of small animal cages at one end, that he could glimpse dimly through the glass. It was all crammed with equipment of the medical/biochemical sort, far more than a mere treatment clinic would require. The place fairly reeked of research.
   How do I know_no. Don't ask. Just keep going. A lift-tube beckoned at the corridor's end. His body ached, breathing hurt, but he had to grab his chance. Go, go, go.
   Wherever he was, he was at the very bottom of it. The tube's floor was at his feet. It rose into dimness, lit by panels reading S-3, S-2, S-l. The tube was switched off, its safety door locked across the opening. He slid it open manually, and considered his options. He could switch the tube on, and risk lighting up some security monitor panel somewhere (why could he picture such a thing?); or he could leave it off and climb the safety-ladder in secret. He tried one rung of the ladder; his vision blackened. He backed down carefully and switched on the tube.
   He rose gently to level S-l, and swung out. A tiny foyer had one door, solid and blank. It opened before him, and closed behind him. He stared around what was obviously a junk-storage chamber, and turned back. His door had vanished into a blank wall.
   It took him a full minute of frightened examination to convince himself his sputtering brain wasn't playing tricks on him. The door was disguised as the wall. And he'd just locked himself out. He patted it frantically all over, but it would not re-admit him. His bare feet were freezing, on the polished concrete floor, and he was dizzy and dreadfully tired. He wanted to go back to bed. The frustration and fear were almost overwhelming, not that they were so vast, but that he was so weak.
   You only want it 'cause you can't have it. Perverse. Go on, he told himself sternly. He made his way from support to support to the outer door of the storage chamber. It too was locked from the outside, he found out the hard way when it sealed behind him. Go on.
   The storage room had opened onto another short corridor, centered around an ordinary lift-tube foyer. This level pretended to be the end of the line, Level B-2; openings marked B-l, G, 1, 2, and so on ascended out of sight. He went for the zero-point, G. G for Ground? Yes. He exited into a darkened lobby.
   It was a neat little place, elegantly furnished but in the manner of a business rather than a home, with potted plants and a reception or security desk. No one around. No signs. But there were windows at last, and transparent doors. They reflected a dim replica of the interior; it was night outside. He leaned on the comconsole desk. Jackpot. Here was not only a place to sit down, but data in abundance . . . hell. It was palm-locked, and would not even turn on for him. There were ways to overcome palm-locks_how did he ... ?_the fragmentary visions exploded like a school of minnows, eluding his grasp. He nearly cried with the uselessness of it, sitting in the station chair with his too-heavy head laid in his arms, across the blank unyielding vid plate.
   He shivered. God, I hate cold. He wobbled over to the glass door. It was snowing outside, tiny scintillant dots whipping by slantwise through the white are of a floodlight. They would be hard, and hiss and sting on bare skin. A weird vision of a dozen naked men standing shivering in a midnight blizzard flitted across his mind's eye, but he could attach no names to the scene, only a sensation of deep disaster. Was that how he had died, freezing in the wind and snow? Recently, nearby?
   I was dead. The realization came to him for the first time, a burst of shock radiating outward from his belly. He traced the aching scars on his torso through the thin fabric of his gown. And I'm not feeling too good now, either. He giggled, an off-balance noise disturbing even to his own ears. He stifled his mouth with his fist. He must not have had time to be afraid, before, because the retroactive wash of terror knocked him to his knees. Then to his hands and knees. The shivering cold was making his hands shake uncontrollably. He began to crawl.
   He must have triggered some sensor, because the transparent door hissed open. Oh, no, he wasn't going to make that error again, and get exiled to the outer darkness. He began to crawl away. His vision blurred, and he got turned around somehow; icy concrete instead of smooth tile beneath his hand warned him of his mistake. Something seemed to seize his head, half-shock, half-blow, with a nasty buzzing sound. Violently rebuffed, he smelled singed hair. Fluorescent patterns spun on his retinas. He tried to withdraw, but collapsed across the door-groove in a puddle of ice water and some slimy orange glop like gritty mold. No, damn it no, I don't want to freeze again . . . ! He curled up in desperate revulsion.
   Voices; shouts of alarm. Footsteps, babble, warm, oh blessed warm hands pulled him away from the deadly portal. A couple of women's voices, and one man's: "How did he get up here?" "_shouldn't have gotten out." "Call Rowan. Wake her up_" "He looks terrible." "No," a hand held his face to the light by his hair, "that's the way he looks anyway. You can't tell."
   The face belonging to the hand loomed over his, harsh and worried. It was Rowan's assistant, the young man who'd sedated him. He was a lean fellow with Eurasian features, with a definite bridge to his nose. His blue jacket said R. Durona, insanely enough. But it wasn't Dr. R. So call him . . . Brother Durona. The young man was saying, "_dangerous. It's incredible that he penetrated our security in that condition!"
   "Na' sec'rty." Words! His mouth was making words! "Fire safty." He added reflectively, "Dolt."
   The young man's face jerked back in bewildered offense. "Are you talking to me, Short Circuit?"
   "He's talking!" His Dr. Durona's face circled overhead, her voice thrilled. He recognized her even with her fine hair loose, falling all around her face in a dark cloud. Rowan, my love. "Raven, what did he say?"
   The youth's dark brows wrinkled. "I'd swear he just said 'fire safety.' Gibberish, I guess."
   Rowan smiled wildly. "Raven, all the secured doors open outward without code-locks. For escape in case of fire or chemical accident or_do you realize the level of understanding that reveals?"
   "No," said Raven coldly.
   That dolt must have stung, considering its source ... he grinned darkly up at the hovering faces and the lobby ceiling wavering beyond them.
   An older, alto voice came in from the left, restoring order, disbanding the crowd. "If you don't have a function here, get back to bed." A Dr. Durona whose short-cut hair was almost pure white, the owner of the alto voice, shuffled into his field of view, and stared thoughtfully down at him. "Dear heart, Rowan, he almost escaped, disabled as he is!"
   "Hardly an escape," said Brother Raven. "Even if he'd somehow gotten through the force screen, he'd have frozen to death in twenty minutes out there tonight, dressed like that."
   "How did he get out?"
   An upset Dr. Durona confessed, "He must have gone past the monitor station while I was in the lav. I'm sorry!"
   "Suppose he had made it this far in the daytime?" speculated the alto. "Suppose he had been seen? It could have been disastrous."
   "I'll palm-lock the door to the private wing after this," the flustered Dr. Durona promised.
   "I'm not sure that will be enough, considering this remarkable performance. Yesterday he couldn't even walk. Still, this fills me with hope as much as alarm. I think we have something here. We had better set a closer guard."
   "Who can be spared?" asked Rowan.
   Several Dr. Duronas, clad variously in robes and nightgowns, looked at the young man.
   "Aw, no," Raven protested.
   "Rowan may watch him in the daytime, and continue her work. You will take the night shift," the white-haired woman instructed firmly.
   "Yes, ma'am," the youth sighed.
   She gestured imperiously. "Take him back to his room now. You had better check him for damages, Rowan."
   "I'll get a float pallet," said Rowan.
   "You don't need a float pallet for him," scoffed Raven. He knelt, gathered the wanderer up in his arms, and grunted to his feet.
   Showing off his strength? Well . . . no. "He weighs about as much as a wet coat. Come on, Short Circuit, back to bed with you."
   Muzzily indignant, he suffered himself to be carried off. Rowan hovered apprehensively at his side across the lobby, down the tube, through the storage chamber, and back into the peculiar building-under-a-building. At least, in response to his continued shivering, she set the bed's heat-bubble zone to a higher temperature this time.
   Rowan examined him, with particular attention to his aching scars. "He hasn't managed to rip anything apart inside. But he seems physiologically upset. It may be from the pain."
   "Do you want me to give him another two cc's of sedative?" asked Raven.
   "No. Just keep the room dim and quiet. He's exhausted himself. Once he warms up I think he'll sleep on his own." She touched his cheek, then his lips, tenderly. "That was the second time today that he spoke, do you know?"
   She wanted him to speak to her. But he was too tired now. And too rattled. There had been a tension among those people tonight, all those Dr. Duronas, that was more than medical fear for a patient's safety. They were very worried about something. Something to do with him? He might be a blank to himself, but they knew more and they weren't telling him.
   Rowan eventually pulled her night robe more closely about herself, and left. Raven arranged two chairs, one for a seat and one for his feet, settled down, and began reading from a hand-viewer. Studying, for he occasionally re-ran screens or made notes. Learning to be a doctor, no doubt.
   He lay back, drained beyond measure. His excursion tonight had nearly killed him, and what had he learned for all his pains? Not much, except this: I am come to a very strange place.
   And I am a prisoner here.
   

CHAPTER TWENTY

   Mark, Bothari-Jesek, and the Countess were in the library of Vorkosigan House going over ship specs the day before the scheduled departure.
   "Do you think I would have time to stop and see my clones on Komarr?" Mark asked the Countess a little wistfully. "Would Illyan let me?"
   ImpSec had settled on a Komarran private boarding school as the clones' initial depository, after consultation with the Countess, who had in turn kept Mark informed. ImpSec liked it because it meant they had only one location to guard. The clones liked it because they were together with their friends, the only familiarity in their sudden new situation. The teachers liked it because the clones could all be treated as one remedial class, and brought up to academic speed together. At the same time the young refugees had a chance to mingle with youths from normal, if mostly upper-class, families, and begin to get a handle on socialization. Later, when it was safer, the Countess was pushing for placement in foster-families despite the clones' awkward age and size. How will they learn to form families themselves, later, if they have no models? she'd argued with Illyan. Mark had listened in on that conversation with the most intense imaginable fascination, and kept his mouth tightly shut.
   "Certainly, if you wish," the Countess now said to Mark. "Illyan will kick, but that's pure reflex. Except ... I can think of one proper complaint he might have, because of your destination. If you encounter House Bharaputra again, God forbid, it might be better if you don't know everything about ImpSec's arrangements. Stopping on your way back might be more prudent." The Countess looked as if she didn't care for the flavor of her own words, but years of living with security concerns made her reasoning automatic.
   If I encounter Vasa Luigi again, the clones will be the least of my worries, Mark thought wryly. What did he want of a personal visit anyway? Was he still trying to pass himself off as a hero? A hero should be more self-contained and austere. Not so desperate for praise as to pursue his_victims_begging for it. Surely he'd played the fool enough. "No," he sighed at last. "If any of them ever want to talk to me, they can find me, I guess." No heroine was going to kiss him anyway.
   The Countess raised her brows at his tone, but shrugged agreement.
   Led by Bothari-Jesek, they turned to more practical matters involving fuel costs and life-support system repairs. Bothari-Jesek and the Countess_who, Mark was reminded, had been a ship captain herself once_were deep into a startlingly technical discussion involving Necklin rod adjustments, when the comconsole image split, and Simon Illyan's face appeared.
   "Hello, Elena." He nodded to her, in the comconsole's station chair. "I wish to speak with Cordelia, please."
   Bothari-Jesek smiled, nodded, muted the outgoing audio, and slid aside. She beckoned urgently to the Countess, whispering, "Do we have trouble?"
   "He's going to block us," worried Mark, agitated, as the Countess settled into the comconsole's station chair. "He's going to nail me to the floor, I know he is."
   "Hush," reproved the Countess, smiling slightly. "Both of you sit over there and resist the temptation to talk. Simon is my meat." She re-opened her audio transmission mode. "Yes, Simon, what can I do for you?"
   "Milady," Illyan gave her a short nod, "in a word, you can desist. This scheme you are putting forward is unacceptable."
   "To whom, Simon? Not to me. Who else gets a vote?"
   "Security," Illyan growled.
   "You are Security. I'll thank you to take responsibility for your own emotional responses, and not try to shift them onto some vague abstraction. Or get off the line and let me talk to Captain Security, then."
   "All right. It's unacceptable to me."
   "In a word_tough."
   "I request you to desist."
   "I refuse. If you want to stop me, ultimately, you'll have to generate an order for Mark's and my arrest."
   "I will speak to the Count," said Illyan stiffly, with the air of a man driven to a last resort.
   "He's much too ill. And I've spoken with him already."
   Illyan swallowed his bluff without gagging, much. "I don't know what you think this unauthorized venture can do, besides muddy the waters, maybe risk lives, and cost you a small fortune."
   "Well, that's just the point, Simon. I don't know what Mark will be able to do. And neither do you. The trouble with ImpSec is that you've had no competition lately. You take your monopoly for granted. A bit of hustle will be good for you."
   Illyan sat with his teeth clenched for a short time. "You put House Vorkosigan at triple risk, with this," he said at last. "You are endangering your last possible back-up."
   "I am aware. And I choose the risk."
   "Do you have that right?"
   "I have more right than you."
   "The government is in the biggest uproar behind closed doors that I've seen in years," said Illyan. "The Centrist Coalition is scrambling to find a man to replace Aral. And so are three other parties."
   "Excellent. I hope one of them may succeed before Aral gets back on his feet, or I'll never get him to retire."
   "Is that what you see in this?" Illyan demanded. "A chance to end your husband's career? Is this loyal, milady?"
   "I see a chance to get him out of Vorbarr Sultana alive," she said icily, "an end I have often despaired of, over the years. You pick your loyalties, I'll pick mine."
   "Who is capable of succeeding him?" asked Illyan plaintively.
   "A number of men. Racozy, Vorhalas, or Sendorf, to name three. If not, there was something terribly wrong with Aral's leadership. One mark of a great man is the legacy of men he leaves behind him, to whom he's passed on his skills. If you think Aral so small as to have stifled all possible others around him, spreading smallness like a plague, then perhaps Barrayar is better off without him."
   "You know I don't think that!"
   "Good. Then your argument annihilates itself."
   "You tie me in knots." Illyan rubbed his neck. "Milady," he said at last, "I didn't want to have to say this to you. But have you considered the possible dangers of letting Lord Mark get to Lord Miles before anyone else?"
   She leaned back in her chair, smiling, her fingers lightly drumming. "No, Simon. What dangers are you thinking of?"
   "The temptation to promote himself," Illyan bit out.
   "Murder Miles. Say what you damn mean." Her eyes glinted dangerously. "So you'll just have to make sure your people get to Miles first. Won't you. I've no objection."
   "Damn it, Cordelia," he cried, harried, "you realize, that if they get into trouble, the first thing they're going to do is cry to ImpSec for rescue!"
   The Countess grinned. "You live to serve, I believe you fellows say in your oath. Don't you?"
   "We'll see," snapped Illyan, and cut the comm.
   "What's he going to do?" asked Mark anxiously.
   "At a guess, go over my head. Since I've already cut him out with Aral, that leaves only one choice. I don't think I'll bother getting up. I expect I'll get another call here shortly."
   Distracted, Mark and Bothari-Jesek attempted to carry on with the ship specs. Mark jumped when the comm chimed again.
   An anonymous young man appeared, nodded to the Countess, stated, "Lady Vorkosigan. Emperor Gregor," and vanished. Gregor's face appeared in his place, looking bemused.
   "Good morning, Lady Cordelia. You really ought not to stir up poor Simon that way, you know."
   "He deserved it," she said equably. "I admit, he has far too much on his mind at the moment. Suppressed panic turns him into a prick every time, it's what he does instead of running in circles screaming. A way of coping, I suppose."
   "While others of us cope by becoming over-analytical," Gregor murmured. The Countess's lip twitched, and Mark suddenly thought he knew who might shave the barber.
   "His security concerns are legitimate," Gregor continued. "Is this Jackson's Whole venture wise?"
   "A question that can only be answered by empirical testing. So to speak. I grant you, Simon argues sincerely. But_how do you consider Barrayar's concerns will best be served, Sire? That's the question you must answer."
   "I'm divided in mind."
   "Are you divided in heart?" Her question was a challenge. She opened her hands, half-placation, half-pleading. "One way or another, you're going to be dealing with Lord Mark Vorkosigan for a long time to come. This excursion, if it does nothing else, will test the validity of all doubts. If they are not tested, they will always remain with you, an unanswered itch. And that's not fair to Mark."
   "How very scientific," he breathed. They regarded each other with equal dryness.
   "I thought it might appeal to you."
   "Is Lord Mark with you?"
   "Yes," the Countess gestured him to her side.
   Mark entered the range of the vid pick-up. "Sire."
   "So, Lord Mark." Gregor studied him gravely. "It seems your mother wants me to give you enough rope to hang yourself."
   Mark swallowed. "Yes, Sire."
   "Or save yourself . . ." Gregor nodded. "So be it. Good luck and good hunting."
   "Thank you, Sire."
   Gregor smiled and cut the comm.
   They did not hear from Illyan again.
   In the afternoon, the Countess took Mark with her to the Imperial Military Hospital on her daily visit to her husband. Mark had made that journey in her company twice before, since the Count's collapse. He didn't much care for it. For one thing, the place smelled entirely too much like the clinics that had helped make a torment of his Jacksonian youth; he found himself remembering details of early surgeries and treatments that he thought he'd altogether forgotten. For another, the Count himself still terrified Mark. Even laid low, his personality was as powerful as his life was precarious, and Mark wasn't sure which teetering aspect scared him more.
   His feet slowed to a halt in the hospital corridor outside the Prime Minister's guarded room, and he stood in indecisive misery. The Countess glanced back, and stopped. "Yes?"
   "I ... really don't want to go in there."
   She frowned thoughtfully. "I won't force you. But I'll predict you a prediction."
   "Say on, oh seeress."
   "You will never regret having done so. But you may deeply regret not having done so."
   Mark digested that. "All right," he said faintly, and followed her.
   They tiptoed in quietly on the deep carpeting. The drapes were open on a wide view of the Vorbarr Sultana city-scape, sweeping down to the ancient buildings and the river that bisected the capital's heart. It was a cloudy, chilly, rainy afternoon, and grey and white mists swirled around the tops of the highest modern towers. The Count's face was turned to the silver light. He looked abstracted, bored, and ill, his face puffy and greenish, only partly a reflection of the light and the green uniform pajamas that reminded all forcibly of his patient-status. He was peppered with monitor pads, and had an oxygen tube to his nostrils.
   "Ah." His head turned at their entry, and he smiled. He keyed up a light at his bedside, which cast a warmer pool of illumination that nonetheless failed to improve his color. "Dear Captain. Mark." The Countess bent to his bedside, and they exchanged a longer-than-formal kiss. The Countess swung herself up on the end of his bed and perched there cross-legged, arranging her long skirt. Casually, she began to rub his bare feet, and he sighed contentedly.
   Mark advanced to about a meter distance. "Good afternoon, sir. How are you feeling?"
   "Hell of a deal, when you can't kiss your own wife without running out of breath," he complained. He lay back, panting heavily.
   "They let me into the lab to see your new heart," the Countess commented. "It's chicken-heart sized already, and beating away cheerfully in its little vat."
   The Count laughed weakly. "How grotesque."
   "I thought it was cute."
   "You would."
   "If you really want grotesque, consider what you want to do with the old one, after," the Countess advised with a wicked grin. "The opportunities for tasteless jokes are almost irresistible."
   "The mind reels," murmured the Count. He glanced up at Mark, still smiling.
   Mark took a breath. "Lady Cordelia has explained to you what I intend to do, hasn't she, sir?"
   "Mm." The Count's smile faded. "Yes. Watch out for your back. Nasty place, Jackson's Whole."
   "Yes, I ... know."
   "So you do." He turned his head to stare out the grey window. "I wish I could send Bothari with you."
   The Countess looked startled. Mark could read her thought right off her face, Has he forgotten Bothari is dead? But she was afraid to ask. She pasted a brighter smile on her mouth instead.
   "I'm taking Bothari-Jesek, sir."
   "History repeats itself." He struggled to sit up on one elbow, and added sternly, "It had better not, boy, y'hear?" He relaxed back into his pillows before the Countess could respond and make him. Her face lost its tension; he was clearly a little fogged, but he wasn't so far out of it as to have forgotten his Armsman's violent death. "Elena's smarter than her father was, I'll give her that," he sighed. The Countess finished with his feet.
   He lay back, brows drawn down, apparently struggling to think of more useful advice. "I once thought_I only found this out when I grew old, understand_that there is no more terrible fate than to become the mentor. To be able to tell how, yet not to do. To send your protege out, all bright and beautiful, to stand your fire ... I think I've found a worse fate. To send your student out knowing damn well you haven't had a chance to teach enough. ... Be smart, boy. Duck fast. Don't sell yourself to your enemy in advance, in your mind. You can only be defeated here." He touched his hands to his temples.
   "I don't even know who the enemy is, yet," said Mark ruefully.
   "They'll find you, I suppose," sighed the Count. "People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damn rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf. Eh?"
   "I guess so. Sir," said Mark, baffled.
   "Huh." The Count had run himself completely out of breath. "You'll see," he wheezed. The Countess eyed him, swung herself off the bed, and stood up.
   "Well," said Mark, and nodded briefly, "goodbye." His word hung in the air, insufficient. Cardiac conditions are not contagious, dammit. What are you scared of? He swallowed, and cautiously went nearer the Count. He had never touched the man except the once when trying to help load him onto the float bike. Afraid, emboldened, he held out his hand. »
   The Count grasped it, a brief, strong grip. His hand was big and square and blunt-fingered, a hand fit for shovels and picks, swords and guns. Mark's own hand seemed small and child-like, plump and pale by contrast. They had nothing in common but the grip.
   "Confusion to the enemy, boy," whispered the Count.
   "Turn-about is fair play, sir."
   His father snorted a laugh.
   Mark made one final vid-call that evening, his last night on Bar-rayar. He sneaked off to use the console in Miles's room, not in secret, exactly, but in private. He stared at the blank machine for ten minutes before spasmodically punching in the code he had obtained.
   A middle-aged blonde woman's image appeared over the vid plate when the chime stopped. The remains of a striking beauty made her face strong and confident. Her eyes were blue and humorous. "Commodore Koudelka's residence," she answered formally.
   It's her mother. Mark choked down panic to quaver, "May I speak with Kareen Koudelka, please_ma'am?"
   A blonde brow twitched. "I believe I know which one you are, but_who may I say is calling?"
   "Lord Mark Vorkosigan," he got out.
   "Just a moment, my lord." She left the range of the vid pick-up; he could hear her voice fading in the distance, calling "Kareen!"
   There was a muffled bumping in the background, garbled voices, a shriek, and Kareen's laughing voice crying, "No, Delia, it's for me! Mother, make her go away! Mine, all mine! Out!" The sound of a door thumping closed on, presumably, flesh, a yelp, then a firmer and more final slam.
   Panting and tousled, Kareen Koudelka arrived in range, and gave him a starry-eyed "Hi!"
   If not just like the look Lady Cassia had given Ivan, it was a robust and blue near-cousin. Mark felt faint. "Hello," he said breathlessly. "I called to say goodbye." No, dammit, that was much too short_
   "What?"
   "Um, excuse me, that's not quite what I meant. But I'm going to be traveling off-planet soon, and I didn't want to leave without speaking to you again."
   "Oh." Her smile drooped. "When will you come back?"
   "I'm not sure. But when I do, I'd like to see you again."
   "Well . . . sure."
   Sure, she said. What a lot of joyful assumptions were embedded in that sure.
   Her eyes narrowed. "Is there something wrong, Lord Mark?"
   "No," he said hastily. "Um . . . was that your sister I heard in the background just now?"
   "Yes. I had to lock her out, or she'd stand out of range and make faces at me while we talked." Her earnest air of injury was immediately spoiled when she added, "That's what I do to her, when fellows call."
   He was a fellow. How . . . how normal. He led her on with one question after another, to talk about her sisters, her parents, and her life. Private schools and cherished children . . . The Commodore's family was well-to-do, but with some sort of Barrayaran-style work ethic driving a passion for education and accomplishment, an ideal of service running like an undercurrent, towing them all into their future. He went awash in her words, dreamily sharing. She was so peaceable and real. No shadow of torment, nothing spoiled or deformed. He felt like he was feeding, not his belly but his head. His brain felt warm and distended and happy, a sensation near-erotic but less threatening. Alas, after a time she became conscious of the disproportion in the conversation.
   "Good heavens, I'm babbling. I'm sorry."
   "No! I like listening to you talk."
   "That's a first. In this family, I'm lucky to get a word in edgewise. I didn't talk till I was three. They had me tested. It turned out it was just because my sisters were answering everything for me!"
   Mark laughed.
   "Now they say I'm making up for lost time."
   "I know about lost time," Mark said ruefully.
   "Yes, I've . . . heard a little. I guess your life has been quite an adventure."
   "Not an adventure," he corrected. "A disaster, maybe." He wondered what his life would look like, reflected in her eyes. Something shinier. . . . "Maybe when I get back I can tell you a bit about it." If he got back. If he brought this off.
   I'm not a nice person. 'You should know that, before. Before what? The more over-extended their acquaintance became, the harder it would be to tell her his repellent secrets.
   "Look, I ... you have to understand." God, he sounded just like Bothari-Jesek, working up to her confession. "I'm kind of a mess, and I'm not just talking about my outsides." Hell, hell, and what had this f nice young virgin to do with the arcane subtleties of psycho-programming tortures, and their erratic results? What right had he to put horrors in her head? "I don't even know what I should tell you!"
   Now was too soon, he could feel that clearly. But later might be too late, leaving her feeling betrayed and tricked. And if he continued this conversation one more minute, he'd drift into abject-blurting mode, and lose the one bright, un-poisoned thing he'd found.
   Kareen tilted her head in puzzlement. "Maybe you ought to ask the Countess."
   "Do you know her well? To talk to?"
   "Oh, yes. She and my mother are best friends. My mother used to be her personal bodyguard, before she retired to have us."
   Mark sensed the shadowy league of grandmothers again. Powerful old women with genetic agendas. . . . He felt obscurely that there were some things a man ought to do for himself. But on Barrayar, they used go-betweens. He had in his camp an ambassadoress-extraordinary to the whole female gender. The Countess would act for his good. Yeah, like a woman holding down a screaming child to get it a painful vaccination that would save it from a deadly disease.
   How much did he trust the Countess? Did he dare trust her in this?
   "Kareen . . . before I come back, do me a favor. If you get a chance to talk privately to the Countess, ask her what she thinks you ought to know about me, before we get better acquainted. Tell her I asked you to."
   "All right. I like to talk with Lady Cordelia. She's sort of been my mentor. She makes me think I can do anything." Kareen hesitated. "If you're back by Winterfair, will you dance with me again at the Imperial Residence Ball? And not hide in the corner this time," she added sternly.
   "If I'm back by Winterfair, I won't have to hide in the corner. Yes."
   "Good. I'll hold you to your word."
   "My word as Vorkosigan," he said lightly.
   Her blue eyes widened. "Oh. My." Her soft lips parted in a blinding smile.
   He felt like a man who's gone to spit, and had a diamond pop accidentally from his lips instead. And he couldn't call it back and re-swallow it. There must be a Vorish streak in the girl, to take a man's word so seriously.
   "I have to go now," he said.
   "All right. Lord Mark_be careful?"
   "I_why do you say that?" He hadn't said a word about where he was going or why, he swore.
   "My father is a soldier. You have that same look in your eyes that he gets, when he's lying through his teeth about some difficulty he's heading into. He can never fool my mother, either."
   No girl had ever told him to be careful, like she meant it. He was touched beyond measure. "Thank you, Kareen." Reluctantly, he cut the comm, with a gesture that was nearly a caress.
   

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

   Mark and Bothari-Jesek hitched a ride from Barrayar back to Komarr on an ImpSec courier vessel very like the one they'd ridden before, the last favor, Mark swore, that he would ever ask of Simon Illyan. This resolve lasted till they arrived at Komarr orbit, where Mark found that the Dendarii had given him his Winterfair gift early. All of Medic Norwood's personal effects had finally arrived, shipped from the main Dendarii fleet.
   ImpSec being ImpSec, they had opened it first. So much the better; they would hardly have let Mark touch it if they had not convinced themselves they'd already emptied it of all its secrets. With Bothari-Jesek's backing, Mark begged, bluffed, bullied and whined his way to access to it. With obvious reluctance, ImpSec admitted him under supervision to a locked room in their orbital HQ. But they admitted him.
   Mark turned Bothari-Jesek loose to oversee the arrangements for the ship the Countess's agent had located. As a Dendarii shipmaster Bothari-Jesek was not only the most logical person for the logistical tasks, she was probably overkill. With barely a pang of conscience Mark dismissed her from his thoughts to plunge into his examination of his new treasure box. Alone in an empty room. Heavenly.
   After his first excited pass through the material_which included old clothing, a disk library, letters, and souvenir knickknacks from Norwood's four years of Dendarii service_Mark, depressed, was inclined to allow ImpSec was right. There was nothing here of value. Nothing up any of the sleeves_ImpSec had checked; Mark set aside clothing, boots, mementos, and all the physical effects. It gave him a queer feeling to handle the old clothes, marked with the wear of a body that was gone forever. Too damn much mortality around here. He turned his attention instead to the more intellectual detritus of the medic's life and career: his library and technical notes. ImpSec had gone through this same focusing before him, he noted glumly.
   He sighed, and settled back in his station chair for a long slog. He desperately wanted Norwood to yield him the clue, if only so that a man he had inadvertently led to his death might not have died so in vain. I never want to be a combat commander again. Ever.
   He hadn't expected it to be obvious. But his connector, when he finally ran across it hours later, was just about as subliminal as they came. It was a note hand-jotted on a plastic flimsy stuck in a pile of similar notes, interspersed in a cryo-prep training manual for emergency medical technicians. All it said was, See Dr. Durona at 0900 for laboratory materials.
   Not the Durona . . . ?
   Mark back-pedaled to Norwood's certifications and transcripts, part of the medic's computerized records he'd already seen in the ImpSec files on Barrayar. Norwood had taken his Dendarii cryonics training at a certain Beauchene Life Center, a respected commercial cryo-revival facility on Escobar. The name "Dr. Durona" did not appear anywhere among his immediate instructors. It did not appear on a listing of the Life Center's staff. It did not, in fact, appear anywhere at all. Mark checked it all again, to be sure.
   There are probably lots of people named Durona on Escobar. It's not that rare a name. He clutched the flimsy anyway. It itched in his palm.
   He called Quinn, aboard the Ariel moored nearby.
   "Ah," she said, eyeing him without favor in the vid. "You're back. Elena said you were. What do you think you're doing?"
   "Never mind that. Look, is there anyone here among the Dendarii, any medics or medtechs, who were trained at the Beauchene Life Center? Preferably at the same time as Norwood? Or near his time?"
   She sighed. "There were three in his group. Red Squad's medic, Norwood, and Orange Squad's medic. ImpSec has already asked us about that, Mark."
   "Where are they now?"
   "Red Squad's medic was killed in a shuttle crash several months ago_"
   "Agh!" He ran his hands through his hair.
   "Orange Squad's man is here on the Ariel."
   "Right!" Mark crowed happily. "I have to talk to him." He almost said, Put him on, then remembered he was on ImpSec's private line and certainly being monitored. "Send a personnel pod to pick me up."
   "One, ImpSec has already interrogated him, at great length, and two, who the hell are you to give orders?"
   "Elena hasn't told you much, I see." Curious. Did Bothari-Jesek's dubious Armsman's oath then outrank her loyalties to the Dendarii? Or was she just too busy to chat? How much time had he been_he glanced at his chrono. My God. "I happen to be on my way to Jackson's Whole. Very soon. And if you are very nice to me, I might ask ImpSec to release you to me, and let you ride along as my guest. Maybe." He grinned breathlessly at her.
   The smoldering look she gave him in return was more eloquent than the bluest string of swear words he'd ever heard. Her lips moved_counting to ten?_but no sound came out. When she did speak, her tone was clipped to a burr. "I'll have your pod at the station's hatch ring in eleven minutes."
   "Thank you."
   The medic was surly.
   "Look, I've been through this. For hours on end. We're done."
   "I promise I'll keep it brief," Mark assured him. "Just one question."
   The medic eyed Mark malignantly, perhaps correctly identifying him as the reason why he'd been stuck ship-bound in Komarr orbit for the last dozen weeks.
   "When you and Norwood were taking your cryonics training at Beauchene Life Center, do you ever remember meeting a Dr. Durona? Handing out lab supplies, maybe?"
   "The place was knee-deep in doctors. No. Can I go now?" The medic made to rise.
   "Wait!"
   "That was your one question. And the ImpSec goons asked it before you."
   "And that was the answer you gave them? Wait. Let me think." Mark bit his lip anxiously. The name alone was not enough to hare off on, not even for him. There had to be more. "Do you ever remember . . . Norwood being in contact with a tall, striking woman with Eurasian features, straight black hair, brown eyes . . . extremely smart." He didn't dare to suggest an age. It could be anywhere between twenty and sixty.
   The medic stared at him in astonishment. "Yeah! How did you know?"
   "What was she? What was her relation with Norwood?"
   "She was a student too, I think. He was chasing her for a time, playing off his military glamour to the hilt, but I don't think he caught her."
   "Do you remember her name?"
   "Roberta, or something like that. Rowanna. I don't remember."
   "Was she from Jackson's Whole?"
   "Escobaran, I thought." The medic shrugged. "The clinic had post-doc trainees from all over the planet to take residencies in cryo-revival. I never talked to her. I saw her with Norwood a couple of times. He might have figured we'd try to cut him out with her."
   "So the clinic is a top place. With a wide reputation."
   "We thought so."
   "Wait here." Mark left the medic sitting in the Ariel's little briefing room, and rushed out to find Quinn. He hadn't far to rush. She was waiting in the corridor, her boot tapping.
   "Quinn, quick! I need a visual off Sergeant Taura's helmet recorder from the drop mission. Just one still."
   "ImpSec confiscated the originals."
   "You kept copies, surely."
   She smiled sourly. "Maybe."
   "Please, Quinn!"
   "Wait here." She returned promptly, and handed him a data disk. This time she followed him into the briefing room. Since the secured console wouldn't take his palm-print any more no matter how he wriggled it, Mark perforce let her power it up. He fast-forwarded Taura's visuals to the image he wanted. A close-up of a tall, dark-haired girl, her head turning, eyes wide. Mark blurred the background of the clone-creche, in the view.
   Only then did he motion the medic to look.
   "Hey!"
   "Is it her?"
   "It's . . ." the medic peered. "She's younger. But it's her. Where did you get that?"
   "Never mind. Thank you. I won't take any more of your time. You've been a great help."
   The medic exited as reluctantly as he had entered, staring back over his shoulder.
   "What's this all about, Mark?" Quinn demanded.
   "When we're on my ship and on our way, I'll tell you. Not before." He had a head-start on ImpSec, and he wasn't going to give it up. If they were anything less than desperate, they'd never let him go, Countess or no Countess. It was quite fair; he didn't have any information ImpSec didn't, potentially. He'd just put it together a little differently.
   "Where the hell did you get a ship?"
   "My mother gave it to me." He tried not to smirk.
   "The Countess? Rats! She's turning you loose?"
   "Don't begrudge me my little ship, Quinn. After all, my parents gave my big brother a whole fleet of ships." His eyes gleamed. "I'll see you on board, as soon as Captain Bothari-Jesek reports it ready."
   His ship. Not stolen, nothing faked or false. His by right of legitimate gift. He who'd never had a birthday present, had one now. Twenty-two years' worth.
   The little yacht was a generation old, formerly owned by a Komarran oligarch in the balmy days before the Barrayaran conquest. It had been quite luxurious, once, but obviously had been neglected for the past ten years or so. This did not represent hard times for the Komarran clan, Mark understood; they were in process of replacing it, hence the sale. The Komarrans understood business, and the Vor understood the relation between business and taxation. Business under the new regime had recovered much of its former vigor.
   Mark had declared the yacht's lounge to be the mission-briefing room. He glanced around now at his invitees, draped variously over the furniture secured to the carpeted deck around a fake fireplace that ran a vid program of atavistic dancing flames, complete with infra-red radiance.
   Quinn was there, of course, still in her Dendarii uniform. She had entirely overgrazed her fingernails and had taken to cheek-biting instead. Bel Thorne sat silent and reserved, a permanent bleakness emphasizing the fine lines around its eyes. Sergeant Taura loomed next to Thorne, big and puzzled and wary.
   It was no strike-group. Mark wondered if he ought to have packed along more muscle . . . no. If there was one thing his first mission had taught him, it was that if you didn't have enough force to win, it was better not to engage force at all. What he had done was cream off the maximum expertise the Dendarii could supply on the subject of Jackson's Whole.
   Captain Bothari-Jesek entered, and gave him a nod. "We're on our way. We've broken orbit, and your pilot has the comm. Twenty hours to the first jump point."
   "Thank you, Captain."
   Quinn made a place beside her for Bothari-Jesek; Mark sat on the fake fieldstone hearth with his back to the crackling flames, his hands clasped loosely between his knees. He took a deep breath. "Welcome aboard, and thank you all for coming. You all understand, this is not in official Dendarii expedition, and is neither authorized nor funded by ImpSec. Our expenses are being privately paid by Countess Vorkosigan. You are all listed as being on unpaid personal leave. With one exception, I have no formal authority over any of you. Nor you over me. We do have an urgent mutual interest, which demands we pool our skills and information. The first piece is the proper identity of Admiral Naismith. You've brought Captain Thorne and Sergeant Taura up to speed on that, haven't you, Quinn?"
   Bel Thorne nodded. "Old Tung and I had it figured out a long time ago. Miles's secret identity isn't as secret as he hoped, I'm afraid."
   "It was news to me," rumbled Sergeant Taura. "It sure explained a lot I'd wondered about, though."
   "Welcome to the Inner Circle anyway," said Quinn. "Officially." She turned to Mark. "All right, what do you have? A connection, finally?"
   "Oh, Quinn. I'm up to my ass in connections. It's motive I'm missing now."
   "You're ahead of ImpSec, then."
   "Maybe not for long. They've sent an agent to Escobar for more details on the Beauchene Life Center_they're bound to make the same connection I did. Eventually. But I planned this expedition with a primary list of twenty sites on Jackson's Whole to re-check in depth. As a result of something I found in Norwood's personal effects, I've altered the order of the list. If Miles gets revived_which is part of my hypothesis_how long d'you think it would be till he did something to draw attention to himself?"
   "Not long," said Bothari-Jesek reluctantly.
   Quinn nodded wryly. "Though he could well wake amnesic, for a time." Or forever, she did not add aloud, though Mark could see the fear in her face. "It's almost more normal than not, in cryo-revivals."
   "The thing is_ImpSec and we are not the only ones looking for him. I'm getting a timing-itch. Whose attention will he draw first?"
   "Mm," said Quinn glumly. Thorne and Taura exchanged a worried look.
   "All right." Mark rubbed his hands through his hair. He did not rise and pace, Miles-fashion; for one thing, Quinn's disapproving glances made him feel like he was starting to waddle. "Here's what I found and here's what I think. When Norwood was on Escobar for his cryo-prep training, he met a certain Dr. Roberta or Rowanna Durona, from Jackson's Whole, who was there also taking a residency in cryo-revival. They had some positive relationship, enough, anyway, that when Norwood was cornered at Bharaputra's, he remembered her. And trusted her enough to ship her the cryo-chamber. Remember, Norwood was also under the impression at this time that House Fell was our ally. Because the Durona Group works for House Fell."
   "Wait a minute," said Quinn instantly. "House Fell claims not to have the cryo-chamber!"
   Mark held up a restraining hand. "Let me give you a little Jacksonian history, as far as I know it. About ninety or a hundred years ago_"
   "My God, Lord Mark, how long is this story going to be?" asked Bothari-Jesek. Quinn glanced up sharply at her use of the Barrayaran honorific.
   "Bear with me. You have to understand who the Durona Group is. About ninety years ago, the present Baron Ryoval's father was setting up his arcane little genetic slave-trade, the manufacture of humans to order. At some point it occurred to him: Why hire genius from outside? Grow your own. Mental properties are the most elusive to create genetically, but the old Ryoval was a genius himself. He started a project that culminated in the creation of a woman he named Lilly Durona. She was to be his medical research muse, his slave-doctor. In both senses.
   "She grew, was trained, and put to work. And she was brilliant. About this time the old Baron Ryoval died, not too mysteriously, during an early attempt at a brain transplant.
   "I say not too mysteriously because of the character his son and successor, the present Baron Ryoval, immediately revealed. His first project was to get rid of all his potential sibling-rivals. The old man had sired a lot of children. Ryoval's early career is something of a Jacksonian legend. The eldest and most dangerous males, he simply had assassinated. The females and some of the younger males he sent to his body-modification laboratories, and thence to his very-private bordellos, to service the customers on that side of the business. I suppose they're all dead by now. If they're lucky.
   "Ryoval also, apparently, used this direct management approach on the staff he had inherited. His father had handled Lilly Durona as a cherished treasure, but the new Baron Ryoval threatened to send her after his sisters, to satisfy the biological fantasies of his customers directly, if she didn't cooperate. She began to plot her escape with a despised young half-brother of Ryoval's by the name of Georish Stauber."
   "Ah! Baron Fell!" said Thorne. Thorne was looking enlightened, Taura fascinated, Quinn and Bothari-Jesek horrified.
   "The same, but not yet. Lilly and young Georish escaped to the protection of House Fell. In fact, I gather that Lilly was Georish's ticket in. They both set up in service to their new masters, with considerable negotiated autonomy, at least on Lilly's part. It was the Deal. Deals are as semi-sacred as anything can be, on Jackson's Whole.
   "Georish began to rise through the ranks of House Fell. And Lilly began the Durona Research Group by cloning herself. Again and again. The Durona Group, which is now up to thirty or forty cloned sisters, serves House Fell in several ways. It's sort of a family doctor for upper level Fell executives who don't want to entrust their health to outside specialist houses like Bharaputra. And since House Fell's stock in trade is weapons, they've done R&D on military poisons and biologicals. And their antidotes. The Durona Group made House Fell a small fortune on Peritaint, and a few years later made it a huge fortune on Peritaint's antidote. The Durona Group is kind of quietly famous, if you follow that sort of thing. Which ImpSec does. There was a pile of stuff on 'em even in the stripped-down files they let me see. Though most of this is common knowledge on Jackson's Whole.
   "Georish, not least owing to the coup he brought House Fell in the person of Lilly, ascended to the pinnacle a few years back when he became Baron Fell. Now, enter the Dendarii Mercenaries. And now you have to tell me what happened." Mark nodded to Bel Thorne. "I've only caught garbled bits."
   Bel whistled. "I knew some of this, but I don't think I'd ever heard the whole story. No wonder Fell and Ryoval hate each other." It glanced at Quinn: she nodded permission to proceed. "Well, about four years ago, Miles brought the Dendarii a little contract. It was for a pick-up. Our Employer_excuse me, Barrayar, I've been calling them Our Employer for so long it's a reflex."
   "Keep that reflex," Mark advised.
   Bel nodded. "The Imperium wanted to import a galactic geneticist. I don't quite know why." It glanced at Quinn.
   "Nor do you need to," said she.
   "But a certain Dr. Canaba, who was then one of House Bharaputra's top genetics people, wanted to defect. House Bharaputra takes a lethally dim view of employees departing with a head full of trade secrets, so Canaba needed help. He struck a deal with the Barrayaran Imperium to take him in."
   "That's where I come from," Taura put in.
   "Yes," said Thorne. "Taura was one of his pet projects. He, um, insisted on taking her along. Unfortunately, the super-soldier project had recently been canceled, and Taura sold to Baron Ryoval, who collects genetic, excuse me Sergeant, oddities. So we had to break her out of House Ryoval, in addition to breaking Canaba out of House Bharaputra. Um, Taura, you'd better say what happened next."
   "The Admiral came and rescued me from Ryoval's main biologicals facility," the big woman rumbled. She heaved a large sigh, as if at some sweet memory. "In the process of escaping, we totally destroyed House Ryoval's main gene banks. A hundred-year-old tissue collection went up in smoke. Literally." She smiled, baring her fangs.
   "House Ryoval lost about fifty percent of its assets that night, Baron Fell estimated," Thorne added. "At least."
   Mark hooted, then sobered. "That explains why you all think Baron Ryoval's people will be hunting for Admiral Naismith."
   "Mark," said Thorne desperately, "if Ryoval finds Miles first, he'll have him revived just so he can kill him again. And again. And again. That's why we were all so insistent that you play Miles, when we were pulling out of Jackson's Whole. Ryoval has no motive to take revenge on the clone, just on the Admiral."
   "I see. Gee. Thanks. Ah, whatever happened to Dr. Canaba? If I may ask."
   "He was delivered safely," said Quinn. "He has a new name, a new face, a new laboratory, and a salary that ought to keep him happy. A loyal new subject for the Imperium."
   "Hm. Well, that brings me to the other cross-connection. It's not a new or secret one, though I don't know yet what to make of it. Neither does ImpSec, incidentally, though as a result of it they've sent agents to check the Durona Group twice. Baronne Lotus Bharaputra, the Baron's wife, is a Durona clone."
   Taura's clawed hand flew to her lips. "That girl!"
   "Yes, that girl. I wondered why she gave me the cold chills. I'd seen her before, in another incarnation. The clone of a clone.
   "The Baronne is one of the oldest of Lilly Durona's clone daughters, or sisters, or whatever you want to call the tribe. Hive. She didn't sell herself cheaply. Lotus went renegade for one of the biggest bribes in Jacksonian history_co-control, or nearly so, of House Bharaputra. She's been Baron Bharaputra's mate for twenty years. And now it seems she's getting one other thing. The Durona Group among them have an astonishing range of bio-expertise, but they refuse to do clone-brain transplants. It was written right into Lilly Durona's foundation-deal with House Fell. But Baronne Bharaputra, who must be over sixty-standard, apparently plans to embark on her second youth very shortly. Judging from what we witnessed."
   "Rats," muttered Quinn.
   "So that's another cross-connection," said Mark. "In fact, it's a damned cat's cradle of cross-connections, once you get hold of the right thread. But it doesn't explain, to me at least, why the Durona Group would conceal Miles from their own House Fell bosses. Yet they must have done so."
   "If they have him," Quinn said, gnawing on her cheek.
   "If," Mark conceded. "Although," he brightened slightly, "it would explain why that incriminating cryo-chamber ended up in the Hegen Hub. The Durona Group wasn't trying to hide it from ImpSec. They were trying to hide it from other Jacksonians."
   "It almost all fits," said Thorne.
   Mark opened his hands and held them apart palm to palm, as if invisible threads ran back and forth between them. "Yeah. Almost." He closed his hands together. "So here we are. And there we're going. Our first trick will be to re-enter Jacksonian space past Fell's jump point station. Captain Quinn has brought along quite a kit for doctoring our identities. Coordinate your ideas with her on that one. We have ten days to play with it."
   The group broke up, to study the new problems each in his, her, or its own way. Bothari-Jesek and Quinn lingered as Mark rose, and stretched his aching back. His aching brain.
   "That was quite a pretty piece of analysis, Mark," said Quinn grudgingly. "If it's not all hot air."
   She ought to know. "Thank you, Quinn," he said sincerely. He too prayed it wouldn't all turn out to be hallucinatory, an elaborate mistake.
   "Yes . . . he's changed a bit, I think," Bothari-Jesek observed judiciously. "Grown."
   "Yeah?" Quinn's gaze swept him, up and down. "True . . ."
   Mark's heart warmed in hungry anticipation of a crumb of approval.
   "_he's fatter."
   "Let's get to work," Mark growled.
   

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

   He could remember studying tongue-twisters, once. He could even picture a whole screen-list of them, black words on pale blue. Had it been for some sort of rhetoric course? Unfortunately, though he could picture the screen, he could only remember one of the actual lines. He struggled to sit upright in bed, and try it. "Sheshells . . . shsh . . . she shells she shit!" He took a breath, and started over. Again. Again. His tongue seemed thick as an old sock. It felt staggeringly important to recover control of his speech. As long as he kept talking like an idiot, they were going to keep treating him like one.
   It could be worse. He was eating real food now, not sugar-water or soft sludge. He'd been showering and dressing on his own for two whole days. No more patient gowns. They'd given him a shirt and pants, instead. Like ship knits. Their grey color at first pleased him, :hen worried him because he could not think why it pleased him. 'She. Sells. Sea. Shells. By. The. Sea. Shore. Ha!" He lay back, wheezing in triumph. He glanced up to see Dr. Rowan leaning in the doorway, watching him with a slight smile.
   Still catching his breath, he waved his fingers at her in greeting. She pushed off and came to sit at his side on his bed. She wore her usual concealing green smock, and carried a sack.
   "Raven said you were babbling half the night," she remarked, "but you weren't, were you. You were practicing."
   "Yuh," he nodded. "Gotta talk. C'mand_" he touched his lips, and waved vaguely around the room, "obey."
   "You think so, do you?" Her brows arched in amusement but her eyes, beneath them, regarded him sharply. She shifted, and swung his tray table across between them. "Sit up, my authoritarian little friend. I brought you some toys."
   "Sec'on chil'hd," he muttered glumly, and shoved himself upright again. His chest only ached. At least he seemed done with the more repulsive aspects of his second infancy. A second adolescence still to come? God forbid. Maybe he could skip over that part. Why do I dread an adolescence I cannot remember?
   He laughed briefly as she upended the bag and spread about two dozen parts from some disassembled hand weapons across the table. "Test, huh?" He began to pick them up and fit them together. Stunner, nerve disrupter, plasma arc, and a projectile gun . . . slide, twist, click, knock home . . . one, two, three, four, he laid them in a row. "Pow'r cells dea'. Not armin' me, eh? These_extras." He swept half a dozen spare or odd parts aside into a pile. "Ha. Trick." He grinned smugly at her.
   "You never pointed those at me or yourself while you were handling them," she observed curiously.
   "Mm? Didn' notice." She was right, he realized. He fingered the plasma arc doubtfully.
   "Did anything come up for you while you were doing that?" she asked.
   He shook his head in renewed frustration, then brightened. " 'Membered som'thin s'mornin, tho'. Inna shar." At speed, his speech slurred into unintelligibility again, a logjam of the lips.
   "In the shower," she translated encouragingly. "Tell me. Slow down as much as you need."
   "Slow. Is. Death," he enunciated clearly.
   She blinked. "Still. Tell me."
   "Ah. Well. Think I wuzza boy. Ridin' onna horse. Old man on 'nother horse. Uppa hill. 'S chilly. Horses . . . puffin' lak I 'm." His deep breaths were not deep enough to satisfy. "Trees. Mountain, two, three mountain, covered w' trees, all strung tog'ther wf new plastic tubes. Runnin' down to a shack a' t' bottom. Gran'da happy . . . 'cause tubes are efficient." He struggled to get that last word out intact, and succeeded. "Men'r 'appy too."
   "What are they doing, in this scene?" she asked, sounding baffled. "These men."
   He could see it again in his head, the memory of a memory. "Bur-nin' wood. Makin' sugar."
   "That makes no sense. Sugar comes from biological production vats, not from burning trees," said Rowan.
   "Trees," he asserted. "Brown sug'r trees." Another memory wavered up: the old man breaking off a chunk of something that looked like tan sandstone and giving him a taste by popping it in his mouth. The feel of the gnarled old stained fingers cool against his cheek, sweetness tinged with leather and horses. He shivered at the overwhelming sensory blast. This was real. But he still could name no names. Granda.
   "Mountains mine," he added. The thought made him sad, and he didn't know why.
   "What?"
   "Own 'em." He frowned glumly.
   "Anything else?"
   "No. 'S all there is." His fists clenched. He straightened them, spreading his fingers carefully on the tray table.
   "Are you sure this wasn't a dream from last night?"
   "Wo. Inna shar," he insisted.
   "It's very strange. This, I expected," she nodded to the re-assembled weapons, and began putting them back in the cloth bag. "That," a toss of her head indicated his little story, "doesn't fit. Trees made out of sugar sound pretty dream-like to me."
   Doesn't fit what? A desperate excitement surged through him. He grabbed her around one slim wrist, trapping her hand with a stunner still in it. "Doesn' fi' wha'? Wha' d' you know?"
   "Nothing."
   "Na' nothin'!"
   "That hurts," she said levelly.
   He let go of her instantly. "Na' nothin'," he insisted again. "Som-thin. Wha?"
   She sighed, finished bagging the weapons, and sat back and studied him. "It was a true statement that we did not know who you were. It is now a truer statement that we are not sure which one you are."
   "I gotta choice? Tell me!"
   "You are at a ... tricky stage of your recovery. Cryo-revival amnesiacs seldom recover all of their memories at once. It comes in little cascades. A typical bell-curve. A few at first, then a growing mass. Then it trails off. A few last holes may linger for years. Since you had no other gross cranial injuries, my prognosis is that you will eventually recover your whole personality. But."
   A most sinister but. He stared at her beseechingly.
   "At this stage, on the verge of cascading, a cryo-amnesic can be so hungry for identity, he'll pick up a mistaken one, and start assembling evidence to support it. It can take weeks or months to get it straightened out again. In your case, for special reasons, I think this is not only more than usually possible, it could be more than usually difficult to detangle again. I have to be very, very careful not to suggest anything to you that I am not absolutely certain about. And it's hard, because I'm theorizing in my head probably just as urgently as you are. I have to be sure that anything you give me really comes from you, and is not a reflection of some suggestion on my part."
   "Oh." He sagged back in bed, horribly disappointed.
   "There is a possible short-cut," she added.
   He surged back up again. "Wha'? Gimme!"
   "There is a drug called fast-penta. One of its derivatives is a psychiatric sedative, but its usual use is as an interrogation drug. It's actually a misnomer to call it a truth serum, though laymen insist on doing so."
   "I ... know fas'pent'." His brows drew down. He knew something important about fast-penta. What was it?
   "It has some extremely relaxing effects, and sometimes, in cryo-revival patients, it can trigger memory cascades."
   "Ah!"
   "However, it can also be embarrassing. Under its influence people will happily talk about whatever crosses their minds, even their most intimate and private thoughts. Good medical ethics requires me to warn you about that. Also, some people are allergic to the drug."
   "Where'd . . . you learn . . . goo' med'cal ethics?" he asked curiously.
   Strangely, she flinched. "Escobar," she said, and eyed him.
   "Where we now?"
   "I'd rather not say, just yet."
   "How could that contam'nate m' mem'ry?" he demanded indignantly.
   "I can tell you soon, I think," she soothed. "Soon."
   "Mm," he growled.
   She pulled a little white packet from her coat pocket, opened it, and peeled off a plastic-backed dot. "Hold out your arm." He obeyed, and she pressed the dot against the underside of his forearm. "Patch test," she explained. "Because of what I theorize about your line of work, I think you have a higher than normal chance of allergy. Artificially-induced allergy."
   She peeled the dot away again_it prickled_and gazed closely at his arm. A pink spot appeared. She frowned at it. "Does that itch?" she asked suspiciously.
   "No," he lied, and clenched his right hand to keep from scratching at the spot. A drug to give him his mind back_he had to have it. Turn white again, blast you, he thought to the pink splotch.
   "You seem to be a little sensitive," she mused. "Marginally."
   "Pleassse ..."
   Her lips twisted in doubt. "Well . . . what do we have to lose? I'll be right back."
   She exited, and returned shortly with two hyposprays, which she laid on the tray table. "This is the fast-penta," she pointed, "and this is the fast-penta antagonist. You let me know right away if you start to feel strange, itch, tingle, have trouble breathing or swallowing, or if your tongue starts to feel thick."
   "Feels th'ck now," he objected, as she pushed up both his sleeves on his thin white arms and pressed the first spray to the inside of his elbow. "How d'l tell?"
   "You'll be able to tell. Now just lie back and relax. You should start to feel dreamy, like you're floating, by the time you count backward from ten. Try it."
   "Te". Nan. Ei'. Seben. Si', fav, fo', tree-two-wun." He did not feel dreamy. He felt tense and nervous and miserable. "You sure yo' go' rat one?" His fingers began to drum on the tray table. The sound was unnaturally loud in his ears. Objects in the room were taking on hard, bright outlines with colored fringes. Rowan's face seemed suddenly drained of personality, an ivory mask.
   The mask loomed threateningly toward him. "What's your name?" it hissed.
   "I ... I ... yiyi ..." His mouth clogged with stutters. He was the invisible eye, nameless. . . .
   "Strange," the mask murmured. "Your blood pressure should be going down, not up."
   Abruptly, he remembered what was so important about fast-penta.
   'Fas'pent'_maksmeyper." She shook her head in non-comprehension.
   'Yiper," he reiterated, out of a mouth that seemed to be seizing up in spasms. He wanted to talk. A thousand words rushed to his tongue, a chain-collision along his nerves. "Ya. Ya. Ya."
   "This isn't usual." She frowned at the hypospray, still in her hand.
   "No sh't." His arms and legs drew up like coiled springs. Rowan's face grew charming, like a doll's. His heart raced. The room wavered, as if he were swimming underwater. With an effort, he uncoiled. He had to relax. He had to relax right now.
   "Do you remember anything?" she asked. Her dark eyes were like pools, liquid and beautiful. He wanted to swim in those eyes, to shine in them. He wanted to please her. He wanted to coax her out of that green cloth armor, to dance naked with him in the starlight, to ... his mumbles to this effect suddenly found voice in poetry, of a sort, actually, it was a very dirty limerick playing on some obvious symbolism involving wormholes and jumpships. Fortunately, it came out rather garbled.
   To his relief, she smiled. But there was some un-funny association. . . . "Las' time I recited that, som'bod' beat shit outta me. Wuz i fas'pent' then, too."
   Alertness coursed through her lovely long body. "You've been given fast-penta before? What else do you remember about it?"
   " 'Is name wuz Galen. Angry wi' me. Doan' know why." He remembered a reddening face wavering over him, radiating an implacable, murderous hatred. Blows raining on him. He searched himself for remembered fear, and found it oddly mixed with pity. "I doan' unnerstan'."
   "What else did he ask you about?"
   "Doan' know. Told 'im 'nother poem."
   "You recited poetry at him, under fast-penta interrogation?"
   "Fer hours. Made 'im mad as hell."
   Her brows rose; one finger touched her soft lips, which parted in delight. "You beat a fast-penta interrogation? Remarkable! Let's not talk about poetry, then. But you remember Ser Galen. Huh!"
   "Galen fit?" He cocked his head anxiously. Ser Galen, yes! The name was important; she recognized it. "Tell me."
   "I'm . . . not sure. Every time I think I'm taking a step forward with you, we seem to go two sideways and one back."
   "Lak to step out wi' you," he confided, and listened to himself in horror as he went on to describe, briefly and crudely, what else he would like to do with her. "Ah. Ah. Sorry, m'lady." He stuffed his fingers into his mouth, and bit them.
   "It's all right," she soothed. "It's the fast-penta."
   "No_izza testost'rone."
   She laughed outright. It was most encouraging, but his momentary elation was drowned again in a new wash of tension. His hands plucked and twisted at his clothing, and his feet twitched.
   She frowned at a medical monitor on the wall. "Your blood pressure is still going up. Charming as you are under fast-penta, this is not a normal reaction." She picked up the second hypospray. "I think we'd better stop now."
   "M' not a normal man," he said sadly. "Mutant." A wave of anxiety rushed over him. "You gonna tak' my brain out?" he asked in sudden suspicion, eyeing the hypospray. And then, in a mind-blinding blast of realization, "Hey! I know where I am! I'm on Jackson's Whole!" He stared at her in terror, jumped to his feet, and bolted for the door, dodging her lunge.
   "No, wait, wait!" she called, running after him with the glittering hypospray still in her hand. "You're having a drug reaction, stop! Let me get rid of it! Poppy, grab him!"
   He dodged the horse-tail-haired Dr. Durona in the lab corridor, and flung himself into the lift tube, boosting himself up with yanks on the safety ladder that sent bolts of searing pain through his half-healed chest muscles. A whirling chaos of corridors and floors, shouts and running footsteps, resolved at last into the lobby he had found before.
   He shot past some workmen maneuvering a float-pallet stacked with cases through the transparent doors. No force screen shocked him backward this time. A green-parka'd guard turned in slow motion, drawing a stunner, mouth open on a shout that emerged as thickly as cold oil.
   He blinked in blinding grey daylight at a ramp, a paved lot for vehicles, and dirty snow. Ice and gravel bit his bare feet as he ran, gasping, across the lot. A wall enclosed the compound. There was a gate in the wall, open, and more guards in green parkas. "Don't stun him!" a woman yelled from behind him.
   He ran into a grimy street, and barely dodged a ground-car. The piercing grey-whiteness alternated with bursts of color in his eyes. A broad open space across the street was dotted with bare black trees with branches like clutching claws, straining at the sky. He glimpsed other buildings, behind walls, farther down the street, looming and strange. Nothing was familiar in this landscape. He made for the open space and the trees. Black and magenta dizziness clouded his eyes. The cold air seared his lungs. He staggered and fell, rolling onto his back, unable to breathe.
   Half a dozen Dr. Duronas pounced on him like wolves upon their kill. They took his arms and legs, and pulled him up off the snow. Rowan dashed up, her face strained. A hypospray hissed. They hustled him back across the roadway like a trussed sheep, and hurried him inside the big white building. His head began to clear, but his chest was racked with pain, as if it were clamped in a squeezing vise. By the time they put him back in his bed in the underground clinic, the drug-induced false paranoia had washed out of his system. To be replaced by real paranoia. . . .
   "Do you think anyone saw him?" an alto voice asked anxiously.
   "Gate guards," another voice bit out. "Delivery crew."
   "Anybody else?"
   "I don't know," Rowan panted, her hair escaping in snow-dampened wisps. "Half a dozen ground-cars went by while we were chasing him. I didn't see anyone in the park."
   "I saw a couple of people walking," volunteered another Dr. Durona. "At a distance, across the pond. They were looking at us, but I doubt they could see much."
   "We were a hell of a show, for a few minutes."
   "What happened this time, Rowan?" the white-haired alto Dr. Durona demanded wearily. She shuffled closer and stared at him, leaning on a carved walking stick. She did not seem to carry it as an affectation, but as a real prop. All deferred to her. Was this the mysterious Lilly?
   "I gave him a dose of fast-penta," Rowan reported stiffly, "to try and jog his memory. It works sometimes, for cryo-revivals. But he had a reaction. His blood pressure shot up, he went paranoid, and he took off like a whippet. We didn't run him down till he collapsed in the park." She was still catching her own breath, he saw as his agony started to recede.
   The old Dr. Durona sniffed. "Did it work?"
   Rowan hesitated. "Some odd things came up. I need to talk with Lilly."
   "Immediately," said the old Dr. Durona_not-Lilly, apparently. "I_" but she was cut off when his shivering, stuttering attempt to talk blended into a convulsion.
   The world turned to confetti for a moment. He came back to focus with two of the women holding him down, Rowan hovering over him snapping orders, and the rest of the Duronas scattering. "I'll come up as soon as I can," said Rowan desperately over her shoulder. "I can't leave him now."
   The old Dr. Durona nodded understanding, and withdrew. Rowan waved away a proffered hypospray of some anti-convulsant. "I'm writing a standing order. This man gets nothing without a sensitivity scan first." She ran off most of her helpers, and made the room dim and quiet and warm again. Slowly, he recovered the rhythm of his breath, though he was still very sick to his stomach.
   "I'm sorry," she told him. "I didn't realize fast-penta could do that to you."
   He tried to say, It's not your fault, but his powers of speech seemed to have relapsed. "D-d-d-i, diddi, do. Bad. Thing?"
   She took far too long to reply. "Maybe it will be all right."
   Two hours later, they came with a float-pallet and moved him.
   "We're getting some other patients," Dr. Chrys of the wing-hair told him blandly. "We need your room." Lies? Half-truths?
   Where they moved him to puzzled him most of all. He had visions of a locked cell, but instead they took him upstairs via a freight lift tube and deposited him on a camp-bed set up in Rowan's personal suite. It was one of a row of similar chambers, presumably the Duronas' residence-floor. Her suite consisted of a sitting room/study and a bedroom, plus a private bath. It was reasonably spacious, though cluttered. He felt less like a prisoner than like a pet, being smuggled against the rules into some women's dormitory. Though he had seen another male-morph Dr. Durona besides Raven, a man of about thirty Dr. Chrys had addressed as "Hawk." Birds and flowers, they were all birds and flowers in this concrete cage.
   Later still, a young Durona brought dinner on a tray, and he ate together with Rowan at a little table in her sitting room as the grey day outside faded to dusk. He supposed there was no real change in his prisoner/patient status, but it felt good to be out of the hospital-style room, free of the monitors and sinister medical equipment. To be doing something so prosaic as having dinner with a friend.
   He walked around the sitting room, after they ate. "Mind 'f I look it your things?"
   "Go ahead. Let me know if anything comes up for you."
   She still would not tell him anything directly about himself, but she low seemed willing at least to talk about herself. His internal picture of the world shifted as they spoke. Why do I have wormhole maps in my head? Maybe he was going to have to recover himself the hard way . Learn everything that existed in the universe, and whatever was left, that dwarfish-man-shaped hole in the center, would be him by process of elimination. A daunting task.
   He stared out the polarized window at the faint glitter hanging in he air, as if fairy dust were falling all around. He recognized the force screen for what it was, now, an improvement in cognition over is initial head-first encounter with it. The shield was military-grade, he realized, impermeable down to viruses and gas molecules, and up to ... what? Projectiles and plasma, certainly. Must be a powerful generator around here somewhere. The protection was a late add-on to the building's architecture, not incorporated into its design. Some history inherent there. . . . "We are on Jackson's Whole, aren' we?" he asked.
   "Yes. What does that mean to you?"
   "Danger. Bad things happenin'. What is this pla'?" He waved around.
   "The Durona Clinic."
   "Ya, so? What you do? Why'm I here?"
   "We are the personal clinic of House Fell. We do all sorts of medical tasks for them, as needed."
   "House Fell. Weapons." The associations fell into place quite automatically. "Biological weapons." He eyed her accusingly.
   "Sometimes," she admitted. "And biological defenses, too."
   Was he a House Fell trooper? A captured enemy trooper? Hell, what army would employ a half-crippled dwarf as any kind of trooper?
   "House Fell give me to you to do?"
   "No."
   "No? S_why'm I here?"
   "That's been a great puzzle for us, too. You arrived frozen in a cryo-chamber, with every sign of having been prepped in great haste, a crate addressed to me, via common carrier, with no return address. We hoped if we revived you, you could tell us."
   " 'S more goin' on than that."
   "Yes," she said frankly.
   "Bu' you won' tell me."
   "Not yet."
   "Wha' happens if I walk outta here?"
   She looked alarmed. "Please don't. That could get you killed."
   "Again."
   "Again," she nodded.
   "By who?"
   "That . . . depends on who you are."
   He veered off the subject, then ran the conversation around to it three more times, but could not lull or trick her into telling him any more about himself. Exhausted, he gave up for the night, only to lie awake on his cot worrying the problem as a predator might worry a carcass. But all his bone-tossing did no good but to freeze his mind with frustration. Sleep on it, he told himself. Tomorrow must bring him something new. Whatever else this situation was, it wasn't stable. He felt that, felt balanced as though on a knife-edge; below him lay darkness, concealing feathers or sharpened stakes or maybe nothing at all, an endless fall.
   He wasn't quite sure of the rationale behind the hot bath and the therapeutic massage. Exercise, now, he could see that; Dr. Chrys had lugged in an exercise bicycle to Rowan's study, and let him sweat himself near to passing out. Anything that painful must be good for him. No push-ups yet, though. He'd tried one, and collapsed with a wide-eyed, muffled squeak of agony, and been yelled at quite firmly by an irate Dr. Chrys for attempting unauthorized bodily motions.
   Dr. Chrys had made notes and gone off again, leaving him to Rowan's tenderer mercies. He lay now steaming gently in Rowan's bed, dressed in a towel, while she reviewed skeleto-muscular structure all up and down his back. Dr. Chrys's fingers, doing massage, had been like probes. Rowan's hands caressed. Not anatomically equipped to purr, he did manage a small, encouraging moan of appreciation now and then. She worked down to his feet and toes, and started back up.
   Face down, mashed comfortably into her pillows, he became gradually aware that a very important bodily system was reporting for duty, for the first time since his revival. Res-erection indeed. His face flushed in a mixture of embarrassment and delight, and he flung an arm up as-if-casually to conceal his expression. She's your doctor. She'll want to know. It wasn't as if she weren't intimately familiar with every part of his body, inside and out, already. She'd been up to her bloody elbows in him, literally. He stayed hidden in his arm-cave anyway.
   "Roll over," Rowan said, "and I'll do your other side."
   "Er . . . d'rather not," he mumbled into the pillow.
   "Why not?"
   "Um . . . 'member how you keep askin' if somethin' has come up for me?"
   "Yes ..."
   "Well . . . somethin' has."
   There was a brief silence, then, "Oh! In that case, definitely roll over. I need to examine you."
   He took a breath. "Things we do fer science."
   He rolled over, and she took away his towel. "Has this happened before?" she inquired.
   "No. Firs' time in my life. This life."
   Her long cool fingers probed quickly, medically. "That looks good," she said with enthusiasm.
   "Thank you," he carolled cheerfully.
   She laughed. He didn't need a memory to tell him it was a very good sign when a woman laughed at his jokes at this point. Experimentally, gently, he pulled her down to face him. Hooray for science. Let's see what happens. He kissed her. She kissed him back. He melted.
   Speech and science were both put aside for a time, after that. Not to mention the green coat and all the layers underneath. Her body was as lovely as he'd imagined, a pure aesthetic of line and curve, softness and floral, hidden places. His own body contrasted vividly, a little rack of bones scored with shocking red scars.
   An intense consciousness of his recent death welled up in him, and he found himself kissing her frantically, passionately, as if she were life itself and he could so consume and possess her. He didn't know if she was enemy or friend, if this was a right or wrong thing. But it was warm and liquid and moving, not icy and still, surely the most opposite thing imaginable to cryo-stasis. Seize the day. Because the night waited, coldly implacable. This lesson burned from his center outward, like radiation. Her eyes widened. Only his shortness of breath forced him to slow down to a more decorous, reasonable pace.
   His ugliness ought to have bothered him, but it didn't, and he wondered why. We make love with our eyes closed. Who had told him that? The same woman who'd told him, It's not the meat, it's the motion? Opening Rowan's body was like facing that pile of field-stripped weaponry. He knew what to do, what parts counted and which were camouflage, but could not remember how he'd learned it all. The training was there, yet the trainer was erased. It was a more deeply disturbing coupling of the familiar with the strange than any he'd yet experienced here.
   She shivered, sighed, and relaxed, and he kissed his way back up her body to murmur in her ear, "Um . . . doan' think I can do pushups, jus' yet."
   "Oh." Her glazed eyes opened, and focused. "My. Yes." A few moments of experiment found a medically-approved position, flat on his back in great comfort with no pressure or strain on his chest, arms, or abdomen, and then it was his turn. That felt right, ladies first and then he wouldn't have pillows thrown at him for falling asleep immediately afterwards. A terribly familiar pattern, with all the details wrong. Rowan had done this before too, he judged, though perhaps not often. But great expertise on her part was scarcely required. His body worked just fine. . . .
   "Dr. D," he sighed up at her, "yr a gen'ius. Aes . . . Asku . . . Aesch . . . that Greek guy coul' tak' lessons in resurr'ction from you."
   She laughed, and oozed down beside him, body to body. My height doesn't matter when we're lying down. He'd known that, too. They exchanged less-hurried, exploratory kisses, savored slowly like after-dinner mints.
   "You're very good at that," she murmured wheezily, nibbling on his ear.
   "Yea ..." His grin faded, and he stared at the ceiling, brows drawing down in a combination of gentle, post-coital melancholy, and renewed, if purely mental, frustration. ". . . wonder if I was married?" Her head drew back, and he could have bitten his tongue at her stricken look. "Doan' think so," he added quickly.
   "No . . . no," she settled back again. "You're not married."
   "Which ever one I am?"
   "That's right."
   "Huh." He hesitated, winding her long hair in his fingers, spreading it idly out in a fan across the burst of red lines on his torso. "So who d'you think you were makin' love to, jus' now?"
   She touched a long index finger gently to his forehead. "You. Just you."
   This was most pleasing, but . . . "Wuzzat love, or therapy?"
   She smiled quizzically, tracing his face. "A little of both, I think. And curiosity. And opportunity. I've been pretty immersed in you, for the past three months."
   It felt like an honest answer. "Seems t'me you made t' opportunity."
   A small smirk escaped her lips. "Well . . . maybe."
   Three months. Interesting. So he'd been dead a bit over two months. He must have absorbed a lot of the Durona Group's resources, in that time. To begin with, three months of this woman's labor were not cheap.
   "Why you doin' this?" he asked, frowning at the ceiling as she snuggled carefully around his shoulder. "I mean t'whole thing. What d'you expect me to do for you?" Half-crippled, tongue-tied, blank and stupid, not a dollar to his non-existent name. "You're all hangin' on m'recovery like I'm your hope 'f heaven." Even the brutally efficient physical therapist Chrys he'd come to see as pushing him for his good. He almost liked her best, for her merciless drive. He resonated to it. "Who else wants me, tha' you should hide me? Enemies?" Or friends?
   "Enemies for certain," Rowan sighed.
   "Mm." He lay back in lassitude; she dozed, he didn't. He touched her net of hair and wondered. What did she see in him? I thought it as the enchanted knight's crystal coffin ... I picked out enough grenade fragments to be certain you weren't a bystander. . . . So, there was work to be done. Nor did the Durona Group want any ordinary mercenary. If this was Jackson's Whole, they could hire ordinary thugs by the boatload.
   But then, he'd never thought he was an ordinary man. Not even for a minute.
   Oh, milady. Who do you need me to be?
   

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

   The re-discovery of sex fairly immobilized him for the next three days, but his instinct for escape surfaced one afternoon when Rowan left him sleeping, but he wasn't. He unlidded his eyes, and traced the pattern of scars on his chest, and thought it over. Out was clearly a wrong direction. In was one he hadn't tried yet. Everybody here seemed to go to Lilly with their problems. Very well. He would go to Lilly too.
   Up, or down? As a Jacksonian leader, she ought traditionally to lodge in either a penthouse or a bunker. Baron Ryoval lived in a bunker, or at least there was a dim image in his head associated with that name, involving shadowy sub-basements. Baron Fell took the penthouse at apogee, looking down on it all from his orbital station. He seemed to have a lot of pictures in his head of Jackson's Whole. Was it his home? The thought confused him. Up. Up and in.
   He dressed in his grey knits, borrowed some of Rowan's socks, and slipped into the corridor. He found a lift tube and took it to the top floor, just one above Rowan's. It was another floor of residence suites. At its center he found another lift tube, palm-locked. Any Durona could use it. A spiral staircase wound around it. He climbed the stairs very slowly, and waited, near the top, till he had all his breath back. He knocked on the door.
   It slid aside, and a slim Eurasian boy of about ten regarded him gravely. "What do you want?" The boy frowned.
   "I want to see your . . . grandmother."
   "Bring him in, Robin," a soft voice called.
   The boy ducked his head, and motioned him inside. His sock feet trod noiselessly across a deep carpet. The windows were polarized against the dark grey afternoon, and pools of warmer, yellower lamplight fought the gloom. Beyond the window, the force field revealed itself with tiny scintillations, as water droplets or particulars matter were detected and repelled or annihilated.
   A shrunken woman sat in a wide chair, and watched him approach her through dark eyes set in a face of old ivory. She wore a high-necked black silk tunic and loose trousers. Her hair was pure white, and very long; a slim girl, most literally twin to the boy, was brushing it over the back of the chair, in long, long strokes. The room was very warm. Regarding her regarding him, he wondered how he could ever have thought that worried old woman with the cane might be Lilly. Hundred-year-old eyes looked at you differently.
   "Ma'am," he said. His mouth felt suddenly dry.
   "Sit down," she nodded to a short sofa set around the corner of the low table in front of her. "Violet, dear," a thin hand, all white wrinkles and blue ropy veins, touched the girl's hand which had paused protectively on her black silk shoulder. "Bring tea now. Three cups. Robin, please go downstairs and get Rowan."
   The girl arranged the hair in a falling fan around the woman's upright torso, and the two children vanished in un-childlike silence. Clearly, the Durona Group did not employ outsiders. No chance of a mole ever penetrating their organization. With equal obedience, he sank into the seat she'd indicated.
   Her vowels had a vibrato of age, but her diction, containing them, was perfect. "Have you come to yourself, sir?" she inquired.
   "No, ma'am," he said sadly. "Only to you." He thought carefully about how to phrase his question. Lilly would not be any less medically careful than Rowan about yielding him clues. "Why can't you identify me?"
   Her white brows rose. "Well put. You are ready for an answer, I think. Ah."
   The lift tube hummed, and Rowan's alarmed face appeared. She hurried out. "Lilly, I'm sorry. I thought he was asleep_"
   "It's all right, child. Sit down. Pour the tea," for Violet reappeared around the corner bearing a large tray. Lilly whispered to the girl behind a faintly trembling hand, and she nodded and scampered off. Rowan knelt in what appeared to be a precise old ritual_had she once held Violet's place? he rather thought so_and poured green tea into thin white cups, and handed it round. She sat at Lilly's knees, and stole a brief, reassuring touch of the white hair coiled there.
   The tea was very hot. Since he'd lately taken a deep dislike to cold, this pleased him, and he sipped carefully. "Answers, ma'am?" he reminded her cautiously.
   Rowan's lips parted in a negative, alarmed breath; Lilly crooked up one finger, and quelled her.
   "Background," said the old woman. "I believe the time has come to tell you a story."
   He nodded, and settled back with his tea.
   "Once upon a time," she smiled briefly, "there were three brothers. A proper fairy tale, ai? The eldest and original, and two young clones. The eldest_as happens in these tales_was born to a magnificent patrimony. Title_wealth_comfort_his father, if not exactly a king, commanded more power than any king in pre-Jump history. And thus he became the target of many enemies. Since he was known to dote upon his son, it occurred to more than one of his enemies to try and strike at him through his only child. Hence this peculiar multiplication." She nodded at him. It made his belly shiver. He sipped more tea, to cover his confusion.
   She paused. "Can you name any names yet?"
   "No, ma'am."
   "Mm." She abandoned the fairy tale; her voice grew more clipped. "Lord Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar was the original. He is now about twenty-eight standard years old. His first clone was made right here on Jackson's Whole, twenty-two years ago, a purchase by a Komarran resistance group from House Bharaputra. We do not know what this clone names himself, but the Komarrans' elaborate substitution plot failed about two years ago, and the clone escaped."
   "Galen," he whispered.
   She glanced sharply at him. "He was the chief of those Komarrans, yes. The second clone ... is a puzzle. The best guess is that he was manufactured by the Cetagandans, but no one knows. He first appeared about ten years ago as a full-blown and exceptionally brilliant mercenary commander, claiming the quite legal Betan name of Miles Naismith, in his maternal line. He has shown himself no friend to the Cetagandans, so the theory that he is a Cetagandan renegade has a certain compelling logic. No one knows his age, though obviously he can be no more than twenty-eight." She took a sip of her tea. "It is our belief that you are one of those two clones."
   "Shipped to you like a crate of frozen meat? With my chest blown out?"
   "Yes."
   "So what? Clones_even frozen ones_can't be a novelty here." He glanced at Rowan.
   "Let me go on. About three months ago, Bharaputra's manufactured clone returned home_with a crew of mercenary soldiers at his back that he had apparently stolen from the Dendarii Fleet by the simple expedient of pretending to be his clone-twin, Admiral Naismith. He attacked Bharaputra's clone-creche in an attempt to either steal, or possibly free, a group of clones slated to be the bodies for brain transplants, a business which I personally loathe."
   He touched his chest. "He . . . failed?"
   "No. But Admiral Naismith followed in hot pursuit of his stolen hip and troops. In the melee that ensued downside at Bharaputra's main surgical facilities, one of the two was killed. The other escaped, along with the mercenaries and most of Bharaputra's very valuable clone-cattle. They made a fool of Vasa Luigi_I laughed myself sick when I first heard about it." She sipped tea demurely.
   He could actually almost picture her doing so, though it made his eyes cross slightly.
   "Before they jumped, the Dendarii Mercenaries posted a reward for the return of a cryo-chamber containing the remains of a man they claim to have been the Bharaputran-made clone."
   His eyes widened. "Me?"
   She held up a hand. "Vasa Luigi, Baron Bharaputra, is absolutely convinced that they were lying, and that the man in the box was really their Admiral Naismith."
   "Me?" he said less certainly.
   "Georish Stauber, Baron Fell, refuses to even guess. And Baron Ryoval would tear a town apart for even a fifty percent chance of laying hands on Admiral Naismith, who injured him four years ago as no one has in a century." Her lips curved in a scalpel-smile.
   It all made sense, which made no sense at all. It was like a story heard long ago, in childhood, and re-encountered. In another lifetime. Familiarity under glass. He touched his head, which ached. Rowan matched the gesture with concern.
   "Don't you have medical records? Something?"
   "At some risk, we obtained the developmental records of Bharaputra's clone. Unfortunately, they only go up to age fourteen. We have nothing on Admiral Naismith. Alas, one cannot run a triangulation on one data point."
   He turned toward Rowan. "You know me, inside and out. Can't you tell?"
   "You're strange." Rowan shook her head. "Half your bones are plastic replacement parts, do you know? The real ones that are left show old breaks, old traumas. ... I'd guess you not only older than Bharaputra's clone ought to be, I'd guess you older than the original Lord Vorkosigan, and that makes no sense. If we could just get one solid, certain clue. The memories you've reported so far are terribly ambiguous. You know weapons, as the Admiral might_but Bharaputra's clone was trained as an assassin. You remember Ser Galen, and only Bharaputra's clone should do that. I found out about those sugar trees. They're called maple trees, and they originate on Earth_where Bharaputra's clone was taken for training. And so on." She flung up her hands in frustration.
   "If you're not getting the right answer," he said slowly, "maybe you're not asking the right question."
   "So what is the right question?"
   He shook his head, mutely. "Why . . ." His hands spread. "Why not turn my frozen body over to the Dendarii and collect the reward? Why not sell me to Baron Ryoval, if he wants me so much? Why revive me?"
   "I wouldn't sell a laboratory rat to Baron Ryoval," Lilly stated flatly. She twitched a brief smile. "Old business, between us."
   How old? Older than he, whoever he was.
   "As for the Dendarii_we may deal with them yet. Depending on who you are."
   They were approaching the heart of the matter; he could sense it. "Yes?"
   "Four years ago, Admiral Naismith visited Jackson's Whole, and besides counting a most spectacular coup on Ry Ryoval, left with a certain Dr. Hugh Canaba, one of Bharaputra's top genetics people. Now, I knew Canaba. More to the point, I know what Vasa Luigi and Lotus paid to get him here, and how many House secrets he was privy to. They would never have let him go alive. Yet he's gone, and no one on Jackson's Whole has ever been able to trace him."
   She leaned forward intently. "Assuming Canaba was not just disposed of out an airlock_Admiral Naismith has shown he can get people out. In fact, it's a speciality he's famous for. That is our interest in him."
   "You want off-planet?" He glanced around at Lilly Durona's comfortable, self-contained little empire. "Why?"
   "I have a Deal with Georish Stauber_Baron Fell. It's a very old Deal, as we are very old dealers. My time is surely running out, and Georish is growing," she grimaced, "unreliable. If I die_or if he dies_or if he succeeds in having his brain transplanted to a younger body, as he has attempted at least once to arrange_our old Deal will be broken. The Durona Group might be offered less admirable deals than the one we have enjoyed so long with House Fell. It might be broken up_sold_weakened so as to invite attack from old enemies like Ry, who remembers an insult or an injury forever. It might be forced to work it does not choose. I've been looking for a way out for the last couple of years. Admiral Naismith knows one."
   She wanted him to be Admiral Naismith, obviously the most valuable of the two clones. "What if I'm the other one?" He stared at his hands. They were just his hands. No hints there.
   "You might be ransomed."
   By whom? Was'he savior, or commodity? What a choice. Rowan looked uneasy.
   "What am I to you if I can't remember who I am?"
   "No one at all, little man." Her dark eyes glinted, momentarily, like obsidian chips.
   This woman had survived nearly a century on Jackson's Whole. It would not do to underestimate her ruthlessness on the basis of one picky prejudice about clone-brain transplants.
   They finished their tea, and retreated to Rowan's room.
   "What in all that seemed familiar to you?" Rowan asked him anxiously when they were alone on her little sofa.
   "All of it," he said, in deep perplexity. "And yet_Lilly seems to think I can spirit you all away like some kind of magician. But even f I am Admiral Naismith, I can't remember how I did it!"
   "Sh," she tried to calm him. "You're ripe for memory-cascade, I swear. I can almost see it starting. Your speech has improved vastly in just the last few days."
   "All that therapeutic kissing," he smiled, a suggestive compliment :hat won him, as he'd hoped, some more therapy. But when he came up for air he said, "It won't come back to me if I'm the other one. I remember Galen. Earth. A house in London . . . what's the clone's name?"
   "We don't know," she said, and at his exasperated grasp of her bands added, "No, we really don't."
   "Admiral Naismith . . . shouldn't be Miles Naismith. He should be Mark Pierre Vorkosigan." How the hell did he know that? Mark Pierre. Piotr Pierre. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and wouldn't keep her, a taunt from out of a crowd that had put an old man into a terrifying murderous rage, he'd had to be restrained by_ the image escaped him. Gran'da? "If the Bharaputra-made clone is the third son, he could be named anything." Something wasn't right.
   He tried to imagine Admiral Naismith's childhood as a Cetagandan secret covert ops project. His childhood? It must have been extraordinary, if he'd not only escaped at the age of eighteen or less, but invaded Cetagandan Intelligence and established his fortune within a year. But he could think of nothing from such a youth. A complete blank.
   "What are you going to do with me if I'm not Naismith? Keep me is a pet? For how long?"
   Rowan pursed her lips in worry. "If you are the Bharaputran-made clone_you're going to need to get off Jackson's Whole yourself. The Dendarii raid made an awful mess out of Vasa Luigi's headquarters. He has blood to avenge, as well as property. And pride. If it's the case_I'll try to get you out."
   "You? Or you all?"
   "I've never gone against the group." She rose, and paced across her sitting room. "Yet I lived a year, on Escobar, alone, when I was taking my cryo-revival training. I've often wondered . . . what it would be like to be half of a couple. Instead of one-fortieth of a group. Would I feel bigger?"
   "Were you bigger when you were all of one, on Escobar?"
   "I don't know. It's a silly conceit. Still_one can't help thinking of Lotus."
   "Lotus. Baronne Bharaputra? The one who left your group?"
   "Yes. Lilly's oldest daughter after Rose. Lilly says ... if we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately. It's a reference to an ancient method of execution that_"
   "I know what hanging is," he said hastily, before she could go into the medical details.
   Rowan stared out her window. "Jackson's Whole is no place to be alone. You can't trust anybody."
   "An interesting paradox. Makes for quite a dilemma."
   She searched his face for irony, found it, and frowned. "It's no joke."
   Indeed. Even Lilly Durona's self-referential maternal strategy hadn't quite solved the problem, as Lotus had proved.
   He eyed her. "Were you ordered to sleep with me?" he asked suddenly.
   She flinched. "No." She paced again. "But I did ask permission. Lilly said to go ahead, it might help attach you to our interests." She paused. "Does that seem terribly cold, to you?"
   "On Jackson's Whole_merely prudent." And attachments surely ran two ways. Jackson's Whole was no place to be alone. But you can't trust anyone.
   If anyone was sane here, he swore it was by accident.
   Reading, an exercise that had at first given him a stabbing sensation in the eyes and instant excruciating headaches, was getting easier. He could go for up to ten minutes at a time now before it became too blinding to bear. Holed up in Rowan's study, he pushed himself to the limits of pain, an information-bite, a few minutes' rest, and try again. Beginning at the center outward, he read up first on Jackson's Whole, its unique history, non-governmental structure, and the one hundred and sixteen Great Houses and countless Houses Minor, with their interlocking alliances and vendettas, roiling deals and betrayals. The Durona Group was well on its way to growing into a House Minor in its own right, he judged, budding from House Fell like a hydra, also like a hydra reproducing asexually. Mentions of Houses Bharaputra, Hargraves, Dyne, Ryoval and Fell triggered images in his head that did not come from the vid display. A few of them were even starting to cross-connect. Too few. He wondered if it was significant that the Houses that seemed most familiar were also the ones most famous for dealing in off-planet illegalities.
   Whoever I am, I know this place. And yet ... his visions tasted small in scope, too shallow to represent a formative lifetime. Maybe he'd been a small person. Still, it was more than he could dredge up from his subconscious regarding the youth of the putative Admiral Naismith, the Cetagandan-produced clone.
   Gran'da. Those had been memories with mass, an almost stunning sensory weight. Who was Gran'da? Jacksonian fosterer? Komarran mentor? Cetagandan trainer? Someone huge and fascinating, mysterious and old and dangerous. Gran'da had no source, he seemed to come with the universe.
   Sources. Perhaps a study of his progenitor, the crippled Barrayaran lordling Vorkosigan, might yield up something. He'd been made in Vorkosigan's image, after all, which was a hell of a thing to do to any poor sod. He pulled up a listing of references to Barrayar from Rowan's comconsole library. There were some hundreds of non-fiction books, vids, documents and documentaries. For the sake of a frame, he began with a general history, scanning rapidly. The Fifty-thousand Firsters. Wormhole collapse. The Time of Isolation, the Bloody Centuries . . . the Re-discovery . . . the words blurred. His head felt full to bursting. Familiar, so achingly familiar ... he had to stop.
   Panting, he darkened the room and lay down on the little sofa till his eyes stopped throbbing. But then, if he'd ever been trained to replace Vorkosigan, it all ought to be very familiar indeed. He'd have had to study Barrayar forward and backward. I have. He wanted to beg Rowan to shackle him to a wall and give him another dose of fast-penta, regardless of what it did to his blood pressure. The stuff had almost worked. Maybe another try ...
   The door hissed. "Hello?" The lights came up. Rowan stood in the doorway. "Are you all right?"
   "Headache. Reading."
   "You shouldn't try to ..."
   Take it so fast, he supplied silently, Rowan's constant refrain of the last few days, since his interview with Lilly. But this time, she cut herself off. He pushed up; she came and sat by him. "Lilly wants me to bring you upstairs."
   "All right_" He made to rise, but she stopped him.
   She kissed him. It was a long, long kiss, which at first delighted and then worried him. He broke away to ask, "Rowan, what's the matter?"
   "... I think I love you."
   "This is a problem?"
   "Only my problem." She managed a brief, unhappy smile. "I'll handle it."
   He captured her hands, traced tendon and vein. She had brilliant hands. He did not know what to say.
   She drew him to his feet. "Come on." They held hands all the way to the entrance to the penthouse lift-tube. When she disengaged to press the palm lock, she did not take his hand again. They rose together, and exited around the chromium railing into Lilly's living room.
   Lilly sat upright and formal in her wide padded chair, her white hair braided today in a single thick rope that wound down over her shoulder to her lap. She was attended by Hawk, who stood silently behind her and to her right. Not an attendant. A guard. Three strangers dressed in grey quasi-military uniforms with white trim were ranged around her, two women seated and a man standing. One of the women had dark curls, and brown eyes that turned on him with a gaze that scorched him. The other, older woman had short light-brown hair barely touched with grey. But it was the man who riveted him.
   My God. It's the other me.
   Or ... not-me. They stood eye to eye. This one was painfully neat, boots clean, uniform pressed and formal, his mere appearance a salute to Lilly. Insignia glinted on his collar. Admiral . . . Naismith? Naismith was the name stitched over the left breast of his officer's pocketed undress jacket. A sharp intake of breath, an electric snap of the grey eyes, and a half-suppressed smile made the short man's face wonderfully alive. But if he was a bony shadow of himself, this one was him doubled. Stocky, squared-off, muscular and intense, heavy-jowled and with a notable gut. He looked like a senior officer, body-mass balanced over stout legs spread in an aggressive parade rest like an overweight bulldog. So this was Naismith, the famous rescuer so desired by Lilly. He could believe it.
   His utter fascination with his clone-twin was penetrated by a growing, dreadful realization. I'm the wrong one. Lilly had just spent a fortune reviving the wrong clone. How angry was she going to be? For a Jacksonian leader, such a vast mistake must feel like counting coup on yourself. Indeed, Lilly's face was set and stern, as she glanced toward Rowan.
   "It's him, all right," breathed the woman with the burning eyes. Her hands were clenched in tight fists, in her lap.
   "Do I ... know you, ma'am?" he said politely, carefully. Her torch-like heat perturbed him. Half-consciously, he moved closer to Rowan.
   Her expression was like marble. Only a slight widening of her eyes, like a woman drilled neatly through the solar plexus by a laser beam, revealed a depth of ... what feeling? Love, hate? Tension . . . His headache worsened.
   "As you see," said Lilly. "Alive and well. Let us return to the discussion of the price." The round table was littered with cups and crumbs_how long had this conference been going on?
   "Whatever you want," said Admiral Naismith, breathing heavily. "We pay and go."
   "Any price within reason." The brown-haired older woman gave her commander an oddly quelling look. "We came for a man, not an animated body. A botched revival suggests a discount for damaged goods, to my mind." That voice, that ironic alto voice ... I know you.
   "His revival is not botched," said Rowan sharply. "If there was a problem, it was in the prep_"
   The hot woman jerked, and frowned fiercely.
   "_but in fact, he's making a good recovery. Measurable progress every day. It's just too soon. You're pushing too hard." A glance at Lilly? "The stress and pressure slow down the very results they seek to hurry. He pushes himself too hard, he winds himself in knots so that_"
   Lilly held up a placating hand. "So speaks my cryo-revival specialist," she said to the Admiral. "Your clone-brother is in a recovering state, and may be expected to improve. If that is in fact what you desire."
   Rowan bit her lip. The hot woman chewed on her fingertip.
   "Now we come to what I desire," Lilly continued. "And, you may be pleased to learn, it isn't money. Let us discuss a little recent history. Recent in my view, that is."
   Admiral Naismith glanced out the big square windows, framing another dark Jacksonian winter afternoon, with low scudding clouds starting to spit snow. The force screen sparkled, silently eating the ice spicules. "Recent history is much on my mind, ma'am," he said to Lilly. "If you know it, you know why I don't wish to linger here. Get to your point."
   Not nearly oblique enough for Jacksonian business etiquette, but Lilly nodded. "How is Dr. Canaba these days, Admiral?"
   "What?"
   Succinctly, for a Jacksonian, Lilly again described her interest in the fate of the absconded geneticist. "Yours is the organization that made Hugh Canaba completely disappear. Yours is the organization that lifted ten thousand Marilacan prisoners of war from under the noses of their Cetagandan captors on Dagoola Four, though I admit they have spectacularly not-disappeared. Somewhere between those two proven extremes lies the fate of my little family. You will pardon my tiny joke if I say you appear to me to be just what the doctor ordered."
   Naismith's eyes widened; he rubbed his face, sucked air through his teeth, and managed a strained-looking grin. "I see. Ma'am. Well. In fact, such a project as you suggest might be quite negotiable, particularly if you think you might like to join Dr. Canaba. I'm not prepared to pull it out of my pockets this afternoon, you understand_"
   Lilly nodded.
   "But as soon as I make contact with my back-up, I think something might be arranged."
   "Then as soon as you make contact with your back-up, return to us, Admiral, and your clone-twin will be made available to you."
   "No_!" began the hot woman, half-rising; her comrade caught her arm and shook her head, and she sank back into her seat. "Right, Bel," she muttered.
   "We'd hoped to take him today," said the mercenary, glancing at him. Their eyes intersected joltingly. The Admiral looked away, as if guarding himself from some too-intense stimulus.
   "But as you can see, that would strip me of what seems to be my main bargaining chip," Lilly murmured. "And the usual arrangement of half in advance and half on delivery is obviously impractical. Perhaps a modest monetary retainer would reassure you."
   "They seem to have taken good care of him so far," said the brown-haired officer in an uncertain voice.
   "But it would also," the Admiral frowned, "give you an opportunity to auction him to other interested parties. I would caution you against starting a bidding war in this matter, ma'am. It could become the real thing."
   "Your interests are protected by your uniqueness, Admiral. No one else on Jackson's Whole has what I want. You do. And, I think, vice versa. We are very well suited to deal."
   For a Jacksonian, this was bending over backward to encourage. Take it, close the deal! he thought, then wondered why. What did these people want him for? Outside, a gust of wind whipped the snowfall to a blinding, whirling curtain. It ticked on the windows.
   It ticked on the windows. . . .
   Lilly was the next to be aware, her dark eyes widening. No one else had noticed yet, the cessation of that silent glitter. Her startled gaze met his, as his head turned back from his first stare outward, and her lips parted for speech.
   The window burst inward.
   It was a safety-glass; instead of slicing shards, they were all bombarded by a hail of hot pellets. The two mercenary women shot to their feet, Lilly cried out, and Hawk leaped in front of her, a stunner appearing in his hand. Some kind of big aircar was hovering at the window: one, two . . . three, four huge troopers leaped through.
   Transparent biotainer gear covered nerve-disruptor shield-suits; their faces were fully hooded and goggled. Hawk's repeated stunner fire crackled harmlessly over them.
   You'd get farther if you threw the damned stunner at them! He looked around wildly for a projectile weapon, knife, chair, table-leg, anything to attack with. Over one of the mercenary women's pocket comm links a tinny voice was crying, "Quinn, this is Elena. Something just dropped the building's force screen. I'm reading energy discharges_what the hell is going on in there? You want back-up?"
   "Yes!" screamed the hot woman, rolling aside from a stunner beam, which followed her, crackling, across the carpet. Stunner-tag. The assault was a snatch, not an assassination, then. Hawk finally recovered the wit to pick up the round table and swing with it. He hit one trooper but was stunner-dropped by another. Lilly stood utterly still, watching grimly. A gust of cold wind fluttered her silk pant legs. Nobody aimed at her.
   "Which one's Naismith?" boomed an amplified voice from one of the biotainered troopers. The Dendarii must have disarmed for the parley; the brown-haired mere closed hand-to-hand on an intruder. Not an option open to him. He grabbed Rowan's hand and dodged behind a chair, trying to get a clear run toward the exit tube.
   "Take 'em both," the leader shouted over the din. A trooper leaped toward the lift tube to cut them off; the rectangular facet of his stunner discharger winked in the light as he found near-point-blank aim.
   "Like hell!" yelled the Admiral, cannoning into the trooper. The trooper stumbled and his aim went wild. The last thing he saw as he and Rowan dove for the lift tube was a stunner beam from the leader taking Naismith in the head. Both the other Dendarii were down.
   They descended with agonizing slowness. If he and Rowan could get to the force screen generator, could they get it turned back on and trap the attackers inside? Stunner fire sizzled after them, starry bursts on the walls. They twisted in air, somehow landed on their feet, and stumbled backward into the corridor. No time to explain_he grabbed Rowan's hand and slapped it flat to the Durona-keyed lock-pad, and hit the power-off square with his elbow. The trooper pursuing them yelped and fell three meters, not quite head-first.
   He winced at the thud, and towed Rowan down the corridor. "Where are the generators?" he yelled over his shoulder at her. Other Duronas, alarmed, were appearing from all directions. A pair of green-clad Fell guards burst into the corridor's far end and pelted toward the penthouse lift-tube. But what side were they on? He pulled Rowan into the nearest open doorway.
   "Lock it!" he gasped. She keyed the door shut. They were in some Durona's residence suite. A cul-de-sac made a poor bolt-hole, but help seemed to be on the way. He just wasn't sure for whom. Something just dropped your force screen. . . . From the inside. It could only have been dropped from the inside. He half-bent, mouth wide for air, lungs on fire, heart racing and chest aching, a dizzy darkness clouding his vision. He stumbled to the dangerous window anyway, trying to get a handle on the tactical situation. Muffled shouts and thumps penetrated from the wall by the corridor.
   "How t'hell'd those bastards get your screen down?" he wheezed to Rowan, clutching the windowsill. "Didn't hear an explosion_traitor?"
   "I don't know," Rowan replied anxiously. "That's outer-perimeter security. Fell's men are supposed to be in charge of it."
   He stared out over the icy parking lot of the compound. A couple more green-clad men were running across it, shouting, pointing upward, taking cover behind a parked vehicle, and struggling to get a projectile-weapon aimed. Another guard made urgent negative gestures at them; a miss could take out the penthouse and everyone in it. They nodded and waited.
   He craned his neck, face to the glass, trying to see upward and to the left. The armored aircar loomed, still hovering at the penthouse window.
   The assailants were withdrawing already. Damn! No chance with the force-screen. I'm too slow. The aircar rocked as the troopers hastily re-boarded. Hands flashed, and a thick little grey-clad figure was dragged across the gap, six heart-stopping flights above the concrete. A limp trooper was dragged across too. They were leaving no wounded for questioning. Rowan, teeth clenched, pulled him back. "Get out of the line of fire!"
   He resisted her. "They're getting away!" he protested. "We should fight them now, on our own turf_"
   Another aircar rose from the street, beyond the old and obsolete compound wall. A small civilian model, unarmed and unarmored, it fought for altitude. Through its canopy he could see a blurred grey-clad figure at the controls, a white flash of teeth set in a grimace. The assailants' armored car yawed away from the window. The Dendarii aircar tried to ram it, to force it down. Sparks sprayed, plastic cracked, and metal screeched, but the armored car shook it off; it pinwheeled to the pavement and landed with a terminal crunch.
   "Rented, I bet," he groaned, watching. "Gonna have to pay for it. Good try, it almost worked_Rowan! Are any of those aircars down there yours?"
   "You mean the group's? Yes, but_"
   "Come on. We've got to get down there." But the building was crawling with security by now. They'd be nailing everyone to the wall till identified and cleared. He could scarcely leap out the window and fly down the five flights, though he longed to. Oh, for a cloak of invisibility.
   Oh. Yes!
   "Carry me! Can you carry me?"
   "I suppose, but_"
   He raced to the door, and fell backwards into her arms as it opened again.
   "Why?" she asked.
   "Do it, do it, do it!" he hissed through his teeth. She dragged him sack out into the corridor. He studied the chaos through slitted eyes, gasping realistically. Assorted agitated Duronas milled behind a cordon of Fell security now blocking the entry to the penthouse. "Get Dr. Chrys to take my feet," he muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
   Temporarily too overwhelmed to argue, Rowan cried, "Chrys, help me! We have to get him downstairs."
   "Oh_" Given the impression that this was some kind of medical emergency, Dr. Chrys asked no questions. She grabbed his ankles, and within seconds they were forcing their way through the mob. Two Doctors Durona carrying a white-faced, injured-looking fellow at a run_green-clad armed men stepped hastily aside and waved them on.
   As they reached the ground floor Chris tried to gallop toward the clinic area. For a moment he was yanked two ways, then he freed his feet from the astonished Dr. Chrys, and pulled away from Rowan. She gave chase, and they arrived at the outer door together.
   The guards' attention was focused on the efforts of the two men with the projectile launcher; his eyes followed their aim to the shadowy form of their retreating target, being swallowed by the snowy clouds. No, no, don't shoot . . . ! The launcher burped; the bright explosion rocked the car but did not bring it down.
   "Take me to the biggest, fastest thing you can make go," he gasped to Rowan. "We can't let them get away." We can't let Fell's men blow it up, either. "Hurry!"
   "Why?"
   "Those goons just kidnapped my, my . . . brother," he panted. 'Gotta follow. Bring 'em down if we can, follow if we can't. The Dendarii must have reinforcements of some kind, if we don't lose :hem. Or Fell. Lilly's his, his liegewoman, isn't she? He has to respond. Or someone does." He was shivering violently. "Lose 'em and we'll never get 'em back. They're figuring on it."
   "What the hell would we do if we caught them?" Rowan objected. 'They just tried to kidnap you, and you want to run after them? That's i job for security!"
   "I am_I am . . ." What? What am I? His frustrated stutters segued into a confetti-scramble of perception. No, not again_
   His vision cleared with the hiss of a hypospray, biting cold on his arm. Dr. Chrys was supporting him, and Rowan had one thumb pressed against his eyelid, holding it up while she stared into his eye, while her other hand slipped the hypospray back into her pocket. A kind of glassy bemusement descended upon him, as if he were wrapped in cellophane. "That should help," said Rowan.
   "No, it doesn't," he complained, or tried to. His words came out a mumble.
   They had dragged him out of the lobby, out of sight near one of the lift tubes to the underground part of the clinic. He had only lost moments to the convulsion, then. There was still a chance_he struggled in Chrys's grip, which tightened.
   The snap of women's steps, not a guard's boots, rounded the corner. Lilly appeared, her face set and her nostrils flaring, flanked by Dr. Poppy.
   "Rowan. Get him out of here," Lilly said, in a voice dead-level in tone despite its breathlessness. "Georish will be downside himself to investigate this one. He has to never have been here. Our attackers seem to have been one of Naismith's enemies. The story will be that the Dendarii came here looking for Naismith's clone, but didn't find him. Chrys, get rid of the physical evidence in Rowan's room, and hide those files. Go!"
   Chrys nodded and ran. Rowan took over holding him on his feet. He had an odd tendency to slump, as if he were melting. He blinked against the drug. No, we have to go after_
   Lilly tossed Rowan a credit chit, and Dr. Poppy handed her a couple of coats and a medical bag. "Take him out the back door and disappear. Use the evacuation codes. Pick a place at random and go to ground, not one of our properties. Report in on a secured line from a separate location. By then I should know what I can salvage from this mess." Her wrinkled lips peeled back on ivory teeth set in anger. "Move, girl."
   Rowan nodded obediently, and didn't argue at all, he noticed indignantly. Holding him firmly by the arm, she guided his stumbling feet down a freight lift-tube, through the sub-basement, and into the underground clinic. A concealed doorway on its second level opened onto a narrow tunnel. He felt like a rat scurrying through a maze. Rowan stopped three times to key through some security device.
   They came out in some other building's under-level, and the door disappeared behind them, indistinguishable from the wall. They continued on through ordinary utility tunnels. "You use this route often?" he panted.
   "No. But every once in a while we want to get something in or out not recorded by our gate guards, who are Baron Fell's men."
   They emerged finally in a small underground parking garage. She led him to a little blue lightflyer, elderly and inconspicuous, and bundled him into the passenger seat. "This isn' righ'," he complained, thick-tongued. "Admiral Naismith_someone should go after Admiral Naismith."
   "Naismith owns a whole mercenary fleet." Rowan strapped herself into the pilot's seat. "Let them tangle with his enemies. Try to calm down and catch your breath. I don't want to have to dose you again."
   The flyer rose into the swirling snow and rocked uncertainly in the gusts. The city sprawling below them disappeared quickly into the murk as Rowan powered them up. She glanced aside at his agitated profile. "Lilly will do something," she reassured him. "She wants Naismith too."
   "It's wrong," he muttered. "It's all wrong." He huddled in the jacket Rowan had wrapped around him. She turned up the heat.
   I'm the wrong one. It seemed he had no intrinsic value but his mysterious hold on Admiral Naismith. And if Admiral Naismith was removed from the Deal, the only person still interested in him would be Vasa Luigi, wanting vengeance upon him for crimes he couldn't even remember committing. Worthless, unwanted, lonely and scared . . . His stomach churned in pain, and his head throbbed. His muscles ached, tense as wire.
   All he had was Rowan. And, apparently, the Admiral, who had come searching for him. Who had very possibly risked his life to recover him. Why? I have to do . . . something.
   "The Dendarii Mercenaries. Are they all here? Does the Admiral have ships in orbit, or what? How much back-up does he have? He said it would take time for him to contact his back-up. How much time? Where did the Dendarii come in from, a commercial shuttleport? Can they call down air support? How many_how much_ where_" His brain tried madly to assemble data that wasn't there into patterns for attack.
   "Relax!" Rowan begged. "There's nothing we can do. We're only little people. And you're in no condition. You'll drive yourself into another convulsion if you keep on like this."
   "Screw my condition! I have to_I have to_"
   Rowan raised wry eyebrows. He lay back in his seat with a sick sigh, drained. I should have been able to do this . . . to do something. . . . He listened to nothing, half-hypnotized by the sound of his own shallow breathing. Defeated. Again. He didn't like the taste. He brooded at his pale and distorted reflection on the inside of the canopy. Time seemed to have become viscous.
   The lights on the control panel died. They were suddenly weightless. His seat straps bit him. Fog began to stream up around them, faster and faster.
   Rowan screamed, fought and banged the control panel. It flickered; momentarily, they had thrust again. Then lost it again. They descended in stutters. "What's wrong with it, damn it!" Rowan cried.
   He looked upward. Nothing but icy fog_they dropped below cloud level. Then above them, a dark shape loomed. Big lift van, heavy. . . .
   "It's not a systems failure. We're being intermittently field-drained," he said dreamily. "We're being forced down."
   Rowan gulped, concentrated, trying to keep the flyer level in the brief bursts of control. "My God, is it them again?"
   "No. I don't know . . . maybe they had some back-up." With adrenalin and determination, he forced his wits to function through the sedative-haze. "Make a noise!" he said. "Make a splash!"
   "What?"
   She didn't understand. She didn't catch it. She should have_ somebody should have_"Crash this sucker!" She didn't obey.
   "Are you crazy?" They lurched to ground right-side-up and intact in a barren valley, all snow and crackling scrub.
   "Somebody wants to make a snatch. We've got to leave a mark, or we'll just disappear off the map without a trace. No comm link," he nodded toward the dead panel. "We have to make footprints, set fire to something, something!" He fought his seat straps for escape.
   Too late. Four or five big men surrounded them in the gloom, stunners at ready. One reached up and unlatched his door, and dragged him out. "Be careful, don't hurt him!" Rowan cried fearfully, and scrambled after. "He's my patient!"
   "We won't, ma'am," one of the big parka-clad men nodded politely, "but you mustn't struggle." Rowan stood still.
   He stared around wildly. If he made a sprint for their van, could he_? His few steps forward were interrupted when one of the goons grabbed him by his shirt and hoisted him into the air. Pain shot through his scarred torso as the man twisted his hands behind his back. Something coldly metallic clicked around his wrists. They were not the same men who'd broken into the Durona Clinic, no resemblance in features, uniforms, or equipment.
   Another big man crunched through the snow. He pushed back his hood, and shone a hand light upon the captives. He appeared about forty-standard, with a craggy face, olive brown skin, and dark hair stripped back in a simple knot. His eyes were bright and very alert. His black brows bent in puzzlement, as he stared at his prey.
   "Open his shirt," he told one of the guards.
   The guard did so; the craggy man shone the hand-light on the spray of scars. His lips drew back in a white grin. Suddenly, he threw back his head and laughed out loud. The echoes of his voice lost themselves in the empty winter twilight. "Ry, you fool! I wonder how long it will take you to figure it out?"
   "Baron Bharaputra," Rowan said in a thin voice. She lifted her chin in a quick defiant jerk of greeting.
   "Dr. Durona," said Vasa Luigi in return, polite and amused. "Your patient, is he? Then you won't refuse my invitation to join us. Please be our guest. You'll make it quite the little family reunion."
   "What do you want from him? He has no memory."
   "The question is not what I want from him. The question is ... what someone else may want from him. And what I may want from them. Ha! Even better!" He motioned to his men, and turned away. They chivvied their captives into the closed lift van.
   One of the men split off to pilot the blue lightflyer. "Where should I leave this, sir?"
   "Take it back to the city and park it on a side street. Anywhere. See you home."
   "Yes, sir."
   The van doors closed. The van lifted.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

   Mark groaned. Bright prickles of pain shot through a dark nausea.
   "You gonna give him a dose of synergine?" said a voice, surprised. "I didn't get the idea the Baron wanted this one handled gently."
   "You want to clean up the flyer if he vomits his breakfast?" rumbled another voice.
   "Ah."
   "The Baron will do his own handling. He just specified he wanted him alive. Which he is."
   A hypospray hissed.
   "Poor sod," said the first voice reflectively.
   Thanks to the synergine, Mark began to recover from the stunner hit. He didn't know how much time and space lay between him and the Durona Clinic; they'd changed vehicles at least three times after he'd regained consciousness, once to something bigger and faster than an aircar. They stopped at some location, and he and the troopers all went through a decontamination chamber. The anonymously-dressed troopers went their way, and he was given over to two other guards, big flat-faced men in black trousers and red tunics.
   House Ryoval's colors. Oh.
   They laid him facedown, hands and feet bound, in the back of a lightflyer. The gray clouds, darkening toward evening, gave no clue as to the direction they were heading.
   Miles is alive. The relief of that fact was so intense, he smiled in elation even with his face squashed into the sticky plastic seat. What a joyful sight the skinny little bugger had been! Upright and breathing. He'd almost wept. What he'd done, was undone. He could really be Lord Mark, now. All my sins are taken from me.
   Almost. He prayed that Durona doctor had spoken straight about Miles still recovering. Miles's eyes had been frighteningly bewildered. And he hadn't recognized Quinn, which must have nearly slain her. You'll get better. We'll get you home, and you'll get better. He'd haul Miles home and everything would be all right again, better than all right. It would be wonderful.
   As soon as that idiot Ryoval had his delusions straightened around. Mark was ready to gut the man outright for screwing up his family reunion. Imp Sec will handle him.
   They entered an underground parking garage without his getting a glimpse of the exterior of their destination. The two guards hauled him roughly to his feet, and released his legs, which twitched and tingled. They passed through an electronic security chamber, after which his clothing was taken from him. They marched him through the . . . facility. It wasn't a prison. It wasn't one of House Ryoval's famous bordellos. The air bore a faint, unsettling medical tang. The place was far too utilitarian to be where surgical body-sculpture was done on patrons. It was too secret and secure to be where slaves were done to order, where humans were made into things not humanly possible. It wasn't very large. There were no windows. Underground? Where the hell am I?
   He would not panic. He entertained himself with a brief vision of what Ryoval might do to his own troopers, once he discovered they'd snatched the wrong twin. If Ryoval did not realize the mistake at the very first sight of him, he toyed with the idea of concealing his identity for a while. Let Miles and the Dendarii get a bigger head-start. They had not been taken; they were free. 7 found him! They must come for him. And if not them, ImpSec. ImpSec could not be more than a week behind him, and closing fast. I've won, godammit, I've won!
   His head was still spinning with a bizarre mixture of elation and terror when the guards delivered him to Ryoval's presence. It was a luxurious office, or study; the Baron evidently kept private quarters here, for he glimpsed a living room beyond an archway. Mark had no trouble recognizing Ryoval. He'd seen him in the vid recording from the Ariel's first mission here. The conversation where he'd threatened to have Admiral Naismith's severed head encased in plastic for a wall-hanging. In another man, this might be dismissed as hyperbole, but Mark had the uneasy feeling Ryoval had meant it literally. Ryoval was leaning half-seated on his comconsole desk. He had shining dark hair arranged in elaborate bands, a high-bridged nose, and smooth skin. Strong and youthful, for a centenarian.
   He's wearing a clone. Mark's smile became vulpine. He hoped Ryoval would not mistake his post-stun tremula for fear.
   The guards sat him in a chair and fastened him down with metal bands to his wrists. "Wait outside," the Baron instructed them. "It won't be long." They exited.
   Ryoval's hands were trembling slightly. The skin of his bronzed face was faintly moist. When he looked up and smiled back at Mark, his eyes seemed alight with some internal glow, the look of a man so filled with the visions inside his head, he scarcely saw the present reality. Mark was almost too enraged to care. Clone-consumer!
   "Admiral," Ryoval breathed happily. "I promised you we would meet again. As inevitably as fate." He looked Mark up and down; his dark brows rose. "You've put weight on, the last four years."
   "Good living," Mark snarled, uncomfortably reminded of his nakedness. For all he'd loathed the Dendarii uniform, it had actually made him look rather good. Quinn had personally re-tailored it for this masquerade, and he wished for it back. Presumably it had been what had fooled Ryoval's troopers, though, in that moment of heroic temporary insanity.
   "I'm so glad you are alive. At first I'd hoped for your unpleasant death in one of your little combats, but upon reflection I actually began to pray for your survival. I've had four years to plan this meeting. Revising and refining. I'd have hated for you to miss your appointment."
   Ryoval did not recognize him as not-Naismith. Ryoval was barely seeing him at all. He seemed to be looking through him. The Baron began to stride up and down in front of him, pouring out his plans like a nervous lover, elaborate plans for vengeance that ranged from the obscene to the insane to the impossible.
   It could be worse. Ryoval could be making these threats right now to that thin little, vague-eyed, bewildered cryo-amnesic, who would not know even who he was, let alone why these things should be happening to him. The thought sickened Mark. Yeah. Better me than him, right now. No shit.
   He means to terrorize you. It's only words. What was it the Count had said? Don't sell yourself to your enemy in advance, in your mind. . . .
   Hell, Ryoval wasn't even his enemy. All these gaudy scenarios had been tailored for Miles. No, not even for Miles. For Admiral Naismith, a man who didn't exist. Ryoval chased a ghost, a chimera.
   Ryoval stopped beside him, interrupting his whispered tirade. Curiously, he ran a moist hand down Mark's body, fingers curving in precise anatomical tracing of the muscles hidden beneath the layer of fat. "Do you know," he breathed, "I'd planned to have you starved.
   But I think I've changed my mind. I believe I'll have you force-fed, instead. The results could be even more amusing, in the long run."
   Mark shivered sickly for the first time. Ryoval felt it, beneath his probing fingers, and grinned. The man had an appalling instinct for the target. Better he should keep Ryoval focused on the chimera? Better we should get the hell out of here.
   He took a breath. "I hate to burst your bubble, Baron, but I have some bad news for you."
   "Now, did I ask you to speak?" Ryoval's fingers traced back up, to pinch the flesh around his jaw. "This isn't an interrogation. This isn't an inquisition. Confession will gain you nothing. Not even death."
   It was that damned contagious hyperactivity. Even Miles's enemies caught it.
   "I'm not Admiral Naismith. I'm the clone the Bharaputrans made. Your goons grabbed the wrong guy."
   Ryoval merely smiled. "Nice try, Admiral. But we've been watching the Bharaputran clone at the Durona Clinic for days. I knew you would come for him, after what you did to try and get him back the first time. I don't know what passion he inspires in you_were you lovers? You'd be amazed how many people have clones made for that purpose."
   So. When Quinn had sworn no one could possibly be following them, she'd been right. Ryoval hadn't been following them. He'd been waiting for them. Swell. It had been his actions, not his words or his uniform, which had convicted him of being Naismith.
   "But I will obtain him too," Ryoval shrugged. "Very soon."
   No, you won't. "Baron, I really am the other clone. Prove it to yourself. Have me examined."
   Ryoval chuckled. "What do you suggest? A DNA scan? Even the Duronas couldn't decide." He sighed deeply. "There's so much I want to do to you, I scarcely know where to begin. I must take it slowly. And in logical order. One cannot torture body parts that have already been removed, for example. I wonder how many years I can make you last? Decades?"
   Mark felt his self-control cracking. "I'm not Naismith," he said, his voice going high with strain.
   Ryoval grasped Mark's chin and tilted it up, his lips twisting in ironic disbelief. "Then I will practice on you. A dry-run. And Naismith will be along. In time."
   You're going to be astonished at what will be along, in time. ImpSec would have no hesitation whatsoever about taking Ryoval's House apart around him, no inhibitions even by Jacksonian standards.
   To rescue Miles.
   He, of course, wasn't Miles.
   He reflected worriedly on that, as the guards entered again at Ryoval's summons.
   The first beating was unpleasant enough. It wasn't the pain. It was pain without escape, fear without release, that worked upon the mind, tensed the body. Ryoval watched. Mark screamed without restraint. No silent, suffering, manly pride here, thank you. Maybe that would convince Ryoval he was not Naismith. This was crazy. Still, the guards broke no bones, and ended the exercise perfunctorily. They left him locked naked in a very cold, tiny room or closet, without windows. The air vent was perhaps five centimeters across. He couldn't get his fist, let alone his body, though it.
   He tried to prepare, to steel himself. To give himself hope. Time was on his side. Ryoval was a supremely practiced sadist, but of a psychological bent. Ryoval would keep him alive, and relatively undamaged, at least at first. After all, nerves must be intact to report pain. A mind must be relatively unclouded, to experience all the nuances of agony. Elaborate humiliations, rather than immediate flaying to death, must be first on the menu. All he had to do was survive. Later_there wouldn't be a later. The Countess had said Mark's going to Jackson's Whole would force Illyan to assign more agents here whether he wanted to or not, that alone being a sure benefit of Mark's journey even if he accomplished nothing personally at all.
   And what, after all, were a few more humiliations to him? Miles's immense pride could be shattered. He had none. Torture was old news to him. Oh, Ryoval. Have you ever got the wrong man.
   Now, if Ryoval were half the psychologist he clearly imagined himself to be, he would have grabbed a few of Miles's friends, to torment in front of him. That would work beautifully, on Miles. But not, of course, on him. He had no friends. Hell, Ryoval. I can think of worse things than you can.
   No matter. His friends would rescue him. Any time now.
   Now.
   He kept up his mental defiance till the technicians came for him.
   They returned him to his little cell, afterward, presumably to give him some solitude to think about it. He didn't think for quite some time. He lay on his side breathing in tiny gasps, half-conscious, arms and legs slowly starfishing in rhythm to the pain inside that didn't stop.
   At length, the clouds lifted a little from his vision, and the pain eased fractionally, to be replaced by a black, black rage. The techs had secured him, shoved a tube down his throat, and pumped him full of some repulsive high-calorie sludge. Laced with an anti-emetic, they told him, to prevent him getting rid of it later, and a cocktail of metabolic aids to speed digestion and deposition. It was far too subtly complex to have been designed on the spot, it must be something House Ryoval kept in stock. And he'd imagined this was his own private and unique perversion. He thought he'd done himself harm before, but Ryoval's people took it far beyond the limits of merely toying with pain, under the eye of their master, who'd come to watch. And study him, with a growing smile. Ryoval knew. He'd seen it in the man's sly, pleased eyes.
   Ryoval had stripped his very own rebellion of all its secret pleasure. The one somatic power that had been his call, his control, taken from him. Ryoval had hooked him, gotten under his skin. Way under.
   They could do to you all day long, and you could just not-be-there, but it was as nothing compared to getting you to do to yourself. The difference between mere torture and true humiliation was in the participation of the victim. Galen, whose torments were physically much milder than anything Ryoval contemplated, had known this; Galen had always had him doing to himself, or thinking he was.
   That Ryoval knew this too, he demonstrated later, when he administered a violent aphrodisiac to Mark by hypospray, before giving him to his_guards? or were they employees borrowed from one of the bordellos? So that he became a glazed-eyed participant in his own degradation. It doubtless made a great show for the hovering holovids, recording it all from every angle.
   They brought him back to his little cell to digest this new experience much as they'd brought him back to digest the first force-feeding. It took a long time for the shock and drug-fog to clear away. He oscillated slowly between a drained lassitude and horror. Curious. The drug had short-circuited his shock-stick conditioning, reducing it to something like a case of the hiccups, or the show would have been much duller and shorter. Ryoval had watched.
   No. Ryoval had studied.
   His consciousness of the man's eyes had become an obsession. Ryoval's interest had not been erotic. Mark felt the Baron must have become bored with the stereotyped banality of every possible physical act decades ago. Ryoval had been watching him for ... reflexes? Small betrayals of interest, fear, despair. The exercise had not been arranged for the sake of pain. There had been plenty of pain, but it had been incidental. Discomfort from the force-feeding, and running out of neurotransmitters, mostly.
   That wasn't the torture, Mark realized. That was only the pretesting. My torture is still being designed.
   Suddenly, he saw what was coming, all whole. First, Ryoval would condition him to this, addict him by repeated doses. Only then would he add pain, and pin him, vibrating, between pain and pleasure; require him to torture himself, to win through to the dark reward. And then he would withdraw the drug and let Mark, conditioned to the scenarios, continue. And he would. And then Ryoval would offer him his freedom. And he would weep and beg to stay, plead to remain a slave. Destruction by seduction. End-game. Revenge complete. You see me, Ryoval, but I see you. I see you.
   The force-feedings turned out to be on a schedule of every three hours. It was the only clock he had, or he would have thought time had stopped. He had surely entered eternity.
   He'd always thought being skinned alive was something done with sharp knives. Or dull ones. Ryoval's technicians did it chemically, spraying carefully selected areas of his body with an aerosol. They wore gloves, masks, protective clothing; he tried, but failed, to grab off a mask and let one share what they administered. He cursed his littleness, and cried, and watched his skin bubble up and drip away. The chemical was not a caustic, but rather some strange enzyme; his nerves were left horribly intact, exposed. Touching anything, or being touched, was agony after that, especially the pressure of sitting or lying down. He stood in the little closet-cell, shifting from foot to foot, touching nothing, for hours, till his shaking legs finally gave way.
   It was all happening so fast. Where the hell was everybody? How long had he been here? A day?
   So. I have survived one day. Therefore, I can survive another one-day. It couldn't be worse. It could only be more.
   He sat, and rocked, mind half whited-out with pain. And rage. Especially rage. From the moment of the first force-feeding, it hadn't been Naismith's war any more. This was personal now, between Ryoval and him. But not personal enough. He'd never been alone with Ryoval. He'd always been outnumbered, outweighed, passed from one set of bindings to another. Admiral Naismith was being treated as a fairly dangerous little prick, even now. That wouldn't do.
   He would have told them everything, all about Lord Mark, and Miles, and the Count, and the Countess, and Barrayar. And Kareen. But the force-feedings had stopped his mouth, and the drug had stripped him of language, and the other things had kept him too busy screaming. It was all Ryoval's fault. The man watched. But he didn't listen.
   I wanted to be Lord Mark. I just wanted to be Lord Mark. Was that so bad? He still wanted to be Lord Mark. He'd almost had it, brushing his grasp. Ripped away. He wept for it, hot tears splashing like molten lead on his not-skin. He could feel Lord Mark slipping from him, racked apart, buried alive. Disintegrating. I just wanted to be human. Screwed up again.
   

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

   He circled the room for the hundreth time, tapping on the walls. 'If we could figure out which one is the exterior," he said to Rowan, "maybe we could break through it somehow."
   "With what, our fingernails? What if we're three floors up? Will you please sit down," Rowan gritted. "You're driving me crazy!"
   "We have to get out."
   "We have to wait. Lilly will miss us. And something will be done."
   "By who? And how?" He glared around their little bedroom. It wasn't designed as a prison. It was only a guest room, with its own bath attached. No windows, which suggested it was underground or in an interior section of the house. If it was underground, breaking through a wall might not be much use, but if they could bore into another room, the possibilities bloomed. One door, and two stunner-armed guards outside of it. They'd tried enticing the guards into opening the door last night, once with faked illness, and once for real when his frantic agitation had resulted in another convulsion. The guards had handed in Rowan's medical bag, which was no help, because then the exhausted woman had started responding to his demands for action by threatening to sedate him.
   "Survive, escape, sabotage," he recited. It had become a litany, running through his head in an endless loop. "It's a soldier's duty."
   "I'm not a soldier," said Rowan, rubbing her dark-ringed eyes. "And Vasa Luigi isn't going to kill me, and if he was going to kill you he'd have done it last night. He doesn't play with his prey like Ryoval does." She bit her lip, perhaps regretting that last sentence. "Or maybe he's going to leave us in here together till / kill you." She rolled over in bed, and pulled her pillow over her head.
   "You should have crashed that lightflyer."
   A noise from under the pillow might have been either a groan or a curse. He had probably mentioned that regret a few too many times.
   When the door clicked open he spun as if scalded.
   A guard half-saluted, politely. "Baron Bharaputra's compliments, ma'am, sir, and would you prepare to join him and the Baronne for dinner. We will escort you upstairs when you're ready."
   The Bharaputras' dining room had large glass doors giving a view onto an enclosed, winter-frosted garden, and a big guard by every exit. The garden glimmered in the gathering gloom; they had been here a full Jacksonian day, then, twenty-six hours and some odd minutes. Vasa Luigi rose at their entry, and at his gesture the guards faded back to positions outside the doors, giving an illusion of privacy.
   The dining room was arranged stylishly, with individual couches and little tables set in a tiered semi-circle around the view of the garden. A very familiar-looking woman sat on one of the couches.
   Her hair was white streaked with black, and wound up in elaborate braids around her head. Dark eyes, thin ivory skin softening with tiny wrinkles, a high-bridged nose_Dr. Durona. Again. She was dressed in a fine flowing silk shirt in a pale green perhaps accidentally reminiscent of the color of the Durona lab coats, and soft trousers the color of cream. Dr. Lotus Durona, Baronne Bharaputra, had elegant tastes. And the means to indulge them.
   "Rowan, dear," she nodded; she held out a hand as if Rowan might give it a courtier's kiss.
   "Lotus," said Rowan flatly, and compressed her lips. Lotus smiled and turned her hand over, converting it into an invitation to sit, which they all did.
   Lotus touched a control pad at her place, and a girl wearing Bharaputra brown and pink silks entered, and served drinks, to the Baron first, curtseying with lowered eyes before him. A very familiar-looking girl, tall and willowy, with a high-bridged nose, fine straight black hair bound at her nape and flowing in a horse-tail down her back. . . . When she made her offering to the Baronne, her eyes flicked up, and opened like flowers to the sun, bright with joy. When she bowed before Rowan, her up-turning gaze grew startled, and her dark brows drew down in puzzlement. Rowan gazed back equally startled, a look that changed to dawning horror as the girl turned away.
   When she bowed before him, her frown deepened. "You . . . !" she whispered, as if amazed.
   "Run along, Lilly dear, don't gawk," said the Baronne kindly.
   As she left the room, with a swaying walk, she glanced covertly back over her shoulder at them.
   "Lilly?" Rowan choked. "You named her Lilly?"
   "A small revenge."
   Rowan's hands clenched in deep offense. "How can you? Knowing what you are? Knowing what we are?"
   "How can you choose death over life?" The Baronne shrugged. "Or worse_let Lilly choose it for you? Your time of temptation is not yet, Rowan my dear sister. Ask yourself again in twenty or thirty years, when you can feel your body rotting around you, and see if the answer comes so easily then."
   "Lilly loved you as a daughter."
   "Lilly used me as her servant. Love?" The Baronne chuckled. "It's not love that keeps the Durona herd together. It's predator pressure. If all the exterior economic and other dangers were removed, the far corners of the wormhole nexus would not be far enough for us to get away from our dear sibs. Most families are like that, actually."
   Rowan assimilated the point. She looked unhappy. But she didn't disagree.
   Vasa Luigi cleared his throat. "Actually, Dr. Durona, you wouldn't have to travel to the far reaches of the galaxy for a place of your own. House Bharaputra could find a use for your talents and training. And perhaps even a little autonomy. Head of a department, for example. And later, who knows?_maybe even a division."
   "No. Thank you." Rowan bit out.
   The Baron shrugged. Did the Baronne look faintly relieved?
   He interrupted urgently, "Baron_was it really Ryoval's squad who took Admiral Naismith? Do you know where?"
   "Well, now, that's an interesting question," Vasa Luigi murmured, eyeing him. "I've been trying to contact Ry all day, without success. I suspect that wherever Ry is, your clone-twin is also_Admiral."
   He took a deep breath. "Why do you think I am the Admiral, sir?"
   "Because I met the other one. Under telling circumstances. I don't think the real Admiral Naismith would permit his bodyguard to give him orders_do you?"
   His head was aching. "What's Ryoval doing to him?"
   "Really, Vasa, this is not dinner-conversation," reproved the Baronne. She glanced curiously at him. "Besides_why should you care?"
   " 'Miles, what have you done with your baby brother?' " The quote came from nowhere, fell out of his mouth. He touched his lips uncertainly. Rowan stared at him. So did Lotus.
   Vasa Luigi said, "As to your question, Admiral, it turns on whether Ry has come to the same conclusions as I did. If he has_likely he's not doing much. If he hasn't, his methods will depend upon your clone-twin."
   "I ... don't understand."
   "Ryoval will study him. Experiment. His choice of actions will flow from his analysis of his subject's personality."
   That didn't sound so bad. He pictured multiple-choice tests. He frowned, bewildered.
   "Ry is an artist, in his way," continued the Baron. "He can create the most extraordinary psychological effects. I've seen him turn an enemy into a slave utterly devoted to his person, who will obey any order. The last man who attempted to assassinate him and had the misfortune to live ended up serving drinks at Ryoval's private parties, and begging to offer gratification of any kind to any guest on request."
   "What did you ask for?" the Baronne inquired dryly.
   "White wine. It was before your time, love. I watched, though. The man had the most haunted eyes."
   "Are you considering selling me to Ryoval?" he asked slowly.
   "If he's the highest bidder, Admiral. Your and your clone-twin's raid upon my property_and I am still not certain you did not plan it together from first to last_was very costly to my House. And," his eyes glinted, "personally annoying. I'll not bother avenging myself upon a cryo-amnesic, but I do wish to shave my losses. If I sell you to Ry, you'll be better punished than even I care to think about. Ry would be delighted to own a matched pair." Vasa Luigi sighed. "House Ryoval will always be a minor house, I fear, as long as Ry allows his personal gratification to outweigh its profits. It's a shame. I could do so much more with his resources."
   The girl returned, served little plates of hors d'ouvers, refreshed their drinks, some wine-and-fruit concoction, and wafted out again. Slowly. Vasa Luigi's eyes followed her. The Baronne's eyes narrowed, noting his gaze. Her lashes swept down, focusing on her drink, as his head turned back.
   "What about . . . the Dendarii Mercenaries, as a bidder?" Yes! Just let Bharaputra make that offer, and the Dendarii would come knocking on his door. With a plasma cannon. High bid indeed. This game must be a short one. Bharaputra could not put him up for auction without revealing that he had him, and then, and then . . . what? "If nothing else, you could use their competition to force Ryoval's bid up," he added slyly.
   "Their resources are too finite, I fear. And not here."
   "We saw them. Yesterday."
   "A mere covert ops team. No ships. No back-up. I understand they only revealed their identity at all in order to get Lilly to talk with them. But ... I have reason to believe there is another player in this game. My instincts twitch, looking at you. I have the oddest urge to take a modest middleman's profit, and let the negative bidders apply to House Ryoval." The Baron chuckled.
   Negative bidder? Oh. People with plasma cannons. He tried not to react.
   Vasa Luigi continued, "Which brings us back to the original question_what is Lilly's interest in all this? Why did Lilly set you to revive this man, Rowan? For that matter, how did Lilly obtain him, when some hundreds of other earnest searchers could not?"
   "She didn't say," said Rowan blandly. "But I was glad for a chance to sharpen my skills. Thanks to your security guard's excellent aim, he was quite a medical challenge."
   The conversation became medical-technical, between Lotus and Rowan, and then more desultory, as the clone-girl served them an elaborate meal. Rowan evaded as smoothly as the Baron questioned, and no one expected him to know anything. But Baron Bharaputra seemed not to be in a hurry. Clearly, he was setting up to play some land of waiting game. Afterwards the guards escorted them back to their room, which he realized at last was part of a corridor of identical chambers designed, perhaps, to house the servants of important visitors.
   "Where are we?" he hissed at Rowan as soon as the door shut behind them. "Could you tell? Is this Bharaputra's headquarters?"
   "No," said Rowan. "His main residence is still under renovation. Something about a commando raid blowing out several rooms," she added snappishly.
   He walked slowly around their chamber, but he did not take up banging on the walls again, to Rowan's obvious relief. "It occurs to me . . . that there's another way to escape besides breaking from the inside out. That's to get someone else to break from the outside in. Tell me . . . would it be harder to break in and take someone held prisoner by House Bharaputra, House Fell, or House Ryoval?"
   "Well . . . Fell would be the hardest, I suppose. He has more troops and heavy weapons. Ryoval would be the easiest. Ryoval's really a House Minor, except he's so old, he gets the honors of a House Major by habit."
   "So ... if one wanted someone bigger and badder than Bharaputra, one might go to Fell."
   "One might."
   "And ... if one knew help were on the way ... it might be tactically brighter to leave said prisoner at Ryoval's, rather than to have him shifted to some more formidible location."
   "It might," she conceded.
   "We have to get to Fell."
   "How? We can't even get out of this room!"
   "Out of the room, yes, we must get out of the room. But we might not have to get out of the house. If one of us could just get to a comconsole for a few uninterrupted minutes. Call Fell, call someone, let the world know Vasa Luigi has us. That would start things moving."
   "Call Lilly," said Rowan sturdily. "Not Fell."
   I need Fell. Lilly can't break into Ryoval's. He considered the uneasy possibility that he and the Durona Group might be starting to move at cross-purposes. He wanted a favor from Fell, whom Lilly wished to escape. Still_one would not have to offer very much to interest Fell in a raid on Ryoval. A break-even in materials, and the profit in old hatred. Yeah.
   He wandered into the bathroom, and stared at himself in the mirror. Who am I? A skinny, haggard, pale, odd-looking little man with desperate eyes and a tendency to convulsions. If he could even decide which one his clone-twin was, glimpsed so painfully yesterday, he could dub himself the other by process of elimination. The fellow had looked like Naismith to him. But Vasa Luigi was no fool, and Vasa Luigi was convinced of the reverse. He had to be one or the other. Why couldn't he decide? If I am Naismith, why did my brother claim my place?
   At that moment, he discovered why it was called a cascade.
   The sensation was of being under a waterfall, of some river that emptied a continent, tons of water battering him to his knees. He emitted a tiny mewl, crouching down with his arms wrapping his head, shooting pains behind his eyes and terror locking his throat. He pressed his lips together to prevent any other sound escaping, that would attract Rowan in all her concern. He needed to be alone for this, oh yes.
   No wonder I couldn't guess. I was trying to choose between two wrong answers. Oh, Mother. Oh, Da. Oh, Sergeant. Your boy has screwed up this one, bad. Real bad. Lieutenant Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan crawled on the tiled floor and screamed in silence, just a faint hiss. No, no, no, oh, shit. . . .
   Elli . . .
   Bel, Elena, Taura . . .
   Mark . . . Mark? That stout, glowering, controlled, determined fellow had been Mark?
   He could not remember anything about his death. He touched his chest, fearfully, tracing the evidence of ... what event? He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember the last that he could. The raid downside at Bharaputra's surgical facility, yes. Mark had engineered a disaster, Mark and Bel between them, and he'd come flying down to try and pull all their nuts out of the fire. Some megalomanic inspiration to top Mark, show him how the experts did it, to take those clone-children from Vasa Luigi, who had offended him . . . take 'em home to Mother. Crap, what does my mother know about all this by now? Nothing, he prayed. They were all still here on Jackson's Whole, somehow. How long had he been dead . . . ?
   Where the hell is ImpSec?
   Besides rolling around here on this bathroom floor, of course.
   Ow, ow, ow. . . .
   And Elli. Do I know you, ma'am? he'd asked. He should have bitten his tongue out.
   Rowan . . . Elli. It made sense, in a weird way. His lover was a tall, brown-eyed, dark-haired, tough-minded, smart woman. The first thing presented to his confused awakening senses had been a tall, brown-eyed, dark-haired, tough-minded, smart woman. It was a very natural mistake.
   He wondered if Elli was going to buy that explanation. His taste for heavily-armed girlfriends did have potential drawbacks. He inhaled a hopeless laugh.
   It clogged in his throat. Taura, here? Did Ryoval know it? Did he know what a lovely big clawed hand she'd had in the destruction of his gene banks, four years ago, or did he just blame "Admiral Naismith"? True, all of Ryoval's bounty hunters he'd encountered subsequently had seemed focused obsessively and exclusively upon himself. But Ryoval's troopers had mistaken Mark for the Admiral; had Ryoval? Surely Mark would tell him he was the clone. Hell, I'd tell him the same if it were me, on the off-chance of confusing the issue. What was happening to Mark? Why had Mark offered himself as Miles's . . . ransom? Mark couldn't possibly be cryo-amnesic too, could he? No_ Lilly had said the Dendarii, and the clones, and "Admiral Naismith" had all escaped. So how did they come to be back?
   They came looking for you, Admiral Dipshit.
   And had run headlong into Ryoval, looking for the same thing. He was a damned rendezvous.
   What a merciful state cryo-amnesia was. He wished for it back.
   "Are you all right?" Rowan called doubtfully. She stepped to the bathroom door, and saw him on the floor. "Oh, no! Another convulsion?" She dropped to her knees beside him, long fingers checking for damages. "Did you hit yourself on anything?"
   "Ah ... ah ..." I'll not bother avenging myself upon a cryo-amnesic, Vasa Luigi had said. He had better remain a cryo-amnesic then, for the moment, till he had a better grip on things. And on himself. "I think I'm all right."
   He suffered her to anxiously put him to bed. She stroked his hair. He stared at her in dismay through half-lidded, pretend-post-convulsion-sleepy eyes. What have I done?
   What am I going to do?
   

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

   He had forgotten why he was here. His skin was beginning to grow back.
   He wondered where Mark had gone.
   People came, and tormented a nameless thing without boundaries, and went away again. He met them variously. His emerging aspects became personas, and eventually, he named them, as well as he could identify them. There was Gorge, and Grunt, and Howl, and another, quiet one that lurked on the fringes, waiting.
   He let Gorge go out to handle the force-feedings, because Gorge was the only one who actually enjoyed them. Gorge, after all, would never have been permitted to do all that Ryoval's techs did. Grunt he sent forth when Ryoval came again with the hypospray of aphrodisiac. Grunt had also been responsible for the attack on Maree, the body-sculptured clone, he rather thought, though Grunt, when not all excited, was very shy and ashamed and didn't talk much.
   Howl handled the rest. He began to suspect Howl had been obscurely responsible for delivering them all to Ryoval in the first place. Finally, he'd come to a place where he could be punished enough. Never give aversion therapy to a masochist. The results are unpredictable. So Howl deserved what Howl got. The elusive fourth one just waited, and said that someday, they would all love him best.
   They did not always stay within their lines. Howl had a tendency to eavesdrop on Gorge's sessions, which came regularly while Howl's did not; and more than once Gorge turned up riding along with Grunt on his adventures, which then became exceptionally peculiar. Nobody joined Howl by choice.
   Having named them all, he finally found Mark by process of elimination. Gorge and Grunt and Howl and the Other had sent Lord Mark deep inside, to sleep through it all. Poor, fragile Lord Mark, barely twelve weeks old.
   Ryoval could not even see Lord Mark down in there. Could not reach him. Could not touch him. Gorge and Grunt and Howl and the Other were all very careful not to wake the baby. Tender and protective, they defended him. They were equipped to. An ugly, grotty, hard-bitten bunch, these psychic mercenaries of his. Unlovely. But they got the job done.
   He began to hum little marching tunes to them, from time to time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

   Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And, Miles feared, the converse. Rowan had pulled her pillow over her head again. He continued to pace. And talk. He couldn't seem to stop himself. In the time that had passed since his concealed memory cascade, he had evolved a multitude of plans for their escape, all with some fatal flaw. Unable to put any of them into effect, he had re-ordered and refined them out loud. Over and over. Rowan had stopped critiquing them . . . yesterday? In fact, she'd stopped talking to him at all. She'd given up trying to pet him and relax him, and instead tended to stay on the far side of the room, or hide for long periods in the bathroom. He couldn't blame her. His returning nervous energy seemed to be building to something like a frenzy.
   This forced confinement was stressing her affection for him to the limit. And, he had to admit, he had not been able to conceal his slight new hesitation toward her. A coolness in his touch, an increased resistance to her medical authority. He loved and admired her, no question, and would be delighted to have her in charge of any sickbay he owned. Under his command. But guilt and the sense of no privacy had combined to cripple his interest in intimacy. He had other passions at the moment. And they were consuming him.
   Dinner was due soon. Assuming three meals per long Jacksonian day, they'd been here four days. The Baron had not spoken with them again. What schemes was Vasa Luigi evolving, out there? Had he been auctioned yet? What if the next person through the door was his buyer? What if nobody bid at all, what if they left him in here forever?
   Meals were usually brought on a tray by a servant, under the watchful eye of a couple of stunner-armed guards. He'd tried everything he could think of short of breaking his cover to suborn them, in their brief snatches of conversation. They'd just smiled at him. He was dubious of his ability to outrun a stunner-beam, but at the next opportunity, he resolved to try. He hadn't had a chance to try anything lever. He was ready to try something stupid. Surprise sometimes worked. . . .
   The lock clicked. He spun, poised to dart forward. "Rowan, get up!" he hissed. "I'm going to try for it."
   "Oh, hell," she moaned, emerging. Without faith, brow-beaten, she rose and trudged around the bed to stand by his side. "Stunning hurts, you know. And then you throw up. You'll probably have convulsions."
   "Yes. I know."
   "But at least it'll shut you up for a while," she muttered under her breath.
   He rose on the balls of his feet. Then sank back again as the servant entered. Oh, my. What's this? There was suddenly a new player in he game, and his mind locked into over-drive. Rowan, watching him or his announced bolt, looked up too, and her eyes widened.
   It was the clone-girl Lilly_Lilly Junior, he supposed he must think of her_in her brown-and-pink silk house-servant's uniform, a long wrap skirt and spangled jacket. Straight-backed, she carried their meal tray, and set it down on the table across the room. Incomprehensibly, the guard nodded at her and withdrew, closing the door behind him.
   She began to lay out their meal, servant-fashion; Rowan approached her, lips parted.
   He saw a dozen possibilities, instantly; also that this chance might ever come again. There was no way, in his debilitated state, that he could overpower the girl himself. What about that sedative Rowan had threatened him with? Could Rowan get the drop on her? Rowan was not good at catching oblique hints, and terrible at following cryptic orders. She'd want explanations. She'd want to argue. He could only try.
   "Goodness you two look alike," he chirped brightly, glaring at Rowan. She gave him a look of exasperated bafflement, which she converted to a smile as the girl turned toward them. "How is it that we rate, uh, such a high-born servant, milady?"
   Lilly's smooth hand touched her chest. "I am not my lady," she lid, in a tone that suggested he must be a complete fool. Not without reason. "But you . . ." She looked searchingly at Rowan. "I don't understand you."
   "Did the Baronne send you?" Miles asked.
   "No. But I told the guards your food was drugged, and the Baronne sent me to stay and watch you eat it," she added, somewhat off-the-cuff.
   "Is that, uh, true?" he asked.
   "No." She tossed her head, making her long hair swing, and dropped him from her attention to focus hungrily upon Rowan. "Who are you?"
   "She is the Baronne's sister," he said instantly. "Daughter to your lady's mother. Did you know you were named after your, uh, grandmother?"
   "... Grandmother?"
   "Tell her about the Durona Group, Rowan," he said urgently.
   "Give me a chance to speak, then, why don't you," Rowan said through her teeth, smiling.
   "Does she know what she is? Ask her if she knows what she is," he demanded, then stuffed his knuckle into his mouth and bit it. The girl hadn't come for him. She'd come for Rowan. He had to let Rowan take this one.
   "Well," Rowan glanced at the closed door, and back to the girl, "The Duronas are a group of thirty-six cloned siblings. We live under the protection of House Fell. Our mother_the first Durona_is named Lilly, too. She was very sad when Lotus_the Baronne_left us. Lotus used to be my . . . older sister, you see. You must be my sister too, then. Has Lotus told you why she had you? Are you to be her daughter? Her heir?"
   "I am to be united with my lady," said the girl. There was a faint defiance in her tone, but her fascination with Rowan was obvious. "I wondered ... if you were to take my place." Jealousy? Madness.
   Rowan's eyes darkened in muted horror. "Do you understand just what that means? What a clone-brain transplant is? She will take your body, Lilly, and you will be nowhere."
   "Yes. I know. It's my destiny." She tossed her head again, flipping her hair back from her face. Her tone was one of conviction. But her eyes . . . was there the faintest question, in her eyes?
   "So much alike, you two," he murmured, circling them in suppressed anxiety. Smiling. "I'll bet you could exchange clothes with each other, and no one could tell the difference." Rowan's quick glance told him yes, she'd caught it, but thought he was pushing it too hard. "Naw," he went on, pursing his lips and tilting his head, "I don't think so. The girl's too fat. Don't you think she's too fat, Rowan?"
   "I am not fat!" said Lilly Junior indignantly.
   "Rowan's clothes would never fit you."
   "You're wrong," said Rowan, giving up and letting herself be pushed into fast-forward. "He's an idiot. Let's prove it, Lilly." She began to peel out of her jacket, blouse, trousers.
   Slowly, very curiously, the girl took off her jacket and skirt, and took up Rowan's outfit. Rowan did not yet touch Lilly's silks, laid out neatly on the bed.
   "Oh, that looks nice," said Rowan. She nodded toward the bathroom. "You should go look at yourself."
   "I was wrong," Miles admitted nobly, steering the girl toward the bathroom. No time to plot, no way to give orders. He'd have to utterly rely on Rowan's . . . initiative. "Actually, Rowan's clothes look quite good on you. Imagine yourself as a Durona surgeon. They're all doctors there, did you know? You could be a doctor too. . . ." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rowan tear the bands from her hair and shake it loose, and grab for the silks. He let the door shut behind him and Lilly, and aimed her at the mirror. He turned on the water, to mask the sound of Rowan's knock on the outer door, of the guard opening it, of her retreat, hair swinging down across her face. . . .
   Lilly stared into the long mirror. She glanced at him by her side in it, waving his hand as if to introduce her to herself, then down at the top of his head by her shoulder. He grabbed a cup and took a gulp of water, to clear his throat for action. How long could he keep the girl distracted in here? He didn't think he could successfully sap her on the skull, and he was not completely certain which item in Rowan's medical satchel, sitting on the countertop, was the threatened sedative.
   To his surprise, she spoke first. "You're the one who came for me, aren't you. For all us clones."
   "Uh . . ." The disastrous Dendarii raid on Bharaputra's? Had she been one of the rescuees? What was she doing back here, then? "Excuse me. I've been dead, lately, and my brain isn't working too well. Cryo-amnesia. It might have been me, but you might have met my clone-twin."
   "You have clone-sibs too?"
   "At least one. My . . . brother."
   "You were really dead?" She sounded faintly disbelieving.
   He pulled up his gray knit shirt and displayed his scars.
   "Oh," she said, impressed. "I guess you were."
   "Rowan put me back together. She's very good." No, don't draw her attention to the missing Rowan. "You could be just as good, I'll bet, if you tried. If you were trained."
   "What was it like? Being dead?" Her eyes were suddenly intent upon his face.
   He shrugged his shirt back down. "Dull. Really boring. A blank. I don't remember anything. I don't remember dying_" His breath caught. . . . the projectile weapon's muzzle, bright with flame . . . his chest bursting outward, terrible pain . . . He inhaled, and leaned against the counter, legs suddenly weak. "Lonely. You wouldn't like it. I guarantee." He took her warm hand. "Being alive is much better. Being alive is, is . . ." He needed something to stand on. He scrambled up on the counter instead, crouching eye to eye with her at last. He twined her hair in his hand, tilted his head, and kissed her, just a brief press of the lips. "You can tell you're alive when somebody touches you back."
   She drew back, shocked and interested. "You kiss differently from the Baron."
   His brain seemed to hiccup. "The Baron has kissed you?"
   "Yes . . ."
   Sampling his wife's new body early? How soon was that transplant scheduled? "Have you always lived with, uh, your lady?"
   "No. I was brought here after the clone-creche was wrecked. The repairs are almost complete, I'll be moving back soon."
   "But . . . not for long."
   "No."
   The temptations to the Baron must be ... interesting. After all, she would have her brain destroyed soon, and be unable to accuse. Vasa Luigi could do anything but damage her virginity. What was this doing to her apparent mental conditioning, her allegiance to her destiny? Something, obviously, or she wouldn't be here.
   She glanced at the closed door, and her mouth went round in sudden suspicion. She pulled her hand from his grip, and raced back to the empty bedroom. "Oh, no!"
   "Sh! Sh!" He ran after her, grabbed her hand again, lunged up to stand on the bed to turn her face to his and regain eye contact. "Don't shout!" he hissed. "If you run out and tell the guards, you'll be in terrible trouble, but if you just wait until she comes back, no one will ever know." He felt quite vile, to be playing so on her obvious panic, but it had to be done. "Be quiet, and no one will ever know." He had no idea if Rowan intended to come back, for that matter. By this point maybe she had just wanted to escape from him. None of his plans had assumed a piece of luck like this.
   Lilly Junior could physically overpower him with ease, though he was not sure if she realized it. One good punch to his chest would drop him to the floor. She wouldn't even have to hit him very hard.
   "Sit down," he told her. "Here, next to me. Don't be afraid. Actually, I can't imagine what you could possibly be afraid of, if your destiny doesn't make you blink. You must be a courageous girl. Woman. Sit ..." He drew her down; she glanced from him to the door in great uncertainty, but allowed herself to be settled, temporarily. Her muscles were tight as springs. "Tell me . . . tell me about yourself. Tell me about your life. You are a most interesting person, do you know?"
   "Me?"
   "I can't remember much about my life, right now, which is why I ask. It's a terror to me, not to be able to remember. It's killing me. What's the very earliest thing about yourself that you can remember?"
   "Why ... I suppose . . . the place I lived before I came to the creche. There was a woman who took care of me. I have_this is silly_but I remember she had some purple flowers, as tall as,! was, that grew out of this little square of a garden, hardly a meter square, and they smelled like grapes."
   "Yes? Tell me more about those flowers ..."
   They were in for a long conversation, he feared. And then what? That Rowan had not yet been brought back was a very good sign. That she might not be coming back left an unsettling dilemma for Lilly Junior. So what could the Baron and Baronne possibly do to her? his mind mocked savagely. Kill her?
   They talked of her life in the creche. He teased out an account of the Dendarii raid from her point of view. How she had managed to re-join the Baron. Sharp, sharp kid. What a mess for Mark. The pauses grew longer. He was going to end up talking about himself soon, just to keep things going, and that was incredibly dangerous. She was running out of conversation, her eyes turning more and more often toward the door.
   "Rowan's not coming back," said Lilly Junior at last. "Is she."
   "I think not," he said frankly. "I think she's escaped clean."
   "How can you tell?"
   "If they had caught her, they would have come for you, even if they didn't bring her back here. From their point of view, Rowan is still in here. It's you who's missing."
   "You don't think they could have mistaken her for me, do you?" she gasped in alarm. "Taken her to be united with my lady?"
   He wasn't sure if she was afraid for Rowan, or afraid that Rowan would steal her place. What a ghastly, hideous new paranoia. "How soon are you . . . no," he reassured her. Himself. "No. At a glance in the hallway, sure, you'd look quite alike, but someone would have to take a closer look for that. She's years older than you. It's just not possible."
   "What should I do?" She tried to get to her feet; he held her arm, pulled her back to his side on the bed.
   "Nothing," he advised. "It's all right. Tell them_tell them I made you stay in here."
   She looked askance at his littleness. "How?"
   "Trickery. Threats. Psychological coercion," he said truthfully. "You can blame it on me."
   She looked most dubious.
   How old was she? He'd spent the last two hours teasing out her whole life story, and there didn't seem to be very much of it. Her talk was an odd mixture of sharpness and naivete. The greatest adventure of her life had been her brief kidnapping by the Dendarii Mercenaries.
   Rowan. She's made it out. Then what? Would she come back for him? How? This was Jackson's Whole. You couldn't trust anyone. People were meat, here. Like this girl in front of him. He had a sudden nightmarish picture of her, empty-skulled, blank-eyed.
   "I'm sorry," he whispered. "You are so beautiful ... on the inside. You deserve to live. Not be eaten by that old woman."
   "My lady is a great woman," she said sturdily. "She deserves to live more."
   What kind of twisted ethics drove Lotus Durona, to make of this girl an imitation-willing sacrifice? Who did Lotus think she was fooling? Only herself, apparently.
   "Besides," said Lilly Junior. "I thought you liked that fat blonde. You were squirming all over her."
   "Who?"
   "Oh, that's right. That must have been your clone-twin."
   "My brother," he corrected automatically. What was this story, Mark?
   She was getting relaxed, now, reconciled to her strange captivity. And bored. She looked at him speculatively. "Would you like to kiss me again?" she inquired.
   It was his height. It brought out the beast in women. Unthreatened, they became bold. He normally considered it a quite delightful effect, but this girl worried him. She was not his . . . equal. But he had to kill time, keep her in here, keep her entertained for as long as possible. "Well ... all right. . . ."
   After about twenty minutes of tame and decorous necking, she drew back and remarked, "That's not the way the Baron does it."
   "What do you do for Vasa Luigi?"
   She unfastened his trouser-strings and started to show him. After about a minute, he choked, "Stop!"
   "Don't you like it? The Baron does."
   "I'm sure." Dreadfully aroused, he fled to the chair by the little dining table, and scrunched himself up in it. "That's, um, very nice, Lilly, but it's too serious for you and me."
   "I don't understand."
   "Just exactly so." She was a child, despite her grown-up body, he was increasingly certain of it. "When you are older . . . you will find your own boundaries. And you can invite people across them as you choose. Right now you scarcely know where you leave off and the world begins. Desire should flow from within, not be imposed from without." He tried to choke off his own flow by sheer will-power, half-successfully. Vasa Luigi, you scum.
   She frowned thoughtfully. "I'm not going to be older."
   He wrapped his arms around his drawn-up knees, and shuddered. Hell.
   He suddenly remembered how he'd met Sergeant Taura. How they had become lovers, in that desperate hour. Ah, ambushed again by the pot-holes in his memory. There were certain obvious parallels with his current situation, it must be why his subconscious was trying to apply the old successful solution. But Taura was a bioengineered mutation, short-lived. The Dendarii medicos had stolen her a little more time with metabolic adjustments, but not much. Every day was a gift, each year a miracle. She was living her whole life as a smash-and-grab, and he heartily approved. Lilly Junior could live a century, if she wasn't . . . cannibalized. She needed to be seduced to life, not sex.
   Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it. "Don't you want to live?" he asked her.
   "I ... don't know."
   "I do. I want to live. And believe me, I have considered the alternative deeply."
   "You are ... a funny, little, ugly man. What can you get from life?"
   "Everything. And I mean to get more." I want, I want. Wealth, power, love. Victories, splendid, brilliant victories, shining reflected in the eyes of comrades. Someday, a wife, children. A herd of children, tall and healthy, to rock those who whispered Mutant! right back on their heels and over on their pointed heads. And I mean to have a brother.
   Mark. Yeah. The surly little fellow that Baron Ryoval was, quite possibly, taking apart strand by strand right now. In Miles's place. His nerves stretched to the screaming point, with no release. I've got to make time.
   He finally persuaded Lilly Junior to go to sleep, wrapped up in the covers on Rowan's side of the bed. Chivalrously, he took the chair. A couple of hours into the night and he was in agony. He tried the floor. It was cold. His chest ached. He dreaded the thought of waking with a cough. He finally crept into the bed on top of the covers, and curled up facing away from her. He was intensely conscious of her body. The reverse was obviously not so. His anxiety was the more enormous for being so formless. He didn't have control of anything. Near morning, he at last warmed up enough to doze.
   "Rowan, m'love," he muttered muzzily, nuzzling into her scented hair and wrapping himself around her warm, long body. "M'lady." A Barrayaran turn of phrase; he knew where that milady came from, at long last. She flinched; he recoiled. Consciousness returned. "Ak! Sorry."
   Lilly Junior sat up, shaking off his ugly-little-man grasp. Grope, actually. "I am not my lady!"
   "Sorry, wrong referent. I think of Rowan as milady, inside my head. She is milady, and I'm her . . ." court fool "knight. I really am a soldier, you know. Despite being short."
   At the second knock on the door, he realized what had awakened him. "Breakfast. Quick! Into the bathroom. Rattle around in there. I swear we can keep this going another round."
   For once he did not try to engage the guards in conversation leading to bribery. Lilly Junior came back out when the door closed again behind the servant. She ate slowly, dubiously, as if she doubted her right to food. He watched her, increasingly fascinated. "Here. Have this other roll. You can put sugar on it, you know."
   "I'm not allowed to eat sugar."
   "You should have sugar." He paused. "You should have everything. You should have friends. You should have . . . sisters. You should have education to the limits of your mind's powers, and work to challenge your spirit. Work makes you bigger. More real. You eat it up, and grow. You should have love. A knight of your own. Much taller. You should have ... ice cream."
   "I mustn't get fat. My lady is my destiny."
   "Destiny! What do you know about destiny?" He rose, and began to pace, zig-zagging around bed and table. "I'm a frigging expert on destiny. Your lady is a false destiny, and do you know how I know? She takes everything, but she doesn't give anything back.
   "Real destiny takes everything_the last drop of blood, and strip out your veins to be sure_and gives it back doubled. Quadrupled. A thousand-fold! But you can't give halves. You have to give it all. I know. I swear. I've come back from the dead to speak the truth to you. Real destiny gives you a mountain of life, and puts you on top of it."
   His conviction felt utterly megalomanic. He adored moments like this.
   "You're insane," she said, staring at him warily.
   "How would you know? You've never met a sane person in your life. Have you? Think about it."
   Her rising interest fell. "It's no use. I'm a prisoner anyway. Where would I go?"
   "Lilly Durona would take you in," he said promptly. "The Durona Group is under House Fell's protection, you know. If you could get to your grandmother, you'd be safe."
   Her brows drew down just like Rowan's had, when she was knocking holes in his escape plans. "How?"
   "They can't leave us in here forever. Suppose ..." he walked behind her, gathered up her hair, and held it in a messy wad on the back of her head. "I didn't get the impression Vasa Luigi meant to keep Rowan past the point of need for secrecy. When I go, so should she. If they thought you were Rowan, I bet you could just walk right out."
   "What . . . would I say?"
   "As little as possible. Hello, Dr. Durona, your ride is here. Pick up your bag, and go."
   "I couldn't."
   "You could try. If you fail, you'll lose nothing. If you win, you'll win everything. And_if you got away_you could tell people where I've gone. Who took me, and when. All it takes is a few minutes of nerve, and that's free. We make it ourselves, out of ourselves. Nerve can't be taken away from you like a purse or something. Hell, why am I telling you that? You escaped the Dendarii Mercenaries on nerve and wit alone."
   She looked utterly boggled. "I was doing it for my lady. I've never done anything for ... for myself."
   He felt like crying, strung up to the point of pure nervous collapse. This was the sort of all-out exalted eloquence he usually reserved for persuading people to risk their lives, not save them. He leaned across to whisper demonically in her ear. "Do it for yourself. The universe will be around to collect its cut later."
   After breakfast, he tried to help her fix her hair Rowan-fashion. He was terrible at hair. Since Rowan was too, the final result was quite convincing, he fancied. They survived the delivery and removal of lunch.
   He knew it wasn't dinner when they didn't knock before entering.
   There were three guards, and a man in House livery. Two of the guards took him, wordlessly, and fastened his hands in front of him. He was grateful for that small favor. Behind his back would have been excruciating, after the first half-hour. They prodded him into the hall. No sign of Vasa and Lotus. Out looking for their lost clone, he hoped? He glanced back over his shoulder.
   "Dr. Durona," the House man nodded at Lilly Junior. "I am to be your driver. Where to?"
   She brushed a loose wisp of hair from her eyes, picked up Rowan's bag, stepped forward, and said, "Home."
   "Rowan," Miles said. She turned.
   "Take all, for it will all be taken back in time. That's a grave truth." He moistened dry lips. "Kiss me goodbye?"
   She tilted her head, wheeled, bent. Pressed her lips to his, briefly. Followed the driver.
   Well, it was enough to impress the guards. "How'd you rate that?" one inquired, amiably amused, as he was led in the opposite direction.
   "I'm an acquired taste," he informed them smugly.
   "Cut the chat," sighed the senior man.
   He made two attempted breaks on the way to the groundcar; after the second, the biggest guard simply slung him over his shoulder, head-down, and threatened to drop him if he wriggled. They'd used enough force tackling him the second time that Miles didn't think he was joking. They bundled him into the back of the vehicle between two of them.
   "Where are you taking me?"
   "To a transfer point," one said.
   "What transfer point?"
   "That's all you need to know."
   He kept up a steady stream of commentary, bribes, threats, insults, and at last, invective, but they never rose to the bait again. He wondered if any of them could be the man who'd killed him. No. No one involved in that mess at the surgical facility could be so calm about it all. These guys had been far away, that day. His voice went hoarse. It was a long ride. Groundcars were hardly used outside the cities, the roads were so bad. And they were far outside any city. It was past dusk when they pulled over beside a lonely intersection.
   They handed him off to two humorless, flat-faced men in red and black House livery, who were waiting patiently as oxen. Ryoval's colors. These men fastened his hands behind his back, and his ankles too, before slinging him into the back of a lightflyer. It rose silently into darkness.
   Looks like Vasa Luigi got his price.
   Rowan, if she'd made it, must send anyone looking for him to Bharaputra's. Where Miles would not be. Not that he was so sure Vasa Luigi wouldn't just cheerfully sic them right on to Ryoval.
   But if Ryoval's location was easy to find, they would have found it by now.
   By God. I could be the first ImpSec agent on-site. He'd have to be sure and point that out, in his report to Illyan. He had looked forward to making posthumous reports to Illyan. Now he wondered if he was going to live long enough.
   

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

   "I hate to be the one to tell you this, Baron," said the technician, "but your torture victim appears to be having a wonderful time."
   Gorge grinned around the tube gagging his mouth as Baron Ryoval walked around him and stared. Admiring his amazing stomach, perhaps.
   "There are a number of possible psychological defenses in these situations," Ryoval said. "Split personalities and identification with the captor included. I expected Naismith to work through them all, eventually, but_so soon?"
   "I didn't believe it either, sir, so I took a series of brain scans. The results were unusual."
   "If his personality is indeed splitting, it should show up on the scan."
   "Something shows up on the scan. He seems to be shielding portions of his mind from our stimuli, and his surface responses certainly suggest a split, but . . . the pattern is abnormally abnormal, if that makes sense, sir."
   "Not really." Ryoval pursed his lips with interest. "I'll take a look at them."
   "Whatever is going on, he's not faking it. That I am sure of."
   "So impossibly fast ..." murmured Ryoval. "When do you think he snapped? How could I have missed it?"
   "I'm not sure. Early. The first day_maybe the first hour. But if he keeps it up, he's going to be very elusive, to bring much force to bear upon. He can keep . . . changing shifts."
   "So can I," stated Ryoval coldly.
   The pressure in his stomach was growing into pain. Howl prodded anxiously, but Gorge would not give way. It was still his turn. The Other listened attentively. The fourth one always listened, when Baron Ryoval was present. Rarely slept, almost never spoke.
   "I didn't expect him to reach this stage of disintegration for months. It throws off my time-table," the Baron complained.
   Yes, Baron. Aren't we fascinating? Don't we intrigue you?
   "I must consider how best to re-focus him," Ryoval mused. "Bring him to my quarters later. I'll see what a little quiet conversation and a few experiments will yield, in the way of new directions."
   Beneath his flattened affect, the Other shivered in anticipation.
   Two guards delivered him/them to Baron Ryoval's pleasant living room. There were no windows, though a large holovid display took up most of one wall, presently running a view of some tropical beach. But Ryoval's quarters were surely underground. Nobody would break through windows here.
   His skin was still patchy. The techs had sprayed the raw areas with some kind of coating, to keep him from oozing on Ryoval's fine furniture, and dressed the other wounds with plastic bandage, so they wouldn't break open and bleed and stain.
   "Think this'll do any good?" the tech with the sprayer had asked.
   "Probably not," his comrade had sighed. "I suppose I'd better go ahead and put a cleaning crew on call. Wish he'd put down a tarp or something."
   The guards sat him now in a low, wide chair. It was just a chair, no spikes or razors or impalements. His hands were fastened behind him, which meant he could not settle back. He spread his knees and sat uncomfortably upright, panting.
   The senior guard asked Ryoval, "Do you wish us to secure him, sir?"
   Ryoval raised an eyebrow. "Can he stand up without help?"
   "Not readily, from that position."
   Ryoval's lips crooked up in amused contempt, as he gazed down at his prisoner. "Ah, we're getting there. Slowly. Leave us. I'll call you. Don't interrupt. It may become noisy."
   "Your soundproofing is very effective, sir." The flat-faced guards saluted and withdrew. There was something wrong with those guards. When not following orders, they tended to just sit, or stand, wordless and blank. Constructed that way, no doubt.
   Gorge and Grunt and Howl and the Other stared around with interest, wondering whose turn it was going to be next.
   You just had your turn, said Howl to Gorge. It'll be me.
   Don't bet on it, said Grunt. Could be me.
   If it weren't for Gorge, said the Other, grimly, I'd take my turn right now. Now I have to wait.
   You've never taken a turn, said Gorge curiously. But the Other was silent again.
   "Let's watch a show," said Ryoval, and pouched a remote. The tropic display changed to a life-sized vid recording of one of Grunt's sessions with the . . . creatures, from the bordello. Grunt watched himself with great interest and delight, from all these new angles. Gorge's work was gradually threatening to put many interesting events out of sight, below his equator.
   "I am thinking of sending a copy of this to the Dendarii mercenary fleet," Ryoval murmured, watching him. "Imagine all your senior staff officers, viewing this. I think it would fetch a few to me, no?"
   No. Ryoval was lying. His presence here was still secret, or he wouldn't be present here. And Ryoval could be in no rush to give that secret away. The Other muttered dryly, Send a copy to Simon Illyan, why don't you, and see what that fetches you. But Illyan belonged to Lord Mark, and Mark wasn't here, and anyway, the Other never, ever, ever spoke aloud.
   "Imagine that pretty bodyguard of yours, joining you here . . ." Ryoval went on, in detail. Grunt was perfectly willing to imagine some parts of it, though other parts offended even him. Howl?
   Not me! said Howl. That's not my job.
   We'll just have to make a new recruit, they all said. He could make a thousand of them, at need. He was an army, flowing like water, parting around obstacles, impossible to destroy with any one cut.
   The vid display changed to one of Howl's finest moments, the one which had given him his name. Shortly after he'd been chemically skinned, the techs had painted sticky stuff on him that made him itch unbearably. The techs hadn't had to touch him. He'd almost killed himself. They'd given him a transfusion afterwards, to replace the blood lost in the raking wounds.
   He stared impassively at the convulsing creature in the vid. The show that Ryoval wanted to see was himself. Looking at him right now must have all the drama and excitement of watching a test-pattern. Boring. Ryoval looked like he wanted to aim the remote at him, and switch programs.
   The Other waited with growing impatience. He was beginning to get his breath back, but there was still the damned low chair to contend with. It had to be tonight. By the next opportunity, if any ever came, Gorge might have immobilized them all. Yes. He waited.
   Ryoval's lips puffed with disappointment, watching his serene profile. He shut the vid off and rose, and walked around the chair, studying him through narrowed eyes. "You're not even with me, are you? You've gone up around some bend. I must think what will bring you back to me. Or should I say, you all." Ryoval was much too perceptive.
   I don't trust you, said Gorge to the Other, doubtfully. What will happen to me, after?
   And me, added Grunt. Only Howl said nothing. Howl was very tired.
   I promise Mark will still feed you, Gorge, the Other whispered, from deep inside. At least now and then. And Grunt. Mark could take you to Beta Colony. There are people there who could help you clean up enough to come out in the daylight, I think. You wouldn't need Ryoval's hypospray. Poor Howl is all exhausted anyway, he's worked the hardest, covering for the rest of you lot. Anyway, Grunt, what if Ryoval decides on castration next? Maybe you and Howl can get together, and Mark could rent you a squad of beautiful women_ wouldn't women be a lovely change?_with whips and chains. This is Jackson's Whole, I bet you could find some in the vid directory. You don't need Ryoval. We save Mark, and he'll save us. I promise.
   Who are you, to pledge Mark's word? said Gorge grumpily.
   I am the closest to him.
   You've certainly hidden out the best, said Howl, with a hint of resentment.
   It was necessary. But we will all perish, one by one, as Ryoval hunts us down. He's terribly sharp. We are the originals. The new recruits would only be distorted shadows of us anyway.
   This was true, they all could see.
   "I'm bringing you a friend to play with," Ryoval commented, walking around him. Having Ryoval behind him had some odd effects on his internal topography. Gorge flattened, Howl emerged, then sank again as Ryoval came back in view. Grunt watched alertly for his cues, rocking just slightly. "Your clone-twin. The one my stupid squad failed to take along."
   Deep down inside, Lord Mark came wide awake, screaming. The Other smothered him up. He lies. He lies.
   "Their fumble proved to be a costly error, for which they will pay. Your double vanished, then somehow turned up with Vasa Luigi. A typically smooth bit of sleight of hand on Vasa's part. I'm still not convinced dear Lotus doesn't have a private line of some kind into the Durona Group."
   Ryoval circled him again. It was very disorienting. "Vasa is quite convinced his twin is the Admiral, and you are the clone. He has infected me with his doubts, though if as he claims the man is indeed cryo-amnesic, it could prove most disappointing even if he's right. But it doesn't matter now. I have you both. Just as I predicted. Can you guess what is the first thing I shall have you two do to each other?"
   Grunt could. Spot-on, though not with the whispered refinements Ryoval added.
   Lord Mark raged, wept with terror and dismay. Not a vibration rippled Grunt's slack-mouthed surface, nor marred the flat glisten of his eyes with any inner purpose. Wait, begged the Other.
   The Baron walked to a counter or bar, made of some zebra-grained, polished wood, and unwrapped an array of glittering tools, which no one could quite see, though Howl stretched his neck. Meditatively, Ryoval looked his kit over.
   You have to stay out of my way. And not sabotage me, said the Other. I know Ryoval gives you what you hunger for_but it's a trick.
   Ryoval doesn't feed you, said Gorge.
   Ryoval is my food, whispered the Other.
   You'll only get one chance, said Howl nervously. And then they'll come after me.
   I only need one chance.
   Ryoval turned back. A surgical hand-tractor gleamed in his grip. Grunt, frightened, gave way to the Other.
   "I believe," said Ryoval, "that I will pull out one of your eyes, next. Just one. That should have some interesting psychological focusing effects, when I threaten the remaining one."
   Smoothly, Howl gave way. Last of all, reluctantly, Gorge gave way, as Ryoval walked toward them.
   Killer's first attempt to struggle to his feet failed, and he fell back. Damn you, Gorge. He tried again, shifted his weight forward, heaved up, stepped once, half-unbalanced without the use of his arms to save himself. Ryoval watched, highly amused, unalarmed by the waddling little monster he doubtless thought he had created.
   Trying to work around Gorge's new belly was something like being the Blind Zen Archer. But his alignment was absolute.
   His first kick took Ryoval in the crotch. This folded him neatly over, and put his upper body within practical range. He flowed instantly into the second kick, striking Ryoval squarely in the throat. He could feel cartilage and tissue crunch all the way back to Ryoval's spine. Since he was not wearing steel-capped boots this time, it also broke several of his toes, smashed up and down at right angles. He felt no pain. That was Howl's job.
   He fell over. Getting up again wasn't easy, with his hands still shackled behind him. Wallowing around on the floor trying to get his legs under himself, he saw with disappointment that Ryoval wasn't dead yet. The man writhed and gurgled and clutched his throat, on the carpet next to him. But the room's computer control did not recognize the Baron's voice commands now. They had a little time yet.
   He rolled near to Ryoval's ear. "I am too a Vorkosigan. The one who was trained as a deep-penetration mole and assassin. It really pisses me off when people underestimate me, y'know?"
   He managed to get back on his feet, and studied the problem, which was, Ryoval was still alive. He sighed, swallowed, stepped forward, and pounded the man with repeated blows of his feet till Ryoval stopped vomiting blood, convulsing, and breathing. It was a nauseating process, but in all, he was very relieved that there seemed no part of himself who actually enjoyed it. Even Killer had to muster a determined professionalism, to see it through to the end.
   He considered the Other, whom he now recognized as Killer. Galen made you, mostly, didn't he?
   Yes. But he didn't make me out of nothing.
   You did very well. Hiding out. Stalking. I'd wondered if any of us possessed any sense of timing at all. I'm glad at least one of us does.
   It was what the Count our Father said, Killer admitted, pleased and embarrassed to be praised. That people would give themselves to you, if you waited them out, and didn't rush to give yourself to them. And I did. And Ryoval did. He added shyly, The Count's a killer too, you know. Like me.
   Hm.
   He pulled his wrists against the shackles, and limped over to the zebra-wood counter to study Ryoval's kit. The selection included a laser-drill, as well as a sickening assortment of knives, scalpels, tongs, and probes. The drill was a short-focal-range surgical type suitable for cutting bone, a dubious weapon, but a most suitable tool.
   He wobbled around and tried to pick it up, behind his back. He almost wept when he dropped it. He was going to have to get down on the floor again. Awkwardly, he did so, and lumbered around till he managed to grub up the drill. It took many minutes of fiddling, but at last he got it turned around and aimed in such a way as to cut through his shackles without either slicing his hand off, or burning himself in the butt. Released, he flung his arms around his swollen torso, and rocked himself like someone rocking a weary child. His foot was starting to throb. The assorted mass vectors had apparently also combined to wrench his back, when he'd kicked Ryoval in the throat.
   He stared, aside, at his victim/tormentor/prey. Clone-consumer. He felt apologetic toward the body he had pummeled underfoot. It wasn't your fault. You died, what, ten years ago? It was the one up top, inside the skull, who had been his enemy.
   An illogical fear possessed him that Ryoval's guards would break in, and save their master even in death. He crawled over, much easier now that he had his hands free, took the laser-drill, and made certain that no one would be transplanting that brain again, ever. No one, no way.
   He sagged back into the low chair, and sat in utter exhaustion, waiting to die. Ryoval's men surely had orders to avenge their fallen lord.
   No one came.
   . . . Right. The boss had locked himself in his quarters with a prisoner and a surgical kit, and told his goons not to bother him. How long before one worked up the courage to interrupt his little hobby? Could be ... quite a long time.
   The weight of hope returning was an almost intolerable burden, like walking on a broken bone. I don't want to move. He was very angry with ImpSec for abandoning him here, but thought he might forgive them everything if only they would charge in now, and waft him away without any further exertion or effort on his part. Haven't I earned a break? The room grew very silent.
   That was over-kill, he thought, staring down at Ryoval's body. A trifle unbalanced, that. And you've made a mess on the carpet.
   I don't know what to do next.
   Who was speaking? Killer? Gorge, Grunt? Howl? All of them?
   You're good troops, and loyal, but not too bright.
   Bright is not our job.
   It was time for Lord Mark to wake up. Had he ever really been asleep?
   "All right, gang," he muttered aloud, enfolding himself. "Everybody up." The low chair was a torture-device in its own right. Ryoval's last snide dig. With a groan, he regained his feet.
   It was impossible that an old fox like Ryoval would have only one entrance to his den. He poked around the underground suite. Office, living room, small kitchen, big bedroom, and a rather oddly equipped bathroom. He gazed longingly at the shower. He had not been allowed to bathe since he'd been brought here. But he was afraid it might wash off the plastic skin. He did brush his teeth. His gums were bleeding, but that was all right. He drank a little cold water. At least I'm not hungry. He vented a small cackle.
   He found the emergency exit at last in the back of the bedroom closet.
   If it's not guarded, stated Killer, it must be booby-trapped.
   Ryoval's main defenses will work from the outside in, said Lord Mark slowly. From the inside out, it will be set up to facilitate a quick escape. For Ryoval. And Ryoval alone.
   It was palm-locked. Palm-lock pads read pulse, temperature, and the electrical conductivity of the skin, as well as the whorls of fingerprints and grooves of life-lines. Dead hands didn't open palm-locks.
   There are ways around palm locks, murmured Killer. Killer had been trained in such things once, in a previous incarnation. Lord Mark let go, and floated, watching.
   The surgical array was almost as useful as an electronics kit, in Killer's hands. Given abundant time, and as long as the palm lock was never going to be required to work again. Lord Mark gazed dreamily as Killer loosened the sensor-pad from the wall, touched here, cut there.
   The control virtual on the wall lit at last. Ah, murmured Killer proudly.
   Oh, said the rest. The display projected a small glowing square.
   It wants a code-key, said Killer in dismay. His panic at being trapped quickened their heart rate. Howl's tenuous containment loosened, and electrical twinges of pain coursed through them.
   Wait, said Lord Mark. If they needed a code-key, so must Ryoval.
   Baron Ryoval has no successor. Ryoval had no second-in-command, no trained replacement. He kept all his oppressed subordinates in separate channels of communication. House Ryoval consisted of Baron Ryoval, and slaves, period. That's why House Ryoval failed to grow. Ryoval didn't delegate authority, ever.
   Therefore, Ryoval had no place nor trusted subordinates with whom to leave his private code-keys. He had to carry them on his person. At all times.
   The black-gang whimpered as Lord Mark turned around and returned to the living room. Mark ignored them. This is my job, now.
   He turned Ryoval's body over on its back, and searched it methodically from head to toe, down to the skin and farther. He missed no possibility, not even hollow teeth. He sat back uncomfortably, distended belly aching, sprained back on fire. His level of pain was rising as he re-integrated, which made it a very tentative process. It has to be here. It has to be here somewhere.
   Run, run, run, the black-gang gibbered, in a remarkably unified chorus.
   Shut up and let me think. He turned Ryoval's right hand over in his own. A ring with a flat black stone gleamed in the light. . . .
   He laughed out loud.
   He swallowed the laugh fearfully, looking around. The Baron's soundproofing held, apparently. The ring would not slide off. Stuck? Riveted to the bone? He cut off Ryoval's right hand with the laser drill. The laser also cauterized the wrist, so it wasn't too drippy. Nice. He limped slowly and painfully back to the bedroom closet, and stared at the little glowing square, just the size of the ring's stone.
   Which way up? Would the wrong rotation trigger an alarm?
   Lord Mark pantomimed Baron Ryoval in a hurry. Slap the palm lock, turn his hand over and jam the ring into the code slot_"This way," he whispered.
   The door slid open on a personal lift tube. It extended upward some twenty meters. Its antigrav control pads glowed, green for up, red for down. Lord Mark and Killer gazed around. No obvious defenses, such as a tanglefield generator. . . .
   A faint draft brought a scent of fresh air from above. Let's go! screamed Gorge and Grunt and Howl.
   Lord Mark stood spraddle-legged and stodgy, staring, refusing to be rushed. It has no safety ladder, he said at last.
   So what?
   So. What?
   Killer sagged back, and muffled the rest of them, and waited respectfully.
   I want a safety ladder, muttered Lord Mark querulously. He turned away, and wandered back through Ryoval's quarters. While he was at it, he looked for clothes. There wasn't much to choose from; this clearly was not Ryoval's main residence. Just a private suite. The garments were all too long and not wide enough. The trousers were impossible. A soft knit shirt stretched over his raw skin, though. A loose jacket, left open, provided some more protection. A Betan-style sarong, bath-wear, wrapped his loins. A pair of slippers were sloppy on his left foot, tight on his swollen, broken right foot. He searched for cash, keys, anything else of use. But there was no handy climbing gear.
   I'll just have to make my own safety ladder. He hung the laser drill around his neck on a tie made from a couple of Ryoval's belts, stepped into the bottom of the lift tube, and systematically began to burn holes in the plastic side.
   Too slow! the black gang wailed. Howl howled inside, and even Killer screamed, Run, dammit!
   Lord Mark ignored them. He turned on the "up" field, but did not let it take them. Clinging to his hot hand and foot holds, he pocked his way upward. It was not difficult to climb, buoyed in the flowing grav field, only hard to remember to keep his three points of contact. His right foot was nearly useless. The black gang gibbered in fear. Mulish and methodical, Mark ascended. Melt a hole. Wait. Move a hand, foot, hand, foot. Melt another hole. Wait. . . .
   Three meters from the top, his head came level with a small audio pick-up, flush to the wall, and a shielded motion sensor.
   I imagine it wants a code word. In Ryoval's voice, Lord Mark remarked blandly, observing. Can't oblige.
   It doesn't have to be what you guess, Killer said. It could be anything. Plasma arcs. Poison gas.
   No. Ryoval saw me, but I saw Ryoval. It will be simple. And elegant. And you will do it to yourself. Watch.
   He gripped his handhold, and extended the laser drill up past the motion sensor for the next burn.
   The lift tube's grav field switched off.
   Even half-expecting it, he was nearly ripped from his perch by his own weight. Howl could not contain it all. Mark screamed silently, flooded in pain. But he clung, and did not let them fall.
   The last three meters of ascent could have been called a nightmare, but he had new standards for nightmares now. It was merely tedious.
   There was a tanglefield trap at the top entrance, but it faced outward. The laser drill disarmed its controls. He managed a crippled, shuffling, crabwise walk into a private underground garage. It contained the Baron's lightflyer. The canopy opened at the touch of Ryoval's ring.
   He slid into the lightflyer, adjusted the seat and controls as best he could around his distorted and aching contours, powered it up, eased it forward. That button on the control panel_there? The garage door slid aside. Once through, he shot up, and up, and up, through the dark, the acceleration pummeling him. Nobody even fired on him. There were no lights below. A rocky winter waste. The whole little installation must be underground.
   He checked the flyer's map display, and picked his direction_ East. Toward the light. That seemed right.
   He kept accelerating.