CHAPTER NINE

   "Whatever you do," said Captain Thorne, "don't mention the Betan rejuvenation treatment.
   Mark frowned. "What Betan rejuvenation treatment? Is there one?"
   "No."
   "Then why the hell would I mention it?"
   "Never mind, just don't."
   Mark gritted his teeth, swung around in his station chair square to he vid plate, and pressed the keypad to lower his seat till his booted feet were flat to the floor. He was fully kitted in Naismith's officer's greys. Quinn had dressed him as though he were a doll, or an idiot child. Quinn, Bothari-Jesek, and Thorne had then preceded to fill his lead with a mass of sometimes-conflicting instructions on how to play Miles in the upcoming interview. As if I didn't know. The three captains now each sat in station chairs out of range of the vid pick-up in he Peregrine's tac room, ready to prompt him through an ear-bug, and he'd thought Galen was a puppet master. His ear itched, and he wriggled the bug in irritation, earning a frown from Bothari-Jesek. Quinn had never stopped scowling.
   Quinn had never stopped. She still wore her blood-soaked fatigues, her sudden inheritance of command of this debacle had allowed her no rest. Thorne had cleaned up and changed to ship greys, but obviously had not slept yet. Both their faces stood out pale in the shadows, too sharply lined. Quinn had made Mark take a stimulant when, getting him dressed, she'd found him too muzzy-mouthed for her taste, and he did not quite like its effects. His head and eyes were almost too clear, but his body felt beaten. All the edges and surfaces of the tac room seemed to stand out with unnatural clarity. Sounds and voices in his ears seemed to have a painful serrated quality, sharp and blurred at once. Quinn was on the stuff too, he realized, watching her wince at a high electronic squeal from the comm equipment.
   ("All right, you're on,") said Quinn through the ear-bug as the vid plate in front of him began to sparkle. They all shut up at last.
   The image of Baron Fell materialized, and frowned at him too. Georish Stauber, Baron Fell of House Fell, was unusual for the leader of a Jacksonian Great House in that he still wore his original body. An old man's body. The Baron was stout, pink of face, with a shiny liver-spotted scalp fringed by white hair trimmed short. The silk tunic he wore in his House's particular shade of green made him look like a hypothyroid elf. But there was nothing elfin about his cold and penetrating eyes. Miles was not intimidated by a Jacksonian Baron's power, Mark reminded himself. Miles was not intimidated by any power backed by less than three entire planets. His father the Butcher of Komarr could eat Jacksonian Great Houses for breakfast.
   He, of course, was not Miles.
   Screw that. I'm Miles for the next fifteen minutes, anyway.
   "So, Admiral," rumbled the Baron. "We meet again after all."
   "Quite." Mark managed not to let his voice crack.
   "I see you are as presumptuous as ever. And as ill-informed."
   "Quite."
   ("Start talking, dammit,") Quinn's voice hissed in his ear.
   Mark swallowed. "Baron Fell, it was not a part of my original battle plan to involve Fell Station in this raid. I am as anxious to decamp with my forces as you are to have us leave. To that end, I request your help as a go-between. You . . . know that we've kidnapped Baron Bharaputra, I trust?"
   "So I'm told." One of Fell's eyelids tic'd. "You've rather overreached your available back-up, have you not?"
   "Have I?" Mark shrugged. "House Fell is in a state of vendetta with House Bharaputra, are you not?"
   "Not exactly. House Fell was on the verge of ending the vendetta with House Bharaputra. We've found it mutually unprofitable, of late. I'm now suspected of collusion in your raid." The Baron's frown deepened.
   "Uh ..." his thought was interrupted by Thorne whispering, ("Tell him Bharaputra's alive and well.")
   "Baron Bharaputra is alive and well," said Mark, "and can remain so, for all I care. As a go-between, it seems to me you would be well-placed to demonstrate your good faith to House Bharaputra by helping to get him back. I only wish to trade him_intact_for one item, and then we'll be gone."
   "You are optimistic," Fell said dryly.
   Mark plowed on. "A simple, advantageous trade. The Baron for my clone."
   ("Brother,") Thorne, Quinn, and Bothari-Jesek all corrected in unison in his ear-bug.
   "_brother," Mark continued, edged. He unset his teeth. "Unfortunately, my . . . brother, was shot in the melee downside. Fortunately, he was successfully frozen in one of our emergency cryo-chambers. Um, unfortunately, the cryo-chamber was accidentally left behind in the scramble to get off. A live man for a dead one; I fail to see the difficulty."
   The Baron barked a laugh, which he muffled in a cough. The three Dendarii faces across from Mark in the shadows were chill and stiff and not amused. "You've been having an interesting visit, Admiral. What do you want with a dead clone?"
   ("Brother,") Quinn said again. ("Miles insists, always.")
   ("Yes,") seconded Thorne. ("That's how I first knew you weren't Miles, back on the Ariel, when I called you a clone and you didn't jump down my throat.")
   "Brother," Mark repeated wearily. "There was no head-wound, and the cryo-treatment was begun almost instantly. He has good hope of revival, as such things go."
   ("Only if we get him back,") Quinn growled.
   "I have a brother," remarked Baron Fell. "He inspires no such emotions in me."
   I'm right with you, Baron, Mark thought.
   Thorne piped up in Mark's ear, ("He's talking about his half-brother, Baron Ryoval of House Ryoval. The original axis of this vendetta was between Fell and Ryoval. Bharaputra got dragged in later.")
   I know who Ryoval is, Mark wanted to snap, but could not.
   "In fact," Baron Fell went on, "my brother will be quite excited to learn you are here. After you so reduced his resources on your last visit, he is alas limited to small-scale attacks. But I suggest you watch your back."
   "Oh? Do Ryoval's agents operate so freely on Fell Station?" Mark purred.
   Thorne approved, ("Good one! Just like Miles.")
   Fell stiffened. "Hardly."
   Thorne whispered, ("Yes, remind him you helped him with his brother.")
   What the hell had Miles done here, four years ago? "Baron. I helped you with your brother. You help me with mine, and we can call it square."
   "Hardly that. The apples of discord you threw among us on your last departure took far too much time to sort out. Still . . . it's true you dealt Ry a better blow that I could have." Was there a tiny glint of approval in Fell's eye? He rubbed his round chin. "Therefore, I will give you one day to complete your business and depart."
   "You'll act as go-between?"
   "The better to keep an eye on both parties, yes."
   Mark explained the Dendarii's best guess as to the approximate location of the cryo-chamber, and gave its description and serial numbers. "Tell the Bharaputrans, we think it may have been hidden or disguised in some way. Please emphasize, we wish it returned in good condition. And their Baron will be too."
   ("Good,") Bothari-Jesek encouraged. ("Let 'em know it's too valuable to destroy, without letting 'em guess they could hold us up for more ransom.")
   Fell's lips thinned. "Admiral, you are an acute man, but I don't think you altogether understand how we do things on Jackson's Whole."
   "But you do, Baron. That's why we'd like to have you on our side."
   "I am not on your side. That is perhaps the first thing you don't understand."
   Mark nodded, slowly; Miles would have, he thought. Fell's attitude was strange. Faintly hostile. Yet he acts like he respects me.
   No. He respected Miles. Hell. "Your neutrality is all I ask."
   Fell shot him a narrow glance from under his white eyebrows. "What about the other clones?"
   "What about them?"
   "House Bharaputra will be inquiring."
   "They do not enter into this transaction. Vasa Luigi's life should be sufficient and more."
   "Yes, the trade seems uneven. What is so valuable about your late clone?"
   Three voices chorused in his ear, ("Brother!") Mark yanked the ear-bug out and slapped it to the counter beside the vid plate. Quinn nearly choked.
   "I cannot trade back fractions of Baron Bharaputra," snapped Mark. "Tempted as I am to start doing so."
   Baron Fell raised a placating plump palm. "Calm, Admiral. I doubt it will be necessary to go so far."
   "I hope not." Mark trembled. "It'd be a shame if I had to send him back without his brain. Like the clones."
   Baron Fell apparently read the absolute personal sincerity of his threat, for he opened both palms. "I'll see what I can do, Admiral."
   "Thank you," whispered Mark.
   The Baron nodded; his image dissolved. By some trick of the holovid or the stimulant, Fell's eyes seemed to linger for one last unsettling stare. Mark sat frozen for several seconds till he was certain they were gone.
   "Huh," said Bothari-Jesek, sounding surprised. "You did that rather well."
   He did not bother to answer that one.
   "Interesting," said Thorne. "Why didn't Fell ask for a fee or a cut?"
   "Dare we trust him?" asked Bothari-Jesek.
   "Not trust, exactly." Quinn ran the edge of her index finger along her white teeth, nibbling. "But we must have Fell's cooperation to transit Jumppoint Five. We dare not offend him, not for any money. I thought he would be more pleased with our bite out of Bharaputra, at the strategic situation seems to have changed since your last visit here, Bel."
   Thorne sighed agreement.
   Quinn continued, "I want you to see what you can find out about the current balance of power here. Anything that may affect our operations, anything we can use to help. Houses Fell, Bharaputra and Ryoval, and anything coming up on the blindside. There's something bout all this that's making me feel paranoid as hell, though it may be just the drugs I'm on. But I'm too damned tired to see it right now."
   "I'll see what I can do." Thorne nodded and withdrew.
   When the door hissed shut behind Thorne, Bothari-Jesek asked Quinn, "Have you reported all this to Barrayar yet?"
   "No."
   "Any of it?"
   "No. I don't want to send this one over any commercial comm channel, not even in code. Illyan may have a few deep cover agents here, but I don't know who they are or how to access them. Miles would have known. And . . ."
   "And?" Bothari-Jesek raised an eyebrow.
   "And I'd really like to have the cryo-chamber back first."
   "To shove under the door along with the report? Quinnie, it wouldn't fit."
   Quinn shrugged one defensive shoulder.
   After a moment Bothari-Jesek offered, "I agree with you about not sending anything through the Jacksonian jump-courier system, though."
   "Yes, from what Illyan's said, it's riddled with spies, and not just the Great Houses checking up on each other, either. There's nothing Barrayar could do to help us in the next day-cycle anyway."
   "How long," Mark swallowed, "is that how long I have to go on laying Miles?"
   "I don't know!" said Quinn sharply. She gulped back control of her voice. "A day, a week, two weeks_at least till we can deliver you and the cryo-chamber to ImpSec's galactic affairs HQ on Komarr. Then it will be out of my hands."
   "How the hell do you think you're going to keep all this under wraps?" Mark asked scornfully. "Dozens of people know what really happened."
   " 'Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead'?" Quinn grimaced. "I don't know. The troops will be all right, they have the discipline. The clones I can keep incommunicado. Anyway, we're all going to be bottled up on this ship till we reach Komarr. Later . . . I'll deal with later."
   "I want to see my . . . the . . . my clones. What you've done with them," Mark demanded suddenly.
   Quinn looked like she was about to explode, but Bothari-Jesek cut in, "I'll take him down, Quinnie. I want to check on my passengers too."
   "Well ... as long as you escort him back to his cabin when you're done. And put a guard on his door. We can't have him wandering around the ship."
   "Will do." Bothari-Jesek chivvied him out quickly, before Quinn decided to have him bound and gagged as well.
   The clones had been housed in three hastily-cleared freight storage chambers aboard the Peregrine, two assigned to the boys and one to the girls. Mark ducked through a door behind Bothari-Jesek into one of the boys' chambers, and looked around. Three rows of bedrolls, which must have been podded over from the Ariel, filled the floor space. A self-contained field latrine was strapped into one corner, and a field shower hastily connected in the other, to keep any need for the clones to move about the ship to a minimum. Half jail, half refugee camp, crowded_as he walked down a row between bedrolls the boys glowered up at him with the hollow faces of prisoners.
   I freed you all, dammit. Don't you know I freed you?
   It had been a rough rescue, true. During that hideous night of siege the Dendarii had been liberal with the most dire threats, to keep their charges under control. Some clones now slept, exhausted. The stunned ones were waking up sick and disoriented; a female Dendarii medic moved among them administering synergine and soothing words. Things were . . . under control. Suppressed. Silent. Not jubilant; not grateful. If they believed our threats, why don't they believe our promises? Even the active boys who had cooperated enthusiastically in the excitement of siege and firefight now stared at him with renewed doubt.
   The blond boy was one of them. Mark stopped by his bedroll, and hunkered down. Bothari-Jesek waited, watching them. "All this," Mark waved vaguely at the chamber, "is temporary, you know. It's going to get better later. We're going to get you out of here."
   The boy, propped on his elbow, shrank slightly away. He chewed on his lip. "Which one are you?" he asked suspiciously.
   The live one, he thought of answering, but did not dare in front of Bothari-Jesek. She might mistake it for flippancy. "It doesn't matter. We're going to get you out of here just the same." Truth or not? He had no control over the Dendarii now, still less over the Barrayarans, if indeed as Quinn threatened that was their new destination. Dreary depression washed over him as he stood and followed Bothari-Jesek into the girls' chamber across the corridor.
   The physical set-up was identical, with bedrolls and sanitary facilities, though with only fifteen girls it was slightly less crowded. A Dendarii was passing out a stack of packaged meals, which lent the chamber a moment of positive activity and interest. The trooper was Sergeant Taura, unmistakable even from the back and dressed in clean grey ship-knits and friction-slippers. She sat cross-legged to reduce her intimidating height. The girls, overcoming fear, crept up to her and even touched her with apparent fascination. Of all the Dendarii Taura had never, even in the most frantic moments, addressed the clones with anything but politely-worded requests. She now had all the air of a fairy-tale heroine trying to make pets of wild animals.
   And succeeding. As Mark came up, two of the clone girls actually skittered around behind the seated sergeant, to peek at him over the protection of her broad shoulders. Taura frowned at him, and looked at Bothari-Jesek, who returned a short nod, It's all right. He's with me.
   "S-surprised to see you here, Sergeant," Mark managed.
   "I volunteered to baby-sit," rumbled Taura. "I didn't want anybody bothering them."
   "Is . . . that likely to be a problem?" Fifteen beautiful virgins . . . well, maybe. Sixteen, counting yourself, came a tiny jeer from the back of his brain.
   "Not now," said Bothari-Jesek firmly.
   "Good," he said faintly.
   He waffled up the row of mats for a moment. It was all as comfortable and secure as possible, under the circumstances, he supposed. He found the short platinum blonde clone asleep on her side, the soft masses of her body sculpture spilling out of her pink tunic. Embarrassed by his own arrested eye, he knelt and drew her cover up to her chin. His hand, half-unwilled, stole a touch of her fine hair in passing. Guiltily, he glanced up at Taura. "Has she had a dose of synergine?"
   "Yes. We're letting her sleep it off. She should feel all right when she wakes up."
   He took one of the sealed meal trays and set it down by the blonde's head, for when she did wake. Her breathing was slow and steady. There seemed not much else he could do for her. He looked up to catch the Eurasian girl watching him with knowing, malicious eyes, and he turned hastily away.
   Bothari-Jesek completed her inspection and exited, and he followed in her trail. She paused to speak with the stunner-armed guard in the corridor.
   "_wide dispersal," she was saying. "Shoot first and ask questions later. They're all young and healthy, you don't have to worry about hidden heart conditions with this lot, I don't think. But I doubt they'll give you much trouble."
   "With one exception," Mark put in. "There's this dark-haired girl, slim, very striking_she appears to have undergone some special mental conditioning. Not . . . quite sane. Watch out for her."
   "Yes, sir," said the trooper automatically, then caught himself, glancing at Bothari-Jesek, ". . . uh . . ."
   "Sergeant Taura confirms the report on that one," said Bothari-Jesek. "Anyway, I don't want any of them loose on my ship. They're totally untrained. Their ignorance could be as dangerous as any hostility. This is not an ornamental guard post. Stay awake."
   They exchanged parting salutes. The trooper, overcoming reflex, managed not to include Mark in his directed courtesy. Mark trotted after Bothari-Jesek's long stride.
   "So," she said after a moment, "does our treatment of your clones meet with your approval?" He could not quite tell if her tone was ironic.
   "It's as good as anyone could do for them, for now." He bit his tongue, but the too self-revealing outburst escaped it anyway. "Dammit, it's not fair!"
   Bothari-Jesek's brows rose, as she paced along the corridor. "What's not fair?"
   "I saved these kids_or we did, you did_and they act like we're some kind of villains, kidnappers, monsters. They're not happy at all."
   "Perhaps ... it will have to be enough for you just to have saved them. To demand that they be happy about it too may exceed your mandate . . . little hero." Her tone was unmistakably ironic now, though oddly devoid of scorn.
   "You'd think there'd be a little gratitude. Belief. Acknowledgement. Something."
   "Trust?" she said in a quiet voice.
   "Yes, trust! At least from some of them. Can't any of them tell we're on the level?"
   "They've been rather traumatized. I wouldn't expect too much if I were you, till they get a chance to see more evidence." She paused, in speech and stride, and swung to face him. "But if you ever figure it out_figure out how to make an ignorant, traumatized, paranoid stupid kid trust you_tell Miles. He urgently wants to know."
   Mark stood, nonplussed. "Was that . . . directed to me?" he demanded, dry-mouthed.
   She glanced over his head, around the empty corridor, and smiled i bitter, maddening smile. "You're home." She nodded pointedly toward his cabin door. "Stay there."
   He slept at last, for a long time, though when Quinn came to wake him it seemed like not long enough. Mark wasn't sure if Quinn had slept at all, though she had finally cleaned up and changed back into her officer's undress greys. He'd been starting to imagine her planning to wear the bloodstained fatigues till they retrieved the cryo-chamber, as some sort of vow. Even without the fatigues she radiated an unsettling edginess, red-eyed and strained.
   "Come on," she growled. "I need you to talk to Fell again. He's been giving me a run-around. I'm starting to wonder if he could be in collusion with Bharaputra. I don't understand, it doesn't add up."
   She hauled him off to the tac room again, though this time she did not rely on the ear-bug, but stood aggressively at his elbow. To the outside eye, she'd ranged herself as bodyguard and chief assistant; all Mark could think of was how conveniently placed she was to grab him by the hair and slit his throat.
   Captain Bothari-Jesek sat in, occupying a spare station chair as before, watching quietly. She eyed Quinn's frazzled demeanor with a look of concern, but said nothing.
   When Fell's face appeared above the vid plate again, its pinkness was decidedly more irate than jolly. "Admiral Naismith, I told Captain Quinn that when I had firm information, / would contact you."
   "Baron, Captain Quinn . . . serves me. Please forgive any importunity on her part. She only, ah, faithfully reflects my own anxieties." Miles's typical overflowing vocabulary filled his mouth like flour. Quinn's fingers bit into his shoulder, silent painful warning that he had better not let his invention carry him too far. "What, shall we say, less-than-firm information can you give us?"
   Fell settled back, frowning but placated. "To put it bluntly, the Bharaputrans say they cannot find your cryo-chamber."
   "It has to be there," hissed Quinn.
   "Now, now, Quinnie." Mark patted her hand. It clamped like a vise. Her nostrils flared murderously, but she achieved a faint false smile for the holovid. Mark turned back to Fell. "Baron_in your best judgment_are the Bharaputrans lying?"
   "I don't think so."
   "Do you have some independent corroboration for your opinion? Agents on site, or anything of the sort?"
   The Baron's lips twisted. "Really, Admiral, I cannot say."
   Naturally not. He rubbed his face, a Naismith-thoughtful gesture. "Can you say anything specific about what the Bharaputrans are doing?"
   "They are in fact turning their medical complex inside out right now. All the employees, and all the security forces they brought in to contain your raid, have been engaged in the search."
   "Could it be an elaborate charade, to mislead us?"
   The Baron paused. "No," he said flatly at last. "They're really scrambling. On all levels. Are you aware . . ." he took a decisive breath, "of what your kidnapping of Baron Bharaputra, if it should prove more than a brief interlude, could do to the balance of power among the Great Houses of Jackson's Whole?"
   "No, what?"
   The Baron's chin went up, and he checked Mark sharply for signs of sarcasm. The vertical lines between his eyes deepened, but he answered seriously. "You should realize, the value of your hostage may go down with time. No power-vacuum at the top of a Great House, or even a House Minor, can last long. There are always factions of younger men waiting, perhaps in secret, to rush in and fill it. Even supposing Lotus manages to get Vasa Luigi's chief loyalist lieutenant to fill and retain his place_as time goes on, it can only dawn on him that the return of his master will involve demotion as well as reward. Think of a Great House as the hydra of mythology. Chop off its head, and seven more arise on the stump of neck_and begin biting each other. Eventually, only one will survive. In the meantime, the House is weakened, and all its old alliances and deals are thrown into doubt. The turmoil expands in a widening ring to associate Houses . . . such abrupt changes are not welcomed, here. Not by anyone." Least of all by Baron Fell himself, Mark gathered.
   "Except maybe by your younger colleagues," Mark suggested.
   A wave of Fell's hand dismissed the concerns of his younger colleagues. If they wanted power, the wave implied, let them plot and scramble and kill for it as he had.
   "Well, I have no desire to keep Baron Bharaputra till he grows old and moldy," said Mark. "I have no personal use for him at all, out of this context. Please urge House Bharaputra to speed in finding my brother, eh?"
   "They need no urging." Fell regarded him coldly. "Be aware, Admiral, if this . . . situation is not brought to a satisfactory conclusion quickly, Fell Station will not be able to harbor you."
   "Uh . . . define quickly."
   "Very soon. Within another day-cycle."
   Fell Station surely had enough force to evict the two small Dendarii ships whenever it willed. Or worse than evict. "Understood. Uh . . . what about unimpeded passage out at Jumppoint Five?" If things did not go well . . .
   "That . . . you may have to deal for separately."
   "Deal how?"
   "If you still had your hostage ... I would not desire that you carry Vasa Luigi out of Jacksonian local space. And I am positioned to see that you do not."
   Quinn's fist slammed down beside the vid plate. "No!" she cried. "No way! Baron Bharaputra is the only card we have to get my, get the cryo-chamber back. We will not give him up!"
   Fell recoiled slightly. "Captain!" he reproved.
   "We will take him with us if we're forced out," Quinn threatened, "and you can all hang out to dry. Or he can walk back from Jumppoint Five without a pressure suit. If we don't get that cryo-chamber_well, we have better allies than you. And with fewer inhibitions. They won't care about your profits, or your deals, or your balances. The only question they'll be asking is whether to start at the north pole, and burn down, or at the south pole, and burn up!"
   Fell grimaced angrily. "Don't be absurd, Captain Quinn. You speak of a planetary force."
   Quinn leaned into the vid pick-up and snarled, "Baron, I speak of a multi-planetary force!"
   Bothari-Jesek, startled, made an urgent throat-slicing gesture across her neck, Cut it, Quinn!
   Fell's eyes went hard and bright as glass glints. "You're bluffing," he said at last.
   "I am not. You'd best believe I am not!"
   "No one would do all that for one man. Still less for one corpse."
   Quinn hesitated. Mark's hand closed on hers upon his shoulder and squeezed hard to say, Control yourself, dammit. She was on the verge of giving away what she'd practically threatened him with death not to reveal. "You may be right, Baron," she said finally. "You'd better pray you're right."
   After a long moment of silence, Fell inquired mildly, "And just who is this uninhibited ally of yours, Admiral?"
   After an equally long pause, Mark looked up and said sweetly, "Captain Quinn was bluffing, Baron."
   Fell's lips drew back on an extremely dry smile. "All Betans are liars," he said softly. His hand moved to cut the comm; his image faded in the usual haze of sparkles. This time it was his cold smile that seemed to linger, bodiless.
   "Good job, Quinn," Mark snarled into the silence. "You've just let Baron Fell know how much he could really get for that cryo-chamber. And maybe even who from. Now we have two enemies."
   Quinn was breathing hard, as though she'd been running. "He's not our enemy; he's not our friend. Fell serves Fell. Remember that, 'cause he will."
   "But was Fell lying, or was he merely passing on House Bharaputra's lies?" Bothari-Jesek asked slowly. "What independent line of profit could Fell possibly have on all this?"
   "Or are they both lying?" said Quinn.
   "What if neither of them are?" asked Mark in irritation. "Have you thought of that? Remember what Norwood_"
   A comm beeper interrupted him. Quinn leaned on her hands on the comconsole to listen.
   "Quinn, this is Bel. That contact I found agrees to meet us at the Ariel's docking bay. If you want to be in on the interrogation, you need to pod over now."
   "Yes, right, I'll be there, Quinn out." She turned, haggard, and started for the door. "Elena, see that he," a jerk of her thumb, "is confined to quarters."
   "Yeah, well, after you talk with whatever Bel dragged in, get yourself some rest, huh, Quinnie? You're unstrung. You almost lost it back there."
   Quinn's ambiguous parting wave acknowledged the truth of this, without making any promises. As Quinn exited, Bothari-Jesek turned to her station console, to order up a personnel pod to be ready for Quinn by the time she arrived at the hatch.
   Mark rose and wandered around the tactics room, his hands thrust carefully into his pockets. A dozen real-time and holo-schematic display consoles sat dark and still; communication and encoding systems lay silent. He pictured the tactics nerve center fully staffed, alive and bright and chaotic, heading into battle. He imagined enemy fire peeling the ship open like a meal tray, all that life smashed and burned and spilled into the hard radiation and vacuum of space. Fire from House Fell's station at Jumppoint Five, say, as the Peregrine fought for escape. He shuddered, nauseated.
   He paused before the sealed door to the briefing chamber. Bothari-Jesek was now engaged in some other communication, some decision having to do with the security of their Fell Station moorings. Curious, he laid his palm upon the lock-pad. Somewhat to his surprise, the door slid demurely open. Somebody had some re-programming to do, if all top-secured Dendarii facilities were keyed to admit a dead man's palm print. A lot of re-programming_Miles doubtless had it fixed so he could just waft right through anywhere in the fleet. That would be his style.
   Bothari-Jesek glanced up, but said nothing. Taking that as tacit permission, Mark walked into the briefing room, and circled the table. Lights came up for him as he paced. Thorne's words, spoken here, echoed in his head. Norwood said, The Admiral will get out of here even if we don't. How carefully had the Dendarii examined their recordings of the drop mission? Surely someone had been over them all several times by now. What could he possibly see that they hadn't? They knew their people, their equipment. But I know the medical complex. I know Jackson's Whole.
   He wondered how far his palm would take him. He slipped into Quinn's station chair; sure enough, files bloomed for him, opened at his touch as no woman ever had. He found the downloaded records of the drop mission. Norwood's data was lost, but Tonkin had been with him part of the time. What had Tonkin seen? Not colored lines on the map, but real-time, real-eye, real-ear? Was there such a record? The command helmet had kept such, he knew, if trooper-helmets did too then_ah, ha. Tonkin's visuals and audio came up on the console before his fascinated eyes.
   Trying to follow them gave him an almost instant headache. This was no ballasted and gimballed vid pick-up, no steady pan, but rather the jerky, snatching glances of real head movements. He slowed the replay to watch himself in the lift-tube foyer, a short, agitated fellow in grey camouflage, glittering eyes in a set face. Do I really look like that? The deformities of his body were not so apparent as he'd imagined, under the loose uniform.
   He sat behind Tonkin's eyes and walked with him through the hurried maze of Bharaputra's buildings, tunnels, and corridors, all the way to the last firefight at the end. Thorne had quoted Norwood correctly; it was right there on the vid. Though he'd been wrong on the time; Norwood was gone eleven minutes by the helmet's unsubjective clock. Norwood's flushed face reappeared, panting, the urgent laugh sounded_and, moments later, the grenade-strike, the explosion_almost ducking, Mark hastily shut off the vid, and glanced down at himself as if half-expecting to be branded with another mortal splattering of blood and brains.
   If there's any clue, it has to be earlier. He started the program again from the parting in the foyer. The third time through, he slowed it down and took it step by step, examining each. The patient, finicky, self-forgetful absorption was almost pleasurable. Tiny details_you could lose yourself in tiny details, an anesthetic for brain-pain.
   "Got you," he whispered. It had flashed past so fast as to be subliminal, if you were running the vid in real-time. The briefest glimpse of a sign on the wall, an arrow on a cross-corridor labeled Shipping and Receiving.
   He looked up to find Bothari-Jesek watching him. How long had she been sitting there? She slumped relaxed, long legs crossed at booted ankles, long fingers tented together. "What have you got?" she asked quietly.
   He called up the holomap of the ghostly buildings with Norwood and Tonkin's line of march glowing inside. "Not here," he pointed, "but there." He marked a complex well off-sides from the route the Dendarii had traveled with the cryo-chamber. "That's where Norwood went. Through that tunnel. I'm sure of it! I've seen that facility_been all over that building. Hell, I used to play hide and seek in it with my friends, till the babysitters made us stop. I can see it in my head as surely as if I had Norwood's helmet vid playing right here on the table. He took that cryo-chamber down to Shipping and Receiving, and he shipped it!"
   Bothari-Jesek sat up. "Is that possible? He had so little time!"
   "Not just possible. Easy! The packing equipment is fully automated. All he had to do was put the cryo-chamber in the casing machine and hit the keypad. The robots would even have delivered it to the loading dock. It's a busy place_receives supplies for the whole complex, ships everything from data disks to frozen body parts for transplants to genetically engineered fetuses to emergency equipment for search and rescue teams. Such as reconditioned cryo-chambers. All sorts of stuff! It operates around the clock, and it would have had to be evacuated in a hurry when our raid hit. While the packing equipment was running, Norwood could have been generating the shipping label on the computer. Slapped 'em together, gave it to the transport robot_and then, if he was as smart as I think, erased the file record. Then he ran like hell back to Tonkin."
   "So the cryo-chamber is sitting packed on a loading dock downside! Wait'll I tell Quinn! I suppose we'd better tell the Bharaputrans where to look_"
   "I . . ." he held up a restraining hand. "I think . . ."
   She looked at him, and sank back into the station chair, eyes narrowing. "Think what?"
   "It's been almost a full day since we lifted. It's been a half-day and more since we told the Bharaputrans to look for the cryo-chamber. If that cryo-chamber was still sitting on a loading dock, I think the Bharaputrans would have found it by now. The automated shipping system is efficient. I think the cryo-chamber already went out, maybe within the first hour. I think the Bharaputrans and Fell are telling the truth. They must be going insane right now. Not only is there no cryo-chamber down there, they haven't got a clue in hell where it went!"
   Bothari-Jesek sat stiff. "Do we?" she asked. "My God. If you're right_it could be on its way anywhere. Freighted out from any of two dozen orbital transfer stations_it could have been jumped by now! Simon Illyan is going to have a stroke when we report this."
   "No. Not anywhere," Mark corrected intently. "It could only have been addressed to somewhere that Medic Norwood knew. Someplace he could remember, even when he was surrounded and cut off and under fire."
   She licked her lips, considering this. "Right," she said at last. "Almost anywhere. But at least we can start guessing by studying Norwood's personnel files." She sat back, and looked up at him with grave eyes. "You know, you do all right, alone in a quiet room. You're not stupid. I didn't see how you could be. You're just not the field-officer type."
   "I'm not any kind of officer-type. I hate the military."
   "Miles loves field work. He's addicted to adrenalin rushes."
   "I hate them. I hate being afraid. I can't think when I'm scared. I freeze when people shout at me."
   "Yet you can think. . . . How much of the time are you scared?"
   "Most of it," he admitted grimly.
   "Then why do you ..." she hesitated, as if choosing her words very cautiously, "why do you keep trying to be Miles?"
   "I'm not, you're making me play him!"
   "I didn't mean now. I mean generally."
   "I don't know what the hell you mean."
   

CHAPTER TEN

   Twenty hours later, the two Dendarii ships undocked from Fell Station and maneuvered to boost toward Jumppoint Five. They were not alone. An escort of half a dozen House Fell security vessels paced and policed them. The Fell vessels were dedicated local space warships, lacking Necklin rods and wormhole jump capacity; the power thus saved was shunted into a formidible array of weapons and shielding. Muscle-ships.
   The convoy was trailed at a discreet distance by a Bharaputran cruiser, more yacht than warship, prepared to accept the final transfer of Baron Bharaputra, as arranged, in space near Fell's Jumppoint Five station. Unfortunately, Miles's cryo-chamber was not aboard it.
   Quinn had come close to a breakdown, before accepting the inevitable. Bothari-Jesek had literally backed her against the wall, at their last private conference in the briefing room.
   "I won't leave Miles!" Quinn howled. "I'll space that Bharaputran bastard first!"
   "Look," Bothari-Jesek hissed, Quinn's jacket bunched in her fist. If she'd been an animal, Mark thought, her ears would have been flat to her head. He huddled in a station chair and tried to make himself small. Smaller. "I don't like this any better than you do, but the situation has gone way beyond our capacity. Miles is clearly out of Bharaputran hands, heading God knows where. We need reinforcements: not warships, but trained intelligence agents. A pile of 'em. We need Illyan, and ImpSec, we need them bad, and we need them as fast as possible. It's time to cut and run. The faster we get out of here, the faster we can return."
   "I will be back," Quinn swore.
   "That'll be between you and Simon Illyan. I promise you, he'll be just as interested as we are in retrieving that cryo-chamber."
   "Illyan's just a Barrayaran," Quinn sputtered for a word, "bureaucrat. He can't care the way we do."
   "Don't bet on that," whispered Bothari-Jesek.
   In the end, Bothari-Jesek, Quinn's downward duty to the rest of the Dendarii, and the logic of the situation had prevailed. And so Mark found himself dressing in officer's greys for what he earnestly prayed would be his last public appearance ever as Admiral Miles Naismith, observing the transfer of their hostage onto a House Fell shuttle. Whatever happened to Vasa Luigi after that would be up to Baron Fell. Mark could only hope it would be something unpleasant.
   Bothari-Jesek came to escort Mark personally from his cabin-prison to the shuttle hatch corridor where the Fell ship was scheduled to clamp on. She looked cool as ever, if weary, and unlike Quinn she limited her critique of the fit of his uniform to a pass of her hand to straighten his collar insignia. The pocketed jacket was roomy, and came down far enough to cover and so disguise the tight bite of the trouser waistband, and the way his flesh was beginning to burgeon over the belt. He yanked the jacket down firmly, and followed the Peregrine's captain through her ship.
   "Why do I have to do this?" he asked her plaintively.
   "It's our last chance to prove_for certain_to Vasa Luigi that you are Miles Naismith, and that . . . thing in the cryo-chamber is just a clone. Just in case the cryo-chamber didn't go off-planet, and just in case, by whatever chance, wherever it went, Bharaputra finds it again before we do."
   They arrived at the shuttle hatch corridor at the same time as a couple of heavily-armed Dendarii techs, who took up station at the docking clamp controls. Baron Bharaputra appeared shortly thereafter, escorted by a wary Captain Quinn and two edgy Dendarii guards. The guards, Mark decided, were mainly ornamental. The real power, and the real threat, the heavy pieces on this chessboard, were Jump-point Station Five and the House Fell ships that supported it. He pictured them, arrayed in space around the Dendarii ships. Check. Was Baron Bharaputra king? Mark felt like a pawn masquerading as a knight. Vasa Luigi ignored the guards, kept half an eye on Quinn the Red Queen, but mostly watched the shuttle hatch.
   Quinn saluted Mark. "Admiral."
   He returned the salute. "Captain." He stood at parade rest, as if overseeing his operation. Was he supposed to bandy words with the Baron? He waited for Vasa Luigi to open the conversation. The Baron merely waited, with a disturbingly controlled patience, as if he did not even perceive time the same way Mark did.
   Regardless of how outgunned they were, the Dendarii were only minutes from escape. As soon as the transfer was complete, the Peregrine and the Ariel could jump, and the clones would be beyond House Bharaputra's lethal reach. That much he had accomplished, ass-backwards and screwed up beyond repair, but done. Small victories.
   At last came the clanking of the shuttle hatch clamps grasping and positioning their prey, and the hiss of the flex-tube sealing. The Dendarii oversaw the dilation of the hatch portal, and stood to attention. On the other side of the portal a man dressed in House Fell green with captain's insignia, and flanked by two ornamental guards of his own, nodded sharply and identified himself and his vessel of origin.
   He spotted Mark as the highest ranking officer present, and saluted. "Baron Fell's compliments, Admiral Naismith sir, and he is returning to you something you accidentally left behind."
   Quinn went pale with hope; Mark could swear her heart stopped beating. The Fell captain stepped back from the hatch. But through it swung not the ardently-desired cryo-chamber on a float pallet, but a file of three men and two women, civilian-clothed, looking variously sheepish, angry, and grim. One man was limping, and supported by another.
   Quinn's spies. The group of Dendarii volunteers she had attempted to slip onto Fell Station to continue the search. Quinn's face flushed red with chagrin. But she raised her chin and said clearly, "Tell Baron Fell we thank him for his care."
   The Fell captain acknowledged the message with a salute and a sour smirk.
   "Meet you all in debriefing, soonest," she breathed, and dismissed the unhappy mob with a nod. They clattered off. Bothari-Jesek went with them.
   The Fell captain announced, "We are ready to board our passenger." Punctilliously, he did not set foot aboard the Peregrine, but waited. Equally punctilliously, the Dendarii guards and Quinn stood away from Baron Bharaputra, who raised his square chin and began to stride forward.
   "My lord! Wait for me!"
   The high cry from behind them made Mark's head snap around. The Baron's eyes too widened in surprise.
   The Eurasian girl, her hair swinging, slipped out of a cross-corridor and ran forward. She held hands with the platinum blonde clone. She darted like an eel around the Dendarii guards, who had better sense than to draw weapons in this dicey moment, but not quite enough speed of reflex to catch her. The small-footed blonde was not so athletic, half out-of-balance with her other arm crossed under her breasts, and she was pulled along gasping for breath, blue eyes wide with fear.
   Mark saw her, in his mind's eye, laid out on some operating table, light-crowned scalp peeled carefully back_the whine of a surgical saw cutting through bone, the slow teasing apart of living neurons in the brain stem, then at last the lifting-out of brain, like a gift, mind, memory, person, an offering to some dark god in the masked monster's gloved hands_
   He tackled her around the knees. Her fine-boned hand jerked out of the dark-haired girl's grip, and she fell forward on the deck. She cried out, then just cried, and kicked at him, rocking and bucking and twisting onto her back. Terrified he would lose his clutch, he worked upward till he lay across her with his full weight. She squirmed beneath him, ineffectually; she didn't even know enough to try to knee him in the groin. "Stop. Stop, for God's sake, I don't want to hurt you," he mumbled in her ear around a mouthful of sweet-smelling hair.
   The other girl meanwhile had succeeded in diving through the shuttle hatch. The House Fell guard captain was confused by her arrival, but not by the Dendarii; he'd drawn a nerve disrupter instantly, repelling the first reflexive lurch of Quinn's men. "Stop right there. Baron Bharaputra, what is this?"
   "My lord!" the Eurasian girl cried. "Take me with you, please! I will be united with my lady. I will!"
   "Stay on that side," the Baron advised her calmly. "They cannot touch you there."
   "You try me_" began Quinn, starting forward, but the Baron raised a hand, fingers delicately crooked, neither fist nor obscenity yet somehow faintly insulting.
   "Captain Quinn. Surely you do not wish to create an incident and delay your departure, do you? Clearly, this girl chooses of her own free will."
   Quinn hesitated.
   "No!" screamed Mark. He scrambled to his feet, hauled the blonde girl up, and jammed her into the grip of the biggest Dendarii guard. ''Hold her." He wheeled to pass Baron Bharaputra.
   "Admiral?" The Baron raised a faintly ironic brow.
   "You're wearing a corpse," Mark snarled. "Don't talk to me." He staggered forward, hands out, to face the dark-haired girl across that little, dreadful, politically significant gap. "Girl ..." he did not know her name. He did not know what to say. "Don't go. You don't have to go. They'll kill you."
   Growing more certain of her security, though still positioned behind the Fell captain and well out of reach of any Dendarii lunge, she smiled triumphantly at Mark and tossed back her hair. Her eyes were alight. "I've saved my honor. All by myself. My honor is my lady. You have no honor. Pig! My life is an offering . . . greater than you can imagine being. I am a flower on her altar."
   "You are frigging crazy, Flowerpot," Quinn opined bluntly.
   Her chin rose, and her lips thinned. "Baron, come," she ordered coolly. She held out a theatric hand.
   Baron Bharaputra shrugged as if to say, What would you?, and walked toward the hatch. No Dendarii raised a weapon; Quinn had not ordered them to. Mark had no weapon. He turned to her, anguished. "Quinn ..."
   She was breathing hard. "If we don't jump now, we could lose it all. Stand still."
   Vasa Luigi paused in the hatchway, hand on the seal, one foot still on the Peregrine's deck, and turned back to face Mark. "In case you are wondering, Admiral_she is my wife's clone," he purred. He raised his right hand, licked his index finger, and touched it to Mark's forehead. It left a cool spot. Counting coup. "One for me. Forty-nine for you. If you ever dare to return here, I promise you I'll even up that score in ways that will make your death something you'll beg for." He slipped the rest of the way through the shuttle hatch. "Hello, Captain, thank you for your patience ..." The hatch seals closed on the rest of his greeting to his rival's, or ally's, guards.
   The silence was broken only by the releasing clank of the clamps and the blonde clone's hopeless, abandoned weeping. The spot on Mark's forehead itched like ice. He rubbed at it with the back of his hand as if half-expecting it to shatter.
   Friction-slippered footsteps were nearly silent, but these were heavy enough to vibrate the deck. Sergeant Taura pelted into the shuttle hatch corridor. She saw the blonde clone, and yelled over her shoulder, "Here's another one! Just two to go." Another trooper came panting in her wake.
   "What happened, Taura?" sighed Quinn.
   "That girl, that ringleader. The really smart one," said Taura, skidding to a halt. Her eyes checked the cross-corridors as she spoke. "She told all the girls some bullshit story about how we were a slave ship. She persuaded ten of them to try for a break-out at once. Stunner guard got three, the other seven scattered. We've recaptured four. Mostly just hiding, but I think that long-haired girl actually had a coherent plan to try to get to the personnel pods before we jumped from local space. I've put a guard on them to cut her off."
   Quinn swore, bleakly. "Good thinking, Sergeant. Your cut-off must have succeeded, because she came up here. Unfortunately, she ran smack into Baron Bharaputra's exchange. She got out with him. We were able to grab the other one before she made it across." Quinn nodded at the blonde, whose weeping had choked down to snivels. "So you're only looking for one more."
   "How did_" the sergeant's eyes flicked over the shuttle hatch corridor, puzzled. "How did you let that happen, ma'am?"
   Quinn's face was set in an expressionless mask. "I chose not to start a fire-fight over her."
   The sergeant's big clawed hands twitched in bewilderment, but no verbal criticism of her superior escaped those outslung lips. "We'd better find the last one, then, before something worse happens."
   "Carry on, Sergeant. You four, help her," Quinn gestured to her now-unemployed guards. "Report to me in the briefing room when you have them all re-secured, Taura."
   Taura nodded, motioned the troopers down the various cross-corridors, and herself loped toward the nearest lift tube. Her nostrils flared; she seemed to be almost sniffing for her quarry.
   Quinn turned on her heel, muttering, "I've got to get to the debriefing. Find out what happened to_"
   "I'll . . . take her back to the clone quarters, Quinn," Mark volunteered, with a nod at the blonde.
   Quinn looked doubtfully at him.
   "Please. I want to."
   She glanced at the hatch where the Eurasian girl had gone, and back at his face. He didn't know what his face looked like, but she inhaled. "You know, I've been over the drop records a couple of times, since we left Fell Station. I hadn't . . . had a chance to tell you. Did you realize, when you stepped in front of me when we were scrambling to board Kimura's drop shuttle, just what your plasma mirror field power was down to?"
   "No. I mean, I knew I'd taken a lot of hits, in the tunnels."
   "One hit. If it had absorbed one more hit, it would have failed. Two more hits and you'd have fried."
   "Oh."
   She frowned at him, as if still trying to decide whether to credit him with courage or simply with stupidity. "Well. I thought it was interesting. Something you'd want to know." She hesitated longer. "My power pack was down to zero. So if you're really comparing scores with Baron Bharaputra, you can raise yours back to fifty."
   He didn't know what she expected him to say. At last Quinn sighed, "All right. You can escort her. If it'll make you feel better." She strode off toward the debriefing, her own face very anxious.
   He turned, and took the blonde by the arm, very gently; she flinched, blinking through big tear-sheened blue eyes. Even though he knew very well_none better_how intentionally her features and body were sculptured and designed, the effect was still overwhelming: beauty and innocence, sexuality and fear mixed in an intoxicating draught. She looked a ripe twenty, at fresh physical peak, a perfect match to his own age. And only a few centimeters taller than himself. She might have been designed to be the heroine in his drama, except that his life had dissolved into some sub-heroic puddle, chaotic and beyond control. No rewards, only more punishments.
   "What's your name?" he asked with false brightness.
   She looked at him suspiciously. "Maree."
   Clones had no surnames. "That's pretty. Come on, Maree. I'll take you back to your, uh, dormitory. You'll feel better, when you're back with your friends."
   She perforce began to walk with him.
   "Sergeant Taura is all right, you know. She really wants to take care of you. You just scared her, running off like that. She was worried you'd get hurt. You're not really afraid of the sergeant, are you?"
   Her lovely lips pressed closed in confusion. "I'm . . . not sure." Her walk was a dainty, swaying thing, though her steps made her breasts wobble most distractingly, half-bagged in the pink tunic. She ought to be offered reduction treatment, though he was not sure such was in the Peregrine's ship's surgeon's range of expertise. And if her somatic experiences at Bharaputra's were anything like his had been, she was probably sick of surgery right now. He certainly had been, after all the bodily distortions they'd laid on him.
   "We're not a slave ship," he began again earnestly. "We're taking you_" The news that their destination was the Barrayaran Empire might not be so reassuring, at that. "Our first stop will probably be Komarr. But you might not have to stay there." He had no power to make promises about her ultimate destination. None. One prisoner could not rescue another.
   She coughed, and rubbed her eyes.
   "Are you ... all right?"
   "I want a drink of water." Her voice was hoarse from the running and the crying.
   "I'll get you one," he promised. His own cabin was just a corridor away; he led her there.
   The door hissed open at the touch of his palm upon the pad. "Come in. I never had a chance to talk with you. Maybe if I had . . . that girl wouldn't have fooled you." He guided her within, and settled her on the bed. She was trembling slightly. So was he.
   "Did she fool you?"
   "I ... don't know, Admiral."
   He snorted bitterly. "I'm not the Admiral. I'm a clone, like you. I was raised at Bharaputra's, one floor down from where you live. Lived." He went to his washroom, drew a cup of water, and carried it to her. He had half an impulse to offer it to her on his knees. She had to be made to_"I have to make you understand. Understand who you are, what's happened to you. So you won't he fooled again. You have a lot to learn, for your own protection." Indeed_in that body. "You'll have to go to school."
   She swallowed water. "Don't want to go to school," she said, muffled into the cup.
   "Didn't the Bharaputrans ever let you into the virtual learning programs? When I was there, it was the best part. Better even than the games. Though I liked the games, of course. Did you play Zylec?"
   She nodded.
   "That was fun. But the history, the astrography shows_the virtual instructor was the funniest program. A white-haired old geezer in Twentieth-century clothes, this jacket with patches on the elbows_I always wondered if he was based on a real person, or was a composite."
   "I never saw them."
   "What did you do all day?"
   "We talked among ourselves. We did our hair. Swam. The proctors made us do calesthenics every day_"
   "Us, too."
   "_till they did this to me." She touched a breast. "Then they only made me swim."
   He could see the logic of that. "Your last body-sculpture was pretty recent, I take it."
   "About a month ago." She paused. "You really don't . . . think my mother was coming for me?"
   "I'm sorry. You don't have a mother. Neither do I. What was coming for you . . . was a horror. Almost beyond imagining." Except he could imagine it all too vividly.
   She frowned at him, obviously reluctant to part with her beloved dream-future. "We're all beautiful. If you're really a clone, why aren't you?"
   "I'm glad to see you're beginning to think," he said carefully. "My body was sculpted to match my progenitor's. He was crippled."
   "But if it's true_about the brain transplants_why not you?"
   "I was . . . part of another plot. My purchasers took me away whole. It was only later that I learned all the truth, for sure, about Bharaputra's." He sat beside her on the bed. The smell of her_had they genetically engineered some subtle perfume into her skin? It was intoxicating. The memory of her soft body, squirming under his on the hatch corridor deck, perturbed him. He could have dissolved into it. ... "I had friends_don't you?"
   She nodded mutely.
   "By the time I could do anything for them_long before I could do anything for them_they were gone. All killed. So I rescued you instead."
   She stared doubtfully at him. He could not tell what she was thinking.
   The cabin wavered, and a flash of nausea that had nothing to do with suppressed eroticism twisted his stomach.
   "What was that?" Maree gasped, her eyes widening. Unconsciously, she grasped his hand. His hand burned at her touch.
   "It's all right. It's more than all right. That was your first wormhole jump." From his vantage of, well, several wormhole jumps, he made his tone heartily reassuring. "We're away. The Jacksonians can't get us now." Much better than die double-cross he'd been half-anticipating, in some reserved part of his mind, from Baron Fell's forces the moment he had Vasa Luigi hostage in his own fat hands. Not the roar and rock of enemy fire. Just a nice little tame jump. "You're safe. We're all safe now." He thought of the mad Eurasian girl. Almost all.
   He so wanted Maree to believe. The Dendarii, the Barrayarans_ he'd scarcely expected them to understand. But this girl_if only he could shine in her eyes. He wanted no reward but a kiss. He swallowed. You sure it's only a kiss you want? There was an uncomfortable hot knot growing in his belly, beneath that ghastly constricted waistband. An embarrassing stiffening in his loins. Maybe she wouldn't notice. Understand. Judge.
   "Will you . . . lass me?" he asked humbly, very dry-mouthed. He took the cup from her, and tossed back the last trickle of water. It was not enough to unlock the tension in his throat.
   "Why?" she asked, brow wrinkling.
   "For . . . pretend."
   That was an appeal she understood. She blinked, but, willingly enough, leaned forward and touched her lips to his. Her tunic shifted. . . .
   "Oh," he breathed. His hand went round her neck, and stopped its retreat. "Please, again ..." He drew her face to his. She neither resisted nor responded, but her mouth was amazing nonetheless. I want, I want ... It couldn't hurt to touch her, just to touch her. Her hands went around his neck, automatically. He could feel each cool finger, tipped by a tiny bite of nail. Her lips parted. He melted. His head was pounding. Hot, he shrugged off his jacket.
   Stop. Stop now, dammit. But she should have been his heroine. Miles had a damned harem full of them, he was certain. Might she let him ... do more than kiss her? Not penetration, definitely not. Nothing to hurt her, nothing invasive. A rub between those vast breasts could not hurt her, though it would doubtless bewilder her. He might bury himself in that soft flesh and find release as effectively, more effectively, than between her thighs. She might think he was crazy, but it wouldn't hurt her. His mouth sought hers again, hungrily. He touched her skin. More. He slipped her tunic down off her shoulders, freeing her body to his starving hand. Her skin was velvet soft. His other hand, shaking, dove to release the strangling-tight waistband of his trousers. That was a relief. He was dreadfully, excruciatingly aroused. But he would not touch her below the waist, no. . . .
   He rolled her backwards on the bed, pinning her, kissing frantically down her body. She emitted a startled gasp. His breath deepened, then, suddenly, stopped. A spasm reached deep into his lungs, as if all his bronchia had constricted at once with a snap like a trap closing.
   No! Not again! It was happening again, just like the time he'd tried last year_
   He rolled off her, icy sweat breaking out all over his body. He fought his locked throat. He managed one asthmatic, shuddering indrawn breath. The flashbacks of memory were almost hallucinatory in their clarity.
   Galen's angry shouting. Lars and Mok, pinning him at Galen's command, pulling off his clothes, as if the beating he'd just taken at their hands was not punishment enough. They'd sent the girl away before they'd started; she'd run like a rabbit. He spat salt-and-iron blood. The shock-stick pointing, touching, there, there, pop and crackle. Galen going even more red-faced, accusing him of treason, worse, raving on about Aral Vorkosigan's alleged sexual proclivities, turning up the power far too high. "Flip him." Knotting terror deep in his gut, the visceral memory of pain, humiliation, burning and cramps, a weird short-circuited arousal and horribly shameful release despite it all, the stink of searing flesh. . . .
   He pushed back the visions, and almost passed out before he managed to inhale and exhale one more time. Somehow he was sitting not on the bed but on the floor beside it, arms and legs spasmodically drawn up. The astonished blonde girl crouched half-naked on the rumpled mattress, staring down at him. "What's the matter with you? Why did you stop? Are you dying?"
   No, just wishing I were. It wasn't fair. He knew exactly where this conditioned reflex came from. It wasn't a memory buried in his subconscious, more's the pity, nor from some distant, blurred childhood. It was barely four years ago. Wasn't that sort of clear insight supposed to free one from such demons of the past? Was he going to go into self-induced spasms every time he tried to have sex with a real girl? Or was it just the extreme tension of the occasion? If ever the situation was less tense, less conscience-thwarted, if ever he really had time to make love instead of a hasty, sweaty scramble, then maybe he might overcome memory and madness_ or maybe I won't ... he fought for another shuddering inhalation. Another. His lungs began to work again. Was he really in danger of choking to death? Presumably once he actually passed out his autonomic nervous system would take over again.
   His cabin door slid open. Taura and Bothari-Jesek stood silhouetted in the aperture, peering into the dimness. What they saw made Bothari-Jesek swear, and Sergeant Taura shoulder forward.
   Now, he wanted to pass out now. But his single-minded demon did not cooperate. He continued to breathe, curled up with his trousers around his knees.
   "What are you doing?" Sergeant Taura growled. A dangerous, truly wolflike timbre; her fangs gleamed at the corners of her mouth in the soft light. He'd seen her tear men's throats out with one hand.
   The little clone sat up on her knees on the bed, looking terribly worried, her hands as usual trying to cover and support her most notable features, as usual only drawing more attention to them. "I only asked for a drink of water," she whimpered. "I'm sorry."
   Sergeant Taura hastily dropped her eight-foot height to one knee and turned out her palms, to indicate to the girl that she wasn't angry with her. Mark wasn't sure if Maree caught that subtlety.
   "Then what happened?" Bothari-Jesek asked sternly.
   "He made me kiss him."
   Bothari-Jesek's eye raked his huddled disarray, and glinted furiously. She was stiff and tense as a drawn bow. She wheeled to face him. Her voice went very low. "Did you just try to rape her?"
   "No! I don't know. I only_"
   Sergeant Taura rose, grasped him by the shirt and some skin, pulled him to his feet and beyond, and pinned him against the nearest wall. The floor was a meter beyond his stretching toes. "Answer straight, damn you," the sergeant snarled.
   He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. Not for any threat from Miles's women, no. Not for them. But for the second half of Galen's humiliation of him, in its own way a more excruciating rape than the first. When Lars and Mok, alarmed, had finally persuaded Galen to stop, Mark had been in shock so deep as to be skirting cardiac arrest. Galen had been forced to take his valuable clone to his pet physician in the middle of the night, the one he'd somehow strong-armed into supplying him with the drugs and hormones to keep Mark's body growth on track, matching Miles's. Galen had explained the burns by telling the physician that Mark had been secretly masturbating with the shock-stick, accidentally powered it up, and been unable to turn it off for the muscle spasms it caused, till his screams brought help. The doctor had actually barked a shocked laugh. Thin-voiced, Mark had concurred, too afraid to gainsay Galen even when he was alone with the physician. Yet the doctor saw his bruises, must have known there was more to the story. But said nothing. Did nothing. It was his own weak concurrence that he regretted most, in hindsight, the black laugh that burned the deepest. He could not, would not, let Maree exit bearing any such burden of proof.
   In short, blunt phrases, he described exactly what he had just tried to do. It all came out sounding terribly ugly, though it had been her beauty that had overwhelmed him. He kept his eyes shut. He did not mention his panic attack, or try to explain Galen. He writhed inside, but spoke flat truth. Slowly, as he spoke, the wall bumped up his spine till his feet were on the deck again. The pressure on his shirt released, and he dared to open his eyes.
   He almost closed them again, scorched by the open contempt in Bothari-Jesek's face. He'd done it now. She who had been almost sympathetic, almost kind, almost his only friend here, stood rigidly enraged, and he knew he had alienated the one person who might have spoken for him. It hurt, a killing hurt, to have so little and then lose it.
   "When Taura reported she was one clone short," Bothari-Jesek bit out, "Quinn said you'd insisted on taking her. Now we know why."
   "No. I didn't intend . . . anything. She really only wanted a drink of water." He pointed to the cup, lying on its side on the deck.
   Taura turned her back on him, and knelt on one knee by the bed, and addressed the blonde in a deliberately gentle voice. "Are you hurt?"
   "I'm all right," she quavered. She pulled her tunic back up over her shoulders with a shrug. "But that man was real sick." She stared at him in puzzled concern.
   "Obviously," muttered Bothari-Jesek. Her chin went up, and her eyes nailed Mark, still clinging to the wall. "You're confined to quarters, mister. I'm putting the guard back on your door. Don't even try to come out."
   I won't, I won't.
   They marched Maree away. The door seals hissed closed like a falling guillotine blade. He rolled onto his narrow bed, shaking.
   Two weeks to Komarr. He very seriously wished he were dead.
   

CHAPTER ELEVEN

   Mark spent the first three days of his solitary confinement lying in a depressed huddle. He had meant his heroic mission to save lives, not destroy them. He added up the body count, one by one. The shuttle pilot. Phillipi. Norwood. Kimura's trooper. And the eight seriously wounded. All those people hadn't had names, back when he had first been planning this. And all the anonymous Bharaputrans, too. The average Jacksonian security guard was just a joe scrambling for a living. He wondered bleakly if any of the dead Bharaputrans were people he had once met or joked with when he'd lived in the clone creche. As ever, the little people were ground up like meat, while those with enough power to really be held responsible escaped, walking out free like Baron Bharaputra.
   Did the lives of forty-nine clones outweigh four dead Dendarii? The Dendarii did not seem to think so. Those people were not volunteers. you tricked them to their deaths.
   He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.
   I didn't mean it to come out this way.
   And the clones. The blonde girl. He of all men knew she was not the mature woman her general physique and particular augmentations so stunningly advertised her as being. The sixty-year-old brain which had been planning to move in doubtless would have known how to handle such a body. But Mark had seen her so clearly, in his mind, that ten-year-old on the inside. He hadn't wanted to hurt or frighten her, yet he'd managed to do both. He'd wanted to please her, make her face light. The way they all lit up for Miles?, the internal voice mocked.
   None of the clones could possibly respond as he so ached to have them do. He must let that fantasy go. Ten years from now, twenty years from now, they might thank him for their lives. Or not. / did all 1 could. I'm sorry.
   Somewhere around the second day he became obsessed with the thought of himself as brain-transplant bait for Miles. Oddly enough, or perhaps logically enough, he did not fear it from Miles. But Miles was hardly in a position to veto the plan. What if it occurred to someone that it would be easier to transplant Miles's brain into Mark's warm and living body than to attempt the tedious repair of that gaping mortal chest wound, and all the cryo-trauma on top of it? It was so frightening a possibility that he half-wanted to volunteer, just to get it over with.
   The only thing that kept him from total gibbering breakdown was the reflection that with the cryo-chamber lost, the threat was moot. Until it was found again. In the dark of his cabin, his head buried in his pillow, it came to him that the face he'd most desired to see transformed with respect for him by his daring clone-rescue was Miles's.
   You've rather eliminated that possibility, haven't you?
   The only surcease from his mental treadmill came with food, and sleep. Forcing down an entire field-ration tray left him blood-stunned enough to actually doze, in inadequate snatches. Desiring unconsciousness above all things, he cajoled the glowering Dendarii who shoved the trays through his door three times a day to bring him extras. Since the Dendarii apparently did not regard their disposable-container field rations as treats, they were willing enough to do so.
   Another Dendarii brought, and shoved through the door, a selection of Miles's clean clothing from the stores on the Ariel. This time all the insignia were carefully removed. On the third day he gave up even attempting to fasten Naismith's uniform trousers, and switched to loose ship knits. At this point the inspiration struck him.
   They can't make me play Miles if I don't look like Miles.
   After that, things grew a little foggy, in his head. One of the Dendarii became so irritated by his repeated requests for extra rations that he lugged in a whole case, dumped it in a corner, and told Mark roughly not to pester him again. Mark was left alone with his self-rescue and cunning calculation. He had heard of prisoners tunneling out of their cells with a spoon; might not he?
   Still, loony as it was, and on some level he knew that it was, it gave his life a focus. From too much time, endless hours on the multi-jump boost through to Komarr, suddenly there seemed to be not enough. He read the nutrition labels. If he maintained maximum inactivity, a single tray provided all the daily fuel he required. Everything he consumed after that must be converted directly into Not-Miles. Every four trays ought to produce a kilo of extra body mass, if he had the numbers right. Too bad they were all the same menu. . . .
   There were scarcely enough days to make the project work. Still, on his body, any extra kilos had no place to hide. Toward the end, panicked at the thought of time running out, he ate continuously, till the sheer gasping pain forced him to stop, thus combining pleasure, rebellion, and punishment into one weirdly satisfying experience.
   Quinn entered without knocking, flipping up the lights with brutal efficiency from pitch-dark to full illumination.
   "Agh." Mark recoiled, and held his hands over his eyes. Ripped from his uncomfortable doze, he rolled over in bed. He blinked at the chrono on the wall. Quinn had come for him a half day-cycle earlier than he'd expected. The Dendarii ships must have been putting on maximum accelerations, if this meant they were about to arrive in Komarr orbit. Oh, help.
   "Get up," said Quinn. She wrinkled her nose. "Get washed. Put on this uniform." She laid something forest-green with gold gleams across the foot of the bed. From her general air he'd have expected her to fling things; from the reverent care she bestowed, Mark deduced the uniform must be one of Miles's.
   "I'll get up," said Mark. "And I'll get washed. But I won't put on the uniform, or any uniform."
   "You'll do as you're told, mister."
   "That's a Barrayaran officer's uniform. It represents real power, and they guard it accordingly. They hang people who wear fake uniforms." He tossed off the covers and sat up. He was a little dizzy.
   "My gods," said Quinn in a choked voice. "What have you done to yourself?"
   "I suppose," he allowed, "you can still try to stuff me into the uniform. But you might want to consider the effect." He staggered to the washroom.
   While washing and depiliating, he inventoried the results of his escape attempt. There just hadn't been enough time. True, he'd regained the kilos he'd had to lose to play Admiral Naismith at Escobar, plus maybe a slight bonus, and in a mere fourteen days instead of the year it had taken them to creep on in the first place. A hint of a double chin. His torso was notably thickened, though, his abdomen_he moved carefully_achingly distended. Not enough, not enough to be safe yet.
   Quinn being Quinn, she had to convince herself, and she tried the Barrayaran uniform on him anyway. He made sure to slump. The effect was . . . very unmilitary. She gave up, snarling, and let him dress himself. He chose clean ship-knit pants, soft friction-slippers, and a loose Barrayaran civilian-style tunic of Miles's with big sleeves and an embroidered sash. It took him a moment of careful consideration to decide whether it would annoy Quinn more to see the sash positioned across his rounding belly, equatorially, or under the bulge like a sling. Judging from the lemon-sucking look on her face, under it was, and he left it that way.
   She sensed his fey mood. "Enjoying yourself?" she inquired sarcastically.
   "It's the last fun I'll get today. Isn't it?"
   Her hand opened in dry acquiescence.
   "Where are you taking me? For that matter, where are we?"
   "Komarr orbit. We are about to pod over, secretly, to one of the Barrayaran military space stations. There we are going to have a very private meeting with Chief of Imperial Security Captain Simon Illyan. He came by fast courier all the way from ImpSec headquarters on Barrayar on the basis of a rather ambiguous coded message I sent him, and he's going to be extremely hot to know why I've interrupted his routine. He's going to demand to know what the hell was so important. And," her voice wavered in a sigh, "I'm going to have to tell him."
   She led him out of his cabin-cell through the Peregrine. She had evidently dismissed his door guard when she'd first come in, but in fact all the corridors seemed deserted. No, not deserted. Cleared.
   They came to a personnel pod hatch, and ducked through to find Captain Bothari-Jesek herself at the controls. Bothari-Jesek and no one else. A very private party indeed.
   Bothari-Jesek's usual coolness seemed particularly frigid today. When she glanced over her shoulder at him, her eyes widened, and her dark winged brows drew down in startled disapproval of his pasty, bloated appearance.
   "Hell, Mark. You look like a drowned corpse that's floated to the surface after a week."
   I feel like one. "Thank you," he intoned blandly.
   She snorted, whether with amusement, disgust, or derision he was not sure, and turned her attention back to the pod control interface. Hatches sealed, clamps retracted, and they sped silently away from the side of the Peregrine. Between the zero-gee and the accelerations, he found his attention centered on his stretched stomach again, and he swallowed against the nausea.
   "Why is the ImpSec head man only ranked as captain?" Mark inquired, to take his mind off his queasiness. "It can't be for secrecy, everybody knows who he is."
   "Another Barrayaran tradition," Bothari-Jesek said. Her tone put a slightly bitter spin on the term tradition. At least she was speaking to him. "Illyan's predecessor in the post, the late great Captain Negri, never took a promotion beyond captain. That kind of ambition was apparently irrelevant to Emperor Ezar's Familiar. Everybody knew Negri spoke with the Emperor's Voice, and his orders cut across all ranks. Illyan . . . was always a little shy of promoting himself over the rank of his former boss, I guess. He's paid a vice-admiral's salary, though. Whatever poor sucker heads ImpSec next after Illyan retires is probably going to be stuck with the rank of captain forever."
   They approached a mid-sized high orbital space station. Mark finally glimpsed Komarr, turning far below, shrunken by the distance to a half-moon. Bothari-Jesek kept strictly to the flight path assigned to her by an extremely laconic station traffic control. After a nervous pause while they exchanged codes and countersigns, they locked onto a docking hatch.
   They were met by two silent, expressionless armed guards, very neat and trim in Barrayaran green, who ushered them through the station and into a small windowless chamber set up as an office, with a comconsole desk, three chairs, and no other decoration.
   "Thank you. Leave us," said the man behind the desk. The guards exited as silently as they had done everything else.
   Alone, the man seemed to relax slightly. He nodded to Bothari-Jesek. "Hullo, Elena. It's good to see you." His light voice had an unexpected warm timbre, like an uncle greeting a favorite niece.
   The rest of him seemed exactly as Mark had studied in Galen's vids. Simon Illyan was a slight, aging man, gray rising in a tide from his temples into his brown hair. A rounded face with a snub nose was too etched with faint lines to look quite youthful. He wore, on this military installation, correct officer's undress greens and insignia like the ones Quinn had tried to foist on Mark, with the Horus-eye badge of Imperial Security winking from his collar.
   Mark realized Illyan was staring back at him with the most peculiar suffused look on his face. "My God, Miles, you_" he began in a strangled voice, then his eye lit with comprehension. He sat back in his chair. "Ah."' His mouth twisted up on one side. "Lord Mark. Greetings from your lady mother. And I am most pleased to meet you at last." He sounded perfectly sincere.
   Not for long, thought Mark hopelessly. And, Lord Mark? He can't be serious.
   "Also pleased to know where you are again. I take it, Captain Quinn, that my department's message about Lord Mark's disappearance from Earth finally caught up with you?"
   "Not yet. It's probably still chasing us from . . . our last stop."
   Illyan's brows rose. "So did Lord Mark come in from the cold on his own, or did my erstwhile subordinate send him to me?"
   "Neither, sir." Quinn seemed to have trouble speaking. Bothari-Jesek wasn't even trying to.
   Illyan leaned forward, growing more serious, though still tinged with a slight irony. "So what half-cocked, insubordinate, I-thought-you-wanted-me-to-use-my-initiative-sir scam has he sent you to try to con me into paying for this time?"
   "No scam, sir," muttered Quinn. "But the bill is going to be huge." The coolly amused air faded altogether as he studied her grey face. "Yes?" he said after a moment.
   Quinn leaned on the desk with both hands, not for emphasis, Mark fancied, but for support. "Illyan, we have a problem. Miles is dead."
   Illyan took this in with a waxen stillness. Abruptly, he turned his chair around. Mark could see only the back of his head. His hair was thin. When he turned back, the lines had sprung out on his set face like a figure-ground reversal; like scars. "That's not a problem, Quinn," he whispered. "That's a disaster." He laid his hands down flat, very carefully, across the smooth black surface of the desk. So that's where Miles picked up that gesture, Mark, who had studied it, thought irrelevantly.
   "He's frozen in a cryo-chamber." Quinn licked her dry lips.
   Illyan's eyes closed; his mouth moved, whether on prayers or curses Mark could not tell. But he only said, mildly, "You might have said that first. The rest would have followed as a logical supposition." His eyes opened, intent. "So what happened? How bad were his wounds_not a head wound, pray God? How well-prepped was he?"
   "I helped do the prep myself. Under combat conditions. I ... I think it was good. You can't know until . . . well. He took a very bad chest wound. As far as I could tell he was untouched from the neck up."
   Illyan breathed, carefully. "You're right, Captain Quinn. Not a disaster. Only a problem. I'll alert the Imperial Military Hospital at Vorbarr Sultana to expect their star patient. We can transfer the cryo-chamber from your ship to my fast courier immediately." Was the man babbling, just a little, with relief?
   "Uh . . ." said Quinn. "No."
   Illyan rested his forehead gingerly in his hand, as if a headache was starting just behind his eyes. "Finish, Quinn," he said in a tone of muffled dread.
   "We lost the cryo-chamber."
   "How could you lose a cryo-chamber?!"
   "It was a portable." She intercepted his burning stare, and hurried up her report. "It was left downside in the scramble to get off. Each of the combat drop shuttles thought the other one had it. It was a mis-communication_I checked, I swear. It turned out the medic in charge of the cryo-chamber had been cut off from his shuttle by enemy forces. He found himself with access to a commercial shipping facility. We think he shipped the cryo-chamber from there."
   "You think? I will ask_ what combat drop mission, in a moment. Where did he ship it?"
   "That's just it, we don't know. He was killed before he could report. The cryo-chamber could be on its way literally anywhere by now."
   Illyan sat back and rubbed his lips, which were set in a thin, ghastly smile. "I see. And all this happened when? And where?"
   "Two weeks and three days ago, on Jackson's Whole."
   "He sent you all to Illyrica, via Vega Station. How the hell did you end up on Jackson's Whole?"
   Quinn stood at parade rest, and took it from the top, a stiff, clipped synopsis of the events of the last four weeks from Escobar onward. "I have a complete report with all our vid records and Miles's personal log here, sir." She laid a data cube on his comconsole.
   Illyan eyed it like a snake; his hand did not move toward it. "And the forty-nine clones?"
   "Still aboard the Peregrine, sir. We'd like to off-load them."
   My clones. What would Illyan do with them? Mark dared not ask.
   "Miles's personal log tends to be a fairly useless document, in my experience," observed Illyan distantly. "He is quite canny about what to leave out." He grew introspective, and fell silent for a time. Then he rose, and walked from side to side across the little office. The cool facade cracked without warning; face contorted, he turned and slammed his fist into the wall with bone-crunching force, shouting, "Damn the boy for making a fucking farce out of his own funeral!"
   He stood with his back to them; when he turned again and sat down his face was stiff and blank. When he looked up, he addressed Bothari-Jesek.
   "Elena. It's clear I'm going to have to stay here at Komarr, for the moment, to coordinate the search from ImpSec's galactic affairs HQ. I can't afford to put an extra five days of travel time between myself and the action. I will, of course . . . compose the formal missing-inaction report on Lieutenant Lord Vorkosigan and forward it immediately to Count and Countess Vorkosigan. I hate to think of it delivered by some subordinate, but it will have to be. But will you, as a personal favor to me, escort Lord Mark to Vorbarr Sultana, and deliver him to their custody?"
   No, no, no, Mark screamed inside.
   "I ... would rather not go to Barrayar, sir."
   "The Prime Minister will have questions that only one who was on the spot can answer. You are the most ideal courier I can imagine for a matter of such . . . complex delicacy. I grant you the task will be painful."
   Bothari-Jesek was looking trapped. "Sir, I'm a senior shipmaster.
   I'm not free to leave the Peregrine. And_frankly_I do not care to escort Lord Mark."
   "I'll give you anything you ask, in return."
   She hesitated. "Anything?"
   He nodded.
   She glanced at Mark. "I gave my word that all the House Bharaputra clones would be taken somewhere safe, somewhere humane, where the Jacksonians can't reach. Will you redeem my word for me?"
   Illyan chewed his lip. "ImpSec can launder their identities readily enough, of course. No difficulty there. Appropriate placement might be trickier. But yes. We'll take them on."
   Take them on. What did Illyan mean? For all their other flaws, the Barrayarans at least did not practice slavery.
   "They're children," Mark blurted. "You have to remember they're only children." It's hard to remember, he wanted to add, but couldn't, under Bothari-Jesek's cold eyes.
   Illyan averted his glance from Mark. "I shall seek Countess Vorkosigan's advice, then. Anything else?"
   "The Peregrine and the Ariel_"
   "Must remain, for the moment, in Komarr orbit and communications quarantine. My apologies to your troops, but they'll have to tough it out."
   "You'll cover the costs for this mess?"
   Illyan grimaced. "Alas, yes."
   "And . . . and look hard for Miles!"
   "Oh, yes," he breathed.
   "Then I'll go." Her voice was faint, her face pale.
   "Thank you," said Illyan quietly. "My fast courier will be at your disposal as quickly as you can make ready to depart." His eye fell reluctantly on Mark. He had been avoiding looking at Mark for the whole last half of this interview. "How many personal guards do you wish?" he asked Bothari-Jesek. "I'll make it clear to them that they are under your command till they see you safe to the Count."
   "I don't want any, but I suppose I have to sleep sometime. Two," Bothari-Jesek decided.
   And so he was officially made a prisoner of the Barrayaran Imperial government, Mark thought. The end of the line.
   Bothari-Jesek rose and motioned Mark to his feet. "Come on. I want to get a few personal items from the Peregrine. And tell my exec he's got the command, and explain to the troops about being confined to quarters. Thirty minutes."
   "Good. Captain Quinn, please remain."
   "Yes, sir."
   Illyan stood, to see Bothari-Jesek out. "Tell Aral and Cordelia," he began, and paused. Time stretched.
   "I will," said Bothari-Jesek quietly. Mutely, Illyan nodded.
   The door seals hissed open for her stride. She didn't even look back to see if Mark was following. He had to break into a run every five steps to keep up.
   His cabin aboard the ImpSec fast courier proved to be even tinier and more cell-like than the one he'd occupied aboard the Peregrine. Bothari-Jesek locked him in and left him alone. There was not even the time marker and limited human contact of three-times-a-day ration delivery; the cabin had its own computer-controlled food dispensing system, pneumatically connected to some central store. He over-ate compulsively, no longer sure why or what it could do for him, besides provide a combination of comfort and self-destruction. But death from the complications of obesity took years, and he only had five days.
   On the last day his body switched strategies, and he became violently ill. He managed to keep this fact secret until the trip downside in the personnel shuttle, where it was mistaken for zero-gravity and motion sickness by a surprisingly sympathetic ImpSec guard, who apparently suffered from some such slight weakness himself. The man promptly and cheerfully slapped an anti-nausea patch from the med kit on the wall onto the side of Mark's neck.
   The patch also had some sedative power. Mark's heart rate slowed, an effect which lasted till they landed and transferred to a sealed ground-car. A guard and a driver took the front compartment, and Mark sat across from Bothari-Jesek in the rear compartment for the last leg of his nightmare journey, from the military shuttleport outside the capital into the heart of Vorbarr Sultana. The center of the Barrayaran Empire.
   It wasn't until he found himself having something resembling an asthma attack that Bothari-Jesek looked up from her own glum self-absorption and noticed.
   "What the hell's the matter with you?" She leaned forward and took his pulse, which was racing. He was clammy all over.
   "Sick," he gasped, and then at her irritated I-could-have-figured-that-out-for-myself look, admitted, "Scared." He thought he'd been as frightened as a human being could be, under Bharaputran fire, but that was as nothing compared to this slow, trapped terror, this drawn-out suffocating helplessness to affect his destiny.
   "What do you have to be afraid of?" she asked scornfully. "Nobody's going to hurt you."
   "Captain, they're going to kill me."
   "Who? Lord Aral and Lady Cordelia? Hardly. If for any reason we fail to get Miles back, you could be the next Count Vorkosigan. Surely you've figured on that."
   At this point he satisfied a long-held curiosity. When he passed out, his breathing did indeed begin again automatically. He blinked away black fog, and fended off Bothari-Jesek's alarmed attempt to loosen his clothes and check his tongue to be sure he hadn't swallowed it. She had pocketed a couple of anti-nausea patches from the shuttle medkit, just in case, and she held one uncertainly. He motioned urgently for her to apply it. It helped.
   "Who do you think these people are?" she demanded angrily, when his breathing grew less irregular.
   "I don't know. But they're sure as hell going to be pissed at me."
   The worst was the knowledge that it need not have been this bad. Any time before the Jackson's Whole debacle he could in theory have walked right in and said hello. But he'd wanted to meet Barrayar on his own terms. Like trying to storm heaven. His attempt to make it better had made it infinitely worse.
   She sat back and regarded him with slow bemusement. "You really are scared to death, aren't you?" she said, in a tone of revelation that made him want to howl. "Mark, Lord Aral and Lady Cordelia are going to give you the benefit of every doubt. I know they will. But you have to do your part."
   "What is my part?"
   "I'm . . . not sure," she admitted.
   "Thanks. You're such a help."
   And then they were there. The ground-car swung through a set of gates and into the narrow grounds of a huge stone residence. It was the pre-electric Time-of-Isolation design that gave it such an air of fabulous age, Mark decided. The architecture he'd seen like it in London all dated back well over a millenium, though this pile was only a hundred and fifty standard years old. Vorkosigan House.
   The canopy swung up, and he struggled out of the ground-car after Bothari-Jesek. This time she waited for him. She grasped him firmly by the upper arm, either worried he would collapse or fearing he would bolt. They stepped through a pleasantly-hued sunlight into the cool dimness of a large entry foyer paved in black and white stone and featuring a remarkable wide curving staircase. How many times had Miles stepped across this threshold?
   Bothari-Jesek seemed an agent of some evil fairy, which had snatched away the beloved Miles and replaced him with this pallid, pudgy changeling. He choked down an hysterical giggle as the sardonic mocker in the back of his brain called out, Hi, Mom and Dad, I'm home. . . . Surely the evil fairy was himself.
   

CHAPTER TWELVE

   They were met in the entry hall by a pair of liveried servants wearing Vorkosigan brown and silver. In a high Vor household even the staff played soldier. One of them directed Bothari-Jesek away to the right. Mark could have wept. She despised him, but at least she was familiar. Stripped of all support and feeling more utterly alone than when locked in the darkness of his cabin, he turned to follow the other manservant through a short arched hallway and a set of doors on the left.
   He had memorized the layout of Vorkosigan House under Galen's tutelage, long ago, so he knew they were entering a room dubbed the First Parlor, an antechamber to the great library that ran from the front of the house to the back. By the standards of Vorkosigan House's public rooms he supposed it was relatively intimate, though its high ceiling seemed to lend it a cool, disapproving austerity. His consciousness of the architectural detail was instantly obliterated when he saw the woman sitting on a padded sofa, quietly awaiting him.
   She was tall, neither thin nor stout, a sort of middle-aged solid in build. Red hair streaked with natural gray wound in a complex knot on the back of her head, leaving her face free to make its own statement of cheekbone, line of jaw, and clear grey eye. Her posture was contained, poised rather than resting. She wore a soft silky beige blouse, a hand-embroidered sash that he suddenly realized matched the pattern on his own stolen one, and a calf-length tan skirt and buskins. No jewelry. He had expected something more ostentatious, elaborate, intimidating, the formal icon of Countess Vorkosigan from the vids of reviewing stands and receptions. Or was her sense of power so fully encompassed that she didn't need to wear it, she was it? He could see no physical similarity whatsoever between her and himself. Well, maybe eye color. And the paleness of their skins. And the bridge of the nose, perhaps. The line of the jaw had a certain congruence not apparent from vids_
   "Lord Mark Vorkosigan, milady," the manservant announced portentously, making Mark flinch.
   "Thank you, Pym," she nodded to the middle-aged retainer, dismissing him. The Armsman's disappointed curiosity was well-concealed, except for one quick glance back before closing the doors after himself.
   "Hello, Mark." Countess Vorkosigan's voice was a soft alto. "Please sit." She waved at an armchair set at a slight angle opposite her sofa. It did not appear to be hinged and sprung to snap closed upon him, and it was not too close to her; he lowered himself into it, gingerly, as instructed. Unusually, it was not too high for his feet to touch the floor. Had it been cut down for Miles?
   "I am glad to meet you at last," she stated, "though I'm sorry the circumstances are so awkward."
   "So am I," he mumbled. Glad, or sorry? And who were these I's sitting here, lying politely to each other about their gladness and sorrow? Who are we, lady? He looked around fearfully for the Butcher of Komarr. "Where is ... your husband?"
   "Ostensibly, greeting Elena. Actually, he funked out and sent me into the front line first. Most unlike him."
   "I ... don't understand. Ma'am." He didn't know what to call her.
   "He's been drinking stomach medicine in beverage quantities for the past two days . . . you have to understand how the information has been trickling in, from our point of view. Our first hint that there was anything amiss came four days ago in the form of a courier officer from ImpSec HQ, with a brief standard message from Illyan that Miles was missing in action, details to follow. We were not at first inclined to panic. Miles has been missing before, sometimes for quite extended periods. It was not until Illyan's full transmission was relayed and decoded, several hours later, together with the news that you were on your way, that it all came clear. We've had three days to think it through."
   He sat silent, struggling with the concept of the great Admiral Count Vorkosigan, the feared Butcher of Komarr, that massive, shadowy monster, even having a point of view, let alone one that low mortals such as himself were casually expected to understand.
   "Illyan never uses weasel-words," the Countess continued, "but he made it through that whole report without once using the term 'dead,' 'killed,' or any of their synonyms. The medical records suggest otherwise. Correct?"
   "Um . . . the cryo-treatment appeared successful." What did she want from him?
   "And so we are mired in an emotional and legal limbo," she sighed. "It would be almost easier if he . . ." She frowned fiercely down into her lap. Her hands clenched, for the first time. "You understand, we're going to be talking about a lot of possible contingencies. Much revolves around you. But I won't count Miles as dead till he's dead and rotted."
   He remembered that tide of blood on the concrete. "Um," he said helplessly.
   "The fact that you could potentially play Miles has been a great distraction to some people." She looked him over bemusedly. "You say the Dendarii accepted you . . .?"
   He cringed into the chair, body-conscious under her sharp grey gaze, feeling the flesh of his torso roll and bunch under Miles's shirt and sash, the tightness of the trousers. "I've . . . put on some weight since then."
   "All that? In just three weeks?"
   "Yes," he muttered, flushing.
   One brow rose. "On purpose?"
   "Sort of."
   "Huh." She sat back, looking surprised. "That was extremely clever of you."
   He gaped, realized it emphasized his doubling chin, and closed his mouth quickly.
   "Your status has been the subject of much debate. I voted against any security ploy to conceal Miles's situation by having you pose as him. In the first place, it's redundant. Lieutenant Lord Vorkosigan is often gone for months at a time; his absence is more normal than not, these days. It's strategically more important to establish you as yourself, Lord Mark, if Lord Mark is indeed who you are to be."
   He swallowed in a dry throat. "Do I have a choice?"
   "You will, but a reasoned one, after you've had time to assimilate it all."
   "You can't be serious. I'm a clone."
   "I'm from Beta Colony, kiddo," she said tartly. "Betan law is very sensible and clear on the topic of clones. It's only Barrayaran custom that finds itself at a loss. Barrayarans!" She pronounced it like a swear word. "Barrayar lacks a long experience of dealing with all the technological variants on human reproduction. No legal precedents. And if it's not a tradition" she put the same sour spin on the word as had Bothari-Jesek, "they don't know how to cope."
   "What am I, to you as a Betan?" he asked, nervously fascinated.
   "Either my son or my son once removed," she answered promptly. "Unlicensed, but claimed by me as an heir."
   "Those are actual legal categories, on your homeworld?"
   "You bet. Now, if I had ordered you cloned from Miles, after getting an approved child-license first of course, you would be my son pure and simple. If Miles as a legal adult had done the same, he would be your legal parent and I would be your mother-once-removed, and bear claims upon you and obligations to you approximately the equivalent of a grandparent. Miles was not, of course, a legal adult at the time you were cloned, nor was your birth licensed. If you were still a minor, he and I could go before an Adjudicator, and your guardianship would be assigned according to the Adjudicator's best judgment of your welfare. You are no longer, of course, a minor in either Betan or Barrayaran law." She sighed. "The time for legal guardianship is past. Lost. The inheritance of property will mostly be tangled in the Barrayaran legal confusions. Aral will discuss Barrayaran customary law, or the lack of it, with you when the time comes. That leaves our emotional relationship."
   "Do we have one?" he asked cautiously. His two greatest fears, that she would either pull out a weapon and shoot him, or else throw herself upon him in some totally inappropriate paroxysm of maternal affection, both seemed to be fading. He was left facing a level-voiced mystery.
   "We do, though exactly what it is remains to be discovered. Realize this, though. Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds and time, so my interest is doubly riveted. The artistic combination of the two, shall we say, arrests my attention."
   Put like that, it actually seemed to make sense, logically and without threat. He found his stomach unknotting, his throat relaxing. He promptly felt hungry again, for the first time since planetary orbit.
   "Now, what's between you and me has nothing to do with what's between you and Barrayar. That's Aral's department, and he'll have to speak for his own views. It's all so undecided, except for one thing. While you are here, you are yourself, Mark, Miles's six-years-younger twin brother. And not an imitation or a substitute for Miles. So the more you can establish yourself as distinct from Miles, from the very beginning, the better."
   "Oh," he breathed, "please, yes."
   "I suspected you'd already grasped that. Good, we agree. But just not-being-Miles is no more than the inverse of being an imitation Miles. I want to know, who is Mark?"
   "Lady ... I don't know." His prodded honesty had an edge of anguish.
   She watched him, sapiently. "There is time," she said calmly. "Miles . . . wanted you to be here, you know. He talked about showing you around. Imagined teaching you to ride horseback." She gave a furtive shudder.
   "Galen tried to have me taught, in London," Mark recalled. "It was terrifically expensive, and I wasn't very good at it, so he finally told me just to avoid horses, when I got here."
   "Ah?" she brightened slightly. "Hm. Miles, you see, has . . . had . . . has these only-child romantic notions about siblings. Now, I have a brother, so I have no such illusions." She paused, glanced around the room, and leaned forward with a suddenly confidential air, lowering her voice. "You have an uncle, a grandmother, and two cousins on Beta Colony who are just as much your relatives as Aral and myself and your cousin Ivan here on Barrayar. Remember, you have more than one choice. I've given one son to Barrayar. And watched for twenty-eight years while Barrayar tried to destroy him. Maybe Barrayar has had its turn, eh?"
   "Ivan's not here now, is he?" Mark asked, diverted and horrified.
   "He's not staying at Vorkosigan House, no, if that's what you mean. He is in Vorbarr Sultana, assigned to Imperial Service Headquarters. Perhaps," her eye lit in speculation, "he could take you out and show you some of the things Miles wanted you to see."
   "Ivan may still be angry for what I did to him in London," Mark jittered.
   "He'll get over it," the Countess predicted confidently. "I have to admit, Miles would have positively enjoyed unsettling people with you."
   A quirk Miles inherited from his mother, clearly.
   "I've lived almost three decades on Barrayar," she mused. "We've come such a long way. And yet there is still so terribly far to go. Even Aral's will grows weary. Maybe we can't do it all in one generation. Time for the changing of the guard, in my opinion ... ah, well."
   He sat back in his chair for the first time, letting it support him, starting to watch and listen instead of just cower. An ally. It seemed he had an ally, though he was still not sure just why. Galen had not spent much time on Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan, being totally obsessed with his old enemy the Butcher. Galen, it appeared, had seriously underestimated her. She had survived twenty-nine years here . . . might he? For the first time, it seemed something humanly possible.
   A brief knock sounded on the hinged double doors to the hallway. At Countess Vorkosigan's "Yes?", they swung open partway, and a man poked his head around the frame and favored her with a strained smile.
   "Is it all right for me to come in now, dear Captain?"
   "Yes, I think so," said Countess Vorkosigan.
   He let himself through and closed the doors again. Mark's throat closed; he swallowed and breathed, swallowed and breathed, with frighteningly fragile control. He would not pass out in front of this man. Or vomit. He hadn't more than a teaspoon of bile left in his gut by now anyway. It was him, unmistakably him, Prime Minister Aral Count Aral Vorkosigan, formerly Regent of the Barrayaran Dire and de facto dictator of three worlds, conqueror of Komarr, military genius, political mastermind_accused murderer, torturer, hit man, too many impossible things to be contained in that stocky form now striding toward Mark.
   Mark had studied vids of him taken at every age; perhaps it was somewhat odd that his first coherent thought was, He looks older than I expected. Count Vorkosigan was ten standard years older than his Betan wife, but he looked twenty or thirty years older. His hair was lighter shade of grey than in the vids from even two years ago. He was short for a Barrayaran, eye to eye with the Countess. His face was heavy, intense, weathered. He wore green uniform trousers but no jacket, just the cream shirt with the long sleeves rolled up and open at the round collar which, if it was an attempt at a casual look, failing utterly. The tension in the room had risen to choking levels at his entrance.
   "Elena is settled," Count Vorkosigan reported, seating himself beside the Countess. His posture was open, hands on knees, but he did not lean back comfortably. "The visit seems to be stirring up more memories than she was ready for. She's rather disturbed."
   I'll go talk to her in a bit," promised the Countess.
   "Good." The Count's eyes inventoried Mark. Puzzled? Repelled?
   "Well." The practiced diplomat whose job it was to talk three planets along the road to progress sat speechless, at a loss, as if unable to address Mark directly. He turned instead to his wife. "He passed as Miles?"
   A tinge of dark amusement flashed in Countess Vorkosigan's eyes.
   He's put on weight since then," she said blandly.
   "I see."
   The silence stretched for excruciating seconds.
   Mark blurted out, "The first thing I was supposed to do when I saw you was try to kill you."
   "Yes. I know." Count Vorkosigan settled back on the sofa, eyes on Mark's face at last.
   "They made me practice about twenty different back-up methods, could do them in my sleep, but the primary was to have been use a patch with a paralyzing toxin that left evidence on autopsy pointing to heart failure. I was to get alone with you, touch it to any part of your body I could reach. It was strangely slow, for an assassination drug.
   I was to wait, in your sight, for twenty minutes while you died, and never let on that I was not Miles."
   The Count smiled grimly. "I see. A good revenge. Very artistic. It would have worked."
   "As the new Count Vorkosigan, I was then to go on and spearhead a drive for the Imperium."
   "That would have failed. Ser Galen expected it to. It was merely the chaos of its failure, during which Komarr was supposed to rise, that he desired. You were to be another Vorkosigan sacrifice then." He actually seemed to grow more at ease, professional, discussing these grotesque plots.
   "Killing you was the entire reason for my existence. Two years ago I was all primed to do it. I endured all those years of Galen for no other purpose."
   "Take heart," advised the Countess. "Most people exist for no reason at all."
   The Count remarked, "ImpSec assembled a huge pile of documentation on you, after the plot came to light. It covers the time from when you were a mere mad gleam in Galen's eye, to the latest addition about your disappearance from Earth two months ago. But there's nothing in the documentation that suggests your, er, late adventure on Jackson's Whole was some sort of latent programming along the lines of my projected assassination. Was it?" A faint doubt colored his voice.
   "No," said Mark firmly. "I've been programmed enough to know. It's not something you can fail to notice. Not the way Galen did it, anyway."
   "I disagree," said Countess Vorkosigan unexpectedly. "You were set up for it, Mark. But not by Galen."
   The Count raised his brows in startled inquiry.
   "By Miles, I'm afraid," she explained. "Quite inadvertently."
   "I don't see it," said the Count.
   Mark felt the same way. "I was only in contact with Miles for a few days, on Earth."
   "I'm not sure you're ready for this, but here goes. You had exactly three role models to learn how to be a human being from. The Jacksonian body-slavers, the Komarran terrorists_and Miles. You were steeped in Miles. And I'm sorry, but Miles thinks he's a knight-errant. A rational government wouldn't allow him possession of a pocket-knife, let alone a space fleet. And so, Mark, when you were finally forced to choose between two palpable evils and a lunatic_you upped and ran after the lunatic."
   "I think Miles does very well," objected the Count.
   "Agh." The Countess buried her face in her hands, briefly. "Love, we are discussing a young man upon whom Barrayar laid so much unbearable stress, so much pain, he created an entire other personality escape into. He then persuaded several thousand galactic mercenararies to support his psychosis, and on top of that conned the Barrayaran Imperium into paying for it all. Admiral Naismith is one hell of a lot more than just an ImpSec cover identity, and you know it. I grant you he's a genius, but don't you dare try to tell me he's sane." She paused. "No. That's not fair. Miles's safety valve works. I won't really begin to fear for his sanity till he's cut off from the little admiral. It's extraordinary balancing act, all in all." She glanced at Mark. "And a nearly impossible act to follow, I should think."
   Mark had never thought of Miles as seriously crazed; he'd only thought of him as perfect. This was all highly unsettling.
   "The Dendarii truly function as a covert operations arm of ImpSec," said the Count, looking a bit unsettled himself. "Spectacularly well, occasion."
   "Of course they do. You wouldn't let Miles keep them if they didn't, so he makes sure of it. I merely point out that their official function is not their only function. And_if Miles ever ceases to need them, it won't be a year before ImpSec finds reason to cut that tie. And you'll earnestly believe you are acting perfectly logically."
   Why weren't they blaming him . . . ? He mustered the courage to say it aloud. "Why aren't you blaming me for killing Miles?"
   With a glance, the Countess fielded the question to her husband, ne nodded and answered. For them both? "Illyan's report stated Miles was shot by a Bharaputran security trooper."
   "But he wouldn't have been in the line of fire if I hadn't_"
   Count Vorkosigan held up an interrupting hand. "If he hadn't foolishly chosen to be. Don't attempt to camouflage your real blame by taking more than your share. I've made too many lethal errors myself be fooled by that one." He glanced at his boots. "We have also considered the long view. While your personality and persona are nearly distinct from Miles's, any children you sire would be genetically indistinguishable. Not you, but your son, may be what Barrayar needs."
   "Only to continue the Vor system," Countess Vorkosigan put in lightly. "A dubious goal, love. Or are you picturing yourself as a grandfatherly mentor to Mark's theoretical children, as your father was to Miles?"
   "God forbid," muttered the Count fervently.
   "Beware your own conditioning." She turned to Mark. "The trouble . ." she looked away, looked back, "if we fail to recover Miles, at you will be facing is not just a relationship. It's a job. At a minimum, you'd be responsible for the welfare of a couple of million people in your District; you would be their Voice in the Council of Counts. It's a job Miles was trained for literally from birth; I'm not sure it's possible to send in a last-minute substitute."
   Surely not, oh, surely not.
   "I don't know," said the Count thoughtfully. "I was such a substitute. Until I was eleven years old I was the spare, not the heir. I admit, after my older brother was murdered, the rush of events made the shift in destinies easy for me. We were all so intent on revenge, in Mad Yuri's War. By the time I looked up and drew breath again, I'd fully assimilated the fact I would be Count someday. Though I scarcely imagined that someday would be another fifty years. It's possible you too, Mark, could have many years to study and train. But it's also possible my Countship could land in your lap tomorrow."
   The man was seventy-two standard years old, middle-aged for a galactic, old for harsh Barrayar. Count Aral had used himself hard; had he used himself nearly up? His father Count Piotr had lived twenty years more than that, a whole other lifetime. "Would Barrayar even accept a clone as your heir?" he asked doubtfully.
   "Well, it's past time to start developing laws one way or the other. Yours would be a major test case. With enough concentrated will, I could probably ram it down their throats_"
   Mark didn't doubt that.
   "But starting a legal war is premature, till things sort themselves out with the missing cryo-chamber. For now, the public story is that Miles is away on duty, and you are visiting for the first time. All true enough. I need scarcely emphasize that the details are classified."
   Mark shook his head and nodded in agreement, feeling dizzy. "But_is this necessary? Suppose I'd never been created, and Miles was killed in the line of duty somewhere. Ivan Vorpatril would be your heir."
   "Yes," said the Count, "and House Vorkosigan would come to an end, after eleven generations of direct descent."
   "What's the problem with that?"
   "The problem is that it is not the case. You do exist. The problem is ... that I have always wanted Cordelia's son to be my heir. Note, we're discussing rather a lot of property, by ordinary standards."
   "I thought most of your ancestral lands glowed in the dark, after the destruction of Vorkosigan Vashnoi."
   The Count shrugged. "Some remain. This residence, for example. But my estate is not just property; as Cordelia puts it, it comes with a full-time job. If we allow your claim upon it, you must allow its claim upon you."
   "You can keep it all," said Mark sincerely. "I'll sign anything."
   The Count winced.
   "Consider it orientation, Mark," said the Countess. "Some of the people you may encounter will be thinking much about these questions. You simply need to be aware of the unspoken agendas."
   The Count acquired an abstracted look; he let out his breath in a long trickle. When he looked up again his face was frighteningly serious. "That's true. And there's one agenda that is not only unspoken, unspeakable. You must be warned."
   So unspeakable Count Vorkosigan was having trouble spitting it out self, apparently. "What now?" asked Mark warily.
   "There is a ... false theory of descent, one of six possible lines, puts me next in line to inherit the Barrayaran Imperium, should Emperor Gregor die without issue."
   "Cripes," said Mark impatiently, "of course I knew. Galen's plot turned exploiting that legal argument. You, then Miles, then Ivan."
   "Well now it's me, then Miles, then you, then Ivan. And Miles technically_dead at the moment. That leaves only me between and being targeted. Not as an imitation Miles, but in your own right."
   "That's rubbish" exploded Mark. "That's even crazier than the idea of my becoming Count Vorkosigan!"
   "Hold that thought," advised the Countess. "Hold it hard, and never even hint that you could think otherwise."
   I am fallen among madmen.
   "If anyone approaches you with a conversation on the subject, report it to me, Cordelia, or Simon Illyan as soon as possible," the Count added.
   Mark had retreated as far back into his chair as he could go. "All right . . ."
   "You're scaring him, dear," the Countess remarked.
   "On that topic, paranoia is the key to good health," said the Count carefully. He watched Mark silently for a moment. "You look tired. I'll show you to your room. You can wash up and rest a bit."
   They all rose. Mark followed them out to the paved hallway. The Countess nodded to an archway leading straight back under the arched stairway. "I'm going to take the lift tube up and see Elena."
   "Right," the Count agreed. Mark perforce followed him up the steps. Two flights let him know how out of shape he was. By the time they reached the second landing he was breathing as heavily as old man. The Count turned down a third floor hallway.
   Mark asked in some dread, "You're not putting me in Miles's room, are you?"
   "No. Though the one you're getting was mine, once, when I was a child." Before the death of his older brother, presumably. The second son's room. That was almost as unnerving.
   "It's just a guest room, now." The Count swung open another blank wooden door on hinges. Beyond it lay a sunny chamber. Obviously hand-made wooden furniture of uncertain age and enormous value included a bed and chests; a domestic console to control lighting and the mechanized windows sat incongruously beside the carved headboard.
   Mark glanced back, and collided with the Count's deeply questioning stare. It was a thousand times worse than even the Dendarii's I-love-Naismith look. He clenched his hands to his head, and grated, "Miles isn't in here!"
   "I know," said the Count quietly. "I was looking for ... myself, I suppose. And Cordelia. And you."
   Uncomfortably compelled, Mark looked for himself in the Count, reciprocally. He wasn't sure. Hair color, formerly; he and Miles shared the same dark hair he had seen on vids of the younger Admiral Vorkosigan. Intellectually, he'd known Aral Vorkosigan was the old General Count Piotr Vorkosigan's younger son, but that lost older brother had been dead for sixty years. He was astonished the present Count remembered with such immediacy, or made of it a connection with himself. Strange, and frightening. I was to kill this man. I still could. He's not guarding himself at all.
   "Your ImpSec people didn't even fast-penta me. Aren't you at all worried that I might still be programmed to assassinate you?" Or did he seem so little threat?
   "I thought you shot your father-figure once already. Catharsis enough." A bemused grimace curved the Count's mouth.
   Mark remembered Galen's surprised look, when the nerve-disruptor beam had taken him full in the face. Whatever Aral Vorkosigan would look like, dying, Mark fancied it would not be surprised.
   "You saved Miles's life then, according to his description of the affray," the Count said. "You chose your side two years ago, on Earth. Very effectively. I have many fears for you, Mark, but my death at your hand is not one of them. You're not as one-down with respect to your brother as you imagine. Even-all, by my count."
   "Progenitor. Not brother," said Mark, stiff and congealed.
   "Cordelia and I are your progenitors," said the Count firmly.
   Denial flashed in Mark's face.
   The Count shrugged. "Whatever Miles is, we made him. You are perhaps wise to approach us with caution. We may not be good for you, either."
   His belly shivered with a terrible longing, restrained by a terrible fear. Progenitors. Parents. He was not sure he wanted parents, at this late date. They were such enormous figures. He felt obliterated in their shadow, shattered like glass, annihilated. He felt a sudden weird wish to have Miles back. Somebody his own size and age, somebody he could talk to.
   The Count glanced again into the bedchamber. "Pym should have arranged your things."
   "I don't have any things. Just the clothes I'm wearing . . . sir." It was impossible to keep his tongue from adding that honorific.
   "You must have had something more to wear!"
   "What I brought from Earth, I left in a storage locker on Escobar. The rent's up by now, it's probably confiscated."
   The Count looked him over. "I'll send someone to take your measurements, and supply you with a kit. If you were visiting under more normal circumstances, we would be showing you around. Introducing you to friends and relatives. A tour of the city. Getting you aptitude tests, making arrangements for furthering your education. We'll do some of that, in any case."
   A school? What kind? Assignment to a Barrayaran military academy was very close to Mark's idea of a descent into hell. Could they make him . . . ? There were ways to resist. He had successfully resisted being lent Miles's wardrobe.
   "If you want anything, ring for Pym on your console," the Count instructed.
   Human servants. So very strange. The physical fear that had turned him inside out was fading, to be replaced by a more formless general anxiety. "Can I get something to eat?"
   "Ah. Please join Cordelia and me for lunch in one hour. Pym will show you to the Yellow Parlor."
   "I can find it. Down one floor, one corridor south, third door on the right."
   The Count raised an eyebrow. "Correct."
   "I've studied you, you see."
   "That's all right. We've studied you, too. We've all done our homework."
   "So what's the test?"
   "Ah, that's the trick of it. It's not a test. It's real life."
   And real death. "I'm sorry," Mark blurted. For Miles? For himself? He scarcely knew.
   The Count looked like he was wondering too; a brief ironic smile twitched one corner of his mouth. "Well ... in a strange way, it's almost a relief to know that it's as bad as it can be. Before, when Miles was missing, one didn't know where he was, what he might be doing to, er, magnify the chaos. At least this time we know he can't possibly get into any worse trouble."
   With a brief wave, the Count walked away, not entering the room after Mark, not crowding him in any way. Three ways to kill him flashed through Mark's mind. But that training seemed ages stale. He was too out of shape now anyway. Climbing the stairs had exhausted him. He pulled the door shut and fell onto the carved bed, shivering with reaction.
   

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

   Ostensibly to allow Mark to recover from jump-lag, the Count and Countess set no tasks for him the first two days. Indeed, except for the rather formal mealtimes, Mark did not see Count Vorkosigan at all. He wandered the house and grounds at will, with no apparent guard but the Countess's discreet observation of him. There were uniformed guards at the gates; he did not yet have the nerve to test and discover if they were charged to keep him in as well as unauthorized persons out.
   He had studied Vorkosigan House, yes, but the immediacy of actually being here took some getting used to. It all seemed subtly askew from his expectations. The place was a warren, but for all the antiques with which Vorkosigan House was cluttered, every original window had been replaced with modern high-grade armor-glass and automatic shutters, even the ones high up on the wall in the basement kitchen. It was like a shell, if a vast one, of protection, palace/fortress/prison. Could he slide into this shell?
   I've been a prisoner all my life. I want to be a free man.
   On the third day, his new clothing arrived. The Countess came to help him unpack it all. The morning light and cool air of early autumn streamed into his bedchamber through the window which he had, mulishly, opened wide to the mysterious, dangerous, unknown world.
   He opened one bag on a hanger to reveal a garment in a disturbingly military style, a high-necked tunic and side-piped trousers in Vorkosigan brown and silver, very like the Count's armsmen's liveries, but with more glitter on the collar and epaulettes. "What's this?" he asked suspiciously.
   "Ah," said the Countess. "Gaudy, isn't it? It's your uniform as a lord of House Vorkosigan."
   His, not Miles's. All the new clothes were computer-cut to generous fit; his heart sank as he calculated how much he'd have to eat to escape this one.
   The Countess's lips curved up at the dismayed expression on his face. "The only two places you actually have to wear it are if you tend a session of the Council of Counts, or if you go to the Emperor's birthday ceremonies. Which you might; they're coming up in a w weeks." She hesitated, her finger tracing over the Vorkosigan logo embroidered on the tunic's collar. "Miles's birthday isn't very long after that."
   Well, Miles wasn't aging at the moment, wherever he was. "Birthdays are sort of a non-concept, for me. What do you call it when you take someone out of a uterine replicator?"
   "When I was taken out of my uterine replicator, my parents called my birthday," she said dryly.
   She was Betan. Right. "I don't even know when mine is."
   "You don't? It's in your records."
   "What records?"
   "Your Bharaputran medical file. Haven't you ever seen it? I'll have get you a copy. It's, um, fascinating reading, in a sort of horrifying way. Your birthday was the seventeenth of last month, in point of fact."
   "I missed it anyway, then." He closed the bag and stuffed the uniform far back in his closet. "Not important."
   "It's important that someone celebrate our existence," she objected amiably. "People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture."
   "That's . . . true," he admitted, remembering his own recent imprisonment. "Hm." The next garment he shook out suited his mood: solid black. Though on closer examination it proved to be almost the same design as the cadet lord's uniform, the logos and piping muted in black silk instead of glowing in silver thread, almost invisible against the black cloth.
   "That's for funerals," commented the Countess. Her voice was suddenly rather flat.
   "Oh." Taking the hint, he tucked it away behind the Vor cadet's uniform. He finally chose the least military-flavored outfit available, soft loose trousers, low boots without buckles, steel toe caps, or any other aggressive decorations, and a shirt and vest, in dark colors, blues, greens, red-browns. It felt like a costume, but it was all extremely well-made. Camouflage? Did the clothes represent the man inside, or disguise him? "Is it me?" he asked the Countess, upon emerging from the bathroom for inspection.
   She half-laughed. "A profound question, to ask of one's clothing. Even I can't answer that one."
   On the fourth day, Ivan Vorpatril turned up at breakfast. He wore an Imperial lieutenant's undress greens, neatly setting off his tall, physically-fit frame; with his arrival the Yellow Parlor seemed suddenly crowded. Mark shrank down guiltily as his putative cousin greeted his aunt with a decorous kiss on the cheek and his uncle with a formal nod. Ivan nailed a plate from the sideboard and piled it precariously with eggs, meat, and sugared breads, juggled a mug of coffee, hooked back a chair with his foot, and slid into a place at the table opposite Mark.
   "Hello, Mark," Ivan acknowledged his existence at last. "You look like hell. When did you get so bloated?" He shoved a forkful of fried meat into his mouth and started chewing.
   "Thank you, Ivan," Mark took what refuge he could in faint sarcasm. "You haven't changed, I see." Implying no improvement, he hoped.
   Ivan's brown eyes glinted; he started to speak, but was stopped by his aunt's "Ivan" in a tone of cool reproof.
   Mark didn't think it was for trying to talk with his mouth full, but Ivan swallowed before replying, not to Mark but to the Countess, "My apologies, Aunt Cordelia. But I still have a problem with closets and other small, unvented dark areas because of him."
   "Sorry," muttered Mark, hunching. But something in him resisted being cowed by Ivan, and he added, "I only had Galen kidnap you to fetch Miles."
   "So that was your idea."
   "It worked, too. He came right along and stuck his head in the noose for you."
   Ivan's jaw tightened. "A habit he has failed to break, I understand," he returned, in a tone halfway between a purr and a snarl.
   It was Mark's turn to be silent. Yet in a way, it was almost comforting. Ivan at least treated him as he deserved. A little welcome punishment. He felt himself reviving under the rain of scorn like a parched plant. Ivan's challenge almost brightened his day. "Why are you here?"
   "It wasn't my idea, believe me," said Ivan. "I am to take you Out. For an airing."
   Mark glanced at the Countess, but she was focused on her husband. "Already?" she asked.
   "It is by request," said Count Vorkosigan.
   "Ah ha," she said, as if enlightened. No light dawned for Mark; it wasn't his request. "Good. Perhaps Ivan can show him a bit of the city on the way."
   "That's the idea," said the Count. "Since Ivan is an officer, it eliminates the need for a bodyguard."
   Why, so they could talk frankly? A terrible idea. And who would protect him from Ivan?
   "There will be an outer perimeter, I trust," said the Countess.
   "Oh, yes."
   The outer perimeter was the guard no one was supposed to see, not even the principals. Mark wondered what prevented the outer perimeter people from just taking the day off, and claiming they'd been there, invisible men. You could get away with the scam for quite a long time, between crises, he suspected.
   Lieutenant Lord Vorpatril had his own ground-car, Mark discovered after breakfast, a sporty model featuring lots of red enamel. Reluctantly, Mark slid in beside Ivan. "So," he said, in an uncertain voice. "Do you still want to scrag me?"
   Ivan whipped the car through the residence's gates and out into Vorbarr Sultana city traffic. "Personally, yes. Practically, no. I need all the bodies I can get to stand between me, and Uncle Aral's job. I wish Miles had a dozen children. He could have, by now, if only he'd started_in a way, you are a godsend. They'd have me clamped in as heir apparent right now if not for you." He hesitated, in speech only; the ground-car he accelerated through an intersection, weaving narrowly past four other vehicles bearing down in collision courses. "How dead is Miles really? Uncle Aral was pretty vague, on the vid telling me about it. I wasn't sure if it was for security, or_I've never seen him so stiff."
   The traffic was worse than London's and, if possible, even more disorderly, or ordered according to some rule involving survival of the fittest. Mark gripped the edges of his seat and replied, "I don't know. He took a needle-grenade in the chest. Almost as bad as it could be without actually blowing him in half."
   Did Ivan's lips ripple in suppressed horror? If so, the breezy facade re-closed again almost instantly. "It will take a top-notch revival facility to put his torso back together right," Mark continued. "For the brain . . . you never know till revival's over." And then it's too late. "But that's not the problem. Or not the problem yet."
   "Yeah," Ivan grimaced. "That was a real screw-up, y'know? How could you lose . . ." He turned so sharply he trailed an edge, which struck sparks from the pavement, and swore cheerfully at a very large hovertruck which nearly lunged through Mark's side of the groundcar. Mark crouched down and shut his mouth. Better the conversation should die than him; his life could depend on not distracting the driver. His first impression of the city of Miles's birth was that half the population was going to be killed in traffic before nightfall. Or maybe just the ones in Ivan's path. Ivan did a violent U-turn and skidded sideways into a parking space, cutting off two other ground-cars maneuvering toward it, and coming to a halt so abruptly Mark was nearly launched into the front panel.
   "Vorhartung Castle," Ivan announced with a nod and a wave as the engine's whine died away. "The Council of Counts is not in session today, so the museum is open to the public. Though we are not the public."
   "How . . . cultural," said Mark warily, peering out through the canopy. Vorhartung Castle really looked like a castle, a rambling, antiquated pile of featureless stone rising out of the trees. It perched on a bluff above the river rapids that divided Vorbarr Sultana. Its grounds were now a park; beds of cultivated flowers grew where men and horses had once dragged seige engines through icy mud in vain assaults. "What is this really?"
   "You are to meet a man. And I am not to pre-discuss it." Ivan popped the canopy and clambered out. Mark followed.
   Ivan, whether by plan or perversity, really did take him to the museum, which occupied one whole wing of the castle and was devoted to the arms and armor of the Vor from the Time of Isolation. As a soldier in uniform, Ivan was admitted free, though he dutifully paid Mark's way in with a few coins. For a cover, Mark guessed, for members of the Vor caste were also admitted free, Ivan explained in a whisper. There was no sign to that effect. If you were Vor you were presumed to know.
   Or maybe it was Ivan's subtle slur on Mark's Vor-ness, or lack of same. Ivan played the upper-class lout with the same cultivated thoroughness with which he played the Imperial lieutenant, or any other role his world demanded of him. The real Ivan was rather more elusive, Mark gauged; it would not do to underestimate his subtlety, or mistake him for a simpleton.
   So he was to meet a man. What man? If it was another ImpSec debriefing, why couldn't he have met the man at Vorkosigan House? Was it someone in government, or Prime Minister Count Aral's Centrist Coalition party? Again, why not come to him? Ivan couldn't be setting him up for an assassination, the Vorkosigans could have had him killed in secret anytime these past two years. Maybe he was being set up to be accused of some staged crime? Even more arcane plot ideas twisted through his mind, all sharing the same fatal flaw of being totally lacking in motivation or logic.
   He stared at a crammed array of dual sword sets in a chronological row on a wall, displaying the evolution of the Barrayaran smiths' art over two centuries, then hurried to join Ivan in front of a case of chemical-explosive-propelled projectile weapons: highly decorated large-bore muzzle loaders that had once, the card proclaimed, belonged to Emperor Vlad Vorbarra. The bullets were peculiar in being solid gold, massive spheres the size of Mark's thumbtip. At short range, it must have been like being hit by a terminal-velocity brick. At long range, they probably missed. So what poor peasant or squire had been stuck with the job of going around retrieving the misses? Or worse, the hits? Several of the bright balls in display were flattened or misshapen, and to Mark's intense bemusement, one card informed the museum patron that this very distorted blob had killed Lord Vor So-and-so during the battle of Such-and-such . . . "taken from his brain," after death, Mark presumed. Hoped. Yech. He was only surprised someone had cleaned the ancient gore from the spent bullet before mounting it, given the blood-thirsty gruesomeness of some of the other displays. The tanned and cured scalp of Mad Emperor Yuri, for instance, on loan from some Vor clan's private collection.
   "Lord Vorpatril." It was not a question. The man speaking had appeared so quietly Mark was not even sure from what direction he had come. He was dressed as quietly, middle-aged, intelligent-looking; he might have been a museum administrator. "Come with me, please."
   Without question or comment, Ivan fell in behind the man, gesturing Mark ahead of him. Thus sandwiched, Mark trod in his wake, torn between curiosity and nerves.
   They went through a door marked "No Admittance," which the man unlocked with a mechanical key and then locked again behind them, went up two staircases, and down an echoing wood-floored corridor to a room occupying the top floor of a round tower at the building's corner. Once a guard post, it was now furnished as an office, with ordinary windows cut into the stone walls in place of arrow slits. A man waited within, perched on a stool, gazing pensively down at the grounds falling away to the river, and the sprinkling of brightly-dressed people strolling or climbing the paths.
   He was a thin, dark-haired fellow in his thirties, pale skin set off by loose dark clothing entirely lacking in pseudo-military detailing. He looked up with a quick smile at their guide. "Thank you, Kevi." Both greeting and dismissal seemed combined, for the guide nodded and exited.
   It wasn't until Ivan nodded and said, "Sire," that recognition clicked.
   Emperor Gregor Vorbarra. Shit. The door behind Mark was blocked by Ivan. Mark controlled his surge of panic. Gregor was only a man, alone, apparently unarmed. All the rest was . . . propaganda. Hype. Illusion. His heart beat faster anyway.
   "Hullo, Ivan," said the Emperor. "Thank you for coming. Why don't you go study the exhibits for a while."
   "Seen 'em before," said Ivan laconically.
   "Nevertheless." Gregor jerked his head doorward.
   "Not to put too fine a point on it," said Ivan, "but this is not Miles, not even on a good day. And despite appearances, he was trained as an assassin, once. Isn't this a touch premature?"
   "Well," said Gregor softly, "we'll find out, won't we? Do you want to assassinate me, Mark?"
   "No," Mark croaked.
   "There you have it. Take a hike, Ivan. I'll send Kevi for you in a bit."
   Ivan grimaced in frustration, and Mark sensed, not a little frustrated curiosity. He departed with an ironic salaam that seemed to say, On your head be it.
   "So, Lord Mark," said Gregor. "What do you think of Vorbarr Sultana so far?"
   "It went by pretty fast," Mark said cautiously.
   "Dear God, don't tell me you let Ivan drive."
   "I didn't know I had a choice."
   The Emperor laughed. "Sit down." He waved Mark into the station chair behind the comconsole desk; the little room was otherwise sparsely furnished, though the antique military prints and maps cluttering the walls might be spill-over from the nearby museum.
   The Emperor's smile faded back into his initial pensive look as he studied Mark. It reminded Mark a little of the way Count Vorkosigan looked at him, that Who are you? look, only without the Count's ravenous intensity. A bearable wonder.
   "Is this your office?" asked Mark, cautiously settling himself in the Imperial swivel-chair. The room seemed small and austere for the purpose.
   "One of them. This whole complex is crammed with various offices, in some of the oddest niches. Count Vorvolk has one in the old dungeons. No head room. I use this as a private retreat when attending the Council of Counts meetings, or when I have other business here."
   "Why do I qualify as business? Besides not being pleasure. Is this personal or official?"
   "I can't spit without being official. On Barrayar, the two are not very separable. Miles . . . was . . ." Gregor's tongue tripped over that past tense too, "in no particular order, a peer of my caste; an officer in my service; the son of an extremely, if not supremely, important official; and a personal friend of lifelong standing. And the heir to the Countship of a District. And the Counts are the mechanism whereby one man," he touched his chest, "multiplies to sixty, and then to a multitude. The Counts are the first officers of the Imperium; I am its captain. You do understand, that I am not the Imperium? An empire is mere geography. The Imperium is a society. The multitude, the whole body_ultimately, down to every subject_ that is the Imperium. Of which I am only a piece. An interchangeable part, at that_ did you notice my great-uncle's scalp, downstairs?"
   "Um . . . yes. It was, uh, prominently displayed."
   "This is the home of the Council of Counts. The fulcrum of the lever may fancy itself supreme, but it is nothing without the lever. Mad Yuri forgot that. I don't. The Count of the Vorkosigan's District is another such living piece. Also interchangeable." He paused.
   "A ... link in a chain," Mark offered carefully, to prove he was paying attention.
   "A link in a chain-mail. In a web. So that one weak link is not fatal. Many must fail at once, to achieve a real disaster. Still . . . one wants as many sound, reliable links as possible, obviously."
   "Obviously." Why are you looking at me?
   "So. Tell me what happened on Jackson's Whole. As you saw it." Gregor sat up on his perch, hooking one heel and crossing his booted ankles, apparently centered and comfortable, like a raven on a branch.
   "I'd have to start the story back on Earth."
   "Feel free." His easy brief smile implied Mark had all the time in the world, and one hundred percent of his attention.
   Haltingly, Mark began to stammer out his tale. Gregor's questions were few, only interjected when Mark hung up on the difficult bits; few but searching. Gregor was not in pursuit of mere facts, Mark quickly realized. He had obviously already seen Illyan's report. The Emperor was after something else.
   "I cannot argue with your good intentions," said Gregor at one point. "The brain transplant business is a loathsome enterprise. But you do realize_your effort, your raid, is hardly going to put a dent in it. House Bharaputra will just clean up the broken glass and go on."
   "It will make a permanent difference to the forty-nine clones," Mark asserted doggedly. "Everybody makes that same damned argument. 'I can't do it all, so I'm not going to do any.' And they don't. And it goes on, and on. And anyway, if I had been able to go back via Escobar as I'd planned in the first place_there would have been a big news splash. House Bharaputra might even have tried to reclaim the clones legally, and then there would really have been a public stink. I'd have made sure of it. Even if I'd been in Escobaran detention. Where, by the way, the House Bharaputra enforcers would have had a hard time getting at me. And maybe . . . maybe it would have interested some more people in the problem."
   "Ah!" said Gregor. "A publicity stunt."
   "It was not a stunt," Mark grated.
   "Excuse me. I did not mean to imply your effort was trivial. Quite the reverse. But you did have a coherent long-range strategy after all."
   "Yeah, but it went down the waste disintegrator as soon as I lost control of the Dendarii. As soon as they knew who I really was." He brooded on the memory of that helplessness.
   At Gregor's prodding, Mark went on to recount Miles's death, the screw-up with the lost cryo-chamber, their aborted efforts to retrieve it, and their humiliating ejection from Jacksonian local space. He found himself revealing far more of his real thoughts than he was comfortable doing, yet . . . Gregor almost put him at his ease. How did the man do it? The soft, almost self-effacing demeanor camouflaged a consummately skillful people-handler. In a garbled rush, Mark described the incident with Maree and his half-insane time in solitary confinement, then trailed off into inarticulate silence.
   Gregor frowned introspectively, and was quiet for a time. Hell, the man was quiet all the time. "It seems to me, Mark, that you devalue your strengths. You have been battle-tested, and proved your physical courage. You can take an initiative, and dare much. You do not lack brains, though sometimes . . . information. It's not a bad start on the qualities needed for a countship. Someday."
   "Not any day. I don't want to be a Count of Barrayar," Mark denied emphatically.
   "It could be the first step to my job," Gregor said suggestively, with a slight smile.
   "No! That's even worse. They'd eat me alive. My scalp would join the collection downstairs."
   "Very possibly." Gregor's smile faded. "Yes, I've often wondered where all my body parts are going to end up. And yet_I understand you were set to try it, just two years ago. Including Aral's countship."
   "Fake it, yes. Now you're talking about the real thing. Not an imitation." I'm just an imitation, don't you know? "I've only studied the outsides. The inner surface I can barely imagine."
   "But you see," said Gregor, "we all start out that way. Faking it. The role is a simulacrum, into which we slowly grow real flesh."
   "Become the machine?"
   "Some do. That's the pathological version of a Count, and there are a few. Others become . . . more human. The machine, the role, then becomes a handily-worked prosthetic, which serves the man. Both types have their uses, for my goals. One must simply be sure where on the range of self-delusion the man you're talking to falls."
   Yes, Countess Cordelia had surely had a hand in training this man. Mark sensed her trail, like phosphorescent footsteps in the dark. "What are your goals?"
   Gregor shrugged. "Keep the peace. Keep the various factions from trying to kill each other. Make bloody sure that no galactic invader ever puts a boot on Barrayaran soil again. Foster economic progress. Lady Peace is the first hostage taken when economic discomfort rises. Here my reign is unusually blessed, with the terraforming of the second continent, and the opening of Sergyar for full colonization. Finally, now that that vile subcutaneous worm plague is under control. Settling Sergyar should absorb everyone's excess energies for several generations. I've been studying various colonial histories lately, wondering how many of the mistakes we can avoid . . . well, so."
   "I still don't want to be Count Vorkosigan."
   "Without Miles, you don't exactly have a choice."
   "Rubbish." At least, he hoped it was rubbish. "You just said it's an interchangeable part. They could find someone else just fine if they had to. Ivan, I guess."
   Gregor smiled bleakly. "I confess, I've often used the same argument. Though in my case the topic is progeny. Bad dreams about the destiny of my body parts are nothing compared to the ones I have about my theoretical future children's. And I'm not going to marry some high Vor bud whose family tree crosses mine sixteen times in the last six generations." He contained himself abruptly, with an apologetic grimace. And yet . . . the man was so controlled, Mark fancied even this glimpse of the inner Gregor served a purpose, or could be made to.
   Mark was getting a headache. Without Miles . . . With Miles, all these Barrayaran dilemmas would be Miles's. And Mark would be free to face ... his own dilemmas, anyway. His own demons, not these adopted ones. "This is not my . . . gift. Talent. Interest. Destiny. Something, I don't know." He rubbed his neck.
   "Passion?" said Gregor.
   "Yes, that'll do. A countship is not my passion."
   After a moment, Gregor asked curiously, "What is your passion, Mark? If not government, or power, or wealth_you have not even mentioned wealth."
   "Enough wealth to destroy House Bharaputra is so far beyond my reach, it just . . . doesn't apply. It's not a solution I can have. I ... I . . . some men are cannibals. House Bharaputra, its customers_I want to stop the cannibals. That would be worth getting out of bed for." He became aware his voice had grown louder, and slumped down again in the soft chair.
   "In other words . . . you have a passion for justice. Or dare I say it, Security. A curious echo of your, um, progenitor."
   "No, no!" Well . . . maybe, in a sense. "I suppose there are cannibals on Barrayar too, but they haven't riveted my close personal interest. I don't think in terms of law enforcement, because the transplant business isn't illegal on Jackson's Whole. So a policeman isn't the solution either. Or ... it would have to be a damned unusual policeman." Like an ImpSec covert ops agent? Mark tried to imagine a detective-inspector bearing a letter of marque and reprisal. For some reason a vision of his progenitor kept coming up. Damn Gregor's unsettling suggestion. Not a policeman. A knight-errant. The Countess had it dead-on. But there was no place for knights-errant any more; the police would have to arrest them.
   Gregor sat back with a faintly satisfied air. "That's very interesting." His abstracted look resembled that of a man assimilating the code-key to a safe. He slid from his stool to wander along the windows and gaze down from another angle. Face to the light, he remarked, "It seems to me your future access to your . . . passion, depends rather heavily on getting Miles back."
   Mark sighed in frustration. "It's out of my hands. They'll never let me . . . what can I do that ImpSec can't? Maybe they'll turn him up. Any day now."
   "In other words," said Gregor slowly, "the most important thing in your life at this moment is something you are powerless to affect. You have my profound sympathies."
   Mark slipped, unwilled, into frankness. "I'm a virtual prisoner here. I can't do anything, and I can't leave!"
   Gregor cocked his head. "Have you tried?"
   Mark paused. "Well . . . no, not yet, actually."
   "Ah." Gregor turned away from the window, and took a small plastic card from his inner jacket pocket. He handed it across the desk to Mark. "My Voice carries only to the borders of Barrayar's interests," he said. "Nevertheless . . . here is my private vidcom number. Your calls will be screened by only one person. You'll be on their list. Simply state your name, and you will be passed through."
   "Uh . . . thank you," said Mark, in cautious confusion. The card bore only the code-strip: no other identification. He put it away very carefully.
   Gregor touched an audiocom pin on his jacket, and spoke to Kevi. In a few moments there came a knock, and the door swung open to admit Ivan again. Mark, who had started to rock in Gregor's station chair_it did not squeak_self-consciously climbed out of it.
   Gregor and Ivan exchanged farewells as laconically as they had exchanged greetings, and Ivan led Mark out of the tower room. As they rounded the corner Mark looked back at the sound of footsteps. Kevi was already ushering in the next man for his Imperial appointment.
   "So how did it go?" Ivan inquired.
   "I feel drained," Mark admitted.
   Ivan smiled grimly. "Gregor can do that to you, when he's being Emperor."
   "Being? Or playing?"
   "Oh, not playing."
   "He gave me his number." And I think he got mine.
   Ivan's brows rose. "Welcome to the club. I can count the number of people who have that access without even taking both boots off."
   "Was . . . Miles one of them?"
   "Of course."
   

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

   Ivan, apparently acting under orders_from the Countess, was Mark's first guess_took him out to lunch. Ivan followed a lot of orders, Mark noticed with a slight twinge of sympathy. They went to a place called the caravanserai, a stretched walking distance from Vorhartung Castle. Mark escaped another ground-car ride with Ivan by virtue of the narrowness of the streets_alleys_in the ancient district.
   The caravanserai itself was a curious study in Barrayaran social evolution. Its oldest core was cleaned up, renovated, and converted into a pleasant maze of shops, cafes, and small museums, frequented by a mixture of city workers seeking lunch and obvious provincial tourists, come up to the capital to do the historic shrines.
   This transformation had spread from the clusters of old government buildings like Vorhartung Castle along the river, toward the district's center; on the fringes to the south, the renovation petered out into the kind of shabby, faintly dangerous areas that had given the caravanserai its original risky reputation. On the way, Ivan proudly pointed out a building in which he claimed to have been born, during the war of Vordarian's Pretendership. It was now a shop selling overpriced hand-woven carpets and other antique crafts supposedly preserved from the Time of Isolation. From the way Ivan carried on Mark half-expected there to be a plaque on the wall commemorating the event, but there wasn't; he checked.
   After lunch in one of the small cafes, Ivan, his mind now running on his family history, was seized with the notion of taking Mark to view the spot on the pavement where his father Lord Padma Vorpatril had been murdered by Vordarian's security forces during that same war. Feeling it fit in with the general gruesome historic tenor of the rest of the morning, Mark agreed, and they set out again on foot to the south. A shift in the architecture, from the low tan stucco of the first century of the Time of Isolation to the high red brick of its last century, marked the marches of the caravanserai proper, or improper.
   This time, by God, there was a plaque, a cast bronze square set right in the pavement; ground-cars ran past and over it as Ivan gazed down.
   "You'd think they'd at least have put it on the sidewalk," said Mark.
   "Accuracy," said Ivan. "M'mother insisted."
   Mark waited a respectful interval to allow Ivan who-knew-what inward meditations. Eventually Ivan looked up and said brightly, "Dessert? I know this great little Keroslav District bakery around the corner. Mother always took me there after, when we came here to burn the offering each year. It's sort of a hole in the wall, but good."
   Mark had not yet walked down lunch, but the place proved as delectable on the inside as it was derelict on the outside, and he somehow ended up possessed of a bag of nut rolls and traditional brillberry tarts, for later. While Ivan lingered over a selection of delicacies to be delivered to Lady Vorpatril, and possibly some sweeter negotiation with the pretty counter-girl_it was hard to tell if Ivan was serious, or just running on spinal reflex_Mark stepped outside.
   Galen had placed a couple of Komarran underground spy contacts in this area once, Mark remembered. Doubtless picked up two years ago in the post-plot sweep by Barrayaran Imperial Security. Still, he wondered if he could have found them, if Galen's dreams of revenge had ever come real. Should be one street down and two over . . . Ivan was still chatting up the bakery girl. Mark took a walk.
   He found the address in a couple of minutes, to his sufficient satisfaction; he decided he didn't need to check inside. He turned back and took what looked like a short cut toward the main street and the bakery. It proved to be a cul-de-sac. He turned again and started for the alley's mouth.
   An old woman and a skinny youth, who had been sitting on a stoop and watched him go in, now watched him coming out. The old woman's dull eye lit with a faint hostility as he came again into her shortsighted focus.
   "That's no boy. That's a mutie," she hissed to the youth. Grandson? She nudged him pointedly. "A mutie come on our street."
   Thus prodded, the youth slouched to his feet and stepped in front of Mark. Mark stopped. The kid was taller than he_who wasn't?_but not much heavier, greasy-haired and pale. He spread his legs aggressively, blocking Mark's dodge. Oh, God. Natives. In all their surly glory.
   "Shouldn't ought to be here, mutie." He spat, in imitation-bully-mode; Mark almost laughed.
   "You're right," he agreed easily. He let his accent go mid-Atlantic Earth, non-Barrayaran. "This place is a pit."
   "Offworlder!" the old woman whined in even sharper disapproval. "You can take a wormhole jump to hell, offworlder!"
   "I seem to have already," Mark said dryly. Bad manners, but he was in a bad mood. If these slum-louts wanted to bait him, he would bait them right back. "Barrayarans. If there's anything worse than the Vor it's the fools under 'em. No wonder galactics despise this place for a hole." He was surprised at how easily the suppressed rage vented, and how good it felt. Better not go too far.
   "Gonna get you, mutie," the boy promised, hovering on the balls of his feet in nervous threat. The hag urged her bravo on with a rude gesture at Mark. A peculiar set-up; little old ladies and punks were normally natural enemies, but these two seemed in it together. Comrades of the Imperium, no doubt, uniting against a common foe.
   "Better a mutie than a moron," Mark intoned with false cordiality.
   The lout's brows wrinkled. "Hey! Is that back-chat to me? Huh?"
   "Do you see any other morons around here?" At the boy's eye-flicker, Mark looked over his shoulder. "Oh. Excuse me. There are two more. I understand your confusion." His adrenalin pumped, turning his late lunch into a lump of regret in his belly. Two more youths, taller, heavier, older, but only adolescents. Possibly vicious, but untrained. Still . . . where was Ivan now? Where was that bloody invisible supposed outer perimeter guard? On break? "Aren't you late for school? Your remedial drooling class, perhaps?"
   "Funny mutie," said one of the older ones. He wasn't laughing.
   The attack was sudden, and almost took Mark by surprise; he thought etiquette demanded they exchange a few more insults first, and he was just working up some good ones. Exhilaration mixed strangely with the anticipation of pain. Or maybe it was the anticipation of pain that was exhilarating. The biggest punk tried to kick him in the groin. He caught the foot with one hand and boosted it skyward, flipping the kid onto his back on the stones with a wham that knocked the wind out of him. The second one launched a blow with his fist; Mark caught his arm. They whirled, and the punk found himself stumbling into his skinny companion. Unfortunately, now they both were between Mark and the exit.
   They scrambled to their feet, looking astonished and outraged; what kind of easy pickings had they expected, for God's sake? Easy enough. His reflexes were two years stale, and he was already getting winded. Yet the extra weight made him harder to knock off his feet. Three to one on a crippled-looking fat little lost stranger, eh? You like those odds? Come to me, baby cannibals. The bakery bag was still clutched absurdly in his fist as he grinned and opened his arms in invitation.
   They jumped him both together, telegraphing every move. The purely defensive katas continued to work charmingly; they flowed into, and out of, his momentum-gate to end up both on the ground, shaking their heads dizzily, victims of their own aggression. Mark wriggled his jaw, which had taken a clumsy blow, hard enough to sting and wake him up. The next round was not so successful; he ended up rolling out of reach, finally losing his grip on the bakery bag, which promptly got stomped. And then one of them caught up with him in a grapple, and they took some of their own back, pounding unscientific blows of clenched fists. He was getting seriously out of breath. He planned an arm-bar and a sprint to the street. It might have ended there, a good time having been had by all, if one of the idiot punks, crouching, hadn't pulled out a battered old shock-stick and jabbed it toward him.
   Mark almost killed him instantly with a kick to the neck; he pulled his punch barely in time, and the blow landed slightly off-center. Even through his boot he could feel the tissues crush, a sickening sensation richoceting up through his body. Mark recoiled in horror as the kid lay gurgling on the ground. No, I wasn't trained to fight. I was trained to kill. Oh, shit. He'd managed not to quite smash the larynx. He prayed the kick hadn't snapped a major internal blood vessel. The other two assailants paused in shock.
   Ivan pounded around the corner. "What the hell are you doing?" he cried hoarsely.
   "I don't know," Mark gasped, bent over with his hands on his knees. His nose was bleeding all over his new shirt. In delayed reaction, he was beginning to shake. "They jumped me." I baited them. Why the hell was he doing this? It had all happened so fast. . . .
   "Is the mutie with you, soldier?" the skinny lad demanded in a mixture of surprise and dread.
   Mark could see the struggle in Ivan's face with the urge to disavow all connection with him. "Yes," Ivan choked out at last. The big punk who was still on his feet faded backward, turned, and ran. The skinny kid was glued to the scene by the presence of the injured man and the old woman, though he looked like he wanted to run too. The hag, who had risen and hobbled over to her downed champion, screamed accusations and threats at Mark. She was the only one present who seemed undismayed by the sight of Ivan's officer's greens. Then the municipal guards arrived.
   Once he was sure the injured punk was going to be taken care of, Mark shut up and let Ivan handle it. Ivan lied like a ... trooper, to keep the name of Vorkosigan from ever coming up; the municipal guards in turn, realizing who Ivan was, dampened the old woman's hysteria and extricated them with speed. Mark declined to press assault charges even without Ivan's urgent advice to that effect. Thirty minutes later they were back in Ivan's ground car. This time Ivan drove much more slowly; residual terror, Mark judged, from having almost lost his charge.
   "Where the hell was that outer perimeter guy who was supposed to be my guardian angel?" Mark asked, gingerly probing the contusions on his face. His nose had finally stopped bleeding. Ivan hadn't let him in his ground car until it had, and he'd made sure Mark wasn't going to throw up.
   "Who d'you think called the municipal guards? The outer perimeter's supposed to be discreet."
   "Oh." His ribs hurt, but nothing was broken, Mark decided. Unlike his progenitor, he'd never had a broken bone. Mutie. "Was . . . did Miles have to deal with this kind of crap?" All he'd done to those people was walk past them. If Miles had been dressed as he was, been alone as he was, would they have attacked him?
   "Miles wouldn't have been stupid enough to wander in there by himself in the first place!"
   Mark frowned. He'd gained the impression from Galen that Miles's rank made him immune to Barrayar's mutagenic prejudices. Did Miles actually have to run a constant safety-calculation in his head, editing where he could go, what he could do?
   "And if he had," Ivan continued, "he'd have talked his way out of it. Slid on by. Why the hell did you mix in with three guys? If you just want somebody to beat the shit out of you, come to me. I'd be glad to."
   Mark shrugged uncomfortably. Is that what he'd been secretly seeking? Punishment? Was that why things went so bad, so fast? "I thought you all were the great Vor. Why should you have to slide on by? Can't you just stomp the scum?"
   Ivan groaned. "No. And am I ever glad I'm not going to be your permanent bodyguard."
   "I'm glad too, if this is a sample of your work," Mark snarled in return. He checked his left canine tooth; his gum and lips were puffy, but it wasn't actually loose.
   Ivan merely growled. Mark settled back, wondering how the kid with the damaged throat was doing. The municipal guards had taken him away for treatment. Mark should not have fought him; he'd come within a centimeter of killing him. He might have killed all three. The punks were only little cannibals, after all. Which was why, Mark realized, Miles would have talked and slid away; not fear, and not noblesse oblige, but because those people weren't up to his ... weight class. Mark felt ill. Barrayarans. God help me.
   Ivan swung by his apartment, which was in a tower in one of the city's better districts, not far from the entirely modern government buildings housing the Imperial Service Command headquarters. There he allowed Mark to wash up and remove the bloodstains from his clothing before his return to Vorkosigan House. Tossing Mark's shirt back to him from the dryer, Ivan remarked, "Your torso is going to be piebald, tomorrow. Miles would have been in hospital for the next three weeks over that. I'd have had to cart him out of there on a board."
   Mark glanced down at the red blotches, just starting to turn purple. He was stiffening up all over. Half a dozen pulled muscles protested their abuse. All that, he could conceal, but his face bore marks that were going to have to be explained. Telling the Count and Countess that he'd been in a ground-car wreck with Ivan would be perfectly believable, but he doubted they'd get away with the lie for long.
   In the event, Ivan did the talking again, delivering him back to the Countess with a true but absolutely minimized account of Mark's adventure: "Aw, he wandered off and got pushed around a little by the local residents, but I caught up with him before anything much could happen. 'Bye, Aunt Cordelia . . ." Mark let him escape without impediment.
   The whole report had certainly caught up with the Count and Countess by dinner. Mark sensed the cool faint tension even as he slid into his place at the table opposite Elena Bothari-Jesek, who was back at last from her lengthy and presumably grueling debriefing at ImpSec HQ.
   The Count waited until the first course had been served and the human servant had departed the dining room before remarking, "I'm glad your learning experience today was not lethal, Mark."
   Mark managed to swallow without gagging, and said in a subdued voice, "For him, or me?"
   "Either. Do you wish a report on your, ah, victim?"
   No. "Yes. Please."
   "The physicians at the municipal hospital expect to release him in two days. He will be on a liquid diet for a week. He will recover his voice."
   "Oh. Good." I didn't mean to . . . What was the point of excuses, apologies, protests? None, surely.
   "I looked into picking up his medical bill, privately, only to discover that Ivan had been in ahead of me. Upon reflection, I decided to let him stand for it."
   "Oh." Ought he to offer to repay Ivan, then? Did he have any money, or any right to any? Legally? Morally?
   "Tomorrow," stated the Countess, "Elena will be your native guide. And Pym will accompany you."
   Elena looked very much less than thrilled.
   "I spoke with Gregor," Count Vorkosigan continued. "You apparently impressed him enough, somehow, that he has given his approval for my formal presentation of you as my heir, House Vorkosigan's cadet member of the Council of Counts. At a time of my discretion, if and when Miles's death is confirmed. Obviously, this step is still premature. I'm not sure myself whether it would be better to get your confirmation pushed through before the Counts get to know you, or after they have had time to get used to the idea. A swift maneuver, hit and run, or a long tedious siege. For once, I think a siege would be better. If we won, your victory would be far more secure."
   "Can they reject me?" Mark asked. Is that a light I see at the end of this tunnel?
   "They must accept and approve you by a simple majority vote for you to inherit the Countship. My personal property is a separate matter. Normally, such approval is routine for the eldest son, or, lacking a son, whatever competent male relative a Count may put forward. It doesn't even have to be a relative, technically, though it almost always is. There was the famous case of one of the Counts Vortala, back in the Time of Isolation, who had fallen out with his son. Young Lord Vortala had allied with his father-in-law in the Zidiarch Trade War. Vortala disinherited his son and somehow managed to maneuver a rump session of the Counts into approving his horse, Midnight, as his heir. Claimed the horse was just as bright and had never betrayed him."
   "What ... a hopeful precedent for me," Mark choked. "How did Count Midnight do? Compared to the average Count."
   "Lord Midnight. Alas, no one found out. The horse pre-deceased the Vortala, the war petered out, and the son eventually inherited after all. But it was one of the zoological high points of the Council's varied political history, right up there with the infamous Incendiary Cat Plot." Count Vorkosigan's eye glinted with a certain skewed enthusiasm, relating all this. His eye fell on Mark and his momentary animation faded. "We've had several centuries to accumulate any precedent you please, from absurdities to horrors. And a few sound saving graces."
   The Count did not make further inquiries into Mark's day, and Mark did not volunteer further details. The dinner went down like lead, and Mark escaped as soon as he decently could.
   He slunk off to the library, the long room at the end of one wing of the oldest part of the house. The Countess had encouraged him to browse there. In addition to a reader accessing public data banks and a code-locked and secured government comconsole with its own dedicated comm links, the room was lined with bound books printed and even hand-calligraphed on paper from the Time of Isolation. The library reminded Mark of Vorhartung Castle, with its modern equipment and functions awkwardly stuffed into odd corners of an antique architecture that had never envisioned nor provided place for them.
   As he was thinking about the museum, a large folio volume of woodcuts of arms and armor caught his eye, and he carefully pulled it from its slipcase and carried it to one of a pair of alcoves flanking the long glass doors to the back garden. The alcoves were luxuriously furnished, and a little table pulled up to a vast wing-chair provided support for the, in both senses, heavy volume. Bemused, Mark leafed through it. Fifty kinds of swords and knives, with every slight variation possessing its own name, and names for all the parts as well . . . what an absolutely fractal knowledge-base, the kind created by, and in turn creating, a closed-in group such as the Vor. . . .
   The library's door swung open, and footsteps sounded across the marble and carpeting. It was Count Vorkosigan. Mark shrank back in the chair in the alcove, drawing his legs up out of sight. Maybe the man would just take something and go out again. Mark did not want to get trapped into some intimate chat, which this comfortable room so invited. He had conquered his initial terror of the Count, yet the man managed still to make him excruciatingly uncomfortable, even without saying a word.
   Unfortunately, Count Vorkosigan seated himself at one of the com-consoles. Reflections of the colored lights of its display flickered on the glass of the windows Mark's chair faced. The longer he waited, Mark realized, lurking like an assassin, the more awkward it was going to be to reveal himself. So say hello. Drop the book. Blow your nose, something. He was just working up the courage to try a little throat-clearing and page-rustling, when the door hinges squeaked again, and lighter footsteps sounded. The Countess. Mark huddled into a ball in the wing-chair.
   "Ah," said the Count. The lights reflecting in the window died away as he shut down the machine in favor of this new diversion, and swung around in his station chair. Did she lean over for some quick embrace? Fabric whispered as she seated herself.
   "Well, Mark is certainly getting a crash-course about Barrayar," she remarked, effectively spiking Mark's last frantic impulse to make his presence known.
   "It's what he needs," sighed the Count. "He has twenty years of catching up to do, if he is to function."
   "Must he function? I mean, instantly?"
   "No. Not instantly."
   "Good. I thought you might be setting him an impossible task. And as we all know, the impossible takes a little longer."
   The Count vented a short laugh, which faded quickly. "At least he's had a glimpse of one of our worst social traits. We must be sure he gets a thorough grounding in the history of the mutagen disasters, so he'll understand where the violence is coming from. How deeply the agony and the fear are embedded, which drive the visible anxieties and, ah, as you Betans would see it, bad manners."
   "I'm not sure he'll ever be able to duplicate Miles's native ability to dance through that particular minefield."
   "He seems more inclined to plow through it," murmured the Count dryly, and hesitated. "His appearance . . . Miles took enormous pains to move, act, dress, so as to draw attention away from his appearance. To make his personality overpower the evidence of the eye. A kind of whole-body sleight-of-hand, if you will. Mark . . . almost seems to be willfully exaggerating it."
   "What, the surly slump?"
   "That, and ... I confess, I find his weight gain disturbing. Particularly, judging from Elena's report, its rapidity. Perhaps we ought to have him medically checked. It can't be good for him."
   The Countess snorted. "He's only twenty-two. It's not an immediate health problem. That's not what's bothering you, love."
   "Perhaps . . . not entirely."
   "He embarrasses you. My body-conscious Barrayaran friend."
   "Mm." The Count did not deny this, Mark noticed.
   "Score one for his side."
   "Would you care to clarify that?"
   "Mark's actions are a language. A language of desperation, mostly. They're not always easy to interpret. That one is obvious, though."
   "Not to me. Analyze, please."
   "It's a three-part problem. In the first place, there's the purely physical side. I take it you did not read the medical reports as carefully as I did."
   "I read the ImpSec synopsis."
   "I read the raw data. All of it. When the Jacksonian body-sculptors were cutting Mark down to match Miles's height, they did not genetically retrofit his metabolism. Instead they brewed up a concoction of time-release hormones and stimulants which they injected monthly, tinkering with the formula as needed. Cheaper, simpler, more controlled in result. Now, take Ivan as a phenotypic sample of what Miles's genotype should have resulted in, without the soltoxin poisoning. What we have in Mark is a man physically reduced to Miles's height who is genetically programmed for Ivan's weight. And when the Komarrans' treatments stopped, his body again began to try to carry out its genetic destiny. If you ever bring yourself to look at him square on, you'll notice it's not just fat. His bones and muscles are heavier too, compared to Miles or even to himself two years ago. When he finally reaches his new equilibrium, he's probably going to look rather low-slung."
   You mean spherical, Mark thought, listening with horror, and intensely conscious of having overeaten at dinner. Heroically, he smothered an incipient belch.
   "Like a small tank," suggested the Count, evidently entertaining a somewhat more hopeful vision.
   "Perhaps. It depends on the other two aspects of his, um, body-language."
   "Which are?"
   "Rebellion, and fear. As for rebellion_all his life, other people have made free with his somatic integrity. Forcibly chosen his body-shape. Now at last it's his turn. And fear. Of Barrayar, of us, but most of all fear, frankly, of being overwhelmed by Miles, who can be pretty overwhelming even if you're not his little brother. And Mark's right. It's actually been something of a boon. The Armsmen and servants are having no trouble distinguishing him, taking him as Lord Mark. The weight ploy has that sort of half-cocked half-conscious brilliance that . . . reminds me of someone else we both know."
   "But where does it stop?" The Count was now picturing something spherical too, Mark decided.
   "The metabolism_when he chooses. He can march himself to a physician and have it adjusted to maintain any weight he wants. He'll choose a more average body-type when he no longer needs rebellion or feels fear."
   The Count snorted. "I know Barrayar, and its paranoias. You can never be safe enough. What do we do if he decides he can never be fat enough?"
   "Then we can buy him a float pallet and a couple of muscular body-servants. Or_we can help him conquer his fears. Eh?"
   "If Miles is dead," he began.
   "If Miles is not recovered and revived," she corrected sharply.
   "Then Mark is all we have left of Miles."
   "No!" Her skirts rustled as she rose, stepped, turned, paced. God, don't let her walk over this way! "That's where you take the wrong turn, Aral. Mark is all we have left of Mark."
   The Count hesitated. "All right. I concede the point. But if Mark is all we have_do we have the next Count Vorkosigan?"
   "Can you accept him as your son even if he isn't the next Count Vorkosigan? Or is that the test he has to pass to get in?"
   The Count was silent. The Countess's voice went low. "Do I hear an echo of your father's voice in yours? Is that him I see, looking out from behind your eyes?"
   "It is ... impossible . . . that he not he there." The Count's voice was equally low, disturbed, but defiant of apology. "On some level. Despite it all."
   "I ... yes. I understand. I'm sorry." She sat again, to Mark's frozen relief. "Although surely it isn't that hard to qualify as a Count of Barrayar. Look at some of the odd ducks who sit on the Council now. Or fail to show up, in some cases. How long did you say it's been since Count Vortienne cast a vote?"
   "His son is old enough to hold down his desk now," said the Count. "To the great relief of the rest of us. The last time we had to have a unanimous vote, the Chamber's Sergeant-at-Arms had to go collect him bodily from his Residence, out of the most extraordinary scene of ... well, he finds some unique uses for his personal guard."
   "Unique qualifications, too, I understand." There was a grin in Countess Cordelia's voice.
   "Where did you learn that?"
   "Alys Vorpatril."
   "I'm . . . not even going to ask how she knows."
   "Wise of you. But the point is, Mark would really have to work at it to be the worst Count on the Council. They are not so elite as they pretend."
   "Vortienne is an unfairly horrible example. It's only because of the extraordinary dedication of so many of the Counts that the Council functions at all. It consumes men. But_the Counts are only half the battle. The sharper edge of the sword is the District itself. Would the people accept him? The disturbed clone of the deformed original?"
   "They came to accept Miles. They've even grown rather proud of him, I think. But_Miles creates that himself. He radiates enough loyalty, they can't help but reflect some of it back."
   "I'm not sure what Mark radiates," mused the Count. "He seems more of a human black hole. Light goes in, nothing comes out."
   "Give him time. He's still afraid of you. Guilt projection, I think, from having been your intended assassin all these years."
   Mark, breathing through his mouth for silence, cringed. Did the damned woman have x-ray vision? She was a most unnerving ally, if ally she was.
   "Ivan," said the Count slowly, "would certainly have no trouble with popularity in the District. And, however reluctantly, I think he would rise to the challenge of the Countship. Neither the worst nor the best, but at least average."
   "That's exactly the system he's used to slide through his schooling, the Imperial Service Academy, and his career so far. The invisible average man," said the Countess.
   "It's frustrating to watch. He's capable of so much more."
   "Standing as close to the Imperium as he does, how brightly does he dare shine? He'd attract would-be conspirators the way a searchlight attracts bugs, looking for a figurehead for their faction. And a handsome figurehead he'd make. He only plays the fool. He may in fact be the least foolish one among us."
   "It's an optimistic theory, but if Ivan is so calculating, how can he have been like this since he could walk?" the Count asked plaintively. "You'd make of him a fiendishly Machiavellian five-year-old, dear Captain."
   "I don't insist on the interpretation," said the Countess comfortably. "The point is, if Mark were to choose a life on, say, Beta Colony, Barrayar would contrive to limp along somehow. Even your District would probably survive. And Mark would not be one iota less our son."
   "But I wanted to leave so much more. . . . You keep coming back to that idea. Beta Colony."
   "Yes. Do you wonder why?"
   "No." His voice grew smaller. "But if you take him away to Beta Colony, I'll never get a chance to know him."
   The Countess was silent, then her voice grew firmer. "I'd be more impressed by that complaint if you showed any signs of wanting to get to know him now. You've been avoiding him almost as assiduously as he's been ducking you."
   "I cannot stop all government business for this personal crisis," said the Count stiffly. "As much as I might like to."
   "You did for Miles, as I recall. Think back on all the time you spent with him, here, at Vorkosigan Surleau . . . you stole time like a thief to give to him, snatches here and there, an hour, a morning, a day, whatever you could arrange, all the while carrying the Regency at a dead run through about six major political and military crises. You cannot deny Mark the advantages you gave Miles, and then turn around and decry his failure to outperform Miles."
   "Oh, Cordelia," the Count sighed. "I was younger then. I'm not the Da Miles had twenty years ago. That man is gone, burned up."
   "I don't ask that you try to be the Da you were then; that would be ludicrous. Mark is no child. I only ask that you try to be the father you are now."
   "Dear Captain ..." His voice trailed off in exhaustion.
   After a thoughtful silence, the Countess said pointedly, "You'd have more time and energy if you retired. Gave up the Prime Ministership, at long last."
   "Now? Cordelia, think! I dare not lose control now. As Prime Minister, Illyan and ImpSec still report to me. If I step down to a mere Countship, I am out of that chain of command. I'll lose the very power to prosecute the search."
   "Nonsense. Miles is an ImpSec officer. Son of the Prime Minister or not, they'll hunt for him just the same. Loyalty to their own is one of ImpSec's few charms."
   "They'll search to the limits of reason. Only as Prime Minister can I compel them to go beyond reason."
   "I think not. I think Simon Illyan would still turn himself inside out for you after you were dead and buried, love."
   When the Count spoke again at last his voice was weary. "I was ready to step down three years ago and hand it off to Quintillan."
   "Yes. I was all excited."
   "If only he hadn't been killed in that stupid flyer accident. Such a pointless tragedy. It wasn't even an assassination!"
   The Countess laughed blackly at him. "A truly wasted death, by Barrayaran standards. But seriously. It's time to stop."
   "Past time," the Count agreed.
   "Let go."
   "As soon as it's safe."
   She paused. "You will never be fat enough, love. Let go anyway."
   Mark sat bent over, paralyzed, one leg gone pins and needles. He felt plowed and harrowed, more thoroughly worked over than by the three thugs in the alley. The Countess was a scientific fighter, there was no doubt.
   The Count half-laughed. But this time he made no reply. To Mark's enormous relief, they both rose and exited the library together. As soon as the door shut he rolled out of the wing-chair onto the floor, moving his aching arms and legs and trying to restore circulation. He was shaking and shivering. His throat was clogged, and he coughed at last, over and over, blessedly, to clear his breathing. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry, felt like doing both at once, and settled for wheezing, watching his belly rise and fall. He felt obese. He felt insane. He felt as if his skin had gone transparent, and passers-by could look and point to every private organ.
   What he did not feel, he realized as he caught his breath again after the coughing jag, was afraid. Not of the Count and Countess, anyway. Their public faces and their privates ones were . . . unexpectedly congruent. It seemed he could trust them, not so much not to hurt him, but to be what they were, what they appeared. He could not at first put a word to it, this sense of personal unity. Then it came to him. Oh. So that's what integrity looks like. I didn't know.
   

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

   The Countess kept her promise, or threat, to send Mark touring with Elena. The ensuing few weeks were punctuated by frequent excursions all over Vorbarr Sultana and the neighboring Districts, slanted heavily to the cultural and historical, including a private tour of the Imperial Residence. Gregor was not at home that day, to Mark's relief. They must have hit every museum in town. Elena, presumably acting under orders, also dragged him over what must have been two dozen colleges, academies, and technical schools. Mark was heartened to learn that not every institution on the planet trained military officers; indeed, the largest and busiest school in the capital was the Vorbarra District Agricultural and Engineering Institute.
   Elena remained a formal and impersonal factotum in Mark's presence. Whatever her own feelings upon seeing her old home for the first time in a decade, they seldom escaped the ivory mask, except for an occasional exclamation of surprise at some unexpected change: new buildings sprouted, old blocks leveled, streets re-routed. Mark suspected that the frenetic pace of the tours was just so she wouldn't have to actually talk to him; she filled the silences instead with lectures. Mark began to wish he'd buttered up Ivan more. Maybe his cousin could have sneaked him out to go pub-crawling, just for a change.
   Change came one evening when the Count returned abruptly to Vorkosigan House and announced that they were all going to Vorkosigan Surleau. Within an hour Mark found himself and his things packed into a lightflyer, along with Elena, Count Vorkosigan, and Armsman Pym, arrowing south in the dark to the Vorkosigans' summer residence. The Countess did not accompany them. The conversation en route ranged from stilted to non-existent, except for an occasional laconic code between the Count and Pym, all half-sentences. The Dendarii mountain range loomed up at last, a dark blot against cloud shadows and stars. They circled a dimly glimmering lake to land halfway up a hill in front of a rambling stone house, lit up and made welcoming by yet more human servants. The Prime Minister's ImpSec guards were discreet shapes exiting a second lightflyer in their wake. Since it was nearing midnight, the Count limited himself to giving Mark a brief orienting tour of the interior of the house, and depositing him in a second-floor guest bedroom with a view downslope to the lake. Mark, alone at last, leaned on the windowsill and stared into the darkness. Lights shimmered across the black silken waters, from the village at the end of the lake and from a few isolated estates on the farther shore. Why have you brought me here? he thought to the Count. Vorkosigan Surleau was the most private of the Vorkosigans' several residences, the guarded emotional heart of the Count's scattered personal realm. Had he passed some test, to be let in here? Or was Vorkosigan Surleau itself to be a test? He went to bed and fell asleep still wondering.
   He woke blinking with morning sun slanting through the window he'd failed to re-shutter the night before. Some servant last night had arranged a selection of his more casual clothing in the room's closet. He found a bathroom down the hall, washed, dressed, and went in cautious search of humanity. A housekeeper in the kitchen directed him outside to find the Count without, alas, offering to feed him breakfast.
   He walked along a path paved with stone chips toward a grove of carefully-planted Earth-import trees, their distinctive green leaves mottled and gilded by the beginnings of autumn color change. Big trees, very old. The Count and Elena were near the grove in a walled garden that served now as the Vorkosigan family cemetery. The stone residence had originally been a guard barracks serving the now-ruined castle at the lake's foot; its cemetery had once received the guardsmen's last stand-downs.
   Mark's brows rose. The Count was a violent splash of color in his most formal military uniform, Imperial parade red-and-blues. Elena was equally, if more quietly, decorous in Dendarii dress-grey velvet set off with silver buttons and white piping. She squatted beside a shallow bronze brazier on a tripod. Little pale orange flames flickered in it, and smoke rose to wisp away in the gold-misted morning air. They were burning a death-offering, Mark realized, and paused uncertainly by the wrought-iron gate in the low stone wall. Whose? Nobody had invited him.
   Elena rose; she and the Count spoke quietly together while the offering, whatever it was, burned to ash. After a moment Elena folded a cloth into a pad, picked the brazier off its tripod, and tapped out the gray and white flakes over the grave. She wiped out the bronze basin and returned it and its folding tripod to an embroidered brown and silver bag. The Count gazed over the lake, noticed Mark standing by the gate, and gave him an acknowledging nod; it did not exactly invite him in, but neither did it rebuff him.
   With another word to the Count, Elena exited the walled garden. The Count saluted her. She favored Mark with a courteous nod in passing. Her face was solemn, but, Mark fancied, less tense and mask-like than he had seen since their coming to Barrayar. Now the Count definitely waved Mark inside. Feeling awkward, but curious, Mark let himself in through the gate and crunched over the gravel walks to his side.
   "What's . . . up?" Mark finally managed to ask. It came out sounding too flippant, but the Count did not seem to take it in bad part.
   Count Vorkosigan nodded to the grave at their feet: Sergeant Constantine Bothari, and the dates, Fidelis. "I found that Elena had never burned a death-offering for her father. He was my armsman for eighteen years, and had served under me in the space forces before that."
   "Miles's bodyguard. I knew that. But he was killed before Galen started training me. Galen didn't spend much time on him."
   "He should have. Sergeant Bothari was very important to Miles. And to us all. Bothari was ... a difficult man. I don't think Elena ever was quite reconciled to that. She's needed to come to some acceptance of him, to be easy with herself."
   "Difficult? Criminal, I'd heard."
   "That is very . . ." The Count hesitated. Unjust, Mark expected him to add, or untrue, but the word he finally chose was ". . . incomplete."
   They walked around among the graves, the Count giving Mark a tour. Relatives and retainers . . . who was Major Amor Klyeuvi? It reminded Mark of all those museums. The Vorkosigan family history since the Time of Isolation encapsulated the history of Barrayar. The Count pointed out his father, mother, brother, sister, and his Vorkosigan grandparents. Presumably anyone dying prior to their dates had been buried at the old District capital of Vorkosigan Vashnoi, and been melted down along with the city by the Cetagandan invaders.
   "I mean to be buried here," commented the Count, looking over the peaceful lake and the hills beyond. The morning mist was clearing off the surface, sun-sparkle starting to glitter through. "Avoid that crowd at the Imperial Cemetery in Vorbarr Sultana. They wanted to bury my poor father there. I actually had to argue with them over that, despite the declaration of his will." He nodded to the stone, General Count Piotr Pierre Vorkosigan, and the dates. The Count had won the argument, apparently. The Counts.
   "Some of the happiest periods of my life were spent here, when I was small. And later, my wedding and honeymoon." A twisted smile flitted across his features. "Miles was conceived here. Therefore, in a sense, so were you. Look around. This is where you came from. After breakfast, and I change clothes, I'll show you more."
   "Ah. So, uh, no one's eaten yet."
   "You fast, before burning a death-offering. They often tend to be dawn events for just that reason, I suspect." The Count half-smiled.
   The Count could have had no other use for the glorious parade uniform here, nor Elena her Dendarii greys. They'd packed them along for that dedicated purpose. Mark glanced at the dark distorted reflection of himself in the Count's mirror-polished boots. The convex surface widened him to grotesque proportions. His future self? "Is that what we all came down here for, then? So that Elena could do this ceremony?"
   "Among other things."
   Ominous. Mark followed the Count back to the big stone house, feeling obscurely unsettled.
   Breakfast was served by the housekeeper on a sunny patio off the end of the house, made private by landscaping and flowering bushes except for a view cut through to the lake. The Count re-appeared wearing old black fatigue trousers and a back-country style tunic, loose-cut and belted. Elena did not join them. "She wanted to take a long walk," explained the Count briefly. "So shall we." Prudently, Mark returned a third sweet roll to its covered basket.
   He was glad for his restraint very shortly, as the Count led him directly up the hill. They crested it and paused to recover. The view of the long lake, winding between the hills, was very fine and worth the breath. On the other side a little valley flattened out, cradling old stone stables and pastures cultivated to Earth-green grasses. Some unemployed-looking horses idled around the pasture. The Count led Mark down to the fence, and leaned on it, looking pensive.
   "That big roan over there is Miles's horse. He's been rather neglected, of late years. Miles didn't always get time to ride even when he was home. He used to come running, when Miles called. It was the damndest thing, to see that big lazy horse get up and come running." The Count paused. "You might try it."
   "What? Call the horse?"
   "I'd be curious to see. If the horse can tell the difference. Your voices are . . . very like, to my ear."
   "I was drilled on that."
   "His name is, uh, Ninny." At Mark's look he added, "A sort of pet or stable name."
   Its name is Fat Ninny. You edited it. Ha. "So what do I do? Stand here and yell 'Here, Ninny, Ninny'?" He felt a fool already.
   "Three times."
   "What?"
   "Miles always repeated the name three times."
   The horse was standing across the pasture, its ears up, looking at them. Mark took a deep breath, and in his best Barrayaran accent called, "Here, Ninny, Ninny, Ninny. Here, Ninny, Ninny, Ninny!"
   The horse snorted, and trotted over to the fence. It didn't exactly run, though it did kick up its heels once, bouncing, en route. It arrived with a huff that sprayed horse moisture across both Mark and the Count. It leaned against the fence, which groaned and bent. Up close, it was bloody huge. It stuck its big head over the fence. Mark ducked back hastily.
   "Hello, old boy." The Count patted its neck. "Miles always gives him sugar," he advised Mark over his shoulder.
   "No wonder it comes running, then!" said Mark indignantly. And he'd thought it was the I-love-Naismith effect.
   "Yes, but Cordelia and I give him sugar too, and he doesn't come running for us. He just sort of ambles around in his own good time."
   The horse was staring at him in, Mark swore, utter bewilderment. Yet another soul he had betrayed by not being Miles. The other two horses, in some sort of sibling rivalry, now arrived also, a massive jostling crowd determined not to miss out. Intimidated, Mark asked plaintively, "Did you bring any sugar?"
   "Well, yes," said the Count. He drew half a dozen white cubes from his pocket and handed them to Mark. Cautiously, Mark put a couple into his palm and held it out as far as his arm would reach. With a squeal, Ninny laid his ears back and snapped from side to side, driving off his equine rivals, then demurely pricked them forward again and grubbed up the sugar with big rubbery lips, leaving a trail of grass-green slime in Mark's palm. Mark wiped some of it off on the fence, considered his trouser seam, and wiped the rest off on the horse's glossy neck. An old ridged scar spoiled the fur, bumpy under his hand. Ninny butted him again, and Mark retreated out of range. The Count restored order in the mob with a couple of shouts and slaps_ Ah, just like Barrayaran politics, Mark thought irreverently_ and made sure the two laggards received a share of sugar as well. He did wipe his palms on his trouser seams afterward, quite unselfconsciously.
   "Would you like to try riding him?" the Count offered. "Though he hasn't been worked lately, he's probably a bit fresh."
   "No, thank you," choked Mark. "Some other time, maybe."
   "Ah."
   They walked along the fence, Ninny trailing them on the other side till its hopes were stopped by the corner. It whinnied as they walked away, a staggeringly mournful noise. Mark's shoulders hunched as from a blow. The Count smiled, but the attempt must have felt as ghastly as it looked, for the smile fell off again immediately. He looked back over his shoulder. "The old fellow is over twenty, now. Getting up there, for a horse. I'm beginning to identify with him."
   They were heading toward the woods. "There's a riding trail ... it circles around to a spot with a view back toward the house. We used to picnic there. Would you like to see it?"
   A hike. Mark had no heart for a hike, but he'd already turned down the Count's obvious overture about riding the horse. He didn't dare refuse him twice, the Count would think him . . . surly. "All right." No armsmen or ImpSec bodyguards in sight. The Count had gone out of his way to create this private time. Mark cringed in anticipation. Intimate chat, incoming.
   When they reached the woods' edge the first fallen leaves rustled and crackled underfoot, releasing an organic but pleasant tang. But the noise of their feet did not exactly fill the silence. The Count, for all his feigned country-casualness, was stiff and tense. Off-balance. Unnerved by him, Mark blurted, "The Countess is making you do this. Isn't she."
   "Not really," said the Count, ". . . yes."
   A thoroughly mixed reply and probably true.
   "Will you ever forgive the Bharaputrans for shooting the wrong Admiral Naismith?"
   "Probably not." The Count's tone was equable, unoffended.
   "If it had been reversed_if that Bharaputran had aimed one short guy to the left_would ImpSec be hunting my cryo-chamber now?" Would Miles even have dumped Trooper Phillipi, to put Mark in her place?
   "Since Miles would in that case be ImpSec in the area_I fancy the answer is yes," murmured the Count. "As I had never met you, my own interest would probably have been a little . . . academic. Your mother would have pushed all the same, though," he added thoughtfully.
   "Let us by all means be honest with each other," Mark said bitterly.
   "We cannot possibly build anything that will last on any other basis," said the Count dryly. Mark flushed, and grunted assent.
   The trail ran first along a stream, then cut up over a rise through what was almost a gully or wash, paved with loose and sliding rock. Thankfully it then ran level for a time, branching and re-branching through the trees. A few little horse jumps made of cut logs and brush were set up deliberately here and there; the trails ran around as well as over them, optionally. Why was he certain Miles chose to ride over them? He had to admit, there was something primevally restful about the woods, with its patterns of sun and shade, tall Earth trees and native and imported brush creating an illusion of endless privacy. One could imagine that the whole planet was such a people-less wilderness, if one didn't know anything about terraforming. They turned onto a wider double track, where they could walk side by side.
   The Count moistened his lips. "About that cryo-chamber."
   Mark's head came up like the horse's had, sensing sugar. ImpSec wasn't talking to him, the Count hadn't been talking to him; driven half-crazy by the information vacuum, he'd finally broken down and badgered the Countess, though it made him feel ill to do so. But even she could only report negatives. ImpSec now knew over four hundred places the cryo-chamber was not. It was a start. Four hundred down, the rest of the universe to go ... it was impossible, useless, futile_
   "ImpSec has found it." The Count rubbed his face.
   "What!" Mark stopped short. "They got it back? Hot damn! It's over! Where did they_why didn't you_" He bit off his words as it came to him that there was probably a very good reason the Count hadn't told him at once. And he wasn't sure he wanted to hear it. The Count's face was bleak.
   "It was empty."
   "Oh." What a stupid thing to say, Oh. Mark felt incredibly stupid, just now. "How_I don't understand." Of all the scenarios he'd pictured, he'd never pictured that. Empty? "Where?"
   "The ImpSec agent found it in the sales inventory of a medical supply company in the Hegen Hub. Cleaned and re-conditioned."
   "Are they sure it's the right one?"
   "If the identifications Captain Quinn and the Dendarii gave us are correct, it is. The agent, who is one of our brighter boys, simply quietly purchased it. It's being shipped back by fast courier to ImpSec headquarters on Komarr for a thorough forensic analysis right now. Not that, apparently, there is much to analyze."
   "But it's a lead, a break at last! The supply company must have records_ImpSec should be able to trace it back to_to_" To what?
   "Yes, and no. The record trail breaks one step back from the supply company. The independent carrier they bought it from appears to be guilty of receiving stolen property."
   "From Jackson's Whole? Surely that narrows down the search area!"
   "Mm. One must remember that the Hegen Hub is a hub. The possibility that the cryo-chamber was routed into the Cetagandan Empire from Jackson's Whole, and back out again via the Hegen Hub, is ... remote but real."
   "No. The timing."
   "The timing would be tight, hut possible. Illyan has calculated it. The timing limits the search area to a mere . . . nine planets, seventeen stations, and all the ships en route between them." The Count grimaced. "I almost wish I was sure we were dealing with a Cetagandan plot. The Ghem-lords at least I could trust to know or guess the value of the package. The nightmare that makes me despair is that the cryo-chamber somehow fell into the hands of some Jacksonian petty thief, who simply dumped the contents in order to re-sell the equipment. We would have paid a ransom ... a dozen times the value of the cryo-chamber for the dead body alone. For Miles preserved and potentially revivable_whatever they asked. It drives me mad to think that Miles is rotting somewhere by mistake."
   Mark pressed his hands to his forehead, which was throbbing. His neck was so tight it felt like a piece of solid wood. "No . . . it's crazy, it's too crazy. We have both ends of the rope now, we're only missing the middle. It has to be connectable. Norwood_Norwood was loyal to Admiral Naismith. And smart. I met him, briefly. Of course, he hadn't planned to be killed, but he wouldn't have sent the cryo-chamber into danger, or off at random." Was he so sure? Norwood had expected to be able to pick up the cryo-chamber from its destination within a day at most. If it had arrived . . . wherever . . . with some sort of cryptic hold-till-called-for note attached, and then no one had called for it ... "Was it re-conditioned before or after the Hub supply company purchased it?"
   "Before."
   "Then there has to be some sort of medical facility hidden in the gap somewhere. Maybe a cryo-facility. Maybe . . . maybe Miles was shifted into somebody's permanent storage banks." Unidentified, and destitute? On Escobar such a charity might be possible, but on Jackson's Whole? A most forlorn hope.
   "I pray so. There are only a finite number of such facilities. It's checkable. ImpSec is on it now. Yet only the . . . frozen dead require that much expertise. The mere mechanics of cleaning an emptied chamber could be done by any ship's sickbay. Or engineering section. An unmarked grave could be harder to locate. Or maybe no grave, just disintegrated like garbage. . . ." The Count stared off into the trees.
   Mark bet he wasn't seeing trees. Mark bet he was seeing the same vision Mark was, a frozen little body, chest blown out_you wouldn't even need a hand-tractor to lift it_shoved carelessly, mindlessly, into some disposal unit. Would they even wonder who the little man had been? Or would it just be a repellent thing to them? Who was them, dammit?
   And how long had the Count's mind been running on this same wheel of thought, and how the devil was it that he could still walk and talk at the same time? "How long have you known this?"
   "The report came in yesterday afternoon. So you see ... it becomes measurably more important that I know where you stand. In relation to Barrayar." He started again up the trail, then took a side branch that narrowed and began to rise steeply through an area of taller trees and thinner brush.
   Mark toiled on his heels. "Nobody in their right mind would stand in relation to Barrayar. They would run in relation to Barrayar. Away."
   The Count grinned over his shoulder. "You've been talking too much to Cordelia, I fear."
   "Yes, well, she's about the only person here who will talk to me." He caught up with the Count, who had slowed.
   The Count grimaced painfully. "That's been true." He paced up the steep stony trail. "I'm sorry." After a few more steps he added, with a flash of dark humor, "I wonder if the risks I used to take did this to my father. He is nobly avenged, if so." More darkness than humor, Mark gauged. "But it's more than ever necessary ... to know ..."
   The Count stopped and sat down abruptly by the side of the trail, his back to a tree. "That's strange," he murmured. His face, which had been flushed and moist with the hill-climb and the morning's growing warmth, was suddenly pale and moist.
   "What?" said Mark cautiously, panting. He rested his hands on his knees and stared at the man, so oddly reduced to his eye level. The Count had a distracted, absorbed look on his face.
   "I think ... I had better rest a moment."
   "Suits me." Mark sat too, on a nearby rock. The Count did not continue the conversation at once. Extreme unease tightened Mark's stomach. What's wrong with him? There's something wrong with him. Oh, shit. . . . The sky had grown blue and fine, and a little breeze made the trees sigh, and a few more golden leaves flutter down. The cold chill up Mark's spine had nothing to do with the weather.
   "It is not," said the Count in a distant, academic tone, "a perforated ulcer. I've had one of those, and this isn't the same." He crossed his arms over his chest. His breath was becoming shallow and rapid, not recovering its rhythm with sitting as Mark's was.
   Something very wrong. A brave man trying hard not to look scared was, Mark decided, one of the most frightening sights he'd ever seen. Brave, but not stupid: the Count did not, for example, choose to pretend that nothing was the matter and go charging up the trail to prove it.
   "You don't look well."
   "I don't feel well."
   "What do you feel?"
   "Er . . . chest pain, I'm afraid," he admitted in obvious embarrassment. "More of an ache, really. A very . . . odd . . . sensation. Came up between one step and the next."
   "It couldn't be indigestion, could it?" Like the kind that was boiling up acidly in Mark's belly right now?
   "I'm afraid not."
   "Maybe you had better call for help on your comm link," Mark suggested diffidently. There sure as hell wasn't anything he could do, if this was the medical emergency it looked like.
   The Count laughed, a dry wheeze. It was not a comforting sound. "I left it."
   "What? You're the frigging Prime Minister, you can't go around without_"
   "I wanted to assure an uninterrupted, private conversation. For a change. Unpunctuated by half the under-ministers in Vorbarr Sultana calling up to ask me where they left their agendas. I used to ... do that for Miles. Sometimes, when it got too thick. Drove everyone crazy but eventually . . . they became . . . reconciled." His voice went high and light on the last word. He lay back altogether, in the detritus and fallen leaves. "No . . . that's no improvement. . . ." He extended a hand and Mark, his own heart lumping with terror, pulled him back into the sitting position.
   A paralyzing toxin . . . heart failure ... I was to get alone with you . . . I was to wait, in your sight, for twenty minutes while you died. . . . How had he made this happen? Black magic? Maybe he was programmed, and part of him was doing things the rest of him didn't know anything about, like one of those split personalities. Did I do this? Oh, God. Oh shit.
   The Count managed a pallid grin. "Don't look so scared, boy," he whispered. "Just go back to the house and get my guardsmen. It's not that far. I promise I won't move." A hoarse chuckle.
   / wasn't paying any attention to the paths on the way up. I was following you. Could he possibly carry . . . ? No. Mark was no med-tech, but he had a clear cold feeling that it would be a very bad idea to try to move this man. Even with his new girth he was heavily outweighed by the Count. "All right." There hadn't been that many possible wrong turns, had there? "You . . . you . . ." Don't you dare die on me, godammit. Not now!
   Mark turned, and trotted, skidded, and flat ran back down the path. Right or left? Left, down the double track. Where the hell had they turned on to it, though? They'd pushed through some brush_there was brush all along it, and half a dozen openings. There was one of those horse-jumps they'd passed. Or was it? A lot of them looked alike. I'm going to get lost in this frigging woods, and run around in circles for . . . twenty minutes, till he's brain-dead and rigor-stiff, and they're all going to think I did it on purpose . . . He tripped, and bounced off a tree, and scrambled for balance and direction. He felt like a dog in a drama, running for help; when he arrived, all he'd be able to do would be bark and whine and roll on his back, and no one would understand. . . . He clung to a tree, gasping, and staring around. Wasn't moss supposed to grow on the north side of trees, or was that only on Earth? These were Earth trees, mostly. On Jackson's Whole a sort of slimy lichen grew on the south sides of everything, including buildings, and you had to scrape it out of the door grooves . . . ah! there was the creek. But had they walked up or down stream? Stupid, stupid, stupid. A stitch had started in his side. He turned left and ran.
   Hallelujah! A tall female shape was striding down the path ahead of him. Elena, heading back to the barn. Not only was he on the right path, he'd found help. He tried to shout. It came out a croak, but it caught her attention; she looked over her shoulder, saw him, and stopped. He staggered up to her.
   "What the hell's got into you?" Her initial coldness and irritation gave way to curiosity and nascent alarm.
   Mark gasped out, "The Count . . . took sick ... in the woods. Can you get ... his guardsmen ... up there?"
   Her brows drew down in deep suspicion. "Sick? How? He was just fine an hour ago."
   "Real sick, pleasedammit, hurry!"
   "What did you do_" she began, but his palpable agony overcame her wariness. "There's a comm link in the stable, it's closest. Where did you leave him?"
   Mark waved vaguely backward. "Somewhere ... I don't know what you call it. On the path to your picnic spot. Does that make sense? Don't the bloody ImpSec guards have scanners?" He found he was practically stamping his feet in frustration at her slowness. "You have longer legs. Go!"
   She believed at last, and ran, with a blazing look back at him that practically flayed his skin.
   I didn't do_ He turned, and began to leg it back to where he'd left the Count. He wondered if he ought to be running for cover instead. If he stole a lightflyer and made it back to the capital, could he get one of the galactic embassies there to give him political asylum? She thinks I7 ... they're all going to think I ... hell, even he didn't trust himself, why should the Barrayarans? Maybe he ought to save steps, and just kill himself right now, here in these stupid woods. But he had no weapon, and rough as the terrain was, there hadn't been any cliffs high and steep enough to fling himself over and be sure of death on impact.
   At first Mark thought he'd taken another wrong turn. Surely the Count couldn't have risen and walked on_no. There he was, lying down on his back beside a fallen log. He was breathing in short labored gasps, with too-long pauses in between, arms clutched in, clearly in much greater pain than when Mark had left him. But not dead. Not dead yet.
   "Hello. Boy," he huffed in greeting.
   "Elena's bringing help," Mark promised anxiously. He looked up and around, and listened. But they're not here yet.
   "Good."
   "Don't ... try to talk."
   This made the Count snort a laugh, an even more horrible effect against the disrupted breathing. "Only Cordelia . . . has ever succeeded ... in shutting me up." But he fell silent after that. Mark prudently allowed him the last word, lest he try to go another round.
   Live, damn you. Don't leave me here like this.
   A familiar whooshing sound made Mark look up. Elena had solved the problem of getting transport through the trees with a float-bike. A green-uniformed ImpSec man rode behind her, clutching her around the waist. Elena swiftly dropped the bike through the thinner branches, which crackled. She ignored the whipping backlash that left red lines across her face. The ImpSec man dismounted while the bike was still half a meter in the air. "Get back," he snarled to Mark. At least he carried a medkit. "What did you do to him?"
   Mark retreated to Elena's side. "Is he a doctor?"
   "No, just a medic." Elena was out of breath too.
   The medic looked up and reported, "It's the heart, but I don't know what or why. Don't have the Prime Minister's doctor come here, have him meet us in Hassadar. Without delay. I think we're going to need the facilities."
   "Right." Elena snapped orders into a comm link.
   Mark tried to help them get the Count temporarily positioned on the float bike, propped between Elena and the corpsman. The medic glared at Mark. "Don't touch him!"
   The Count, whom Mark had thought half-conscious, opened his eyes and whispered, "Hey. The boy's all right, Jasi." Jasi the medic wilted. "S" all right, Mark."
   He's frigging dying, yet he's still thinking ahead. He's trying to clear me of suspicion.
   "The aircar's meeting us in the nearest clearing," Elena pointed downslope. "Get there if you want to ride along." The bike rose slowly and carefully.
   Mark took the hint, and galloped off down the hill, intensely conscious of the moving shadow just above the trees. It left him behind. He slammed faster, using tree trunks to make turns, and arrived at the double trail with palms scraped raw just as the ImpSec medic, Elena, and Armsman Pym finished laying Count Vorkosigan across the backseat of the rear compartment of a sleek black aircar. Mark tumbled in and sat next to Elena on the rear-facing seat as the canopy closed and sealed. Pym took the controls in the front compartment, and they spiraled into the air and shot away. The medic crouched on the floor by his patient and did logical things like attaching oxygen and administering a hypospray of synergine to stabilize against shock.
   Mark was puffing louder than the Count, to the point that the absorbed corpsman actually glanced up at him with a medical frown, but unlike the Count, Mark caught his breath after a time. He was sweating, and shaking inside. The last time he'd felt this bad Bharaputran security troops had been firing lethal weapons at him. Are aircars supposed to fly this fast? Mark prayed they wouldn't suck anything bigger than a bug into the thruster intakes.
   Despite the synergine the Count's eyes were going shocked and vague. He pawed at the little plastic oxygen mask, batted away the medic's worried attempt to control his hands, and motioned urgently to Mark. He so clearly wanted to say something, it was less traumatic to let him than to try and stop him. Mark slid onto his knees by the Count's head.
   The Count whispered to Mark in a tone of earnest confidence, "All . . . true wealth ... is biological."
   The medic glanced wildly at Mark for interpretation; Mark could only shrug helplessly. "I think he's going out of it."
   The Count only tried to speak once more, on the hurtling trip; he clawed his mask away to say, "Spit," which the medic held his head to do, a nasty hacking which cleared his throat only temporarily.
   The Great Man's last words, thought Mark blackly. All that monstrous, amazing life dwindled down at the end to Spit. Biological indeed. He wrapped his arms around himself and sat in a huddled ball on the floor, gnawing absently on his knuckles.
   When they arrived at the landing pad at Hassadar District Hospital, what seemed a small army of medical personnel descended instantly upon them, and whisked the Count away. The corpsman and the armsman were swept up; Mark and Elena were shuttled into a private waiting area, where they perforce waited.
   At one point a woman with a report panel in her hand popped in to ask Mark, "Are you the next-of-kin?"
   Mark's mouth opened, and stopped. He literally could not reply. He was rescued by Elena, who said, "Countess Vorkosigan is flying down from Vorbarr Sultana. She should be here in just a few more minutes." It seemed to satisfy the woman, who popped out again.
   Elena had it right. It wasn't another ten minutes before the corridor was enlivened by the clatter of boots. The Countess swung in trailed by two double-timing liveried armsmen. She flashed past, giving Mark and Elena a quick reassuring smile, but blasted on through the double doors without pausing. Some clueless passing doctor on the other side actually tried to stop her: "Excuse me, ma'am, no visitors beyond this point_"
   Her voice overrode his, "Don't give me that crap, kid, I own you." His protests ended in an apologetic gurgle as he saw the armsmen's uniforms and made the correct deduction; with a "Right this way, m'lady," their voices faded into the distance.
   "She meant that," Elena commented to Mark with a faint sardonic curl to her lip. "The medical network in the Vorkosigan's District has been one of her pet projects. Half the personnel here are oath-sworn to her to serve in exchange for their schooling."
   Time ticked by. Mark wandered to the window and stared out over the Vorkosigan's District capital. Hassadar was a New City, heir of destroyed Vorkosigan Vashnoi; almost all its building had taken place after the end of the time of Isolation, mostly in the last thirty years. Designed around newer methods of transportation than horse carts, it was spread out like a city on any other developed galactic world, accented by a few sky-piercing towers gleaming in the morning sun. Still only morning? It seemed a century since dawn. This hospital was indistinguishable from a similar modest one on, say, Escobar. The Count's official residence here was one of the few entirely modern villas in the Vorkosigans' household inventory. The Countess claimed to like it, yet they used it only when in Hassadar on District business; more of a hotel than a home. Curious.
   The shadows of Hassadar's towers had shortened toward noon before the Countess returned to collect them. Mark searched her face anxiously as she entered. Her steps were slow, her eyes tired and strained, but her mouth was not distorted with grief. He knew the Count still lived even before she spoke.
   She embraced Elena and nodded to Mark. "Aral is stabilized. They're going to transfer him to the Imperial Military Hospital in Vorbarr Sultana. His heart is badly damaged. Our man says a transplant or a mechanical is definitely indicated."
   "Where were you earlier this morning?" Mark asked her.
   "ImpSec Headquarters." That was logical. She eyed him. "We divided up the work load. It didn't take the both of us to ride the tight-beam decoding room. Aral did tell you the news, didn't he? He swore to me he would."
   "Yes, just before he collapsed."
   "What were you doing?"
   Slightly better than the usual, What did you do to him? Haltingly, Mark tried to describe his morning.
   "Stress, breakfast, running up hills," the Countess mused. "He set the pace, I'll bet."
   "Militarily," Mark confirmed.
   "Ha," she said darkly.
   "Was it an occlusion?" asked Elena. "That's what it looked like."
   "No. That's why this took me so by surprise. I knew his arteries were clean_he takes a medication for that, or his awful diet would have killed him years ago. It was an arterial aneurism, within the heart muscle. Burst blood vessel."
   "Stress, eh?" said Mark, dry-mouthed. "Was his blood pressure up?"
   Her eyes narrowed. "Yes, considerably, but the vessel was weakened. It would have happened sometime soon anyway."
   "Was there . . . any more word come in from ImpSec?" he asked timidly. "While you were there."
   "No." She paced to the window, and stared unseeing at the web and towers of Hassadar. Mark followed her. "Finding the cryo-chamber that way . . . was pretty shattering to our hopes. At least it finally goaded Aral into trying to connect with you." Pause. "Did he?"
   "No ... I don't know. He took me around, showed me things. He tried. He was trying so hard, it hurt to watch." It hurt still, a knotted ache somewhere behind his solar plexus. The soul dwelt there, according to somebody-or-other's mythology.
   "Did it," she breathed.
   It was all too much. The window was safely shatterproof, but his hand was not; his soul-driven fist bunched, drew back, and struck.
   The Countess caught it with a quick open hand; his self-directed violence smacked into her palm and was deflected.
   "Save that," she advised him coolly.
   

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

   A large mirror in a hand-carved frame hung on the wall of the antechamber to the library. Mark, nervous, detoured to stand in front of it for one last check before his inspection by the Countess.
   The brown and silver Vorkosigan cadet's uniform did little to conceal the shape of his body, old distortions or new, though when he stood up very straight he fancied it lent him a certain blunt blockiness. Unfortunately, when he slumped, so did the tunic. It fit well, which was ominous, as when it had been delivered eight weeks ago it had been a little loose. Had some ImpSec analyst calculated his weight gain against this date? He wouldn't put it past them.
   Only eight weeks ago? It felt like he'd been a prisoner here forever. A gently held prisoner, true, like one of those ancient officers who, upon giving their oath of parole, were allowed the run of the fortress. Though no one had demanded his word on anything. Perhaps his word had no currency. He abandoned his repellent reflection and trudged on into the library.
   The Countess was seated on the silk sofa, careful of her long dress, which was a high-necked thing in cloud-soft beige netted with ornate copper and silver embroidery which echoed the color of her hair, done up in loops on the back of her head. Not a speck of black or gray or anything that could suggest anticipation of mourning anywhere: almost arrogantly elegant. We're just fine here, the ensemble seemed to say, and very Vorkosigan. Her head turned at Mark's entry, and her absorbed look melted into a brief spontaneous smile. It drew an answering smile from him despite himself.
   "You look well," she said approvingly.
   "So do you," he replied, and then, because it seemed too familiar, added, "ma'am."
   Her brow quirked at the addition, but she made no comment. He paced to a nearby chair but, too keyed-up to sit, only leaned on its back. He suppressed a tendency for his right boot to tap on the marble floor. "So how do you think they're going to take this tonight? Your Vor friends."
   "Well, you will certainly rivet their attention," she sighed. "You can count on it." She lifted a small brown silk bag with the Vorkosigan logo embroidered in silver on it, and handed it across to Mark. It clinked interestingly from the heavy gold coins it held. "When you present this to Gregor in the taxation ceremony tonight as proxy for Aral, it will serve formal notice to all that we claim you as a legitimate son_and that you accept that claim. Step One. Many others to follow."
   And at the end of that path_the countship? Mark frowned deeply.
   "Whatever your own feelings_whatever the final outcome of the present crisis_don't let them see you shake," the Countess advised. "It's all in the mind, this Vor system. Conviction is contagious. So is doubt."
   "You consider the Vor system an illusion?" Mark asked.
   "I used to. Now I would call it a creation, which, like any living thing, must be continually re-created. I've seen the Barrayaran system be awkward, beautiful, corrupt, stupid, honorable, frustrating, insane and breathtaking. Its gets most of the work of government done most of the time, which is about average for any system."
   "So ... do you approve of it, or not?" he asked, puzzled.
   "I'm not sure my approval matters. The Imperium is like a very large and disjointed symphony, composed by a committee. Over a three-hundred year period. Played by a gang of amateur volunteers. It has enormous inertia, and is fundamentally fragile. It is neither unchanging nor unchangeable. It can crush you like a blind elephant."
   "What a heartening thought."
   She smiled. "We aren't plunging you into total strangeness, tonight. Ivan and your Aunt Alys will be there, and young Lord and Lady Vortala. And the others you've met here in the past few weeks."
   Fruit of the excruciating private dinner parties. From before the Count's collapse, there had been a select parade of visitors to Vorkosigan House to meet him. Countess Cordelia had determinedly continued the process despite the week-old medical crisis, in preparation for this night.
   "I expect everyone will be trolling for inside information on Aral's condition," she added.
   "What should I tell 'em?"
   "Flat truth is always easiest to keep track of. Aral is at ImpMil awaiting a heart to be grown for transplant, and being a very bad patient. His physician is threatening alternately to tie him to his bed or resign if he doesn't behave. You don't need to go into all the medical details."
   Details that would reveal just how badly damaged the Prime Minister was. Quite. ". . . What if they ask me about Miles?"
   "Sooner or later," she took a breath, "if ImpSec doesn't find the body, sooner or later there must be a formal declaration of death. While Aral lives, I would rather it be later. No one outside of the highest echelons of ImpSec, Emperor Gregor, and a few government officials know Miles is anything but an ImpSec courier officer of modest rank. It is a perfectly true statement that he is away on duty. Most who inquire after him will be willing to accept that ImpSec hasn't confided to you where they sent him or for how long."
   "Galen once said," Mark began, and stopped.
   The Countess gave him a level look. "Is Galen much on your mind, tonight?"
   "Somewhat," Mark admitted. "He trained me for this, too. We did all the major ceremonies of the Imperium, because he didn't know in advance just what time of year he'd drop me in. The Emperor's Birthday, the Midsummer Review, Winterfair_all of 'em. I can't do this and not think of him, and how much he hated the Imperium."
   "He had his reasons."
   "He said . . . Admiral Vorkosigan was a murderer."
   The Countess sighed, and sat back. "Yes?"
   "Was he?"
   "You've had a chance to observe him for yourself. What do you think?"
   "Lady . . . I'm a murderer. And I can't tell."
   Her eyes narrowed. "Justly put. Well. His military career was long and complex_and bloody_and a matter of public record. But I imagine Galen's main focus was the Solstice Massacre, in which his sister Rebecca died."
   Mark nodded mutely.
   "The Barrayaran expedition's Political Officer, not Aral, ordered that atrocious event. Aral executed him for it with his own hands, when he found out. Without the formality of a court martial, unfortunately. So he evades one charge, but not the other. So yes. He is a murderer."
   "Galen said it was to cover up the evidence. There'd been a verbal order, and only the Political Officer knew it."
   "So how could Galen know it? Aral says otherwise. I believe Aral."
   "Galen said he was a torturer."
   "No," said the Countess flatly. "That was Ges Vorrutyer, and Prince Serg. Their faction is now extinct." She smiled a thin, sharp smile.
   "A madman."
   "No one on Barrayar is sane, by Betan standards." She gave him an amused look. "Not even you and me."
   Especially not me. He took a small breath. "A sodomite." She tilted her head. "Does that matter, to you?"
   "It was . . . prominent, in Galen's conditioning of me."
   "I know."
   "You do? Dammit . . ." Was he glass, to these people? A feelie-drama for their amusement? Except the Countess didn't seem amused. "An ImpSec report, no doubt," he said bitterly.
   "They fast-penta'd one of Galen's surviving subordinates. A man named Lars, if that means anything to you."
   "It does." He gritted his teeth. Not a chance at human dignity, not one shred left to him.
   "Aside from Galen, does Aral's private orientation matter? To you?"
   "I don't know. Truth matters."
   "So it does. Well, in truth ... I judge him to be bisexual, but subconsciously more attracted to men than to women. Or rather_to soldiers. Not to men generally, I don't think. I am, by Barrayaran standards, a rather extreme, er, tomboy, and thus became the solution to his dilemmas. The first time he met me I was in uniform, in the middle of a nasty armed encounter. He thought it was love at first sight. I've never bothered explaining to him that it was his compulsions leaping up." Her lips twitched.
   "Why not? Or were your compulsions leaping up too?"
   "No, it took me, oh, four or five more days to come completely unglued. Well, three days, anyway." Her eyes were alight with memory. "I wish you could have seen him then, in his forties. At the top of his form."
   Mark had overheard himself verbally dissected by the Countess too, in this very library. There was something weirdly consoling in the knowledge that her scalpel was not reserved for him alone. It's not just me. She does this to everybody. Argh.
   "You're . . . very blunt, ma'am. What did Miles think of this?"
   She frowned thoughtfully. "He's never asked me anything. It's possible that unhappy period in Aral's youth has come to Miles's ears only as the garbled slander of Aral's political enemies, and been discounted."
   "Why tell me?"
   "You asked. You are an adult. And . . . you have a greater need to know. Because of Galen. If things are ever to be square between you and Aral, your view of him should be neither falsely exalted nor falsely low. Aral is a great man. I, a Betan, say this; but I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is ... the higher achievement." She gave him a crooked smile. "It should give you hope, eh?"
   "Huh. Block me from escape, you mean. Are you saying that no matter how screwed up I was, you'd still expect me to work wonders?" Appalling.
   She considered this. "Yes," she said serenely. "In fact, since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same."
   It wasn't just his father who had made Miles crazy, Mark decided. "I've never heard you analyze yourself, ma'am," he said sourly. Yes, who shaved the barber?
   "Me?" she smiled bleakly. "I'm a fool, boy."
   She evaded the question. Or did she? "A fool for love?" he said lightly, in an effort to escape the sudden awkwardness his question had created.
   "And other things." Her eyes were wintry.
   A wet, foggy dusk was gathering to cloak the city as the Countess and Mark were conveyed to the Imperial Residence. The splendidly liveried and painfully neat Pym drove the groundcar. Another half-dozen of the Count's armsmen accompanied them in another vehicle, more as honor guards than bodyguards, Mark sensed; they seemed to be looking forward to the party. At some comment of his to the Countess she remarked, "Yes, this is more of a night off for them than usual. ImpSec will have the Residence sewn up. There is a whole parallel sub-society of servants at these things_and it's not been totally unknown for an armsman of address to catch the eye of some junior Vor bud, and marry upward, if his military background is good enough."
   They arrived at the Imperial pile, which was architecturally reminiscent of Vorkosigan House multiplied by a factor of eight. They hurried out of the clinging fog into the warm, brilliantly-lit interior. Mark found the Countess formally attached to his left arm, which was both alarming and reassuring. Was he escort, or appendage? In either case, he sucked in his stomach and straightened his spine as much as he could.
   Mark was startled when the first person they met in the vestibule was Simon Illyan. The security chief was dressed for the occasion in Imperial parade red-and-blues, which did not exactly render his slight form inconspicuous, though perhaps there were enough other red-and-blues present for him to blend in. Except that Illyan wore real lethal weapons at his hip, a plasma arc and a nerve disrupter in used-looking holsters, and not the blunted dual dress sword sets of the Vor officers. An oversized earbug glittered in his right ear.
   "Milady," Illyan nodded, and drew them aside. "When you saw him this afternoon," he said in a low voice to the Countess, "how was he?"
   No need to specify who he was, in this context. The Countess glanced around, to be sure they were out of earshot of casual passers-by. "Not good, Simon. His color's bad, he's very edemic, and he tends to drift in and out of focus, which I find more frightening than all the rest put together. The surgeon wants to spare him the double stress of having a mechanical heart installed while they're waiting to bring the organic one up to size, but they may not be able to wait. He could end up in surgery for that at any moment."
   "Should I see him, or not, in your estimation?"
   "Not. The minute you walk in the door he'll sit up and try to do business. And the stress of trying will be as nothing compared to the stress of failing. That would agitate the hell out of him." She paused. "Unless you just popped in for a moment to, say, convey a bit of good news."
   Illyan shook his head in frustration. "Sorry."
   Since the Countess did not speak again immediately into the silence that followed, Mark dared to say, "I thought you were on Komarr, sir."
   "I had to come back for this. The Emperor's Birthday Dinner is the security nightmare of the year. One bomb could take out practically the whole damned government. As you well know. I was en route when the news of Aral's . . . illness, reached me. If it would have made my fast courier go any faster, I would have gotten out and pushed."
   "So . . . what's happening on Komarr? Who's supervising the, uh, search?"
   "A trusted subordinate. Now that it appears we may be searching only for a body_" Illyan glanced at the Countess, and cut himself off. She frowned grayly.
   They're dropping the priority of the search. Mark took a disturbed breath. "So how many agents do you have searching Jackson's Whole?"
   "As many as can be spared. This new crisis," a jerk of Illyan's head indicated Count Vorkosigan's dangerous illness, "is straining my resources. Do you have any idea how much unhealthy excitement the Prime Minister's condition is going to create on Cetaganda alone?"
   "How many?" His voice went sharp, and too loud, but the Countess at least made no motion to quiet him. She watched with cool interest.
   "Lord Mark, you are not yet in a position to request and require an audit of ImpSec's most secret dispositions!"
   Not yet? Not ever, surely. "Request only, sir. But you can't pretend that this operation is not my business."
   Illyan gave him an ambiguous, noncommittal nod. He touched his earbug, looked abstracted for a moment, and gave the Countess a parting salute. "You must excuse me, Milady."
   "Have fun."
   "You too." His grimace echoed the irony of her smile.
   Mark found himself escorting the Countess up a wide staircase and into a long reception room lined with mirrors on one side and tall windows on the other. A major domo at the wide-flung doors announced them by title and name in an amplified voice.
   Mark's first impression was of a faceless, ominous blur of colorful forms, like a garden of carnivorous flowers. A rainbow of Vor house uniforms, heavily sprinkled with parade red-and-blues, actually outshone the splendid dresses of the ladies. Most of the people stood in small, changing groups, talking in a babble; a few sat in spindly chairs along the walls, creating their own little courts. Servants moved smoothly among them, offering trays of food and drink. Mostly servants. All those extremely physically-fit young men in the uniform of the Residence's staff were surely ImpSec agents. The tough-looking older men in the Vorbarra livery who manned the exits were the Emperor's personal armsmen.
   It was only his paranoia, Mark decided, that made it seem as if all heads turned toward him and a wave of silence crossed the crowd at their entry; but a few heads did turn, and a few nearby conversations did stop. One was Ivan Vorpatril and his mother, Lady Alys Vorpatril; she waved Countess Vorkosigan over to them at once.
   "Cordelia, dear," Lady Vorpatril gave her a worried smile. "You must bring me up to date. People are asking."
   "Yes, well, you know the drill," the Countess sighed.
   Lady Vorpatril nodded wryly. She turned her head to direct Ivan, evidently continuing the conversation the Vorkosigan entrance had interrupted, "Do make yourself pleasant to the Vorsoisson girl this evening, if the opportunity arises. She's Violetta Vorsoisson's younger sister, perhaps you'll like her better. And Cassia Vorgorov is here. This is her first time at the Emperor's Birthday. And Irene Vortashpula, do get in at least one dance with her, later. I promised her mother. Really, Ivan, there are so many suitable girls here tonight. If only you would apply yourself a little ..." The two older women linked arms to step away, effectively shedding Mark and Ivan from their private conversation. A firm nod from Countess Vorkosigan to Ivan placed him on notice that he was on guard duty again. Recalling the last time, Mark thought he might prefer the more formidable social protection of the Countess.
   "What was that all about?" Mark asked Ivan. A servant passed with a tray of drinks; following Ivan's example, Mark snagged one too. It turned out to be a dry white wine flavored with citrus, reasonably pleasant.
   "The biennial cattle drive," Ivan grimaced. "This and the Winterfair Ball are where all the high Vor heifers are trotted out for inspection."
   This was an aspect of the Emperor's Birthday ceremonies Galen had never mentioned. Mark took a slightly larger gulp of his drink. He was beginning to damn Galen more for what he'd left out than for what and how he'd forced Mark to learn. "They won't be looking back at me, will they?"
   "Considering some of the toads they do kiss, I don't see why not," shrugged Ivan.
   Thank you, Ivan. Standing next to Ivan's tall red-and-blue glitter, he probably did look rather like a squat brown toad. He certainly felt like one. "I'm out of the running," he said firmly.
   "Don't bet on it. There are only sixty Counts' heirs, but a lot more daughters to place. Hundreds, seems like. Once it gets out what happened to poor damned Miles, anything could happen."
   "You mean ... I wouldn't have to chase women? If I just stood still, they'd come to me?" Or at any rate, to his name, position, and money. A certain glum cheer came with the thought, if that wasn't a contradiction in terms. Better to be loved for his rank than not to be loved at all; the proud fools who proclaimed otherwise had never come so close to starving to death for a human touch as he had.
   "It seemed to work that way for Miles," said Ivan, an inexplicable tincture of envy in his voice. "I could never get him to take advantage of it. Of course, he couldn't stand rejection. Try again, was my motto, but he'd just get all shattered and retreat into his shell for days. He wasn't adventurous. Or maybe he just wasn't greedy. Tended to stop at the first safe woman he came to. First Elena, and then when that fell through, Quinn. Though I suppose I can see why he might stop at Quinn." Ivan knocked back the rest of his wine, and exchanged the glass for a full one from a passing tray.
   Admiral Naismith, Mark reminded himself, was Miles's alternate personality. Very possibly Ivan did not know everything about his cousin.
   "Aw, hell," Ivan remarked, glancing over his glass rim. "There's one of the ones on Mamere's short list, being aimed our way."
   "So are you chasing women, or not?" asked Mark, confused.
   "There's no point in chasing the ones here. It's all look-don't-touch. No chance."
   By chance in this context, Mark gathered Ivan meant sex. Like many backward cultures still dependent on biological reproduction instead of the technology of uterine replicators, the Barrayarans divided sex into two categories: licit, inside a formal contract where any resultant progeny must be claimed, and illicit, i.e., all the rest.
   Mark brightened still further. Was this event, then, a sexual safety-zone? No tension, no terror?
   The young woman Ivan had spotted was approaching them. She wore a long, soft pastel-green dress. Dark brown hair was wound up on her head in braids and curls, with some live flowers woven in. "So what's wrong with that one?" whispered Mark.
   "Are you kidding?" murmured Ivan in return. "Cassia Vorgorov? Little shrimp kid with a face like a horse and a figure like a board . . . ?" He broke off as she came within earshot, and gave her a polite nod. "Hi, Cass." He kept almost all of the pained boredom out of his voice.
   "Hello, Lord Ivan," she said breathlessly. She gave him a starry-eyed smile. True, her face was a little long, and her figure slight, but Mark decided Ivan was too picky. She had nice skin, and pretty eyes. Well, all of the women here had pretty eyes, it was the make-up. And the heady perfumes. She couldn't be more than eighteen. Her shy smile almost made him want to cry, so uselessly focused was it on Ivan. Nobody has ever looked at me like that. Ivan, you are a filthy ingrate!
   "Are you looking forward to the dance?" she inquired of Ivan, transparently encouraging.
   "Not particularly," shrugged Ivan. "It's the same every year."
   She wilted. Her first time here, Mark bet. If there had been stairs, Mark would have been tempted to kick Ivan down them. He cleared his throat. Ivan's eye fell on him, and lit with inspiration.
   "Cassie," Ivan purred, "have you met my new cousin, Lord Mark Vorkosigan, yet?"
   She seemed to notice him for the first time. Mark gave her a tentative smile. She stared back dubiously. "No ... I'd heard ... I guess he doesn't look exactly like Miles, does he."
   "No." said Mark. "Fin not Miles. How do you do, Lady Cassia."
   Belatedly recovering her manners, she replied, "How do you do, um, Lord Mark." A nervous bob of her head made the flowers shiver.
   "Why don't you two get acquainted. Excuse me, I have to see a man_" Ivan waved to a red-and-blue uniformed comrade across the room, and slithered away.
   "Are you looking forward to the dance?" Mark tried. He'd been so concentrated on remembering all the formal moves of the taxation ceremony and the dinner, not to mention a Who's Who approximately three hundred names long all starting with "Vor," he'd hardly given the ensuing dance a thought.
   "Um . . . sort of." Her eyes reluctantly abandoned Ivan's successful retreat, touched Mark, and flicked away.
   Do you come here often? he managed not to blurt. What to say? How do you like Barrayar? No, that wouldn't do. Nice fog we're having outside tonight. Inside, too. Give me a cue, girl! Say something, anything!
   "Are you really a clone?" Anything but that. "Yes."
   "Oh. My."
   More silence.
   "A lot of people are," he observed.
   "Not here."
   "True."
   "Uh . . . oh!" Her face melted with relief. "Excuse me, Lord Mark. I see my mother is calling me_" She handed off a spasmodic smile like a ransom, and turned to hurry toward a Vorish dowager on the other side of the room. Mark had not seen her beckon.
   Mark sighed. So much for the hopeful theory of the overpowering attraction of rank. Lady Cassia was clearly not anxious to kiss a toad. If I were Ivan I'd do handstands for a girl who looked at me like that.
   "You look thoughtful," observed Countess Vorkosigan at his elbow. He jumped slightly.
   "Ah, hello again. Yes. Ivan just introduced me to that girl. Not a girlfriend, I gather."
   "Yes, I was watching the little playlet past Alys Vorpatril's shoulder. I stood so as to keep her back to it, for charity's sake."
   "I ... don't understand Ivan. She seemed like a nice enough girl to me."
   Countess Vorkosigan smiled. "They're all nice girls. That's not the point."
   "What is the point?"
   "You don't see it? Well, maybe when you've had more time to observe. Alys Vorpatril is a truly doting mother, but she just can't overcome the temptation to try to micro-manage Ivan's future. Ivan is too agreeable, or too lazy, to resist openly. So he does whatever she begs of him_except the one thing she wants above all others, which is to settle into a marriage and give her grandchildren. Personally, I think his strategy is wrong. If he really wants to take the heat off himself, grandchildren would absolutely divert poor Alys's attention. Meanwhile her heart is in her mouth every time he takes a drive."
   "I can see that," allowed Mark.
   "I could slap him sometimes for his little game, except I'm not sure he's conscious of it, and anyway it's three-quarters Alys's fault."
   Mark watched Lady Vorpatril catch up with Ivan, down the room. Checking his evening's progress down the short list already, Mark feared. "You seem able to maintain a reasonably hands-off maternal attitude yourself," he observed idly.
   "That . . . may have been a mistake," she murmured.
   He glanced up and quailed inwardly at the deathly desolation he surprised, momentarily, in the Countess's eyes. My mouth. Shit. The look twitched away so instantly, he didn't even dare apologize.
   "Not altogether hands-off," she said lightly, attaching herself to his elbow again. "Come on, and I'll show you how they cross-net, Barrayaran style."
   She steered him down the long room. "There are, as you have just seen, two agendas being pursued here tonight," the Countess lectured amiably. "The political one of the old men_an annual renewal of the forms of the Vor_and the genetic agenda of the old women. The men imagine theirs is the only one, but that's just an ego-serving self-delusion. The whole Vor system is founded on the women's game, underneath. The old men in government councils spend their lives arguing against or scheming to fund this or that bit of off-planet military hardware. Meanwhile, the uterine replicator is creeping in past their guard, and they aren't even conscious that the debate that will fundamentally alter Barrayar's future is being carried on right now among their wives and daughters. To use it, or not to use it? Too late to keep it out, it's already here. The middle classes are picking it up in droves. Every mother who loves her daughter is pressing for it, to spare her the physical dangers of biological childbearing. They're fighting not the old men, who haven't got a clue, but an old guard of their sisters who say to their daughters, in effect, We had to suffer, so must you! Look around tonight, Mark. You're witnessing the last generation of men and women on Barrayar who will dance this dance in the old way. The Vor system is about to change on its blindest side, the side that looks to_or fails to look to_its foundation. Another half generation from now, it's not going to know what hit it."
   Mark almost swore her calm, academic voice concealed a savagely vengeful satisfaction. But her expression was as detached as ever.
   A young man in a captain's uniform approached them, and split a nod of greeting between the Countess and Mark. "The Major of Protocol requests your presence, my lord," he murmured. The statement too seemed to hang indeterminately in the air between them. "This way, please."
   They followed him out of the long reception room and up an ornately carved white marble staircase, down a corridor, and into an antechamber where half a dozen Counts or their official representatives were marshalled. Beyond a wide archway in the main chamber, Gregor was surrounded by a small constellation of men, mostly in red-and-blues, but three in dark Minister's robes.
   The Emperor was seated on a plain folding stool, even less than a chair. "I was expecting a throne, somehow," Mark whispered to the Countess.
   "It's a symbol," she whispered back. "And like most symbols, inherited. It's a standard-issue military officer's camp stool."
   "Huh." Then he had to part from her, as the Major of Protocol herded him into his appointed place in line. The Vorkosigan's place. This is it. He had a moment of utter panic, thinking he'd somehow mislaid or dropped the bag of gold along the way, but it was still looped safely to his tunic. He undid the silken cords with sweaty fingers. This is a stupid little ceremony. Why should I be nervous now?
   Turn, walk forward_his concentration was nearly shattered by an anonymous whisper from somewhere in the antechamber behind him, "My God, the Vorkosigans are really going to do it ... !"_step up, salute, kneel on his left knee; he proffered the bag right-handed, palm correctly up, and stuttered out the formal words, feeling as if plasma arc beams were boring into his back from the gazes of the waiting witnesses behind him. Only then did he look up to meet the Emperor's eyes.
   Gregor smiled, took the bag, and spoke the equally formal words of acceptance. He handed the bag aside to the Minister of Finance in his black velvet robe, but then waved the man away.
   "So here you are after all_Lord Vorkosigan," murmured Gregor.
   "Just Lord Mark," Mark pleaded hastily. "I'm not Lord Vorkosigan till Miles is, is . . ." the Countess's searing phrase came back to him, "dead and rotted. This doesn't mean anything. The Count and Countess wanted it. It didn't seem like the time to give them static."
   "That's so." Gregor smiled sadly. "Thank you for that. How are you doing yourself?"
   Gregor was the first person ever to ask after him instead of the Count. Mark blinked. But then, Gregor could get the real medical bulletins on his Prime Minister's condition hourly, if he wanted them. "All right, I guess," he shrugged. "Compared to everybody else, anyway."
   "Mm," said Gregor. "You haven't used your comm card." At Mark's bewildered look he added gently, "I didn't give it to you for a souvenir."
   "I ... I haven't done you any favors that would allow me to presume upon you, sir."
   "Your family has established a credit account with the Imperium of nearly infinite depth. You can draw on it, you know."
   "I haven't asked for anything."
   "I know. Honorable, but stupid. You may fit right in here yet."
   "I don't want any favors."
   "Many new businesses start with borrowed capital. They pay it back later, with interest."
   "I tried that once," said Mark bitterly. "I borrowed the Dendarii Mercenaries, and bankrupted myself."
   "Hm." Gregor's smile twisted. He glanced up, beyond Mark, at the throng no-doubt backing up in the antechamber. "We'll talk again. Enjoy your dinner." His nod became the Emperor's formal dismissal.
   Mark creaked to his feet, saluted properly, and withdrew back to where the Countess waited for him.
   

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

   At the conclusion of the lengthy and tedious taxation ceremony, the Residence's staff served a banquet to a thousand people, spread through several chambers according to rank. Mark found himself dining just downstream from Gregor's own table. The wine and elaborate food gave him an excuse not to chat much with his neighbors. He chewed and sipped as slowly as possible. He still managed to end up uncomfortably overfed and dizzy from alcohol poisoning, till he noticed the Countess was making it through all the toasts by merely wetting her lips. He copied her strategy. He wished he'd noticed sooner, but at least he was able to walk and not crawl from the table afterwards, and the room only spun a little.
   It could have been worse. I could have had to make it through all this while simultaneously pretending to be Miles Vorkosigan.
   The Countess led him to a ballroom with a polished marquetry floor, which had been cleared for dancing, though no one was dancing yet. A live human orchestra, all men in Imperial Service uniforms, was arrayed in one corner. At the moment only a half dozen of its musicians were playing, a sort of preliminary chamber music. Long doors on one side of the room opened to the cool night air of a promenade. Mark noted them for future escape purposes. It would be an unutterable relief to be alone in the dark right now. He was even beginning to miss his cabin back aboard the Peregrine.
   "Do you dance?" he asked the Countess.
   "Only once tonight."
   The explanation unfolded shortly when Emperor Gregor appeared, and with his usual serious smile led Countess Vorkosigan out onto the floor to officially open the dance. On the music's first repeat other couples began to join them. The Vor dances seemed to tend to the formal and slow, with couples arranged in complex groups rather than couples alone, and with far too many precise moves to memorize. Mark found it vaguely allegorical of how things were done here.
   Thus stripped of his escort and protectress, Mark fled to a side chamber where the volume of the music was filtered to background level. Buffet tables with yet more food and drink lined one wall. For a moment, he longingly considered the attraction of anesthetic drinking. Blurred oblivion . . . Right, sure. Get publicly drunk, and then, no doubt, get publicly sick. Just what the Countess needed. He was halfway there already.
   Instead he retreated to a window embrasure. His surly presence seemed enough to claim it against all comers. He leaned against the wall in the shadows, folded his arms, and set himself grimly to endure. Maybe he could persuade the Countess to take him home early, after her one dance. But she seemed to be working the crowd. For all that she appeared relaxed, social, cheerful, he hadn't heard a single word out of her mouth tonight that didn't serve her goals. So much self-control in one so secretly strained was almost disturbing.
   His grim mood darkened further, as he brooded on the meaning of that empty cryo-chamber. ImpSec can't be everywhere, the Countess had once said. Dammit . . . ImpSec was supposed to be all-seeing. That was the intended implication of the sinister silver Horus-eye insignia on Illyan's collar. Was ImpSec's reputation just propaganda?
   One thing was certain. Miles hadn't removed himself from that cryo-chamber. Whether or not Miles was rotted, disintegrated, or still frozen, a witness or witnesses must exist, somewhere. A thread, a string, a hook, a connection, a trail of bloody breadcrumbs, something. I believe it's going to kill me if there isn't. There had to be something.
   "Lord Mark?" said a light voice.
   He raised his eyes from blind contemplation of his boots to find himself facing a lovely cleavage, framed in raspberry pink gauze with white lace trim. Delicate line of collarbone, smooth swelling curves, and ivory skin made an almost abstract sculpture, a tilted topological landscape. He imagined himself shrunk to insect size, marching across those soft hills and valleys, barefoot_
   "Lord Mark?" she repeated, less certainly.
   He tilted his head back, hoping the shadows concealed the embarrassed flush in his cheeks, and managed at least the courtesy of eye contact. I can't help it, it's my height. Sorry. Her face was equally rewarding to the eye: electric blue eyes, curving lips. Short loose ash-blonde curls wreathed her head. As seemed the custom for young women, tiny pink flowers were braided into it, sacrificing their little vegetable lives for her evening's brief glory. However, her hair was too short to hold them successfully, and several were on the verge of falling out.
   "Yes?" It came out sounding too abrupt. Surly. He tried again with a more encouraging, "Lady_?"
   "Oh," she smiled, "I'm not Lady anything. I'm Kareen Koudelka."
   His brow wrinkled. "Are you any relation to Commodore Clement Koudelka?" A name high on the list of Aral Vorkosigan's senior staff officers. Galen's list, of further assassinations if opportunity had presented.
   "He's my father," she said proudly.
   "Uh ... is he here?" Mark asked nervously.
   The smile disappeared in a momentary sigh. "No. He had to go to HQ tonight, at the last minute."
   "Ah." To be sure. It would be a revealing study, to count the men who should have been here tonight but weren't because of the Prime Minister's condition. If Mark were actually the enemy agent he'd trained to be, in that other lifetime, it would be a fast way for him to discover who were the real key men in Aral Vorkosigan's support constellation, regardless of what the rosters said.
   "You really don't look quite like Miles," she said, studying him with a critical eye_he stiffened, but decided sucking in his gut would only draw more attention to it_"your bones are heavier. It would be a treat to see you two together. Will he be back soon?"
   She does not know, he realized with a kind of horror. Doesn't know Miles is dead, doesn't know I killed him. "No," he muttered. And then, masochistically, asked, "Were you in love with him too?"
   "Me?" She laughed. "I haven't a chance. I have three older sisters, and they're all taller than I am. They call me the dwarf."
   The top of his head was not quite level with the top of her shoulder, which meant that she was about average height for a Barrayaran woman. Her sisters must be valkyries. Just Miles's style. The perfume of her flowers, or her skin, rocked him in faint, delicate waves.
   An agony of despair twisted all the way from his gut to behind his eyes. This could have been mine. If I hadn't screwed it up, this could have been my moment. She was friendly, open, smiling, only because she did not know what he had done. And suppose he lied, suppose he tried, suppose he found himself contrary to all reason walking in Ivan's most drunken dream with this girl, and she invited him mountain-climbing, like Miles_what then? How entertaining would it be for her, to watch him choke half to death in all his naked impotence? Hopeless, helpless, hapless_the mere anticipation of that pain and humiliation, again, made his vision darken. His shoulders hunched. "Oh, for God's sake go away," he moaned.
   Her blue eyes widened in startled doubt. "Pym warned me you were moody . . . well, all right." She shrugged, and turned, tossing her head.
   A couple of the little pink flowers lost their moorings and bounced down. Spasmodically, Mark clutched at them. "Wait_!"
   She turned back, still frowning. "What?"
   "You dropped some of your flowers." He held them out to her in his two cupped hands, crushed pink blobs, and attempted a smile. He was afraid it came out as squashed as the blossoms.
   "Oh." She took them back_long clean steady fingers, short undecorated nails, not an idle woman's hands_stared down at the blooms, and rolled up her eyes as if unsure how to reattach them. She finally stuffed them unceremoniously through a few curls on top of her head, out of order of their mates and more precarious than before. She began to turn away again.
   Say something, or you'll lose your chance! "You don't wear your hair long, like the others," he blurted. Oh, no, she'd think he was criticizing_
   "I don't have time to fool with it." Unconsciously compelled, her fingers raked a couple of curls, scattering more luckless vegetation.
   "What do you do with your time?"
   "Study, mostly." The vivacity his rebuff had so brutally suppressed began to leak back into her face. "Countess Vorkosigan has promised me, if I keep my class standing she'll send me to school on Beta Colony next year!" The light in her eyes focused to a laser-scalpel's edge. "And I can. I'll show them. If Miles can do what he does, I can do this."
   "What do you know about what Miles does?" he asked, alarmed.
   "He made it through the Imperial Service Academy, didn't he?" Her chin rose, inspired. "When everyone said he was too puny and sickly, and it was a waste, and he'd just die young. And then after he succeeded they said it was only his father's favor. But he graduated near the top of his class, and I don't think his father had anything to do with that." She nodded firmly, satisfied.
   But they had the die-young part right. Clearly, she was not apprised of Miles's little private army.
   "How old are you?" he asked her.
   "Eighteen-standard."
   "I'm, um, twenty-two."
   "I know." She observed him, still interested, but more cautious. Her eye lit with sudden understanding. She lowered her voice. "You're very worried about Count Aral, aren't you?"
   A most charitable explanation for his rudeness. "The Count my father," he echoed. That was Miles's one-breath phrase. "Among other things."
   "Have you made any friends here?"
   "I ... don't quite know." Ivan? Gregor? His mother? Were any of them friends, exactly? "I've been too busy making relatives. I never had any relatives before, either."
   Her brows went up. "Nor any friends?"
   "No." It was an odd realization, strange and late. "I can't say as I missed friends. I always had more immediate problems." Still do.
   "Miles always seems to have a lot of friends."
   "I'm not Miles," Mark snapped, stung on the raw spot. No, it wasn't her fault, he was raw all over.
   "I can see that . . ." She paused, as the music began again in the adjoining ballroom. "Would you like to dance?"
   "I don't know any of your dances."
   "That's a mirror dance. Anybody can do the mirror dance, it's not hard. You just copy everything your partner does."
   He glanced through the archway, and thought of the tall doors to the promenade. "Maybe_maybe outside?"
   "Why outside? You wouldn't be able to see me."
   "Nobody would be able to see me, either." A suspicious thought struck him. "Did my mother ask you to do this?"
   "No . . ."
   "Lady Vorpatril?"
   "No!" She laughed. "Why ever should they? Come on, or the music will be over!" She took him by the hand and towed him determinedly through the archway, dribbling a few more flowers in her wake. He caught a couple of buds against his tunic with his free hand, and slipped them surreptitiously into his trouser pocket. Help, I'm being kidnapped by an enthusiast . . . ! There were worse fates. A wry half-smile twitched his lips. "You don't mind dancing with a toad?"
   "What?"
   "Something Ivan said."
   "Oh, Ivan." She shrugged a dismissive white shoulder. "Ignore Ivan, we all do."
   Lady Cassia, you are avenged. Mark brightened still further, to medium-gloomy.
   The mirror dance was going on as described, with partners facing each other, dipping and swaying and moving along in time to the music. The tempo was brisker and less stately than the large group dances, and had brought more younger couples out onto the floor.
   Feeling hideously conspicuous, Mark plunged in with Kareen, and began copying her motions, about half a beat behind. Just as she had promised, it took about fifteen seconds to get the hang of it. He began to smile, a little. The older couples were quite grave and elegant, but some of the younger ones were more creative. One young Vor took advantage of a hand-pass to bait his lady by briefly sticking one finger up his nose and wriggling the rest at her; she broke the rule and didn't follow, but he mirrored her look of outrage perfectly. Mark laughed.
   "You look quite different when you laugh," Kareen said, sounding startled. She cocked her head in bemusement.
   He cocked his head back at her. "Different from what?"
   "I don't know. Not so ... funereal. You looked like you'd lost your best friend, when you were hiding back there in the corner."
   If only you knew. She pirouetted; he pirouetted. He swept her an exaggerated bow; looking surprised but pleased, she swept one back at him. The view was charming.
   "I'll just have to make you laugh again," she decided firmly. So, perfectly deadpan, she proceeded to tell him three dirty jokes in rapid succession; he ended up laughing at the absurdity of their juxtaposition with her maidenly airs as much as anything else.
   "Where did you learn those?"
   "From my big sisters, of course," she shrugged.
   He was actually sorry when the music came to an end. This time he took the lead, and urged her back into the next room for something to drink, and then out onto the promenade. After the concentration of the dance was over he'd become uncomfortably conscious of just how many people were looking at him, and it wasn't paranoid dementia this time. They'd made a conspicuous couple, the beautiful Kareen and her Vorkosigan toad.
   It was not as dark outside as he'd hoped. In addition to the lights spilling from the Residence windows, colored spotlights in the landscaping were diffused by the fog to a gentle general illumination. Below the stone balustrade the slope was almost woods-like with old-growth bushes and trees. Stone-paved walkways zig-zagged down, with granite benches inviting lingerers. Still, the night was chilly enough to keep most people inside, which helped.
   It was a highly romantic setting, to be wasted on him. Why am I doing this? What good was it to bait a hunger that could not feed? Just looking at her hurt. He moved closer anyway, more dizzy with her scent than with the wine and the dancing. Her skin was radiantly warm with the exercise; she'd light up a sniper-scope like a torch. Morbid thought. Sex and death seemed too close-connected, somewhere in the bottom of his brain. He was afraid. Everything I touch, I destroy. I will not touch her. He set his glass on the stone railing and shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets. His left fingertips compulsively rotated the little flowers he'd secreted there.
   "Lord Mark," she said, after a sip of wine, "you're almost a galactic. If you were married, and going to have children, would you want your wife to use a uterine replicator, or not?"
   "Why would any couple not choose to use a replicator?" he asked, his head spinning with this sudden new tack in conversation.
   "To, like, prove her love for him."
   "Good God, how barbaric! Of course not. I'd think it would prove just the opposite, that he didn't love her." He paused. "That was a strictly theoretical question, wasn't it?"
   "Sort of."
   "I mean, you don't know anyone who's seriously having this debate_not your sisters or anything?" he asked in worry. Not you, surely? Some barbarian needed his head stuck in a bucket of ice water, if so. And held under for a good long time, like till he stopped wriggling.
   "Oh, none of my sisters are married yet. Though it's not for lack of offers. But Mama and Da are holding out. It's a strategy," she confided.
   "Oh?"
   "Lady Cordelia encouraged them, after the second of us girls came along. There was a period soon after she immigrated here, when galactic medicine was really spreading out, and there was this pill you could take to choose the sex of your child. Everyone went crazy for boys, for a while. The ratio's evened up again lately. But my sisters and I are right in the middle of the girl-drought. Any man who won't agree in the marriage contract to let his wife use a uterine replicator is having a real hard time getting married, right now. The go-betweens won't even bother dealing for him." She giggled. "Lady Cordelia's told Mama if she plays the game well, every one of her grandchildren could be born with a Vor in front of their names."
   "I see," Mark blinked. "Is that an ambition of your parents?"
   "Not necessarily," Kareen shrugged. "But all else being equal, that prefix does give a fellow an edge."
   "That's . . . good to know. I guess." He considered his wine, and did not drink.
   Ivan came out of one of the ballroom doors, saw them both, and gave them a friendly wave, but kept on going. He had not a glass but an entire bottle swinging from his hand, and he cast a slightly hunted look back over his shoulder before disappearing down the walkway. Glancing over the balustrade a few minutes later, Mark saw the top of his head pass by on a descending path.
   Mark took a gulp of his drink then. "Kareen . . . am I possible?"
   "Possible for what?" She tilted her head and smiled.
   "For_for women. I mean, look at me. Square on. I really do look like a toad. All twisted up, and if I don't do something about it soon, I'm going to end up as wide as I am . . . short. And on top of it all, I'm a clone." Not to mention the little breathing problem. Summed up that way, hurling himself head-first over the balustrade seemed a completely logical act. It would save so much pain in the long run.
   "Well, that's all true," she allowed judiciously.
   Dammit, woman, you're supposed to deny it all, to be polite.
   "But you're Miles's clone. You have to have his intelligence, too."
   "Do brains make up for all the rest? In the female view?"
   "Not to every woman, I suppose. Just to the smart ones."
   "You're smart."
   "Yes, but it would be rude of me to say so." She raked her curls and grinned.
   How the hell was he to construe that? "Maybe I don't have Miles's brains," he said gloomily. "Maybe the Jacksonian body-sculptors stupified me, when they were doing all the rest, to keep me under control. That would explain a lot about my life." Now there was a morbid new thought to wallow in.
   Kareen giggled. "I don't think so, Mark."
   He smiled wryly back at her. "No excuses. No quarter."
   "Now you sound like Miles."
   A young woman emerged from the ballroom. Dressed in some pale blue silky stuff, she was athletically trim, glowingly blonde, and nearly as tall as Ivan. "Kareen!" she waved. "Mama wants us all."
   "Now, Delia?" said Kareen, sounding quite put-out.
   "Yes." She eyed Mark with alarmingly keen interest, but drawn by whatever daughterly duty, swung back inside.
   Kareen sighed, pushed away from the stonework upon which she had been leaning, dusted futilely at a snag in her raspberry gauze, and smiled farewell. "It was nice meeting you, Lord Mark."
   "It was nice talking with you too. And dancing with you." It was true. He waved, more casually than he felt, as she vanished into the warm light of the Residence. When he was sure she was out of sight, he knelt and surreptitiously collected the last of the tiny flowers she had shed, and stuffed them into his pocket with the rest.
   She smiled at me. Not at Miles. Not at Admiral Naismith. Me, myself, Mark. This was how it could have been, if he hadn't bankrupted himself at Bharaputra's.
   Now that he was alone in the dark as he had wished, he discovered he didn't much care for it. He decided to go find Ivan, and struck off down the garden walkways. Unfortunately, the paths divided and re-divided, presumably to more than one destination. He passed couples who had taken to the sheltered benches despite the chill, and a few other men and women who'd just wandered down here for private talks, or to cool off. Which way had Ivan gone? Not this way, obviously; a little round balcony made a dead-end. He turned back.
   Someone was following him, a tall man in red-and-blues. His face was in shadow. "Ivan?" said Mark uncertainly. He didn't think it was Ivan.
   "So you're Vorkosigan's clowne." Not Ivan's voice. But his skewed pronunciation made the intended insult very clear.
   Mark stood square. "You've got that straight, all right," he growled. "So who in this circus are you, the dancing bear?"
   "A Vor."
   "I can tell that by the low, sloping forehead. Which Vor?" The hairs were rising on the back of his neck. The last time he'd felt such exhilaration combined with intense sickness to his stomach had been in the alley in the caravanserai. His heart began to pound. But he's made no threat yet, and he's alone. Wait.
   "Offworlder. You have no concept of the honor of the Vor," the man grated.
   "None whatsoever," Mark agreed cheerfully. "I think you're all insane."
   "You are no soldier."
   "Right again. My, we are quick tonight. I was trained strictly as a lone assassin. Death in the shadows is a sort of specialty of mine." He began counting seconds in his head.
   The man, who had started to move forward, sagged back again. "So it seems," he hissed. "You've wasted no time, promoting yourself to a Countship. Not very subtle, for a trained assassin."
   "I'm not a subtle man." He centered his balance, but did not move. No sudden moves. Keep bluffing.
   "I can tell you this, little clowne." He gave it the same insulting slur as before. "If Aral Vorkosigan dies, it won't be you who steps into his place."
   "Well, that's just exactly right," purred Mark. "So what are you all hot about, Vor bore?" Shit. This one knows that Miles is dead. How the hell does he know? Is he an Imp Sec insider? But no Horus-eye stared from his collar; he bore a ship insignia of some kind, which Mark could not quite make out. Active-duty type. "What, to you, is one more little spare Vor drone living off a family pension in Vorbarr Sultana? I saw a herd of them up there tonight, swilling away."
   "You're very cocky."
   "Consider the venue," said Mark in exasperation. "You're not going to carry out any death threats here. It would embarrass ImpSec. And I don't think you want to annoy Simon Illyan, whoever the hell you are." He kept on counting.
   "I don't know what hold you think you have on ImpSec," the man began furiously.
   But he was interrupted. A smiling servant in the Residence's livery walked down the path carrying a tray of glasses. He was a very physically-fit young man.
   "Drinks, gentlemen?" he offered.
   The anonymous Vor glowered at him. "No, thank you." He turned on his heel and strode off. Shrubbery whipped in his wake, scattering droplets of dew.
   "I'll take one, thanks," said Mark brightly. The servant proffered the tray with a slight bow. For his abused stomach's sake Mark stuck with the same light wine he'd been drinking most of the evening. "Eighty-five seconds. Your timing is lousy. He could have killed me three times over, but you interrupted just as the talk was getting interesting. How do you fellows pick this stuff out, real-time? You can't possibly have enough people upstairs to be following every conversation in the building. Automated key-word searches?"
   "Canape, sir?" Blandly, the servant turned the tray and offered the other side.
   "Thank you again. Who was that proud Vor?"
   The servant glanced down the now-empty pathway. "Captain Edwin Vorventa. He's on personal leave while his ship is in orbital dock."
   "He's not in ImpSec?"
   "No, my lord."
   "Oh? Well, tell your boss I'd like to talk to him, at his earliest convenience."
   "That would be Lord Voraronberg, the castellan's food and beverage manager."
   Mark grinned. "Oh, sure. Go away, I'm drunk enough."
   "Very good, my lord."
   "Not come morning. Ah! One more thing. You wouldn't know where I could find Ivan Vorpatril right now, would you?"
   The young man stared absently over the balcony a moment, as though listening, though no earbug showed. "There is a sort of gazebo at the bottom of the next left-hand turn, my lord, near a fountain. You might try there."
   "Thank you."
   Mark followed his directions, through the cool night mist. In a stray ray of light, fog droplets on his uniform sleeve shone like a cloud across the little silver rivers of the embroidery. He soon heard the plash of the fountain. A petite stone building, no walls, just deeply shadowed arches, overlooked it.
   It was so quiet in this pocket of the garden, he could hear the breathing of the person inside. Only one person; good, he wasn't about to diminish his already low popularity still further by interrupting a tryst. But it was strangely hoarse. "Ivan?"
   There was a long pause. He was trying to decide whether to call again or tiptoe off when Ivan's voice returned an uninviting growl of, "What?"
   "I just . . . wondered what you were doing."
   "Nothing."
   "Hiding from your mother?"
   ". . . Yeah."
   "I, ah, won't tell her where you are."
   "Good for you," was the sour reply.
   "Well . . . see you later." He turned to go.
   "Wait."
   He waited, puzzled.
   "Want a drink?" Ivan offered after a long pause.
   "Uh . . . sure."
   "So, come get it."
   Mark ducked inside, and waited for his eyes to adjust. The usual stone bench, and Ivan a seated shadow. Ivan proffered the gleaming bottle, and Mark topped up his glass, only to find too late that Ivan wasn't drinking wine, but rather some sort of brandy. The accidental cocktail tasted vile. He sat down by the steps with his back to a stone post, and set his glass aside. Ivan had dispensed with the formality of a glass.
   "Are you going to be able to make it back to your ground car?" asked Mark doubtfully.
   "Don't plan to. The Residence's staff will cart me out in the morning, when they pick up the rest of the trash."
   "Oh." His night vision continued to improve. He could pick out the glittery bits on Ivan's uniform, and the polished glow of his boots. The reflections of his eyes. The gleam of wet tracks down his cheeks. "Ivan, are you_" Mark bit his tongue on crying, and changed it in mid-sentence to, "all right?"
   "I," Ivan stated firmly, "have decided to get very drunk."
   "I can see that. Why?"
   "Never have, at the Emperor's Birthday. It's a traditional challenge, like getting laid here."
   "Do people do that?"
   "Sometimes. On a dare."
   "How entertaining for ImpSec."
   Ivan snorted a laugh. "Yeah, there is that."
   "So who dared you?"
   "Nobody."
   Mark felt he was running out of probing questions faster than Ivan was running out of monosyllabic replies.
   But, "Miles and I," Ivan said in the dark, "used to work this party together, most every year. I was surprised . . . how much I missed the little bugger's slanderous political commentary, this time around. Used to make me laugh." Ivan laughed. It was a hollow and unfunny noise. He stopped abruptly.
   "They told you about finding the empty cryo-chamber, didn't they," said Mark.
   "Yeah."
   "When?"
   "Couple of days ago. I've been thinking about it, since. Not good."
   "No." Mark hesitated. Ivan was shivering, in the dark. "Do you . . . want to go home and go to bed?" I sure do.
   "Never make it up the hill, now," shrugged Ivan.
   "I'll give you a hand. Or a shoulder."
   ". . . All right."
   It took some doing, but he hoisted Ivan to his unsteady feet, and they navigated back up the steep garden. Mark didn't know what charitable ImpSec guardian angel passed the word, but they were met at the top not by Ivan's mother, but by his aunt.
   "He's, ah . . ." Mark was not sure what to say. Ivan peered around blearily.
   "So I see," said the Countess.
   "Can we spare an armsman, to drive him home?" Ivan sagged, and Mark's knees buckled. "Better make it two armsmen."
   "Yes." The Countess touched a decorative comm pin on her bodice. "Pym . . . ?"
   Ivan was thus taken off his hands, and Mark breathed a sigh of relief. His relief grew to outright gratitude when the Countess commented that it was time for them to quit, too. In a few minutes Pym brought the Count's groundcar around to the entrance, and the night's ordeal was over.
   The Countess didn't talk much, for a change, in the groundcar going back to Vorkosigan House. She leaned back against her seat and closed her eyes in exhaustion. She didn't even ask him anything.
   In the black-and-white paved foyer the Countess handed off her cloak to a maid, and headed left, toward the library.
   "You'll excuse me, Mark. I'm going to call ImpMil."
   She looked so tired. "Surely they'd have called you, ma'am, if there was any change in the Count's condition."
   "I'm going to call ImpMil," she said flatly. Her eyes were puffy slits. "Go to bed, Mark."
   He didn't argue with her. He trudged wearily up the stairs to his bedroom corridor.
   He paused outside the door to his room. It was very late at night. The hallway was deserted. The silence of the great house pressed on his ears. On an impulse, he turned back and stepped down the hall to Miles's room. There he paused again. In all his weeks on Barrayar, he had not ventured in here. He had not been invited. He tried the antique knob. The door was not locked.
   Hesitantly, he entered, and keyed up the lights with a word. It was a spacious bedchamber, given the limits of the house's old architecture. An adjoining antechamber once meant for personal servants had long ago been converted to a private bathroom. At first glance the room seemed almost stripped, bare and neat and clean. All the clutter of childhood must have been boxed and put away in an attic, in some spasm of maturity. He suspected Vorkosigan House's attics were astonishing.
   Yet a trace of the owner's personality remained. He walked slowly around the room, hands in his pockets like a patron at a museum.
   Reasonably enough, the few mementos that had been retained tended heavily to reminders of successes. Miles's diploma from the Imperial Service Academy, and his officer's commission, were normal enough, though Mark wondered why a battered old Service issue weather manual was also framed and placed exactly between them. A box of old gymkhana awards going back to youth looked like they might be heading for an attic very soon. Half a wall was devoted to a massive book-disk and vid collection, thousands of titles. How many had Miles actually read? Curious, he took the hand-viewer off its hook on the wall nearby, and tried three disks at random. All had at least a few notes or glosses entered in the margin-boxes, tracks of Miles's thought. Mark gave up the survey, and passed on.
   One object he knew personally; a cloissone-hilted dagger, which Miles had inherited from old General Piotr. He dared to take it down and test its heft and edge. So when in the past two years had Miles stopped carting it around, and sensibly began leaving it safely at home? He replaced it carefully on the shelf in its sheath.
   One wall-hanging was ironic, personal, and obvious: an old metal leg-brace, crossed, military-museum fashion, with a Vor sword. Half-joke, half-defiance. Both obsolete. A cheap photonic reproduction of a page from an ancient book was matted and mounted in a wildly expensive silver frame. The text was all out of context, but appeared to be some sort of pre-Jump religious gibberish, all about pilgrims, and a hill, and a city in the clouds. Mark wasn't sure what that was all about; nobody had ever accused Miles of being the religious type. Yet it was clearly important to him.
   Some of these things aren't prizes, Mark realized. They are lessons.
   A holovid portfolio box rested on the bedside table. Mark sat down, and activated it. He expected Elli Quinn's face, but the first videoportrait to come up was of a tall, glowering, extraordinarily ugly man in Vorkosigan Armsmen's livery. Sergeant Bothari, Elena's father. He keyed through the contents. Quinn was next, then Bothari-Jesek. His parents, of course. Miles's horse, Ivan, Gregor: after that, a parade of faces and forms. He keyed through faster and faster, not recognizing even a third of the people. After the fiftieth face, he stopped clicking.
   He rubbed his face wearily. He's not a man, he's a mob. Right. He sat bent and aching, face in his hands, elbows on his knees. No. I am not Miles.
   Miles's comconsole was the secured type, in no way junior to the one in the Count's library. Mark walked over and examined it only by eye; his hands he shoved back deep into his trouser pockets. His fingertips encountered Kareen Koudelka's crumpled flowerlets.
   He drew them out, and spread them on his palm. In a spasm of frustration, he smashed the blooms with his other hand, and threw them to the floor. Less than a minute later he was on his hands and knees frantically scraping the scattered bits up off the carpet again. I think I must be insane. He sat on his knees on the floor and began to cry.
   Unlike poor Ivan, no one interrupted his misery, for which he was profoundly grateful. He sent a mental apology after his Vorpatril cousin, Sorry, sorry . . . though odds were even whether Ivan would remember anything about his intrusion come the morning. He gulped for control of his breath, his head aching fiercely.
   Ten minutes delay downside at Bharaputra's had been all the difference. If they'd been ten minutes faster, the Dendarii would have made it back to their drop shuttle before the Bharaputrans had a chance to blow it up, and all would have unfolded into another future. Thousands of ten-minute intervals had passed in his life, unmarked and without effect. But that ten minutes had been all it took to transform him from would-be hero to permanent scum. And he could never recover the moment.
   Was that, then, the commander's gift: to recognize those critical minutes, out of the mass of like moments, even in the chaos of their midst? To risk all to grab the golden ones? Miles had possessed that gift of timing to an extraordinary degree. Men and women followed him, laid all their trust at his feet, just for that.
   Except once, Miles's timing had failed. . . .
   No. He'd been screaming his lungs out for them to keep moving. Miles's timing had been shrewd. His feet had been fatally slowed by others' delays.
   Mark climbed up off the floor, washed his face in the bathroom, and returned and sat in the comconsole's station chair. The first layer of secured functions was entered by a palm-lock. The machine did not quite like his palm-print; bone growth and subcutaneous fat deposits were beginning to distort the pattern out of the range of recognition. But not wholly, not yet; on the fourth try it took a reading that pleased it, and opened files to him. The next layer of functions required codes and accesses he did not know, but the top layer had all he needed for now: a private, if not secured, comm channel to ImpSec.
   ImpSec's machine bounced him to a human receptionist almost immediately. "My name is Lord Mark Vorkosigan," he told the corporal on night-duty, whose face appeared above the vid plate. "I want to speak with Simon Illyan. I suppose he's still at the Imperial Residence."
   "Is this an emergency, my lord?" the corporal asked.
   "It is to me," growled Mark.
   Whatever the corporal thought of that, he patched Mark on through. Mark insisted his way past two more layers of subordinates before the ImpSec chief's tired face materialized.
   Mark swallowed. "Captain Illyan."
   "Yes, Lord Mark, what is it?" Illyan said wearily. It had been a long night for ImpSec, too.
   "I had an interesting conversation with a certain Captain Vorventa, earlier this evening."
   "I am aware. You offered him some not-too-oblique threats."
   And Mark had assumed that ImpSec guard/servant had been sent to protect him ... ah, well.
   "So I have a question for you, sir. Is Captain Vorventa on the list of people who are supposed to know about Miles?"
   Illyan's eyes narrowed. "No."
   "Well, he does."
   "That's . . . very interesting."
   "Is that helpful for you to know?"
   Illyan sighed. "It gives me a new problem to worry about. Where is the internal leak? Now I'll have to find out."
   "But_better to know than not."
   "Oh, yes."
   "Can I ask a favor in return?"
   "Maybe." Illyan looked extremely non-committal. "What kind of favor?"
   "I want in."
   "What?"
   "I want in. On ImpSec's search for Miles. I want to start by reviewing your reports, I suppose. After that, I don't know. But I can't stand being kept alone in the dark any more."
   Illyan regarded him suspiciously. "No," he said at last. "I'm not turning you loose to romp through my top-secret files, thank you. Good night, Lord Mark."
   "Wait, sir! You complained you were understaffed. You can't turn down a volunteer."
   "What do you imagine you can do that ImpSec hasn't?" Illyan snapped.
   "The point is, sir_ImpSec hasn't. You haven't found Miles. I can hardly do less."
   He hadn't put that quite as diplomatically as he should have, Mark realized, as Illyan's face darkened with anger. "Good night, Lord Mark," Illyan repeated through his teeth, and cut the link with a swipe of his hand.
   Mark sat frozen in Miles's station chair. The house was so quiet the loudest sound he could hear was his own blood in his ears. He should have pointed out to Illyan how clever he'd been, how quick on the uptake; Vorventa had revealed what he knew, but in no way had Mark cross-revealed that he knew Vorventa knew. Illyan's investigation must now take the leak, whatever it was, by surprise. Isn't that worth something? I'm not as stupid as you think I am.
   You're not as smart as I thought you were, either, Illyan. You are not . . . perfect. That was disturbing. He had expected ImpSec to be perfect, somehow; it had anchored his world to think so. And Miles, perfect. And the Count and Countess. All perfect, all unkillable. All made out of rubber. The only real pain, his own.
   He thought of Ivan, crying in the shadows. Of the Count, dying in the woods. The Countess had kept her mask up better than any of them. She had to. She had more to hide. Miles himself, the man who had created a whole other personality just to escape into. . . .
   The trouble, Mark decided, was that he had been trying to be Miles Vorkosigan all by himself. Even Miles didn't do Miles that way. He had co-opted an entire supporting cast. A cast of thousands. No wonder I can never catch up with him.
   Slowly, curiously, Mark opened his tunic and removed Gregor's comm card from his inner breast pocket, and set it on the comconsole desk. He stared hard at the anonymous plastic chip, as if it bore some coded message for his eyes only. He rather fancied it did.
   You knew. You knew, didn't you, Gregor you bastard. You've just been waiting for me to figure it out for myself.
   With spasmodic decision, Mark jammed the card into the comconsole's read-slot.
   No machines this time. A man in ordinary civilian clothing answered immediately, though without identifying himself. "Yes?"
   "I'm Lord Mark Vorkosigan. I should be on your list. I want to talk to Gregor."
   "Right now, my lord?" said the man mildly. His hand danced over a keypad array to one side.
   "Yes. Now. Please."
   "You are cleared." He vanished.
   The vid plate remained dark, but the audio transmitted a melodious chime. It chimed for quite a long time. Mark began to panic. What if_but then it stopped. There was a mysterious clanking sound, and Gregor's voice said, "Yes?" in a bleary tone. No visuals.
   "It's me. Mark Vorkosigan. Lord Mark."
   "Yeah?"
   "You told me to call you."
   "Yes, but it's ..." a short pause, "five in the bleeding morning, Mark!"
   "Oh. Were you asleep?" he carolled frantically. He leaned forward and heat his head gently on the hard cool plastic of the desk. Timing. My timing.
   "God, you sound just like Miles when you say that," muttered the Emperor. The vid plate activated; Gregor's image came up as he turned on a light. He was in some sort of bedroom, dim in the hack-ground, and was wearing nothing but loose black silky pajama pants. He peered at Mark, as if making sure he wasn't talking to a ghost. But the corpus was too corpulant to be anyone but Mark. The Emperor heaved an oxygenating sigh and blinked himself to focus. "What do you need?"
   How wonderfully succinct. If he answered in full, it could take him the next six hours.
   "I need to be in on ImpSec's search for Miles. Illyan won't let me. You can override him."
   Gregor sat still for a minute, then barked a brief laugh. He swiped a hand through sleep-bent black hair. "Have you asked him?"
   "Yes. Just now. He turned me down."
   "Mm, well . . . it's his job to be cautious for me. So that my judgment may remain untrammeled."
   "In your untrammeled judgment, sir. Sire. Let me in!"
   Gregor studied him thoughtfully, rubbing his face. "Yes ..." he drawled slowly after a moment. "Let's . . . see what happens." His eyes were not bleary now.
   "Can you call Illyan right now, sire?"
   "What is this, pent-up demand? The dam breaks?"
   I am poured out like water . . . where did that quote come from? It sounded like something of the Countess's. "He's still up. Please. Sire. And have him call me back at this console to confirm. I'll wait."
   "Very well," Gregor's lips twisted up in a peculiar smile, "Lord Mark."
   "Thank you, sire. Uh . . . good night."
   "Good morning." Gregor cut the comm.
   Mark waited. The seconds ticked by, stretched out of all recognition. His hangover was starting, but he was still slightly drunk. The worst of both worlds. He had started to doze when the comconsole chimed at last, and he nearly spasmed out of his chair.
   He slapped urgently at the controls. "Yes. Sir?"
   Illyan's saturnine face appeared over the vid plate. "Lord Mark." He gave Mark the barest nod. "If you come to ImpSec headquarters at the beginning of normal business hours tomorrow morning, you will be permitted to review the files we discussed."
   "Thank you, sir," said Mark sincerely.
   "That's two-and-one-half hours from now," Illyan mentioned with, Mark thought, an understandable hint of sadism. Illyan hadn't slept either.
   "I'll be there."
   Illyan acknowledged this with a shiver of his eyelids, and vanished.
   Damnation through good works, or grace alone? Mark meditated on Gregor's grace. He knew. He knew it before I did. Lord Mark Vorkosigan was a real person.
   

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

   The level light of dawn turned the night's lingering mist to gold, a smoky autumnal haze that gave the city of Vorbarr Sultana an almost magical air. The Imperial Security Headquarters building stood windowless, foursquare against the light, a vast utilitarian concrete block with enormous gates and doors certainly designed to diminish any human supplicant fool enough to approach it. In his case, a redundant effect, Mark decided.
   "What awful architecture," he said to Pym, beside him, chauffeuring him in the Count's ground car.
   "Ugliest building in town," the armsman agreed cheerfully. "It dates back to Mad Emperor Yuri's Imperial architect, Lord Dono Vorrutyer. An uncle to the later vice-admiral. He managed to get up five major structures before Yuri was killed, and they stopped him. The Municipal Stadium runs this a close second, but we've never been able to afford to tear it down. Still stuck with it, sixty years later."
   "It looks like the sort of place that has dungeons in the basement. Painted institutional green. Run by ethics-free physicians."
   "It did," said Pym. The Armsman negotiated their way past the gate guards and slowed in front of a vast flight of steps.
   "Pym . . . aren't those steps a bit oversized?"
   "Yep," grinned the Armsman. "You'd have a cramp in your leg by the time you reached the top, if you tried to take it in one go." Pym eased the ground car forward, and stopped to let Mark off "But if you go around the left end, here, you'll find a little door at ground level, and a lift tube foyer. That's where everybody actually goes in."
   "Thank you." Pym popped the front canopy, and Mark climbed out. "Whatever happened to Lord Dono, after Mad Yuri's reign? Assassinated by the Architectural Defense League, I hope?"
   "No, he retired to the country, lived off his daughter and son-in-law, and died stark mad. There's a bizarre set of towers he built on their estate, that they charge admission to see, now." With a wave, Pym lowered the canopy and pulled away.
   Mark trod around to the left, as directed. So here he was, bright and early ... or at least, early. He'd taken a long shower, donned comfortable dark civilian clothes, and tanked himself on enough painkillers, vitamins, hangover remedies, and stimulants to leave him feeling artificially normal. More artificial than normal, but he was determined not to let Illyan bully him out of his chance.
   He presented himself to the ImpSec guards in the foyer. "I'm Lord Mark Vorkosigan. I'm expected."
   "Hardly that," growled a voice from the lift tube. Illyan himself swung out. The guards braced; Illyan put them back at ease with an unmilitary wave. Illyan too had showered, and changed back into his usual undress greens. Mark suspected Illyan had eaten pills for breakfast too. "Thank you, Sergeant, I'll take him up."
   "What a depressing building to work in," Mark commented, as he rose in the lift tube beside the ImpSec chief.
   "Yes," sighed Illyan. "I visited the Investigatif Federate building on Escobar, once. Forty-five stories, all glass ... I was never closer to emigrating. Dono Vorrutyer should have been strangled at birth. But . . . it's mine now." Illyan glanced around with a dubious possessiveness.
   Illyan led him deep into the_yes, this building definitely had bowels, Mark decided. The bowels of ImpSec. Their footsteps echoed down a bare corridor lined with tiny, cubicle-like rooms. Mark glanced through a few half-open doors at highly-secured corn-consoles manned by green-uniformed men. One man at least had a bank of non-regulation full spectrum lights blazing away, aimed at his station chair. There was a large coffee dispenser at the end of the corridor. He didn't think it was random chance that Illyan led him to the cubicle numbered thirteen.
   "This comconsole has been loaded with every report I've received pertaining to the search for Lieutenant Vorkosigan," said Illyan coolly. "If you think you can do better with it than my trained analysts have, I invite you to try."
   "Thank you, sir." Mark slid into the station chair, and powered up the vid plate. "This is unexpectedly generous."
   "You should have no complaint, my lord," Illyan stated, in the tone of a directive. Gregor must have lit quite a fire under him, earlier this morning, Mark reflected, as Illyan bowed himself out with a distinctly ironic nod. Hostile? No. That was unjust. Illyan was not nearly as hostile as he had a right to be. It's not only obedience to his Emperor, Mark realized with a shiver. Illyan could have stood up to Gregor on a security issue like this if he'd really wanted to. He's getting desperate.
   He took a deep breath and plunged into the files, reading, listening, and viewing. Illyan hadn't been joking about the everything part. There were literally hundreds of reports, generated by fifty or sixty different agents scattered throughout the near wormhole nexus. Some were brief and negative. Others were long and negative. But somebody seemed to have visited, at least once, every possible cryo-facility on Jackson's Whole, its orbital and jump point stations, and several adjoining local space systems. There were even recently-received reports tracing as far away as Escobar.
   What was missing, Mark realized after quite a while, were any synopses or finished analyses. He had received raw data only, in all its mass. On the whole, he decided he preferred it that way.
   Mark read till his eyes were dry and aching, and his stomach gurgled with festering coffee. Time to break for lunch, he thought, when a guard knocked at his door.
   "Lord Mark, your driver is here," the guard informed him politely.
   Hell_it was time to break for dinner. The guard escorted him back through the building and delivered him to Pym. It was dark outside. My head hurts.
   Doggedly, Mark returned the next morning and started again. And the next. And the next. More reports arrived. In fact, they were arriving faster than he could read them. The harder he worked, the more he was falling behind. Halfway through the fifth day he leaned back in his station chair and thought, This is crazy. Illyan was burying him. From the paralysis of ignorance, he had segued with surprising speed to the paralysis of information-glut. I've got to triage this crap, or I'll never get out of this repulsive building.
   "Lies, lies, all lies," he muttered wildly to his comconsole. It seemed to blink and hum back at him, sly and demure.
   With a decisive punch, he turned off the comconsole with its endless babble of voices and fountains of data, and sat for a while in darkness and silence, till his ears stopped ringing.
   ImpSec hasn't. Hasn't found Miles. He didn't need all this data. Nobody did. He just needed one piece. Let's cut this down to size.
   Start with a few explicit assumptions. One. Miles is recoverable.
   Let ImpSec look for a rotted body, unmarked grave, or disintegration record all they wanted. Such a search was no use to him, even if successful. Especially if successful.
   Only cryo-chambers, whether permanent storage banks or other portables, were of interest. Or_less likely, and notably less common_cryo-revival facilities. But logic put an upper cap on his optimism. If Miles had been successfully revived by friendly hands, the first thing he would do would be to report in. He hadn't, ergo: he was still frozen. Or, if revived, in too bad a shape to function. Or not in friendly hands. So. Where?
   The Dendarii cryo-chamber had been found in the Hegen Hub. Well ... so what? It had been sent there after it was emptied. Sinking down into his station chair with slitted eyes, Mark thought instead about the opposite end of the trail. Were his particular obsessions luring him into believing what he wanted to believe? No, dammit. To hell with the Hegen Hub. Miles never got off the planet. In one stroke, that eliminated over three-fourths of the trash-data clogging his view.
   We look at Jackson's Whole reports only, then. Good. Then what?
   How had ImpSec checked all the remaining possible destinations? Places without known motivations or connections with House Bharaputra? For the most part, ImpSec had simply asked, concealing their own identity but offering a substantial reward. All at least four weeks after the raid. A cold trail, so to speak. Quite a lot of time for someone to think about their surprise package. Time to hide it, if they were so inclined. So that, in those cases where ImpSec did a second and more complete pass, they were even more likely to come up empty.
   Miles is in a place that ImpSec has already checked off, in the hands of someone with hidden motivations to be interested in him.
   There were still hundreds of possibilities.
   I need a connection. There has to be a connection.
   ImpSec had torn apart Norwood's available Dendarii records down to the level of a word-by-word analysis. Nothing. But Norwood was medically trained. And he hadn't sent his beloved Admiral's cryo-chamber off at random. He'd sent it someplace to someone.
   If there's a hell, Norwood, I hope you're roasting in it right now.
   Mark sighed, leaned forward, and turned the comconsole back on.
   A couple of hours later, Illyan stopped by Mark's cubicle, closing the soundproof door behind him. He leaned, falsely casual, on the wall and remarked, "How is it going?"
   Mark ran his hands through his hair. "Despite your amiable attempt to bury me, I think I'm actually making some progress."
   "Oh? What kind?" Illyan did not deny the charge, Mark noticed.
   "I am absolutely convinced Miles never left Jackson's Whole."
   "So how do you explain our finding the cryo-chamber in the Hegen Hub?"
   "I don't. It's a diversion."
   "Hm," said Illyan, non-committally.
   "And it worked," Mark added cruelly.
   Illyan's lips thinned.
   Diplomacy, Mark reminded himself. Diplomacy, or he'd never get what he needed. "I accept that your resources are finite, sir. So put them to the point. Everything that you do have available for this, you ought to send to Jackson's Whole."
   The sardonic expression on Illyan's face said it all. The man had been running ImpSec for nearly thirty years. It was going to take a lot more than diplomacy for him to accept Mark telling him how to do his job.
   "What did you find out about Captain Vorventa?" Mark tried another line.
   "The link was short, and not too sinister. His younger brother was my Galactic Operations supervisor's adjutant. These are not disloyal men, you understand."
   "So . . . what have you done?"
   "About Captain Edwin, nothing. It's too late. The information about Miles is now out on the Vorish net, as whispers and gossip. Beyond damage control. Young Vorventa has been transferred and demoted. Leaving an ugly hole in my staffing. He was good at his job." Illyan did not sound very grateful to Mark.
   "Oh." Mark paused. "Vorventa thought I did something to the Count. Is that out on the gossip net too?"
   "Yes."
   Mark winced. "Well ... at least you know better," he sighed. He glanced up at Illyan's stony face, and felt a nauseated alarm. "Don't you, sir?"
   "Perhaps. Perhaps not."
   "How not?! You have the medical reports!"
   "Mm. The cardiac rupture certainly appeared natural. But it could have been artificially created, using a surgical hand-tractor. The subsequent damage to the cardiac region would have masked its traces."
   Mark shuddered in helpless outrage. "Tricky work," he choked. "Extremely precise. How did I make the Count hold still, and not notice, while I was doing this?"
   "That is one problem with the scenario," Illyan agreed.
   "And what did I do with the hand tractor? And the medical scanner, I'd have needed one of those, too. Two or three kilos of equipment."
   "Ditched them in the woods. Or somewhere."
   "Have you found them?"
   "No."
   "Have you looked?"
   "Yes."
   Mark rubbed his face, hard, and clenched and unclenched his teeth. "So. You have all the men you need to quarter and re-quarter several square kilometers of woods looking for a hand tractor that isn't there, but not enough to send to Jackson's Whole to look for Miles, who is. I see." No. He had to keep his temper, or he'd lose everything. He wanted to howl. He wanted to beat Illyan's face in.
   "A galactic operative is a highly-trained specialist with rare personal qualities," said Illyan stiffly. "Area-searches for known objects can be conducted by low-level troopers, who are more abundant."
   "Yes. I'm sorry." He was apologizing? Your goals. Remember your goals. He thought of the Countess, and drew a deep, calming breath. He drew several.
   "I do not hold this as a conviction," Illyan said, watching his face. "I hold it merely as a doubt."
   "Thank-you-I-think," Mark snarled.
   He sat for a full minute, trying to marshall his scattered thoughts, his best arguments. "Look," he said at last. "You are wasting your resources, and one of the resources you are wasting is me. Send me back to Jackson's Whole. I know more about the entire situation than any other agent you have. I have some training, an assassin's training only maybe, but some. Enough to lose your spies three or four times on Earth! Enough to get this far. I know Jackson's Whole, visceral stuff you can only acquire growing up there. And you wouldn't even have to pay me!" He waited, holding his breath in the courage of his terror. Go back? Blood sprayed through his memory. Going to give the Bharaputrans a chance to correct their aim?
   Illyan's cool expression did not change. "Your track record so far in covert ops is not notably impressive for its successes, Lord Mark."
   "So, I'm not a brilliant combat field commander. I am not Miles. We all know that by now. How many of your other agents are?"
   "If you are as, ah, incompetent as you have appeared, sending you would be a further waste. But suppose you are more sly than even I think. All your thrashing around here, a mere smokescreen." Illyan could deliver the veiled insults too. Stiletto-sharp, right between the ribs. "And suppose you get to Miles before we do. What happens then?"
   "What do you mean, what happens then?"
   "If you return him to us as a room-temperature corpse, fit only for burying, instead of a cryo-stat hopeful_how will we know that was the way you found him? And you will inherit his name, his rank, his wealth, and his future. Tempting, Mark, to a man without an identity. Very tempting."
   Mark buried his face in his hands. He sat crushed, infuriated, and wildly frustrated. "Look," he said through his fingers, "look. Either I'm the man who, by your theory, succeeded in half-assassinating Aral Vorkosigan and was so good I left no trace of proof_or I'm not. You can argue that I'm not competent enough to send. Or you can argue that I'm not trustworthy enough to send. But you can't use both arguments at once. Pick one!"
   "I await more evidence." Illyan's eyes were like stones.
   "I swear," Mark whispered, "excess suspicion makes us bigger fools than excess trust does." It had certainly been true in his case. He sat up suddenly. "So fast-penta me."
   Illyan raised his brows. "Mm?"
   "Fast-penta me. You never have. Relieve your suspicions." Fast-penta interrogations could be excruciatingly humiliating experiences, by all reports. So what. What was one more humiliation in his life? Warm and familiar, that was what.
   "I have longed to, Lord Mark," Illyan admitted, "but your, ah, progenitor has a known idiosyncratic response to fast-penta that I assume you share. Not the usual allergy, exactly. It creates an appalling hyperactivity, a great deal of babble, but alas, no overwhelming compulsion to tell the truth. It is useless."
   "In Miles." Mark seized the hope. "You assume? You don't know! My metabolism is demonstrably not like Miles's. Can't you at least check?"
   "Yes," said Illyan slowly, "I can do that." He pushed himself off from the wall, and exited the cubicle, saying, "Carry on. I'll be back shortly."
   Tense, Mark rose and paced the little room, two steps each way. Fear and desire pulsed in his brain. The memory of the inhuman chill of Baron Bharaputra's eyes clashed with hot rage in his throat. If you want to find something, look where you lost it. He'd lost it all on Jackson's Whole.
   Illyan returned at last. "Sit down and roll up your left sleeve."
   Mark did so. "What's that?"
   "Patch test."
   Mark felt a burr-like prickle, as Illyan pressed the tiny med-pad onto the underside of his forearm, then peeled it away. Illyan glanced at his chrono, and leaned on the comconsole, watching Mark's arm.
   Within a minute, there was a pink spot. Within two, it was a hive. Within five, it had grown to a hard white welt surrounded by angry red streaks that ran from his wrist to his elbow.
   Illyan sighed disappointment. "Lord Mark. I highly recommend that you avoid fast-penta at all costs, in your future."
   "That was an allergic reaction?"
   "That was a highly allergic reaction."
   "Shit." Mark sat and brooded. And scratched. He rolled down his sleeve before he drew blood. "If Miles had been sitting here, reading these files, making these same arguments, would you have listened to him?"
   "Lieutenant Vorkosigan has a sustained record of successes that compels my attention. Results speak for themselves. And, as you yourself have repeatedly pointed out, you are not Miles. You can't use both arguments at once," he added icily. "Pick one."
   "Why did you even bother letting me in here, if nothing I say or do can make any difference?" Mark exploded.
   Illyan shrugged. "Aside from Gregor's direct order_at least I know where you are and what you are doing."
   "Like a detention cell, except that I enter it voluntarily. If you could lock me in a cell without a comconsole, you'd be even happier." "Frankly, yes."
   "Just. So." Blackly, Mark switched the comconsole back on. Illyan left him to it.
   Mark jumped out of his chair, stumbled to the door, and stuck his head out. Illyan's retreating back was halfway down the corridor. "I have my own name now, Illyan!" Mark shouted furiously. Illyan glanced back over his shoulder, raised his brows, and walked on.
   Mark tried reading another report, but it seemed to turn to gibberish somewhere between his eyes and his brain. He was too rattled to continue his analysis today. He gave up at last, and called Pym for a pick-up. It was still light out. He stared into the sunset, glimpsed between the buildings on the way home to Vorkosigan House, till his eyes burned.
   It was the first time that week he had returned from ImpSec in time to join the Countess for dinner. He found her and Bothari-Jesek dining casually in a ground-floor nook that looked onto a sheltered corner of the garden, densely arranged with autumn flowers and plants. Spot lighting kept the display colorful in the gathering dusk. The Countess wore a fancy green jacket and long skirt, a Vor matron's town wear; Bothari-Jesek wore a similar costume in blue obviously borrowed from the Countess's wardrobe. A place was set for him at the table despite the fact that he hadn't shown up for the meal for four straight days. Obscurely touched, he slid into his seat.
   "How was the Count today?" he asked diffidently.
   "Unchanged," the Countess sighed.
   As was the Countess's custom, there was a minute of silence before they plowed in, which the Countess used for an inward prayer that Mark suspected involved more this day than calling blessings upon the bread. Bothari-Jesek and he waited politely, Bothari-Jesek meditating God-knew-what, Mark rerunning his conversation with Illyan in his head and evolving all the smarter things he should have said, too late. A servant brought food in covered dishes and departed to leave them in privacy, which was the way the Countess preferred it when not dining formally with official guests. Family style. Huh.
   In truth, Bothari-Jesek had been lending the Countess the support of a daughter in the days since the Count's collapse, accompanying her on her frequent trips to the Imperial Military Hospital, running personal errands, acting as confidant; Mark suspected the Countess had revealed more of her real thoughts to Bothari-Jesek than to anyone else, and felt a little inexplicable envy. As their favorite Armsman's only child, Elena Bothari had been practically the Vorkosigans' foster-daughter; Vorkosigan House had been the home in which she had grown up. So if he was really Miles's brother, did that make Elena his foster-sister too? He would have to try the idea on her. And prepare to duck. Some other time.
   "Captain Bothari-Jesek," Mark began, after he'd swallowed the first couple of bites, "what's going on with the Dendarii at Komarr? Or does Illyan keep you in the dark too?"
   "He'd better not," said Bothari-Jesek. To be sure, Elena had allies that outranked even the ImpSec commander. "We've done a little reshuffling. Quinn retained the chief eyewitnesses to your, um, raid_" land of her, not to use some more forthright term, like debacle, "Green Squad, part of Orange and Blue Squads. She's sent everyone else off in the Peregrine under my second, to rejoin the fleet. People were getting itchy, cooped up in orbit with no downside leave and no duties." She looked distinctly unhappy at this temporary loss of her command.
   "Is the Ariel still at Komarr, then?"
   "Yes."
   "Quinn of course . . . Captain Thorne? Sergeant Taura?"
   "All still waiting."
   "They must be pretty itchy themselves, by now."
   "Yes," said Bothari-Jesek, and stabbed her fork so hard into a chunk of vat protein that it skittered across her plate. Itchy. Yes.
   "So what have you learned this week, Mark?" the Countess asked him.
   "Nothing you don't already know, I'm afraid. Doesn't Illyan pass you reports?"
   "Yes, but due to the press of events I've only had time to glance at his analysts' synopses. In any case, there's only one piece of news I really want to hear."
   Right. Encouraged, Mark began to detail his survey to her, including his data-triage and his growing convictions.
   "You seem to have been quite thorough," she remarked.
   He shrugged. "I now know roughly what ImpSec knows, if Illyan has been honest with me. But since ImpSec frankly doesn't know where Miles is, it's all futile. I swear . . ."
   "Yes?" said the Countess.
   "I swear Miles is still on Jackson's Whole. But I can't get Illyan to focus down. His attention is spread all over hell and gone. He has Cetagandans on the brain."
   "There are sound historical reasons for that," said the Countess. "And current ones too, I'm afraid, though I'm sure Illyan has been cagey about confiding to you any of ImpSec's troubles not directly connected to Miles's situation. To say he's had a bad month would be a gross understatement." She hesitated too, for rather a long time. "Mark . . . you are, after all, Miles's clone-twin. As close as one human being can be to another. This conviction of yours has a passionate edge. You seem to know. Do you suppose . . . you really do know? On some level?"
   "Do you mean, like, a psychic link?" he said. What an awful idea.
   She nodded, faintly flushed. Bothari-Jesek looked appalled, and gave him a strange beseeching look, Don't you dare mess with her mind, you_!
   This is the true measure of her desperation. "I'm sorry. I'm not psychic. Only psychotic." Bothari-Jesek relaxed. He slumped, then brightened slightly with an idea. "Though it might not hurt to let Illyan think that you think so."
   "Illyan is too sturdy a rationalist." The Countess smiled sadly.
   "The passion is only frustration, ma'am. No one will let me do anything."
   "What is it that you wish to do?"
   I want to run away to Beta Colony. The Countess would probably help him to. . . No. I am never running away again.
   He took a breath, in place of a courage he did not feel. "I want to go back to Jackson's Whole and look for him. I could do as good a job as Illyan's other agents, I know I could! I tried the idea on him. He wouldn't bite. If he could, he'd like to lock me in a security cell."
   "It's days like these poor Simon would sell his soul to make the world hold still for a while," the Countess admitted. "His attention isn't just spread right now, it's splintered. I have a certain sympathy for him."
   "I don't. I wouldn't ask Simon Illyan for the time of day. Nor would he give it to me." Mark brooded. "Gregor would hint obliquely where I might look for a chrono. You . . ." his metaphor extended itself, unbidden, "would give me a clock."
   "If I had one, son, I'd give you a clock factory," the Countess sighed.
   Mark chewed, swallowed, stopped, looked up. "Really?"
   "R_" she began positively, then caution caught up with her. "Really what?"
   "Is Lord Mark a free man? I mean, I've committed no crime within the Barrayaran Empire, have I? There being no law against stupidity. I'm not under arrest."
   "No . . ."
   "I could go to Jackson's Whole myself! Screw Illyan and his precious resources. If_" ah, the catch_he deflated slightly, "if I had a ticket," he ran down. His whole wealth, as far as he knew, was seventeen Imperial marks left from a twenty-five note the Countess had given him for spending money earlier in the week, now wadded up in his trouser pocket.
   The Countess pushed her plate away and sat back, her face drained. "This does not strike me as a very safe idea. Speaking of stupidity."
   "Bharaputra's probably got an execution contract out on you now, after what you did," Bothari-Jesek put in helpfully.
   "No_it's on Admiral Naismith," Mark argued. "And I wouldn't be going back to Bharaputra's." Not that he didn't agree with the Countess. The spot on his forehead where Baron Bharaputra had counted coup burned in secret. He stared urgently at her. "Ma'am ..."
   "Are you seriously asking me to finance your risking your life?" she said.
   "No_my saving it! I can't"_he waved around helplessly, at Vorkosigan House, at his whole situation_"go on like this. I'm all out of balance here, I'm all wrong."
   "Balance will come to you, in time. It's just too soon," she said earnestly. "You're still very new."
   "I have to go back. I have to try to undo what I did. If I can."
   "And if you can't, what will you do then?" asked Bothari-Jesek coldly. "Take off, with a nice head start?"
   Had the woman read his mind? Mark's shoulders bowed with the weight of her scorn. And his doubt. "I," he breathed, "don't . . ." know. He could not finish the sentence aloud.
   The Countess laced her long fingers. "I don't doubt your heart," she said, looking at him steadily.
   Hell, and she could break that heart more thoroughly with her trust than Illyan ever could with his suspicion. He crouched in his seat.
   "But_you are my second chance. My new hope, all unlooked-for. I never thought I could have another child, on Barrayar. Now Jackson's Whole has eaten Miles, and you want to go down there after him? You, too?"
   "Ma'am," he said desperately, "Mother_I cannot be your consolation prize."
   She crossed her arms, and rested her chin in one hand, cupped over her mouth. Her eyes were grey as a winter sea.
   "You of all people, have to see," Mark pleaded, "how important a second chance can he."
   She pushed back her chair, and stood up. "I'll . . . have to think about this." She exited the little dining room. She'd left half her meal on her plate, Mark saw with dismay.
   Bothari-Jesek saw it too. "Good job," she snarled.
   I'm sorry, I'm sorry. . . .
   She rose to run after the Countess.
   Mark sat, abandoned and alone. And, blindly and half-consciously, proceeded to eat himself sick. He stumbled up to his room's level by the lift tube, afterward, and lay wishing for sleep more than for breath. Neither came to him.
   After an interminable time his stunned headache and hot abdominal pain were just starting to recede, when there came a knock on his door. He rolled over with a muffled groan. "Who is it?"
   "Elena."
   He keyed on the light, and sat up in bed against the carved headboard, stuffing a pillow under his spine against some killer solid walnut acanthus leaves in high relief. He didn't want to talk to Bothari-Jesek. Or to any other human being. He refastened his shirt as loosely as it would go. "Enter," he muttered.
   She came cautiously around the doorframe, her face serious and pale. "Hello. Are you feeling all right?"
   "No," he admitted.
   "I came to apologize," she said.
   "You? Apologize to me? Why?"
   "The Countess told me . . . something of what was going on with you. I'm sorry. I didn't understand."
   He'd been dissected again, in absentia. He could tell by the horrified way Bothari-Jesek was looking at him, as if his swollen belly was laid open and spread wide in an autopsy with a cut from here to there. "Aw, hell. What did she say now?" He struggled, with difficulty, to sit up straighter.
   "Miles had talked around it. But I hadn't understood how bad it really was. The Countess told me exactly. What Galen did to you. The shock-stick rape, and the, um, eating disorders. And the other disorder." She kept her eyes away from his body, onto his face, a dead give-away of the unwelcome depth of her new knowledge. She and the Countess must have been talking for two hours. "And it was all so deliberately calculated. That was the most diabolical part."
   "I'm not so sure about the shock-stick incident being calculated," Mark said carefully. "Galen seemed out of his head, to me. Over the top. Nobody's that good an actor. Or maybe it started out calculated, and got out of hand." And then burst out, helplessly, "Dammit!" Bothari-Jesek jumped a foot in the air. "She has no right to talk about that with you! Or with anybody! What the hell am I, the best show in town?"
   "No, no," Bothari-Jesek opened her hands. "You have to understand. I told her about Maree, that little blonde clone we found you with. What I thought was going on. I accused you to the Countess."
   He froze, flushed with shame, and a new dismay. "I didn't realize you hadn't told her at the first." Was everything he thought he'd built with the Countess on a rotten foundation, collapsing now in ruins?
   "She wanted you for a son so badly, I couldn't bring myself to. But I was so furious with you tonight, I blurted it all out."
   "And then what happened?"
   Bothari-Jesek shook her head in wonderment. "She's so Betan. She's so strange. She's never where you think she is, mentally. She wasn't the least surprised. And then she explained it all to me_I felt like my head was being turned inside out, and given a good wash-and-brush."
   He almost laughed. "That sounds like a typical conversation with the Countess." His choking fear began to recede. She doesn't despise me ... ?
   "I was wrong about you," Bothari-Jesek said sturdily.
   His hands spread in exasperation. "It's nice to know I have such a defender, but you weren't wrong. What you thought was exactly what was going on. I would have if I could have," he said bitterly. "It wasn't my virtue that stopped me, it was my high-voltage conditioning."
   "Oh, I don't mean wrong about the facts. But I was projecting a lot of my own anger, into the way I was explaining you to myself. I had no idea how much you were a product of systematic torture. And how incredibly you resisted. I think I would have gone catatonic, in your place."
   "It wasn't that bad all the time," he said uncomfortably.
   "But you have to understand," she repeated doggedly, "what was going on with me. About my father."
   "Huh?" He felt as if his head had just been given a sharp half-twist to the left. "I know what my father has to do with this, why the hell is yours in on it?"
   She walked around the room. Working up to something. When she did speak, it came out all in a rush. "My father raped my mother. That's where I came from, during the Barrayaran invasion of Escobar. I've known for some years. It's made me allergically sensitive on the subject. I can't stand it," her hands clenched, "yet it's in me. I can't escape it. It made it very hard for me to see you clearly. I feel like I've been looking at you through a fog for the last ten weeks. The Countess has dispelled it." Indeed, her eyes did not freeze him any more. "The Count helped me too, more than I can say."
   "Oh." What was he to say? So, it hadn't been just him they'd been talking about for the past two hours. There was clearly more to her story, but he sure wasn't going to ask. For once, it wasn't his place to apologize. "I'm . . . not sorry you exist. However you got here."
   She smiled, crookedly. "Actually, neither am I."
   He felt very strange. His fury at the violation of his privacy was fading, to be replaced by a light-heartedness that astonished him. He was greatly relieved, to be unburdened of his secrets. His dread was shrunken, as if giving it away had literally diminished it. I swear if I tell four more people, I'll be altogether free.
   He swung his legs out of the bed, grabbed her by the hand, led her to a wooden chair beside his window, climbed up and stood on it, and kissed her. "Thank you!"
   She looked quite startled. "What for?" she asked on the breath of a laugh. Firmly, she repossessed her hand.
   "For existing. For letting me live. I don't know." He grinned, exhilarated, but the grin faded in dizziness, and he climbed down more carefully, and sat.
   She stared down at him, and bit her lip. "Why do you do that to yourself?"
   No use to pretend he didn't know what that was, the physical manifestations of his compulsive gorge were obvious enough. He felt monstrous. He swiped a hand over his sweaty face. "I don't know. I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him."
   "How is it dealing with pain to give yourself more pain?" she asked plaintively.
   He half-smiled, hands on his knees, staring at the floor. "There is a kind of riveting fascination to it. Takes your mind off the real thing. Consider what a toothache does to your attention span."
   She shook her head. "I'd rather not, thank you."
   "Galen was only trying to screw up my relation with my father," he sighed, "but he managed to screw up my relation with everything. He knew he wouldn't be able to control me directly once he turned me loose on Barrayar, so he had to build in motivations that would last." He added lowly, "It ricocheted back on him. Because in a sense, Galen was my father too. My foster-father. First one I ever had." The Count had been alive to that one. "I was so hungry for identity, when the Komarrans picked me up on Jackson's Whole. I think I must have been like one of those baby birds that imprints on a watering pot or something, because it's the first parent-bird-sized thing it sees."
   "You have a surprising talent for information analysis," she remarked. "I noticed it even back at Jackson's Whole."
   "Me?" he blinked. "Certainly not!" Not a talent, surely, or he'd be getting better results. But despite all his frustrations, he had felt a kind of contentment, in his little cubicle at ImpSec this past week, the serenity of a monk's cell, combined with the absorbing challenge of that universe of data ... in an odd way it reminded him of the peaceful times with the virtual learning programs, in his childhood back at the clone-creche. The times when no one had been hurting him.
   "The Countess thinks so too. She wants to see you."
   "What, now?"
   "She sent me to get you. But I had to get my word in first. Before it got any later, and I lost my chance. Or my nerve."
   "All right. Let me pull myself together." He was intensely grateful wine had not been served tonight. He retreated to his bathroom, washed his face in the coldest water, forced down a couple of painkiller tabs, and combed his hair. He slipped one of the back-country-style vests over his dark shirt, and followed Bothari-Jesek into the hall.
   She took him to the Countess's own study, which was a serene and austere chamber overlooking the back garden, just off her bedroom. Her and her husband's bedroom. Mark glimpsed the dark interior, down a step and through an archway. The Count's absence seemed an almost palpable thing.
   The Countess was at her comconsole, not a secured government model, just a very expensive commercial one. Shell flowers inlaid on black wood framed the vid plate, which was generating the image of a harried-looking man. The Countess was saying sharply, "Well, find out the arrangements, then! Yes, tonight, now. And then get back to me. Thank you." She batted the off-key, and swung around to face Mark and Bothari-Jesek.
   "Are you checking on a ticket to Jackson's Whole?" he asked tremulously, hoping against hope.
   "No."
   "Oh." Of course not. How could she let him go? He was a fool. It was useless to suppose_
   "I was checking on getting you a ship. If you're going, you'll need a lot more independent mobility than scheduled commercial transport will allow."
   "Buy a ship?" he said, stunned. And he'd thought that line about the clock factory had been a joke. "Isn't that pretty expensive?"
   "Lease, if I can. Buy if I have to. There seem to be three or four possibilities, in Barrayar or Komarr orbit."
   "Still_how?" He didn't think even the Vorkosigans could buy a jump-ship out of pocket change.
   "I can mortgage something," the Countess said rather vaguely, looking around.
   "Since synthetics came in, you can't hock the family jewels any more." He followed her gaze. "Not Vorkosigan House!"
   "No, it's entailed. Same problem with the District Residence at Hassadar. I can pledge Vorkosigan Surleau on my bare word, though."
   The heart of the realm, oh shit . . .
   "All these houses and history are all very well," she complained, raising her eyebrows at his dismayed expression, "but a bloody museum doesn't make a very liquid asset. In any case, the finances are my problem. You'll have your own worries."
   "A crew?" was the first thought that popped into his head, and out of his mouth.
   "A jump-pilot and engineer will come with the ship, at a minimum. As for supercargo, well, there are all those idle Dendarii, hanging in Komarr orbit. I imagine you could find a volunteer or two among them. It's obvious they can't take the Ariel back into Jacksonian local space."
   "Quinnie has bleeding fingers by now, from scratching at the doors," Bothari-Jesek said. "Even Illyan won't be able to hold her much longer, if ImpSec doesn't get a break soon."
   "Will Illyan try to hold me?" asked Mark anxiously.
   "If it weren't for Aral, I'd be going myself," said the Countess. "And I sure as hell wouldn't let Illyan stop me. You are my proxy. I'll deal with ImpSec."
   Mark bet she would. "The Dendarii I'm thinking of are highly motivated, but_I foresee problems, getting them to follow my orders. Who will be in command of this little private excursion?"
   "It's the golden rule, boy. He who has the gold, makes the rules. The ship will be yours. The choice of companions will be yours. If they want a ride, they have to cooperate."
   "That would last past the first wormhole jump. Then Quinn would lock me in a closet."
   The Countess puffed a laugh despite herself. "Hm. That is a point." She leaned back in her station chair, and steepled her fingers together, her eyes half-closed for a minute or two. They opened wide again. "Elena," she said. "Will you take oath to Lord Vorkosigan?" The fingers of her right hand fanned at Mark.
   "I'm already sworn to Lord Vorkosigan," Elena said stiffly. Meaning, to Miles.
   The grey eyes went flinty. "Death releases all vows." And then glinted. "The Vor system never has been very good at catching the curve balls thrown at it by galactic technologies. Do you know, I don't think there has ever been a ruling as to the status of a voice-oath when one of the respondents is in cryo-stasis? Your word can't be your breath when you don't have any breath, after all. We shall just have to set our own precedent."
   Elena paced to the window, and stared out into nothing. The reflecting lights of the room obscured any view of the night. At last, she turned decisively on her heel, went down on both knees in front of Mark, and raised her hands pressed palm to palm. Automatically, Mark enclosed her hands with his own.
   "My lord," she said, "I pledge you the obedience of a liegewoman."
   "Um . . ." said Mark. "Urn ... I think I may need more than that. Try this one. 'I, Elena Bothari-Jesek, do testify I am a freewoman of the District Vorkosigan. I hereby take service under Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, as an Armsman_Armswoman?_simple, and will hold him as my liege commander until my death or he releases me.' "
   Shocked, Bothari-Jesek stared up at him. Not very far up, true. "You can't do that! Can you?"
   "Well," said the Countess, watching this playlet with her eyes alight, "there isn't actually a law saying a Count's heir can't take a female Armsman. It's just never been done. You know_ tradition."
   Elena and the Countess exchanged a long look. Hesitantly, as if half-hypnotized, Bothari-Jesek repeated the oath.
   Mark said, "I, Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, vassal secundus to Emperor Gregor Vorbarra, do accept your oath, and pledge you the protection of a liege commander; this by my word as Vorkosigan." He paused. "Actually," he said aside to the Countess, "I haven't made my oath to Gregor yet, either. Would that invalidate this?"
   "Details," said the Countess, waving her fingers. "You can work out the details later."
   Bothari-Jesek stood up again. She looked at him like a woman waking up in bed with a hangover and a strange partner she didn't remember meeting the night before. She rubbed the backs of her hands where his skin had touched hers.
   Power. Just how much Vor-power did this little charade give him? Just as much as Bothari-Jesek allowed, Mark decided, eyeing her athletic frame and shrewd face. No danger she would permit him to abuse his position. The uncertainty in her face was giving way to a suppressed pleasure that delighted his eye. Yes. That was the right move. No question but that he had pleased the Countess, who was grinning outright at her subversive son.
   "Now," said the Countess, "how fast can we pull this together? How soon can you be ready to travel?"
   "Immediately," said Bothari-Jesek.
   "At your command, ma'am," said Mark. "I do feel_it's nothing psychic, you understand. It's not even the general itch. It's only logic. But I do think we could be running out of time."
   "How so?" asked Bothari-Jesek. "There's nothing more static than cryo-stasis. We're all going crazy from uncertainty, sure, but that's our problem. Miles may have more time than we do."
   Mark shook his head. "If Miles had fallen frozen into friendly or even neutral hands, they ought to have responded to the rumors of reward by now. But if ... someone . . . wanted to revive him, they'd have to do the prep first. We're all very conscious right now of how long it takes to grow organs for transplant."
   The Countess nodded wryly.
   "If_wherever Miles is_committed to the project soon after they got him, they could be nearly ready to attempt a revival by now."
   "They might botch it," said the Countess. "They might not be careful enough." Her fingers drummed on the pretty shell inlay.
   "I don't follow that," objected Bothari-Jesek. "Why would an enemy bother to revive him? What fate could be worse than death?"
   "I don't know," sighed Mark. But if there is one, I bet the Jacksoninans can arrange it.