Cryoburn-ARC (3 page)

"Maybe later," said the man faintly, seemed to take in Jin's disappointed look, and after a squinting glance at the shelf of cages, added, "I like rats fine. I'm just afraid I'd drop her. I'm still a bit shaky. I was lost in the Cryocombs for rather a long time, today." After another moment, he offered, "I used to know a spacer who kept hamsters."

This was encouraging; Jin brightened. "Oh, your water!"

"Yes, please," said the man. "This is a chair, right?" He was gripping the back of Jin's late stepstool, leaning on it. The scratched round table beside it, discarded from some cafe and the prize of an alley scavenge, had been a bit wobbly, but Custodian Tenbury had showed Jin how to fix it with a few shims and tacks.

"Yah, sit! I'm sorry there's only one, but usually I'm the only person who comes up here. You get it 'cause you're the guest." As the man dropped into the old plastic cafeteria chair, Jin rummaged on his shelves for his liter water bottle, uncapped it, and handed it over. "I'm sorry I don't have a cup. You don't mind drinking where my mouth was?"

"Not at all," said the man, raised the bottle, and gulped thirstily. He stopped suddenly when it was about three-fourths empty to ask, "Wait, is this all your water?"

"No, no. There's a tap on the outsides of each of these old heat exchanger towers. One's broken, but the custodian hooked up the other for me when I moved all my pets up here. He helped me rig my tent, too. The secretaries wouldn't let me keep my animals inside anymore, because the smell and noise bothered some folks. I like it better up here anyway. Drink all you want. I can just fill it up again."

The little man drained the bottle and, taking Jin at his word, handed it back. "More, please?"

Jin dashed out to the tap and refilled the bottle, taking a moment to rinse and top up the chickens' water pan at the same time. His guest drank another half-liter without stopping, then rested, his eyes sagging shut.

Jin tried to figure out how old the man was. His face was pale and furrowed, with sprays of fine lines at the corners of his eyes, and his chin was shadowed with a day's beard stubble, but that could be from being lost Below, which would unsettle anybody. His dark hair was neatly cut, a few gleams of gray showing in the light. His body seemed more scaled-down than distorted, sturdy enough, though his head, set on a short neck, was a bit big for it. Jin decided to work around to his curiosity more sideways, to be polite. "What's your name, mister?"

The man's eyes flew open; they were clear gray in color, and would probably be bright if they weren't so bloodshot. If the fellow had been bigger, his seedy looks might have alarmed Jin more. "Miles. Miles Vo—well, the rest is a mouthful no one here seems able to pronounce. You can just call me Miles. And what's your name, young
.
.
.
person?"

"Jin Sato," said Jin.

"Do you live on this roof?"

Jin shrugged. "Pretty much. Nobody climbs up to bother me. The lift tubes inside don't work." He led on, "I'm almost twelve," and then, deciding he'd been polite enough, added, "How old are you?"

"I'm almost thirty-eight. From the other direction."

"Oh." Jin digested this. A disappointingly old person, therefore likely to be stodgy, if not so old as Yani, but then, it was hard to know how to count Yani's age. "You have a funny accent. Are you from around here?"

"By no means. I'm from Barrayar."

Jin's brow wrinkled. "Where's that? Is it a city?" It wasn't a Territorial Prefecture; Jin could name all twelve of those. "I never heard of it."

"Not a city. A planet. A triplanetary empire, technically."

"An off-worlder!" Jin's eyes widened with delight. "I never met an off-worlder before!" Tonight's scavenge suddenly seemed more fruitful. Though if the man was a tourist, he would likely leave as soon as he could call his hotel or his friends, which was a disheartening thought. "Did you get beaten up by robbers or something?" Robbers picked on druggies, drunks, and tourists, Jin had heard. He supposed they made easy targets.

"Something like that." Miles squinted at Jin. "You hear much news in the past day?"

Jin shook his head. "Only Suze the Secretary has a working comconsole, in here."

"In here?"

"This place. It was a cryofacility, but it was cleared out and abandoned, oh, way before I was born. A bunch of folks moved in who didn't have anywhere else to go. I suppose we're all sort of hiding out. Well, people living around here know there's people in here, but Suze-san says if we're all real careful not to bother anyone, they'll leave us be."

"That, um, person you were with earlier, Yani. Who is he? A relative of yours?"

Jin shook his head emphatically. "He just came here one day, the way most folks do. He's a revive." Jin gave the word its meaningful pronunciation,
re
-vive.

"He was cryo-revived, you mean?"

"Yah. He doesn't much like it, though. His contract with his corp was just for one hundred years—I guess he paid a lot for it, a long time ago. But he forgot to say he wasn't to be thawed out till folks had found a cure for being old. Since that's what his contract said, they brought him up, though I suppose his corp was sorry to lose his vote. This future wasn't what he was expecting, I guess—but he's too old and confused to work at anything and make enough money to get frozen again. He complains about it a lot."

"I
.
.
.
see. I think." The little man squeezed his eyes shut, and open again, and rubbed his brow, as if it ached. "God, I wish my head would clear."

"You could lie down in my bedroll, if you wanted," Jin suggested diffidently. "If you don't feel so good."

"Indeed, young Jin, I don't feel so good. Well put." Miles tilted up the water bottle and drained it. "The more I can drink the better—wash this damned poison out of my system. What do you do for a loo?" At Jin's blank look he added, "Latrine, bathroom, lavatory, pissoir? Is there one inside the building?"

"Oh! Not close, sorry. Usually when I'm up here for very long I sneak over and use the gutter in the corner, and slosh it down the drainpipe with a bucket of water. I don't tell the women, though. They'd complain, even though the chickens go all over the roof and nobody thinks anything of it. But it makes the grass down there really green."

"Ah ha," said Miles. "Congratulations—you have reinvented the garderobe, my lizard-squire. Appropriate, for a castle."

Jin didn't know what kind of clothes a
guarding-robe
might be, but half the things this druggie said made no sense anyway, so he decided not to worry about it.

"And after your lie-down, I can come back with some food," Jin offered.

"After a lie-down, my stomach might well be settled enough to take you up on that, yes."

Jin smiled and jumped up. "Want any more water?"

"Please."

When Jin returned from the tap, he found the little man easing himself down in the bedroll, laid along the side wall of an exchanger tower. Lucky was helping him; he reached out and absently scritched her ears, then let his fingers massage expertly down either side of her spine, which arched under his hand. The cat deigned to emit a short purr, an unusual sign of approval. Miles grunted and lay back, accepting the water bottle and setting it beside his head. "Ah. God. That's so good." Lucky jumped up on his chest and sniffed his stubbly chin; he eyed her tolerantly.

A new concern crossed Jin's mind. "If heights make you dizzy, the gutter could be a problem." An awful picture arose of his guest falling head-first over the parapet while trying to pee in the dark. His
off-worlder
guest. "See, chickens don't fly as well as you'd think, and baby chicks can't fly at all. I lost two of Mrs. Speck's children over the parapet, when they got big enough to clamber up to the ledge but not big enough to flutter down safely if they fell over. So for the in-between time, I tied a long string to each one's leg, to keep them from going too far. Maybe I could, like
.
.
.
tie a line around your ankle or something?"

Miles stared up at him in a tilted fascination, and Jin was horribly afraid for a moment that he'd mortally offended the little man. But in a rusty voice, Miles finally said, "You know—under the circumstances—that might not be a bad idea, kid."

Jin grinned relief, and hurried to find a bit of rope in his cache of supplies. He hitched one end firmly to the metal rail beside the tower door, made sure it paid out all the way to the corner gutter, and returned to affix the other end to his guest's ankle. The little man was already asleep, the water bottle tucked under one arm and the gray cat under the other. Jin looped the rope around twice and made a good knot. After, he climbed back onto the chair and dimmed the hand light to a soft night-light glow, trying not to think about his mother.

Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite
.

If I ever find bedbugs, I'll catch them and put them in my jars. What do bedbugs look like, anyway?

I have no idea. It's just a silly rhyme for bedtimes. Go to sleep, Jin!

The words had used to make him feel warm, but now they made him feel cold. He hated cold.

Satisfied that he'd made all safe, and that the intriguing off-worlder could not now abandon him, Jin returned to the parapet, swung over, and started down the rungs. If he hurried, he would still get to the back door of Ayako's Cafe before all the good scraps were thrown out at closing time.

Chapter Two

When Armsman Roic woke for the second time—or maybe it was the third—the opaque drug-mush in his head had cleared to a thin throbbing haze. He felt for his wristcom and found it, unsurprisingly, gone. Groaning, he turned on his musty mattress thrown on the floor of this
.
.
.
place, and opened his eyes to plain daylight and his first clear view of his prison.

It was bare of furnishings. Some kind of old hotel room, he decided after a minute from the shape, stains, outlets, corroded-looking sprinkler overhead, and cheap light above the only door. His mattress lay in what might once have been a clothes niche, opposite a small working bathroom with the door removed. A chain bolted around his ankle led in turn to a bolt on the wall. The links were long enough to let him use the facilities, he remembered that from the blurry night, but not to reach the outer door.

He visited them again, and, hoping to wash out more of the mush, drank thirstily from a flimsy plastic cup apparently left for his use. A long narrow window stretched above a stained bathtub. He stared out onto a featureless rise crowded with tall, arrow-shaped conifers, dark and tangled. He rapped on the glass; it gave back that dull tone that said
unbreakable,
at least by anyone not armed with a power drill or perhaps a plasma arc.

He tested the length of his chain. It didn't go even halfway to the door, but by standing upright, he found he could see out the front picture window, unobscured by curtains or a polarizing filter.
They must not expect visitors
. This room seemed to open onto a second-storey gallery. The view beyond the railing ran downhill to a broad patch of flat scrub that curved out of sight, framed by more tangled taiga. Not another building to be seen.

He wasn't in the city any more, that was certain. Had there been any urban glow on the horizon last night? He could only remember the night-light in the loo. He could be ten kilometers from Northbridge or ten thousand, for all he knew. Which could make a difference, later.

He folded his considerable length back onto the mattress, and began working at the bolt in the wall, the only item even remotely resembling a weak point. It didn't budge, and his big fingers could scarcely get a purchase on the annoying little thing. If only he could get it started wriggling
.
.
.

How t' devil did I end up in this mess?
He imagined Armsman-commander Pym critiquing his actions of yesterday, and cringed. This was a thousand times worse than the infamous bug butter debacle. Yet it had all started so benignly, four weeks ago.

If abruptly, but there was nothing new to that—Lord Auditor Vorkosigan's galactic assignments from Emperor Gregor usually arrived abruptly. After a dozen off-world trips in m'lord's wake, Roic was getting practiced at the scramble to arrange m'lord's luggage, in his role of sometime-batman, m'lord's and his own travel documents, in his role as personal assistant—the job title Roic traveled under, as explaining the ancient and honorable rank of
Armsman
to galactics was always a losing game—and m'lord's security. And—though m'lord almost never discussed this aloud—private medtech for m'lord's lingering health issues.

The competent Vorkosigan House staff, under the even more competent supervision of Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan, had actually relieved him of the first of these tasks. Canceling his own affairs had cost more of a pang, as he'd just worked up the courage to invite Miss Pym down to Hassadar to meet his parents for the first time. But as an armsman's child, Aurie had understood perfectly. Courting his commander's daughter had been an oblique process this past year, rather like those Earth insects Lady Vorkosigan had described, where the male approached with painful caution lest he be mistaken for a meal by his intended. But it was Armsman-commander Pym who would tear off Roic's head and eat it if he made a mis-step.