Memory (20 page)

The moonlight rippled on the water. "And you told
me
to stand up straight and speak the truth," said Harra, after a long pause. "Does this mean you'll be spending more time in the District?"

"Maybe."

"Good."

"You're ruthless, Harra," Miles groaned.

The bugs sang their soft chorus in the woods, a tiny organic moonlight sonata. "Little man"—Harra's voice in the dark was as sweet and deadly as maple mead—"my mother killed my daughter. And was judged for it in front of all of Silvy Vale. You think I don't know what public shame is? Or waste?"

"Why d'you think I'm telling all this to you?"

Harra was silent for long enough for Lem to pass around the stone jug one last time, in the dim moonlight and shadows. Then she said, "You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on."

"What do you find on the other side? When you go on?"

She shrugged. "Your life again. What else?"

"Is that a promise?"

She picked up a pebble, fingered it, and tossed it into the water. The moon-lines bloomed and danced. "It's an inevitability. No trick. No choice. You just go on."

Miles got Martin and the lightflyer in the air again by noon the next day. Martin's eyes were red and puffy, and his face had a pale greenish cast worthy of a speed run through the Dendarii Gorge. He flew very gently and carefully, which suited Miles exactly. He was not very conversational, but he did manage a, "Did you ever find what you were looking for, m'lord?"

"The light is clearer up here in these mountains than anywhere else on Barrayar, but . . . no. It was here once, but it's not here now." Miles twisted in his seat straps, and stared back over his shoulder at the rugged receding hills.
These people need a thousand things. But they don't need a hero. At least, not a hero like Admiral Naismith. Heroes like Lem and Harra, yes.

Martin squinted, perhaps not appreciating that light just at present.

After a time, Miles asked, "How old is middle-age, Martin?"

"Oh . . ." Martin shrugged. "Thirty, I guess."

"That's what I'd always thought, too." Though he'd once heard the Countess define it as ten years older than whatever you were, a moveable feast.

"I had a professor at the Imperial Service Academy once," Miles went on, as the hills grew more gentle beneath them, "who taught the introduction to tactical engineering course. He said he never bothered changing his tests from term to term to prevent cheating, because while the questions were always the same, the answers changed. I'd thought he was joking."

"Unh?" said Martin dutifully.

"Never mind, Martin," Miles sighed. "Just go on."

After their return to the lake house, and a sparing lunch from which Martin excused himself altogether, Miles locked himself into the comconsole chamber and prepared to face the expected spate of messages forwarded from Vorbarr Sultana. The birthday congratulations were each the measure of their senders; grave and straight from Gregor, tinged with cautious mockery from Ivan, and falling into a range in between from the handful of acquaintances who knew he was on-planet.

Mark's tight-beam recording from Beta Colony was . . . Markian. His mockery was an awkward imitation of Ivan's, edgier and more self-conscious. From the stilted would-be flippancy Miles gathered this was not the message's first draft. But it was, Miles realized upon reflection, very probably the first time in his life Mark had ever had to compose a birthday greeting to
anyone
.
Keep trying, Mark, you'll learn how to be a human being yet.

Miles's judicious smugness faded as he realized this compelled him to compose a return message. It was obvious Mark hadn't heard the news about Miles's change of status yet. How the devil was he going to tell Mark about it in a way his clone-brother couldn't construe as blame? He set the problem aside, temporarily.

He saved the one from his parents for last. It had been beamed, not mailed. Therefore it would have left Sergyar in the government data tight-beam, and been express-jumped through the wormhole barriers between receivers, taking little more than a day en route; shipped message disks took as long to travel between the two worlds as a person, almost two weeks. This was, therefore, the latest news, and would contain their reactions to the latest news they'd had. He took a deep breath, and keyed it up.

They'd sat back from the vid receptor, to both fit into the scan, and so appeared as small smiling half-figures over his vid plate. Count Aral Vorkosigan was a thick-bodied, white-haired man in his early seventies, dressed in his brown-and-silver Vorkosigan House uniform; this message must have been recorded sometime during his working day. The Countess wore a Vor lady's afternoon-style jacket and skirt in green, ditto. Red roan hair, like Ninny's even to the having of more gray in it, was held back from her broad forehead by fancy combs in her usual style. She was as tall as her husband, and her gray eyes danced with amusement.

They do not know. No one's told them yet
. Miles knew this with sinking certainty before either even opened their mouth.

"Hello, love," the Countess began. "Congratulations for reaching thirty alive."

"Yes," the Count seconded. "We truly wondered if you would make it, many times. But here we all are. Somewhat the worse for wear, but after a deep contemplation of the alternative, happy to be so. I may be far from you here on Sergyar, but I can look in the mirror every morning, and remember you by all these white hairs."

"It's not true, Miles," objected the Countess, grinning. "He was already going gray when I met him, at age forty-odd. I didn't get
my
gray hairs till after, though."

"We miss you," the Count continued. "Do insist your travel to your next mission assignment be routed through Sergyar, coming or going or both, and plan at least a short layover. There's so much going on here of significance to the future of the Imperium. I know you'd be interested in seeing some of it."

"I'll light up Simon's life if he doesn't send you by," the Countess added. "You can pass that on to him as my personal threat. Alys tells me you've been home for several weeks. Why haven't we heard from you? Partying too hard with Ivan to take ten minutes out to talk to your aged parents?"

Lady Alys too had declined, it appeared, to be the bearer of even the nonclassified version of the bad news, and she was ordinarily the Countess's main gossip-pipeline to everything of Vorish interest in Vorbarr Sultana and Gregor's court.

"Speaking of Alys," the Countess went on, "she tells me Gregor has met This Girl—and you can just hear the capital letters in her voice. What do you know about this? Have you met her? Should we be happy, or worried, or what?"

"An Imperial marriage to a Komarran," said Count Vorkosigan—once nicknamed "the Butcher of Komarr" by his political enemies, most of whom he'd survived—"is fraught with potential complications. But at this late date, if Gregor will only do his duty and produce a proper Crown Prince
somehow
, I'll do whatever I can to support the project. And all of us in my generation who were in the pool of potential heirs will breathe a great sigh of relief. Assure Gregor of my full support. I trust his judgment." The Count's face grew oddly wistful. "Does she seem like a nice girl? Gregor deserves a little personal happiness, to make up for all the nonsense on the other side that he bears for us all."

"Alys said she'll do," said the Countess, "and I trust Alys's judgment. Though I don't know if the young lady quite realizes what she's getting into. Please assure Dr. Toscane of
my
full support, Miles, whatever she decides to do."

"Surely she'll accept, if Gregor asks her," said the Count.

"Only if she's so head-over-heels in love as to have lost all sense of self-preservation," said the Countess. "Believe me, you have to have lost your mind to marry a Barrayaran Vor. Let's hope she has." Miles's parents exchanged peculiar smiles.

"So let's see," the Count went on. "What were we doing at age thirty? Can you remember back that far, Cordelia?"

"Barely. I was in the Betan Astronomical Survey, screwing up my first chance at being promoted to captain. It came around again the next year, though, and you bet I grabbed it then. Without which I would never have met Aral when and where I did and you wouldn't exist, Miles, so I don't wish to change a bit of it now."

"I was a captain by twenty-eight," the Count reminisced smugly. The Countess made a face at him. "Ship duty suited me. I didn't get stuck at a desk for another four or five years, when Ezar and the Headquarters hotshots began planning the annexation of Komarr." His face grew serious again. "Good luck to Gregor on this thing of his. I hope he can succeed where . . . I did not succeed so well as I'd hoped to. Thank God for a new generation and clean starts." He and the Countess glanced at each other and he finished, "So long, boy. Communicate, dammit."

The Countess added, "Take good care of yourself, kiddo, please? Communicate, dammit." Their forms twinkled into thin air.

Miles sighed. I can't put this off much longer, I really can't.

He did manage to put it off one more day, by having Martin fly him back to Vorbarr Sultana the following morning. Ma Kosti served Miles lunch in splendid isolation in the Yellow Parlor; she'd obviously worked hard to make it as proper as possible, perhaps studying up on her new job from etiquette manuals, or getting tips from other Vors' servants in the area. He ate dutifully, despite an urge to gather up his plates and go join Martin and his mother in the kitchen. Certain aspects of the Vor lord role seemed remarkably stupid, at times.

Afterwards, he went to his room to finally face the task of composing a message to his parents. He'd recorded and erased three different tries—one too glum, one too flippant, one way too full of ugly sarcasms—when an incoming call interrupted his endeavors. He welcomed it despite the fact that it was Ivan. Ivan was in uniform, calling on his lunch break, perhaps.

"Ah, you're back in town. Good," Ivan began. That
Good
seemed quite heartfelt, apparently on more than one level. "Feeling better for the little vacation in the hills, I trust?"

"Somewhat," Miles said cautiously. How had Ivan found out so soon that he was back?

"Good," Ivan repeated. "Now. I've been wondering. Have you done anything toward getting your head looked at yet? Seen a doctor?"

"Not yet."

"Made an appointment anywhere?"

"No."

"Hm. Mother asked me. Gregor'd asked her, it seems. Guess who's at the bottom of that chain of command, and gets delegated to actually do something about it. I said I didn't think you'd done anything yet, but I'd ask. Why haven't you?"

"I . . ." Miles shrugged. "There didn't seem to be any rush. I wasn't bounced out of ImpSec for having seizures, I was bounced out of ImpSec for falsifying a report. And not one on a minor matter, either. Even if the medicos could do something to get me back into guaranteed perfect working order tomorrow, which if they could my Dendarii surgeon would have already done it, it wouldn't . . . change anything."
Illyan won't take me back. He can't. It's a matter of frigging principle, and Illyan is one of the most principled men I know.

"I'd wondered . . . if it was because you didn't want to go to ImpMil," said Ivan. "Didn't want to deal with the military docs. If that's the case, I understand, I suppose—I think you're being silly, mind you, but I can understand. So I've looked up three different civilian clinics that specialize in cryo-revival cases, that seem to have good reputations. One's here in Vorbarr Sultana, one's over in Weienovya in Vordarian's District, and one's on Komarr, if you think closer proximity to galactic medicine is an advantage that would offset any lingering animosity toward your name there. You want me to make you an appointment at one of them?"

Miles thought he could guess the names of all three, from his prior search. "No. Thanks."

Ivan sat back, his lips twisting in puzzlement. "You know . . . I'd figured that would be the first thing you'd do, once the little ice-water bath brought you up out of the fog. You'd get your legs under yourself and be off and running, just like always. I never saw you face a wall that, if you couldn't go over it, you'd not try to find some way around, through, or under, or blow it up with sapper's charges. Or just bang your head against it till it fell down. And then they'd stick
me
with chasing you. Again."

"Running where, Ivan?"

Ivan grimaced. "Back to the Dendarii, of course."

"You know I can't do that. Without my official position in ImpSec, under due Imperial authority, my command of the Dendarii becomes a Vor lord, a Count's heir for God's sake, running a private army. Treason, Ivan, lethal treason. We've been all through that before. If I went, I could never come back. I gave my word to Gregor I wouldn't do it."

"Yeah?" said Ivan. "If you're not coming back, what does your word as Vorkosigan have to do with anything ever again?"

Miles sat silent. So. That business with having Ivan underfoot in Vorkosigan House hadn't been only a deathwatch after all. It had been an escape-watch as well.

"I'd have bet money you'd bolt," Ivan went on, "if there'd been anybody who had a high enough security classification to bet with. Besides Galeni, of course, and he's not the wagering sort. 'S why I've been dragging my feet despite Gregor and Mother about harassing you to get your head fixed. Why borrow trouble? It's a bet I'm glad to lose, by the way. So when
are
you going to get an appointment?"

" . . . Soon."

"Too vague," Ivan rejected this. "I want a straight answer. Something like,
Today.
Or maybe,
Tomorrow before noon
."

Ivan wouldn't go away till he extracted a response that satisfied him. "By . . . the end of the week," Miles managed.

"Good." Ivan nodded shortly. "I'll check back at the end of the week and expect to hear all about it. 'Bye—for now." He cut the com.