Memory (36 page)

Miles snorted. He wondered about his own motivations, which had driven him so hard, so long, so far. To death, and beyond. He was unexcited by money, he supposed, because he had never felt its lack, except in the astronomical quantities necessary to repair battle cruisers; Mark, by contrast, was in his own quiet way downright greedy. Power? Miles had no hankering for the Imperium, or anything like it. But it itched like fire when others had power over him. That wasn't lust for power; that was fear. Fear of what? Fear of being made victim of their incompetence? Fear of being destroyed for a mutant, if he could not constantly prove his superiority? There was a bit of that, underneath. Well . . . quite a lot, really. His own grandfather had tried to kill him for his deformities, he'd been told; and there had been a few other ugly little incidents during his childhood, usually, though not always, cut short by the timely intervention of Sergeant Bothari. But that was hardly a hidden motivation, not the un-self-aware kind that got you into deep trouble and you didn't know why.

He swallowed another chill and smoky slug of beer.
Identity. That's my elephant.
The thought came with certainty, without the question mark on the end this time. Not fame, exactly, though recognition was some kind of important cement for it. But what you were was what you did.
And I did more, oh yes.
If a hunger for identity were translated into, say, a hunger for food, he'd be a more fantastic glutton than Mark had ever dreamed of being.
Is it irrational, to want to be so much, to want so hard it hurts?
And how much, then, was
enough
?

Illyan too took another swig of home-brew, and wriggled the carbon-fiber high-strength fishing rod, which like Miles's had come from the boathouse's stores. "You sure there are fish down there?"

"Oh, yes. Have been for centuries. You can lie on the dock and watch the little ones, nosing around the rocks, or swim with them. This lake was actually first terraformed long before the end of the Time of Isolation, in the old crude way, which was by dumping every kind of organic waste they could lay hands on into it, followed by stolen weeds and minnows, and hoping an earth-life-form-supporting ecosystem would result. There was a lot of argument over it, back about the time of the first Counts, since the local farmers also wanted the assorted shit for their fields. Since the Count-my-Grandfather's day there's been a string of fellows who work out of the Count's Office in Hassadar, in charge of scientifically terraforming and stocking the District's waters, so it's back to being safe to drink
and
the fish are genetically improved. Lake trout, bass, freshwater salmon . . . there's some good stuff down there."

Illyan leaned over and stared a little doubtfully down into the clear water. "Really." He wound up his line, and examined his hook. His bait-cube was gone.

"Did I put bait on this thing?"

"Yes. I saw you. Fell off, likely."

"Light-fingered fish." But Illyan resisted any impulse to make a more extended mutant-fish joke. He rebaited the hook more firmly and ploinked it into the water again. They opened another beer each. Miles perched on the edge of the boat, and cooled his bare feet in the water for a time.

"This is very inefficient," Illyan noted, after adjusting the awning to reposition the creeping shade.

"I've wondered about that myself. I don't think it was designed to be efficient. I think it was created to give the appearance of doing something, while actually doing nothing. To repel chore-bearing wives, perhaps."

"I've been doing nothing for a week." Illyan hesitated. "It hasn't seemed to help."

"Not true. You're doing better at One-Up. I've been tracking you."

"I thought you and Lady Alys had colluded to let me win, last time."

"Nope."

"Ah." Illyan looked slightly cheered, but only for a moment. "The ability to play One-Up without losing all the time is not enough to make me fit to return to ImpSec, I'm afraid."

"Give yourself time. You've scarcely begun rehabilitation." Miles's feet were getting wrinkled; he returned to his padded seat.

Illyan stared at the farther shore, all green and brown in the westering sun. "No . . . there is an edge to a performance. When you've balanced on that edge, played at the very top of your form . . . you can't go back to anything less. To invert your mother's old saying, anything that can't be done well is not worth doing. And . . . running ImpSec is about as far from
play
as anything I know. There are too many other peoples' lives on the line, every day."

"Mm," said Miles, covering his lack of useful comment in another swig of beer.

"I've had my twice-twenty-years in the Emperor's service," Illyan said. "Started when I was eighteen, in officer's training for old Ezar . . . not the Imperial Service Academy; you needed more points and money and syllables in front of your name to get in back then. I went to one of the regional schools. I never thought to make it to a three-times-twenty-years man. I knew I'd stop sometime before that, I just didn't know when. I've been serving Gregor since he was five years old. He's full-adult now, God knows."

"That's your achievement, surely," said Miles.

Illyan nodded. "Not mine alone. But I can't . . . be who I am—what I was—and not know that."

"I never made it to the end of my first twenty years," said Miles glumly. "Not even close."

Illyan cleared his throat, and studied his line. "Was that a nibble, there?"

"No, I don't think so. The rod would dip more. Just the current, playing with the weight of the line."

"I wouldn't have picked now to quit, mind you," said Illyan. "I would have liked to have seen Gregor through his wedding."

"And the next crisis after that," Miles twitted him. "And the next crisis after that, and . . ."

Illyan grunted resigned agreement. "So . . . maybe this isn't so bad." He added after a time, "Do you suppose all the fish in your lake have been stolen?"

"They'd have to catch 'em first."

"Ah. Good point." Illyan paused to fish up the net bag, and open another beer for himself, and hand one to Miles. He was halfway through the bottle when he said, "I . . . know how much the Dendarii meant to you. I'm . . . pleased you survived."

He did not say
I'm sorry
, Miles noted. Miles's disaster had been a self-inflicted wound. "Death, where is thy sting?" He jiggled his rod. "Hook, where is thy fish . . . ? No. Suicide wasn't an option for me anymore, I found. Not like good old adolescent angst. I'm no longer of the secret opinion that death will somehow overlook me if I don't do something personally about it. And given life . . . it seems stupid not to make the most of what I do have. Not to mention deucedly ungrateful."

"D'you think . . . you and Quinn . . . how to put this delicately. D'you think you will be able to persuade Captain Quinn to take an interest in Lord Vorkosigan?"

Ah. Illyan was trying to apologize for screwing up Miles's
love
-life, that was it. Miles drank more beer, and thought it over seriously. "I never was able to before. I want to try. . . . I have to try one more time with her. Again."
When? How? Where?
It hurt, to think of Quinn. It hurt still, to let himself think of the Dendarii at all. Therefore, he would not. Much.
More beer.
"As for the rest of it . . ."—he sipped, and smiled bitterly—"there is some convincing evidence that I was slowing down too much to play a moving target much longer. Really, my favorite missions lately scarcely engaged any military force."

"You were getting frigging clever, is all," opined Illyan, gazing at Miles's distorted form through the colored glass of his bottle. "Though even a war of maneuver requires a credible force to maneuver with."

"I liked the winning," Miles said softly. "That, I really liked."

Illyan chucked his bottle into the box with the rest of the empties, and leaned over to squint down into the lake water. He sighed, and got up and adjusted the awning again, and pulled up the string bag once more, in lieu of fish.

Miles held up his half-empty bottle, to repel the offered refill, and settled back, and watched his still white line, descending down and down into secret darkness. "I always got away with it somehow. Any way I could. On the table or under it, I won. This seizure thing . . . seems like the first enemy I couldn't outsmart."

Illyan's brows rose quizzically. "Some of the best fortresses were taken at the last by betrayal from within, they say."

"I was beaten." Miles blew thoughtfully across the top of his bottle, making it hum. "Yet I survived. Didn't expect that. I feel . . . very unbalanced about that. I
had
to win, always, or die. So . . . what else was I wrong about? . . . I'll take that other beer, now, thanks."

Illyan popped the cap for him, and handed it over. The lake water was getting nicely icy now, definitely too late in the year for swimming. Or drowning.

"Maybe," said Illyan after a very long while, "generations of fishermen have culled this population of all fish stupid enough to bite hooks."

" 'S possible," Miles allowed. His guest was getting bored, he feared. As a proper host, he ought to do something about that.

"
I
don't think there
are
any fish down there. It's a scam, Vorkosigan."

"Naw. I've seen 'em. If I had a stunner, I could prove it to you."

"You walking around these days without a stunner, boy? Not bright."

"Hey, I'm an Imperial Auditor now. I get hulking goons to carry my stunners for me, just like the big boys."

"Anyway, you couldn't stun anything through all those meters of water," said Illyan firmly.

"Well, not a stunner. A stunner power pack."

"Ah!" Illyan looked immediately enlightened, then more doubtful. "You can bomb fish, can you? I didn't realize that."

"Oh, it's an old Dendarii hill-folk trick.
They
didn't have time to sit on their asses dangling strings into the water; that's a Vor perversion. They were hungry, and wanted their dinners. Also, the lake's lords considered it poaching in their preserve, so there was incentive to get in and out quickly, before the Count's Armsmen came riding along."

After about another minute, Illyan mentioned, "I happen to have a stunner on me."

Dear God, we let you get out armed? "Oh?"

Illyan put down his beer, and pulled the weapon from his pocket. "Here. I offer it as sacrifice. I have to see this trick."

"Ah. Well . . ." Miles put down his own beer, handed his rod to Illyan, and looked over the stunner. Regulation issue, fully charged. He pulled out the power pack and proceeded to bugger the cartridge, in the best approved ImpSec covert ops "How to Turn Your Stunner into a Hand Grenade" style. He took another swig of beer, counted a moment, and flipped the power cartridge overboard.

"You'd better hope that sinks," noted Illyan.

"It will. See." The metallic gleam vanished into the darkness.

"How many seconds?" asked Illyan.

"You never quite know, of course. That's one of the things that always made that maneuver so damned tricky."

A half a minute later, the darkness was lit by a faint radiant flash. A few moments after that, a roiling boil of water surfaced beside the boat. The noise it made could much better be described as a belch than a boom. The boat rocked.

Onshore, the ImpSec guard stood up abruptly, and studied them through his power-binocs. Miles gave him a cheery, beery, reassuring wave; slowly, he sat back down.

"Well?" said Illyan, peering down into the water.

"Just wait."

About two minutes later, a pale gleaming shape shimmered up from below. And then another. And another. Two more, silvery and sleek, popped to the surface.

"Goodness," said Illyan, sounding impressed. "Fish." He upended his beer bottle respectfully in a toast to Miles.

Fish and then some. The smallest was half a meter long, the largest nearly two-thirds of a meter; salmon and lake trout, including one that must have been lurking down there since Miles's grandfather's day. Their eyes were glassy and reproachful, as Miles leaned precariously overboard and tried to collect them with the net. They were cool and slippery, and Miles almost joined them in their watery grave before he managed to snag them all. Illyan prudently hung on to one of his ankles as Miles swung and splashed. Their prey made an impressive row, laid out on the boat deck, scales iridescent in the late afternoon light.

"We have fished," Illyan announced, staring at the mass, which almost equaled Miles's own. "Can we go in now?"

"You got another stunner pack?"

"No."

"Any beer left?"

"That was the last."

"Then we might as well."

Illyan grinned malignantly. "I can hardly wait," he murmured, "till somebody asks me what we used for bait."

Miles managed to dock the boat without crashing it, despite a desperate need to pee and up-and-down sensations that had nothing to do with the waves in the water. He listed upslope toward the house lugging the two smaller fish on a line strung through their gills, and let Illyan struggle with the larger three.

"Do we have to eat all these?" Illyan wheezed in his wake.

"Maybe one. The rest can be cleaned and frozen."

"By whom? Will Ma Kosti mind? I really don't think you want to offend your cook, Miles."

"By no means." Miles stopped, and nodded upward. "What d'you think minions are for, anyway?"

Martin, attracted by the return of the boat—and probably about to angle for permission to take it out himself—was clumping down the path toward them.

"Ah, Martin," Miles caroled, in a tone of voice that would have made the more experienced Ivan turn and run. "Just the man I want to see. Take these to your mother"—he unloaded his burden into the appalled young man's arms—"and do what she tells you to do with 'em. Here, Simon."

Smiling blandly, Illyan handed over his own dead fishes. "Thank you, Martin."

They left Martin, ruthlessly not even looking back at his plaintive, "My lord . . . ?" and lurched on up toward the cool stone house. The greatest ambition in Miles's world right now was for a lavatory, a shower, and a nap, in that order. It would be enough.