CHAPTER TWO

Miles floundered from a dream of his hostess’s hair which, if not exactly erotic, was embarrassingly sensual. Unbound from the severe style she’d favored yesterday, it had revealed itself a rich dark brown with amber highlights, a mass of silk flowing coolly through his stubby hands-he presumed they were his hands, it had been his dream, after all. I woke up too soon. Rats. At least the vision had not been tinged with any of the gory grotesqueries of his occasional nightmares, from which he came awake cold and damp, with heart racing. He was warm and comfortable, in the silly elaborate grav-bed she had insisted on producing for him.

It wasn’t Madame Vorsoisson’s fault that she happened to belong to a certain physical type that set off old resonances in Miles’s memory. Some men harbored obsessions about much stranger things… his own fixation, he had long ago ruefully recognized, was on long cool brunettes with expressions of quiet reserve and warm alto voices. True, on a world where people altered their faces and bodies almost as casually as they altered their wardrobes, there was nothing in the least unusual about her beauty. Till one remembered she wasn’t from here, and realized her ivory-skinned features were almost certainly untouched by modification… Had she recognized his idiot-babble, last night on her balcony, as suppressed sexual panic? Had that odd remark about a Vor woman’s duties been an oblique warning to him to back off? But he hadn’t been on, he didn’t think. Was he that transparent?

Miles had realized within five minutes of his arrival that he should probably not have let the genial and expansive Vorthys bully him into accompanying him downside, but the man seemed constitutionally incapable of not sharing a treat. That the pleasures of this family reunion might not be equally enjoyed by an awkward outsider-or the family into which he’d been thrust-had clearly never occurred to the Professor.

Miles sighed envy of his host. Administrator Vorsoisson seemed to have achieved a perfect little Vor clan. Of course, he’d had the wit to start a decade ago. The arrival of galactic sex-selection technologies had resulted in a shortage of female births on Barrayar. This dearth of women had reached its lowest ebb in Miles’s generation, though parents seemed to be coming back to their senses now. Still, every Vor woman Miles knew close to his own age was already married, and had been for years. Was he going to have to wait another twenty years for his own bride?

If necessary. No lusting after married women, boy. You’re an Imperial Auditor now. The nine Imperial Auditors were expected to be models of rectitude and respectability. He could not recall ever hearing of any kind of sex scandal touching one of Emperor Gregor’s handpicked agent-observers. Of course not. All the rest of the Auditors are eighty years old and have been married for fifty of ’em. He snorted. Besides, she probably thought he was a mutant, though thankfully she’d been too polite to say so. To his face.

So find out if she has a sister, eh?

He wallowed out of the grav-bed’s indolence-inducing clutches and sat up, forcing his mind to switch gears. At a conservative guess, a couple hundred thousand words of new data on the soletta accident and its consequences would be incoming this shift. He would, he decided, start with a cold shower.

No comfortable ship-knits today. After selecting among the three new formal civilian suits he’d packed along from Barrayar-in shades of gray, gray, and gray-Miles combed his damp hair neatly and sauntered out to Madame Vorsoisson’s kitchen, from which voices and the perfume of coffee wafted. There he found Nikolai munching Barrayaran-style groats and milk, Administrator Vorsoisson fully dressed and apparently on the verge of leaving, and Professor Vorthys, still in pajamas, sorting through a new array of data disks and frowning. A glass of pink fruit juice sat untasted at his elbow. He looked up and said, “Ah, good morning, Miles. Glad you’re up,” seconded by Vorsoisson’s polite, “Good morning, Lord Vorkosigan. I trust you slept well?”

“Fine, thanks. What’s up, Professor?”

“Your comm link arrived from ImpSec’s local office.” Vorthys pointed to the device beside his plate. “I notice they didn’t send me one.”

Miles grimaced. “Your father was not so famous in the Komarran conquest.”

“True,” agreed Vorthys. “The old gentleman fell in that odd generation between the wars, too young to fight the Cetagandans, too old to aggress on the poor Komarrans. This lack of military opportunity was a source of great personal regret to him, we children were given to understand.”

Miles strapped the comm link onto his left wrist. It represented a compromise between himself and ImpSec Serifosa, which would otherwise be responsible for his health here. ImpSec had wanted to err on the side of caution and surround him with an inconvenient mob of bodyguards. Miles had ventured to test his Imperial Auditor’s authority by ordering them to stay out of his hair; to his delight, it had worked. But the link gave him a straight line to ImpSec, and tracked his location-he tried not to feel like an experimental animal released into the wild. “And what are those?” He nodded to the data disks.

Vorthys spread the disks like a bad hand of cards. “The morning courier also brought us recordings of last night’s haul of new bits. And something especially for you, since you kindly volunteered to take over the review of the medical end of things. A new preliminary autopsy.”

“They finally found the pilot?” Miles relieved him of the disks.

Vorthys grimaced. “Parts of her.”

Madame Vorsoisson entered from the balcony in time to hear this. “Oh, dear.” She was dressed as yesterday in Komarran-style street wear in dull earthy tones: loose trousers, blouse, and long vest, muffling whatever figure she possessed. She would have been brilliant in red, or breathtaking in pale blue, with those blue eyes… her hair this morning was soberly tied back again, rather to Miles’s relief. It would have been unnerving to think he was developing some form of precognition as a result of his late injuries, along with his damned seizures.

Miles nodded good morning to her and carefully returned his attention to Vorthys. “I must have been sleeping well. I didn’t hear the courier come in. You’ve reviewed them already?”

“Just a glance.”

“What parts of the pilot did they find?” asked Nikolai, interested.

“Never you mind, young man,” said his great-uncle firmly.

“Thank you,” murmured Madame Vorsoisson to him.

“That makes the last body, though. Good,” said Miles. “It’s so distressing for the relatives when they lose one altogether. When I was-” He cut off the rest, When I was a covert ops fleet commander, we’d move the heavens to try and get the bodies of our casualties back to their people. That chapter of his life was closed, now.

Madame Vorsoisson, splendid woman, handed him black coffee. She then inquired what her guests would like for breakfast; Miles maneuvered Vorthys into answering first, and volunteered for groats along with him. As she bustled around serving, and mopping up after Nikolai, Administrator Vorsoisson said, “My department’s presentation will be ready for you this afternoon, Auditor Vorthys. This morning Ekaterin wondered if you would like to see Nikolai’s school. And after the presentation, perhaps there will be time for a flyover of some of our projects.”

“Sounds like a fine itinerary.” Professor Vorthys smiled at Nikolai. In all the hustle of their hurried departure from Barrayar, he-or perhaps the Professora-had not forgotten a gift for his great-nephew. I should have brought something for the kid, Miles decided belatedly. Surest way to please a mother. “Ah, Miles…?”

Miles tapped the stack of data disks beside his bowl. “I suspect I’ll have enough to occupy myself here this morning. Madame Vorsoisson, I noticed a comconsole in your workroom; may I use it?”

“Certainly, Lord Vorkosigan.”

With a polite murmur about getting things in order for them at his department, Vorsoisson took his leave, and the breakfast party broke up shortly thereafter, each to their assorted destinations. Miles, new disks in hand, returned to Madame Vorsoisson’s workroom/guest room.

He paused before seating himself at her comconsole, to stare out the sealed window at the park, and the transparent dome arcing over it to let in the free solar energy. Komarr’s wan sun was not directly visible, risen to the east behind this apartment block, but the line of its morning light crept across the far edge of the park. The damaged insolation mirror, following it, had not yet risen over the horizon to double the shadows it cast.

So does this mean seven thousand years bad luck?

He sighed, darkened the window’s polarization-scarcely necessary-seated himself at the comconsole, and began feeding it data disks. A couple of dozen good-sized new pieces of wreckage had been retrieved overnight; he ran the vids of them turning in space as the salvage ships approached. Theory was, if you could find every fragment, take precise recordings of all their spins and trajectories, and then run them backward, you could end up with a computer-generated picture of the very moment of the disaster, and so diagnose its cause. Real life never worked out quite that neatly, alas, but every little bit helped. ImpSec Komarr was still canvassing the orbital transfer stations for any casual vid-carrying tourists who might have been panning that section of space at the time of the whatever-and-collision. Futilely by now, Miles feared; usually, such people came forward immediately, excited and wanting to be helpful.

Vorthys and the probable-cause crew were now of the opinion that the ore tow had already been in more than one piece at the moment it had struck the mirror, a speculation which had not yet been released to the general public. So had the evidence-destroying explosion of the engines been cause or consequence of that catastrophe? And at what point had those tortured fragments of metal and plastic acquired some of their more interesting distortions?

Miles reran, for the twentieth time that week, the computer’s track of the freighter’s course prior to the collision, and contemplated its anomalies. The ship had carried only its pilot, on a routine-indeed, dead boring-slow run in from the asteroid mining belt to an orbital refinery. The engines had not been supposed to be thrusting at the time of the accident; acceleration had been completed and deceleration was not yet due to begin. The tow ship had been running about five hours ahead of schedule, but only because it had departed early, not because it had boosted hotter than usual. It had been coasting off-course by about six percent, within normal parameters and not yet ready for course correction, though the pilot might have been amusing herself trying to achieve more precision with some unscheduled microboosting. Even with the minor course correction due, the tow ship’s route had been several hundred comfortable kilometers from the soletta array, in fact farther away than if it had been precisely on course.

What the course variation had done was take the freighter’s track almost directly across one of Komarr’s unused worm-hole jump points. Komarr local space was unusually rich in active jump points, a fact of strategic and historic consequence; one of the jumps was Barrayar’s only gateway to the wormhole nexus. It was for control of the jump points, not for possession of the chilly planet, that Barrayar’s invasion fleet had poured through here thirty-five years ago. As long as the Imperium’s military held that high ground, its interest in Komarr’s downside population and their problems was, at best, mild.

This jump point, however, supported neither traffic nor trade nor strategic threat. Explorations through it had dead-ended either in deep interstellar space, or close to stars that did not support either habitable planets or economically recoverable system resources. Nobody jumped out through there; nobody should have jumped in through there. The immediate vision of some unmotivated pirate-villain popping out of the worm-hole, potting the innocent ore freighter-by some weapon that left no traces, mind you-and popping back in again was currently unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, though the area had been scoured for it. It was the news media’s current favorite scenario. But none of the five-space trails generated by ships taking wormhole jumps had been detected, either.

The five-space anomaly of the jump point was not even observable by ordinary means from three-space; it should not, just sitting there, have affected the freighter in any way even if the ship had passed directly across its central vortex. The freighter was a dedicated inner-system ship, and lacked Necklin rods and jump capacity. Still… the jump point was there. Nothing else was.

Miles rubbed his neck and turned to the new autopsy report. Gruesome, as always. The pilot had been a Komarran woman in her mid-fifties. Call it Barrayaran sexism, but female corpses always bothered Miles more. Death was such a malicious destroyer of dignity. Had he looked that disordered and exposed when he’d gone down to the sniper’s fire? The pilot’s body showed the usual progression: smashed, decompressed, irradiated, and frozen, all quite typical of deep-space impact accidents. One arm torn off, somewhere in the initial crunch rather than later, judging from the close-up vids of the freezing-effects of liquids lost at the stump. It had been a quick death, anyway. Miles knew better than to add, Almost painless. No traces of illicit drugs or alcohol had been found in her frozen tissues.

The Komarran medical examiner, along with his six final reports, included a message wanting to know if he had Miles’s permission to release the bodies of the six members of the mirror’s station-keeping crew back to their waiting families.

Good God, hadn’t that been done yet? As an Imperial Auditor, he wasn’t supposed to be running this investigation, just observing and reporting on it. He did not desire his mere presence to freeze anyone’s initiative. He fired off the permission immediately, right from Madame Vorsoisson’s comconsole.

He started working his way through the six reports. They were more detailed than the prelims he’d already seen, but contained no surprises. By this time, he wanted a surprise, something, anything beyond Spaceship blows up for no reason, kills seven. Not to mention the astronomical property damage bill. With three reports assimilated, and his bland breakfast becoming a regret in his stomach, he backed out for a short period of mental recovery.

Idly, while waiting for the queasiness to pass, he sorted through Madame Vorsoisson’s data files. The one titled Virtual Gardens sounded pleasant. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind if he took a virtual stroll through them. The Water Garden enticed him. He called it up on the holovid plate before him.

It was, as he had guessed, a landscape design program. One could view it from any distance or angle, from a miniature-looking total overview to a blown-up detailed inspection of a particular planting; one could program a stroll through its paths at any given eye level. He chose his own, at ahem-mumble-something under five feet. The individual plants grew according to realistic programs taking into account light, water, gravitation, trace nutrients, and even attacks by programmed pests. This garden was about a third filled, with tentative arrangements of grasses, violets, sedges, water lilies, and horsetails; it was currently suffering an outbreak of algae. The colors and shapes stopped abruptly at the unfinished edges, as if an invasion from some alien gray geometric universe were gobbling it all up.

His curiosity piqued, in best approved ImpSec style he dropped to the program’s underlayer and checked for activity levels. The busiest recently, he discovered, was one labeled The Barrayaran Garden. He popped back up to the display level, selected his own eye-height again, and entered it.

It was not a garden of pretty Earth-plants set on some suitably famous site on Barrayar; it was a garden made up entirely and exclusively of native species, something he would not have guessed possible, let alone lovely. He’d always considered their uniform red-brown hues and stubby forms boring at best. The only Barrayaran vegetation he could identify and name offhand was that to which he was violently allergic. But Madame Vorsoisson had somehow used shape and texture to create a sepia-toned serenity. Rocks and running water framed the various plants-there was a low carmine mass of love-lies-itching, forming a border for a billowing blond stand of razor-grass, which, he had once been assured, botanically was not a grass. Nobody argued about the razor part, he’d noticed. Judging from the common names, the lost Barrayaran colonists had not loved their new xenobotany: damnweed, henbloat, goatbane… It’s beautiful. How did she make it beautiful? He’d never seen anything like it. Maybe that kind of artist’s eye was something you just had to be born with, like perfect pitch, which he also lacked.

In the Imperial capital of Vorbarr Sultana, there was a small and dull green park at the end of the block beside Vorkosigan House, on a site where another old mansion had been torn down. The little park had been leveled with more of an eye to security concerns for the neighboring Lord Regent than any aesthetic plan. Would it not be splendid, to replace it with a larger version of this glorious subtlety, and give the city-dwellers a taste of their own planetary heritage? Even if it would-he checked— take fifteen years to grow to this mature climax…

The virtual garden program was supposed to help prevent time-consuming and costly design mistakes. But when all the garden you could have was what you could pack in your luggage, he supposed it could be a hobby in its own right. It was certainly neater, tidier, and easier than the real thing. So… why did he guess she found it approximately as satisfying as looking at a holovid of dinner instead of eating it?

Or maybe she’s just homesick. Regretfully, he closed down the display.

In pure trained habit, he next called up her financial program, for a little quick analysis. It turned out to be her household account. She ran her home on a quite tight budget, given what Administrator Vorsoisson’s salary ought to be, Miles thought; her biweekly allowance was rather stingy. She didn’t spend nearly as much on her botanical hobbies as the results suggested she must. Other hobbies, other vices? The money trail was always the most revealing of people’s true pursuits; ImpSec hired the Imperium’s best accountants to find ingenious ways to hide their own activities, for that very reason. She spent damn little on clothes, except for Nikolai’s. He’d heard parents of his acquaintance complain about the cost of dressing their children, but surely this was extraordinary… wait, that wasn’t a clothing expenditure. Funds squeezed here, here, and there were all being funneled into a dedicated little private account labeled “Nikolai’s Medical.”

Why? As dependents of a Barrayaran bureaucrat on Komarr, weren’t the Vorsoissons’ medical expenses covered by the Imperium?

He called up the account. A year’s worth of savings from her household budget did not make a very impressive pile, but the pattern of contributions was steady to the point of being compulsive. Puzzled, he backed out again and called up the whole program list. Clues?

One file, down at the end of the list, had no name. He called it up immediately. It turned out to be the only thing on her comconsole which required a password for entry. Interesting.

Her comconsole program was the simplest and cheapest commercial type. ImpSec cadets dissected files like this as a class warmup exercise. A touch of homesickness of his own twinged through him. He dropped to the underlayer and had its password choked out in about five minutes. Vorzohn’s Dystrophy? Well, that wasn’t a mnemonic he would have guessed offhand. His reflexes overtook his growing unease. He had the file open simultaneously with belated second thoughts, You’re not in ImpSec anymore, you know. Should you be doing this?

The file proved to contain a medical course’s worth of articles, culled from every imaginable Barrayaran and galactic source, on the topic of one of Barrayar’s rarer and more obscure home-grown genetic disorders. Vorzohn’s Dystrophy had arisen during the Time of Isolation, principally, as its name suggested, among the Vor caste, but had not been medically identified as a mutation until the return of galactic medicine. For one thing, it lacked the sort of exterior markers that would have caused, well, him for example, to have had his throat cut at birth. It was an adult-onset disease, beginning with a bewildering variety of physical debilitations and ending with mental collapse and death. In the harsher world of Barrayar’s past, carriers frequently met their deaths from other causes after bearing or engendering children, but before the syndrome manifested itself. Enough madness ran in enough families— including some of my dear Vorrutyer ancestors-from other causes that late onset was frequently identified as something else anyway. Thoroughly nasty.

But it’s treatable now, isn’t it?

Yes, albeit expensively; that went with the rare part, no economies of scale. Miles scanned rapidly down the articles. Symptoms were manageable with a variety of costly biochemical concoctions to flush out and replace the distorted molecules; retrogenetic true cures were available at a higher price. Well, almost true cures: any progeny would still have to be screened for it, preferably at the time of fertilization and before being popped into the uterine replicator for gestation.

Hadn’t young Nikolai been gestated in a uterine replicator? Good God, Vorsoisson surely hadn’t insisted his wife-and child-go through the dangers of old-fashioned body-gestation, had he? Only a few of the most conservative Old Vor families still held out for the old ways, a custom upon which Miles’s own mother had vented the most violently acerbic criticism he’d ever heard from her lips. And she should know.

So what the hell is going on here? He sat back, mouth tight. If, as the files suggested, Nikolai was known or suspected to carry Vorzohn’s Dystrophy, one or both of his parents must also. How long had they known?

He suddenly realized what he should have noticed before, in the initial illusion of smug marital bliss which Vorsoisson managed to project. That was always the hardest part, seeing the absent pieces. About three more children were missing, that was what. Some little sisters for Nikolai, please, folks? But no. So they’ve known at least since shortly after their son was born. What a personal nightmare. But is he the carrier, or is she? He hoped it wasn’t Madame Vorsoisson; horrible to think of that serene beauty crumbling under the onslaught of such internal disruption…

I don’t want to know all this.

His idle curiosity was justly punished. This idiot snooping was surely not proper behavior for an Imperial Auditor, however much it had been inculcated in an ImpSec covert ops agent. Former agent. Where was all that shiny new Auditor’s probity now? He might as well have been sniffing in her underwear drawer. I can’t leave you alone for a damn minute, can I, boy?

He’d chafed for years under military regulations, till he’d come to a job with no written regs at all. His sense of having died and gone to heaven had lasted about five minutes. An Imperial Auditor was the Emperor’s Voice, his eyes and ears and sometimes hands, a lovely job description till you stopped to wonder just what the hell that poetic metaphor was supposed to mean.

So was it a useful test to ask himself, Can I imagine Gregor doing this or that thing? Gregor’s apparent Imperial sternness hid an almost painful personal shyness. The mind boggled. All right, should the question instead be, Could I imagine Gregor in his office as Emperor doing this? Just what acts, wrong for a private individual, were yet lawful for an Imperial Auditor carrying out his duties? Lots, according to the precedents he’d been reading. So was the real rule, “Ad lib till you make a mistake, and then we’ll destroy you”? Miles wasn’t sure he liked that one at all.

And even in his ImpSec days, slicing through someone’s private files had been a treatment reserved for enemies, or at least suspects. Well, and prospective recruits. And neutrals in whose territory you expected to be operating. And… and… he snorted self-derision. Gregor at least had better manners than ImpSec.