Memory

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Miles stood in the concourse just outside Customs Processing on one of Komarr's larger orbital transfer stations. Smells like a space station, oh, yeah. It was not a sweet perfume, that odd acridity compounded of machinery, electronics, humanity and all its effluvia, and chill air run through filters which never quite succeeded in reducing its complexity. But it was familiar, universal, and an enormously nostalgic odor for him: Admiral Naismith's atmosphere, subliminally electrifying even now.

The station was one of a dozen orbiting the system's only semihabitable planet. Three more deep-space stations circled Komarr s feeble star, and each of the six wormhole exits they all served boasted both a military station and a commercial one. In this far-flung network cargo and passengers loaded, unloaded, and shuffled, bound not only for Barrayar but for Pol, the Hegen Hub, Sergyar, Escobar beyond it, and a dozen other connecting routes. The reopened trade route to Rho Ceta and the rest of the Cetagandan Empire, uneasy neighbors though they were, also supported a growing stream of traffic. The fees and taxes generated here were a vast source of income for the Barrayaran Imperium, far beyond anything squeezed out of poor backcountry groat farmers on the homeworld. This too was part of Barrayar, he must remember to point out to space-bred Elli Quinn.

Quinn might be almost happy on Komarr. Its domed cities were reminiscent of the space station upon which she had been born. True, most of Lord Vorkosigan's duties would keep him in a tight little circuit around Vorbarr Sultana. The capital drew all ambitious men like a gravity well. But one might maintain a second domicile on one of the stations here, a cozy little deep-space dacha. . . . It is far from the mountains.

He'd seen the Count and Countess off from this station yesterday, on their way back to Sergyar, having hitched a ride with them as far as Komarr in their government courier ship. Five days in the relatively uninterrupted confines of a jump-ship had actually given them time enough to talk, for a change. He had also seized the opportunity to beg an Armsman for himself from his father, the comfortable Pym by choice. The Countess grumbled they should have held out for Ma Kosti in exchange, but gave up her favorite Armsman to him nonetheless; the Count promised to send him a couple more in due time, chosen from those whose wives and families had been the most bitterly unhappy at having been forcibly transplanted from their familiar city to the wilds of Chaos Colony.

The crowd around the exit door from Customs Processing thickened, as inbound passengers began to spill through and hurry to their further destinations, or greet waiting parties with businesslike decorum or familial enthusiasm. Miles rose on his toes, futilely. Nine-tenths of this outrush dissipated before Quinn came striding through the doors, conservatively incognito in Komarran civilian fashion, a white padded silk jacket and trousers. The outfit set off her dark curls and brilliant brown eyes; but then, Quinn made anything she wore look great, including ripped fatigues and mud.

She too craned to look for him, murmured a "Heh," of satisfaction upon spotting him waving a hand behind a few other shoulders, and wove through the crowd. Her stride stretched as she neared; she dropped the gray duffel she swung and they embraced with an impact that nearly knocked Miles off his feet. The scent of her made up for any number of defective space station atmospheric filters. Quinn, my Quinn. After a dozen or so kisses, they parted just far enough to permit speech.

"So why did you ask me to bring all your stuff?" she demanded suspiciously. "I didn't like the sound of that."

"Did you?"

"Yes. It's stuck back in Customs. They choked on the contents, particularly all the weapons. I gave up arguing with them after a while—you're a Barrayaran, you sort them out."

"Ah, Pym." Miles gestured to his Armsman, like Miles dressed in discreet streetwear. "Take Commodore Quinn's receipts, and rescue my property from our bureaucracy, please. Address it to Vorkosigan House, and send it by commercial shipper. Then go on back to the hostel."

"Yes, my lord." Pym collected the data codes, and plunged back through the doors into Customs.

"Is that all your personal luggage?" Miles asked Quinn.

"As ever."

"Off to the hostel, then. It's a nice one." The best on the station, in fact, luxury class. "I, ah, got us a suite for tonight."

"You'd better have."

"Have you had dinner?"

"Not yet."

"Good. Neither have I."

A short walk brought them to the nearest bubble-car terminal, and a short ride to the hostel. Its appointments were elegant, its corridors wide and thickly carpeted, and its staff solicitous. The suite was large, for a space station, which meant nicely cozy for Miles's present purposes.

"Your General Allegre is generous," remarked Quinn, unloading her duffel after a quick reconnoiter of the sybaritic bathroom. "I may like working for him after all."

"I think you will, but this is on my bill tonight, not ImpSec's. I wanted someplace quiet where we could talk, before your official meeting with Allegre and the Galactic Affairs chief tomorrow."

"So … I don't quite understand this setup. I get one lousy message from you with you looking like a damned zombie, telling me Illyan caught up with you about poor Vorberg, and didn't I tell you so. Then a resounding silence, for weeks, and no answers to my messages to you, you rat. Then I get another one with you all chipper again, saying it's all right now, and I sure don't see the connection. Then I get this order to report to ImpSec on Komarr without delay, no explanations, no hint of what the new assignment is, except with this postscript from you to bring your whole kit with me when I come and put the freight charges on ImpSec's tab. Are you back in ImpSec, or not?"

"Not. I'm here as a consultant, to get you up and running with your new bosses, and vice versa. I, ah . . . have another job, now."

"I really don't understand. I mean, your messages are usually cryptic—"

"It's hard to send proper love letters, when you know everything you say is going to be monitored by ImpSec censors."

"But this time, it was frigging incomprehensible. What is going on with you?" Her voice was edged with the same suppressed fear Miles was feeling, Am I losing you? No, not fear. Knowledge.

"I tried to compose a message a couple of times, but it was . . . too complicated, and all the most important parts were things I didn't want to send tight-beam. The edited version came out sounding like gibberish. I had to see you face-to-face anyway, for, for a lot of reasons. It's a long story, and most of it is classified, a fact that I am going to completely ignore. I can, you know. Do you want to go down to the restaurant to eat, or order room service?"

"Miles," she said in exasperation. "Room service. And explanations."

He distracted her temporarily with the hostel's enormous menu, to buy a little more time to compose his thoughts. It didn't help any more than the previous weeks he'd spent composing those same thoughts, in their endless permutations. Miles put in their order and they settled side by side, facing one another, on the suite's smaller couch.

"To explain about my new job, I have to tell you something about how I acquired it, and why Illyan isn't Chief of ImpSec anymore. . . ." He told her the story of the past months, beginning with Illyan's breakdown, doubling back to explain about Laisa and Duv Galeni, growing excited and jumping up to gesture and pace when he described how he'd nailed Haroche at last. His seizure treatment. Gregor's job offer. All the easy stuff, the events, the facts. He did not know how to explain his inner journey; Elli was not, after all, Barrayaran. The food arrived, stopping Elli's immediate reaction. Her face was tense and introspective. Yes. We should all think before we speak tonight, love.

She did not take up her thread until the hostel's human servitor finished arranging the meal on their table, and bustled out again.

It was three bites before she spoke; Miles wondered if she was tasting her soup as little as he was tasting his. When she did, she began obliquely, in a carefully neutral tone. "Imperial Auditor . . . sounds like some kind of an accountant. It's not you, Miles."

"It is now. I took my oath. It's one of those Barrayaran terms that doesn't mean what you think it does. I don't know. . . . Imperial Agent? Special Prosecutor? Special Envoy? Inspector General? It's all of those things, and none of them. It's whatever . . . whatever Gregor needs it to be. It's extraordinarily open-ended. I can't begin to tell you how much it suits me."

"You never once mentioned it before, as your ambition."

"I never imagined the possibility. But it's not the sort of job that should ever be given to a man who is too ambitious for it. Willing, yes, but not ambitious. It … calls for dispassion, not passion, even with respect to itself."

She sat frowning over this for a full minute. At last, visibly gathering her courage, she took a more direct cut. "So where does it leave me, leave us? Does it mean you're never coming back to the Dendarii? Miles, I might never see you again." Only the smallest quaver edged her controlled voice.

"That's . . . one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you tonight, personally, before tomorrows business overwhelms everything else." Now it was his turn to pause for courage, to keep his voice in an even register. "You see, if you were . . . if you stayed here . . . if you were Lady Vorkosigan, you could be with me all the time."

"No . . ." Her soup would have cooled, forgotten, if not for the stay-warm circuit in the bottom of die bowl. "I'd be with Lord Vorkosigan all the time. Not with you, Miles, not with Admiral Naismith."

"Admiral Naismith was something I made up, Elli," he said gently. "He was my own invention. I'm an egotistical enough artist, I suppose, I'm glad you liked my creation. I made him up out of me, after all. But not all of me."

She shook her head, tried another tack. "You said the last time, you wouldn't ask me that Lady Vorkosigan thing anymore. You said it the last three times you asked me to marry Lord Vorkosigan, in fact."

"One more last chance, Elli. Except this time it really is. I … in all honesty, I have to tell you the other half, or rather, the other side, the counteroffer. What's coming up tomorrow, along with the Dendariis new contract."

"Contract, hell. You're changing the subject, Miles. What about us?"

"I can't get to us, except this way. Full disclosure. Tomorrow, we, that is, Allegre and ImpSec and I, Barrayar if you will, we're offering you the admiralcy. Admiral Quinn of the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet. You'll go on working for Allegre in exactly the same capacity that I worked for Illyan."

Quinn's eyes widened, lit, fell. "Miles … I can't do your job. I'm not nearly ready."

"You have been doing my job. You're half-past ready, Quinn. I say so."

She smiled at the familiar forward-momentum passion in his voice, that had so often driven them all to results beyond reason. "I admit … I wanted a share of command. But not so soon, not like this."

"The time is now. Your time. My time. This is it."

She stared intently at him, baffled by his tone of voice. "Miles … I don't want to be stuck on just one planet for the rest of my life."

"A planet's a damned big place, Elli, when you get down to the details. And anyway, there are three planets in the Barrayaran Imperium."

"Three times worse, then." She leaned across the table, and grasped his hand in both hers, hard. "Suppose I make you a counterproposal. Screw the Barrayaran Imperium. The Dendarii Fleet does not require its Imperial contracts to survive, though I admit, thanks to you, they have been very fine and favorable. The Fleet existed before Barrayar ever came over our event horizon, it can go on existing after they sink back into their damned gravity well. We spacers, we don't need planets sucking us down. You—come with me, instead. Be Admiral Naismith, shake the dirt off your boots. I'd marry Admiral Naismith in a heartbeat, if that's what you want. We can be such a team, the two of us, we'll make legends. You and me, Miles, out there!" She waved one arm in a random circle, though the other did not release her grip.

"I tried, Elli. I tried for weeks. You don't know how hard I tried to go. I was never a mercenary, not ever. Not for one single minute."

A flash of anger sparked briefly in her brown eyes. "Do you figure that makes you morally superior to the rest of us?"

"No," he sighed. "But it makes me Miles Vorkosigan. Not Miles Naismith."

She shook her head. Ah, denial. He recognized the hollow reverberation of it. "There always was a part of you I could never touch." Her voice was edged with pain.

"I know. I worked for years to extinguish Lord Vorkosigan. I couldn't do it, not even for you. You can't select from me, Elli, take the parts you favor and leave the rest on the table." He gestured in frustration to their drying dinner. "I don't come a la carte. I'm all or nothing "

"You could be anything you chose, Miles, anywhere! Why insist on this place?"

He smiled, grimly. "No. I have discovered I am constrained on other levels." This time, his hands enclosed hers. "But maybe you can choose. Come to Barrayar, Elli, and be … and be desperately unhappy with me?"

Her breath puffed on a laugh. "What is this, more full disclosure?"

"There is no other way, for the long haul. And I'm talking about a very long haul."

"Miles, I can't. I mean, your home is very pretty, for a planet, but it's dreadful down there."

"You could make it less dreadful."

"I can't … I can't be what you want, can't be your Lady Vorkosigan."

He looked away, looked back, opened his hands to her. "I can give you everything I have. I can't give you less."

"But you want everything I am in return. Admiral Quinn annihilated, Lady Vorkosigan . . . rising from the ashes. I'm not good at resurrection, Miles. That's your department." She shook her head, helplessly. "Come away with me."

"Stay here with me."

Love does not conquer all. Watching the struggle in her face, he began to feel horribly like Admiral Haroche. Perhaps Haroche had not enjoyed his moment of moral torture either. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire . . . He gripped her hand harder, willing then not love but truth, and with all his heart. "Then choose Elli. Whoever Elli is."

"Elli is … Admiral Quinn."

"I rather thought she was."

"Then why do you do this to me?"

"Because you have to decide now, Elli, once and for all."

"You're forcing this choice, not me!"

"Yes. That's just exactly right. I can go on with you. I can go on without you, if I have to. But I can't freeze, Elli, not even for you. Perfect preservation isn't life, it's death. I know."

She nodded, slowly. "I understand that part, anyway." She began spooning her soup, watching him watching her watching him. . . .

They made love one last time, for old times' sake, for good-bye, and, Miles realized halfway through, each in a desperate last-ditch effort to please and pleasure the other so much, they would change their mind. We'd have to change more than our minds. We'd have to change our whole selves.

With a sigh, he sat up in the suite's vast bed, disentangling their limbs. "This isn't working, Elli."

"I'll make it work," she mumbled. He captured her hand, and kissed the inside of her wrist. She took a deep breath, and sat up beside him. They were both silent for a long time.

"You were destined to be a soldier," she said at last. "Not some kind of, of, superior bureaucrat."

He gave up trying to explain the ancient and noble post of Imperial Auditor to a non-Barrayaran. "To be a great soldier, you need a great war. There doesn't happen to be one on, just now, not around here. The Cetagandans are quiescent for the first time in a decade. Pol is not aggressive, and anyway, we're in good odor in the whole Hegen Hub these days. Jackson's Whole is nasty enough, but they're too disunited to be a military threat at this distance. The worst menace in the neighborhood is us, and Sergyar is absorbing our energies. I'm not sure I could lend myself to an aggressive war anyway."

"Your father did. With remarkable success."

"Mixed success. You should study our history more closely, love. But I am not my father. I don't have to repeat his mistakes; I can invent bright-new ones."

"You're turning into such a political animal, these days."

"It goes with my territory. And . . . they may also serve who only stand and wait, but life is short enough already. If the Imperium ever wants me in a military capacity again, they can forward a bloody comconsole message."

Her brows rose; she sat back, and plumped pillows around them. He drew her head down, to rest on his scored chest, and stroked her hair, curling it around his fingers; her free hand idled up and down his body. He could feel the letting-go in them, with the easing of the tension and the terror, with the slowing of every pulse of their blood. Not pain, or not so much pain, but only a just sadness, a due measure of melancholy, quiet and right.

"Now . . ." he said at last, "that's not to say there won't be need for the odd rescue mission or whatever, from time to time. Mind you, as Admiral Quinn, the place for your sweet ass is in a nice soft tactics room chair. Don't you be going out with the squads all the time. It's not appropriate for a senior staff officer, and it's way too dangerous."

Her fingernails traced the spider-nest lines of his most spectacular scars, making the hairs stand up on his arms. "You are a howling hypocrite, my love."

He elected prudently not to quibble over that one. He cleared his throat. "That . . . brings up another thing I wanted to ask you. A favor. About Sergeant Taura."

She stiffened slightly. "What?"

"Last time I saw her, I noticed she's getting some gray in her hair. You know what that means. I talked recently to old Canaba about it, you remember him. He gives no more than two months between the time she starts to go into serious metabolic failure, and the end. I want you to promise me, you'll let me know in time, time to get out there with the Fleet, or wherever she is, before she goes. I … don't want her to be alone, then. It's a promise I made to myself once, that I mean to keep."

She settled back. "All right," she said seriously. After a moment she added, "So . . . did you sleep with her?"

"Um . . ." He swallowed. "She was before your time, Elli." After another minute he was compelled to add, "And after, from time to time. Very rarely."

"Hah. I thought so."

As long as we're being morbid . . . "How . . . about you? Was there ever anyone else, when I was gone?"

"No. I was good. Huh!" She added after a moment, "Now, before your time, that's another Quinn."

That dig, he decided, was within her rights; he let it go by. "It should go without saying, but just in case . . . you do know you are free of any personal obligation to me hereafter?"

"So you can be too? Is that what this is all about?" She touched his face, and smiled. "I don't need you to free me, love. I can free myself, any time I choose."

"That's part, I think, of what I've always loved about you." He hesitated. "But can you choose any time you choose?"

"Well. That's the other question, isn't it," she said softly. They each of them gazed long at the other, as if memorizing the image for some interior cache. After a time she added, with unerring perceptiveness and wry goodwill, "I hope you find your Lady Vorkosigan, Miles. Whoever she is."

"I hope so too, Elli," he sighed. "I dread the search, though."

"Lazy," she murmured.

"That, too. You were a drunkard's dream, Quinn. You've quite spoiled me, you know."

"Shall I apologize?"

"Never."

She came up for breath from the long kiss that followed this to ask, "Till your search prospers, shall we have flings? From time to time?"

"Perhaps … I don't know. If we're ever on the same planet at the same time. It's a big universe."

"Then why do I keep running into the same people over and over?"

They fell then to unhurried caresses, without agenda; no future, no past, just a little bubble in time containing Miles and Elli. After that things went much better.

In the afterglow, Elli murmured into his hair, "Do you think you'll like your new job as much as I'll like mine?"

"I'm beginning to suspect so. You are ready, you know. I've lately had some sharp lessons on what a bad idea it is to leave competent subordinates unpromoted for too long. Watch out for that in"—he almost said, my— "your staff."

"So is there, like, a top spot you can go for? Work your way up to First Auditor from Eighth Auditor, say?"

"Only by longevity. Which, come to think of it, could happen; I'm the youngest by three decades. But the Auditors are numbered for convenience. It doesn't denote rank. They all seem to be sort of equal. When they meet, they sit in a circle. Very unusual for hierarchy-conscious Barrayar, really."

"Like the Knights of the Round Table," Elli suggested.

Miles choked on a laugh. "Not if you could see them. . . ." He hesitated. "Well, I don't know. Those original Round Table knights competed for honors, obsessively. I mean, that's why old Arthur had to make the table round in the first place, to defuse all that. But most of the Auditors are … I can't say, not ambitious, or they wouldn't all have achieved what they have. Post-ambitious? These old Barrayaran paladins are an amazingly disinterested lot. I'm actually looking forward to getting to know them better." He provided her with a few giggles, by giving a vigorously worded description of his new colleagues' odder quirks.

She ran a hand through her dark curls, grinning despite herself. "Dear godlings, Miles. I begin to think you're going to fit right in after all."

"Have you ever come home, to a place you've never been before? It feels like that. It's . . . very odd. But not at all unpleasant."

She kissed his forehead, for benediction; he kissed her palm, for luck.

"Well, if you insist on being a civilian, you be a good bureaucrat-paladin, then," she told him firmly. "Do me proud."

"I will, Elli."

Miles's return from Komarr to Barrayar was uneventful. He arrived back at Vorkosigan House in the quiet of a late winter evening, to find it warm and lit and ready for him. Tomorrow he would formally invite company to dinner, he decided, Duv and Delia and the rest of the Koudelkas, by choice. But tonight he dined in the kitchen with his Armsman and Ma Kosti; his cook was a little scandalized, either by his stepping out of his role or by his invading her territory. But he told her a string of jokes until she laughed, and snapped at him with a towel as if he were one of her boys, which amused Pym no end. Corporal Kosti ducked in at the end of his guard shift, to be properly fed as well, and to play with the kittens who now lived in, or rather, obsessively escaped from, a rag-padded box near the stove. The corporal and Ma Kosti caught Miles up on all the news from Martin, now suffering through basic training with all the bragging complaints that entailed.

After his late supper, he took himself off to his wine cellar. Ceremoniously, he selected a bottle of his grandfathers oldest and rarest. Upon opening it, he discovered it was going more than a bit off. He considered drinking it anyway, for the symbolisms sake. Then, decisively, he dumped it down the bathroom sink in his new suite and went back for a bottle from a much more recent batch that he knew to be very good.

With a wineglass of the best crystal this time, he sat in the incredibly comfortable chair by the bay window, to watch a few fat snowflakes dance past in the garden lights, and to hold his own private wake. He toasted his ghostly night-reflection in the window. This was what, Admiral Naismith's third death? Once on Jackson's Whole, once in Illyan's office, third and last and astonishingly painful, resurrected and dispatched again by Lucas Haroche. On his first death he'd been in no position to enjoy a proper wake—frozen lost luggage, he'd been—on the second, his grandfathers dagger, opener for a redder wine, had held more blandishment than the brandy. He settled back, and prepared to ration himself one hour of self-pity along with his wine, and be done with it.

Instead, he found himself leaning back in the warm chair, laughing softly. He swallowed the laugh, wondering if he'd lost his grip at last.

Just the opposite.

Haroche was no miracle-worker. He wasn't even a stage magician. He'd had no power then or ever to give or withhold Naismith, though Miles felt a cryonic chill, thinking how close he'd come to delivering himself into Haroche's hands.

No wonder he was laughing. He wasn't mourning a death. He was celebrating an escape.

"I'm not dead. I'm here." He touched his scarred chest in wonder.

He felt strange and single, not to be in pieces anymore. Not Lord Vorkosigan ascendant, not Naismith lost, but all of him, all at once, all the time. Crowded in there?

Not particularly.

Harra Csurik had been almost right. It wasn't your life again you found, going on. It was your life anew. And it wasn't at all what he'd been expecting. His slow smile deepened. He was beginning to be very curious about his future.