Mirror Dance

Chapter Seventeen

At the conclusion of the lengthy and tedious taxation ceremony, the Residence’s staff served a banquet to a thousand people, spread through several chambers according to rank. Mark found himself dining just downstream from Gregor’s own table. The wine and elaborate food gave him an excuse not to chat much with his neighbors. He chewed and sipped as slowly as possible. He still managed to end up uncomfortably overfed and dizzy from alcohol poisoning, till he noticed the Countess was making it through all the toasts by merely wetting her lips. He copied her strategy. He wished he’d noticed sooner, but at least he was able to walk and not crawl from the table afterwards, and the room only spun a little.

It could have been worse. I could have had to make it through all this while simultaneously pretending to be Miles Vorkosigan.

The Countess led him to a ballroom with a polished marquetry floor, which had been cleared for dancing, though no one was dancing yet. A live human orchestra, all men in Imperial Service uniforms, was arrayed in one corner. At the moment only a half dozen of its musicians were playing, a sort of preliminary chamber music. Long doors on one side of the room opened to the cool night air of a promenade. Mark noted them for future escape purposes. It would be an unutterable relief to be alone in the dark right now. He was even beginning to miss his cabin back aboard the Peregrine.

“Do you dance?” he asked the Countess.

“Only once tonight.”

The explanation unfolded shortly when Emperor Gregor appeared, and with his usual serious smile led Countess Vorkosigan out onto the floor to officially open the dance. On the music’s first repeat other couples began to join them. The Vor dances seemed to tend to the formal and slow, with couples arranged in complex groups rather than couples alone, and with far too many precise moves to memorize. Mark found it vaguely allegorical of how things were done here.

Thus stripped of his escort and protectress, Mark fled to a side chamber where the volume of the music was filtered to background level. Buffet tables with yet more food and drink lined one wall. For a moment, he longingly considered the attraction of anesthetic drinking. Blurred oblivion … Right, sure. Get publicly drunk, and then, no doubt, get publicly sick. Just what the Countess needed. He was halfway there already.

Instead he retreated to a window embrasure. His surly presence seemed enough to claim it against all comers. He leaned against the wall in the shadows, folded his arms, and set himself grimly to endure. Maybe he could persuade the Countess to take him home early, after her one dance. But she seemed to be working the crowd. For all that she appeared relaxed, social, cheerful, he hadn’t heard a single word out of her mouth tonight that didn’t serve her goals. So much self-control in one so secretly strained was almost disturbing.

His grim mood darkened further, as he brooded on the meaning of that empty cryo-chamber. ImpSec can’t be everywhere, the Countess had once said. Dammit … ImpSec was supposed to be all-seeing. That was the intended implication of the sinister silver Horus-eye insignia on Illyan’s collar. Was ImpSec’s reputation just propaganda?

One thing was certain. Miles hadn’t removed himself from that cryo-chamber. Whether or not Miles was rotted, disintegrated, or still frozen, a witness or witnesses must exist, somewhere. A thread, a string, a hook, a connection, a trail of bloody breadcrumbs, something. I believe it’s going to kill me if there isn’t. There had to be something.

“Lord Mark?” said a light voice.

He raised his eyes from blind contemplation of his boots to find himself facing a lovely cleavage, framed in raspberry pink gauze with white lace trim. Delicate line of collarbone, smooth swelling curves, and ivory skin made an almost abstract sculpture, a tilted topological landscape. He imagined himself shrunk to insect size, marching across those soft hills and valleys, barefoot—

“Lord Mark?” she repeated, less certainly.

He tilted his head back, hoping the shadows concealed the embarrassed flush in his cheeks, and managed at least the courtesy of eye contact. I can’t help it, it’s my height. Sorry. Her face was equally rewarding to the eye: electric blue eyes, curving lips. Short loose ash-blonde curls wreathed her head. As seemed the custom for young women, tiny pink flowers were braided into it, sacrificing their little vegetable lives for her evening’s brief glory. However, her hair was too short to hold them successfully, and several were on the verge of falling out.

“Yes?” It came out sounding too abrupt. Surly. He tried again with a more encouraging, “Lady—?”

“Oh,” she smiled, “I’m not Lady anything. I’m Kareen Koudelka.”

His brow wrinkled. “Are you any relation to Commodore Clement Koudelka?” A name high on the list of Aral Vorkosigan’s senior staff officers. Galen’s list, of further assassinations if opportunity had presented.

“He’s my father,” she said proudly.

“Uh … is he here?” Mark asked nervously.

The smile disappeared in a momentary sigh. “No. He had to go to HQ tonight, at the last minute.”

“Ah.” To be sure. It would be a revealing study, to count the men who should have been here tonight but weren’t because of the Prime Minister’s condition. If Mark were actually the enemy agent he’d trained to be, in that other lifetime, it would be a fast way for him to discover who were the real key men in Aral Vorkosigan’s support constellation, regardless of what the rosters said.

“You really don’t look quite like Miles,” she said, studying him with a critical eye—he stiffened, but decided sucking in his gut would only draw more attention to it—”your bones are heavier. It would be a treat to see you two together. Will he be back soon?”

She does not know, he realized with a kind of horror. Doesn’t know Miles is dead, doesn’t know I killed him. “No,” he muttered. And then, masochistically, asked, “Were you in love with him too?”

“Me?” She laughed. “I haven’t a chance. I have three older sisters, and they’re all taller than I am. They call me the dwarf.”

The top of his head was not quite level with the top of her shoulder, which meant that she was about average height for a Barrayaran woman. Her sisters must be valkyries. Just Miles’s style. The perfume of her flowers, or her skin, rocked him in faint, delicate waves.

An agony of despair twisted all the way from his gut to behind his eyes. This could have been mine. If I hadn’t screwed it up, this could have been my moment. She was friendly, open, smiling, only because she did not know what he had done. And suppose he lied, suppose he tried, suppose he found himself contrary to all reason walking in Ivan’s most drunken dream with this girl, and she invited him mountain-climbing, like Miles—what then? How entertaining would it be for her, to watch him choke half to death in all his naked impotence? Hopeless, helpless, hapless—the mere anticipation of that pain and humiliation, again, made his vision darken. His shoulders hunched. “Oh, for God’s sake go away,” he moaned.

Her blue eyes widened in startled doubt. “Pym warned me you were moody … well, all right.” She shrugged, and turned, tossing her head.

A couple of the little pink flowers lost their moorings and bounced down. Spasmodically, Mark clutched at them. “Wait—!”

She turned back, still frowning. “What?”

“You dropped some of your flowers.” He held them out to her in his two cupped hands, crushed pink blobs, and attempted a smile. He was afraid it came out as squashed as the blossoms.

“Oh.” She took them back—long clean steady fingers, short undecorated nails, not an idle woman’s hands—stared down at the blooms, and rolled up her eyes as if unsure how to reattach them. She finally stuffed them unceremoniously through a few curls on top of her head, out of order of their mates and more precarious than before. She began to turn away again.

Say something, or you’ll lose your chance! “You don’t wear your hair long, like the others,” he blurted. Oh, no, she’d think he was criticizing—

“I don’t have time to fool with it.” Unconsciously compelled, her fingers raked a couple of curls, scattering more luckless vegetation.

“What do you do with your time?”

“Study, mostly.” The vivacity his rebuff had so brutally suppressed began to leak back into her face. “Countess Vorkosigan has promised me, if I keep my class standing she’ll send me to school on Beta Colony next year!” The light in her eyes focused to a laser-scalpel’s edge. “And I can. I’ll show them. If Miles can do what he does, I can do this.”

“What do you know about what Miles does?” he asked, alarmed.

“He made it through the Imperial Service Academy, didn’t he?” Her chin rose, inspired. “When everyone said he was too puny and sickly, and it was a waste, and he’d just die young. And then after he succeeded they said it was only his father’s favor. But he graduated near the top of his class, and I don’t think his father had anything to do with that.” She nodded firmly, satisfied.

But they had the die-young part right. Clearly, she was not apprised of Miles’s little private army.

“How old are you?” he asked her.

“Eighteen-standard.”

“I’m, um, twenty-two.”

“I know.” She observed him, still interested, but more cautious. Her eye lit with sudden understanding. She lowered her voice. “You’re very worried about Count Aral, aren’t you?”

A most charitable explanation for his rudeness. “The Count my father,” he echoed. That was Miles’s one-breath phrase. “Among other things.”

“Have you made any friends here?”

“I … don’t quite know.” Ivan? Gregor? His mother? Were any of them friends, exactly? “I’ve been too busy making relatives. I never had any relatives before, either.”

Her brows went up. “Nor any friends?”

“No.” It was an odd realization, strange and late. “I can’t say as I missed friends. I always had more immediate problems.” Still do.

“Miles always seems to have a lot of friends.”

“I’m not Miles,” Mark snapped, stung on the raw spot. No, it wasn’t her fault, he was raw all over.

“I can see that …” She paused, as the music began again in the adjoining ballroom. “Would you like to dance?”

“I don’t know any of your dances.”

“That’s a mirror dance. Anybody can do the mirror dance, it’s not hard. You just copy everything your partner does.”

He glanced through the archway, and thought of the tall doors to the promenade. “Maybe—maybe outside?”

“Why outside? You wouldn’t be able to see me.”

“Nobody would be able to see me, either.” A suspicious thought struck him. “Did my mother ask you to do this?”

“No …”

“Lady Vorpatril?”

“No!” She laughed. “Why ever should they? Come on, or the music will be over!” She took him by the hand and towed him determinedly through the archway, dribbling a few more flowers in her wake. He caught a couple of buds against his tunic with his free hand, and slipped them surreptitiously into his trouser pocket. Help, I’m being kidnapped by an enthusiast … ! There were worse fates. A wry half-smile twitched his lips. “You don’t mind dancing with a toad?”

“What?”

“Something Ivan said.”

“Oh, Ivan.” She shrugged a dismissive white shoulder. “Ignore Ivan, we all do.”

Lady Cassia, you are avenged. Mark brightened still further, to medium-gloomy.

The mirror dance was going on as described, with partners facing each other, dipping and swaying and moving along in time to the music. The tempo was brisker and less stately than the large group dances, and had brought more younger couples out onto the floor.

Feeling hideously conspicuous, Mark plunged in with Kareen, and began copying her motions, about half a beat behind. Just as she had promised, it took about fifteen seconds to get the hang of it. He began to smile, a little. The older couples were quite grave and elegant, but some of the younger ones were more creative. One young Vor took advantage of a hand-pass to bait his lady by briefly sticking one finger up his nose and wriggling the rest at her; she broke the rule and didn’t follow, but he mirrored her look of outrage perfectly. Mark laughed.

“You look quite different when you laugh,” Kareen said, sounding startled. She cocked her head in bemusement.

He cocked his head back at her. “Different from what?”

“I don’t know. Not so … funereal. You looked like you’d lost your best friend, when you were hiding back there in the corner.”

If only you knew. She pirouetted; he pirouetted. He swept her an exaggerated bow; looking surprised but pleased, she swept one back at him. The view was charming.

“I’ll just have to make you laugh again,” she decided firmly. So, perfectly deadpan, she proceeded to tell him three dirty jokes in rapid succession; he ended up laughing at the absurdity of their juxtaposition with her maidenly airs as much as anything else.

“Where did you learn those?”

“From my big sisters, of course,” she shrugged.

He was actually sorry when the music came to an end. This time he took the lead, and urged her back into the next room for something to drink, and then out onto the promenade. After the concentration of the dance was over he’d become uncomfortably conscious of just how many people were looking at him, and it wasn’t paranoid dementia this time. They’d made a conspicuous couple, the beautiful Kareen and her Vorkosigan toad.

It was not as dark outside as he’d hoped. In addition to the lights spilling from the Residence windows, colored spotlights in the landscaping were diffused by the fog to a gentle general illumination. Below the stone balustrade the slope was almost woods-like with old-growth bushes and trees. Stone-paved walkways zig-zagged down, with granite benches inviting lingerers. Still, the night was chilly enough to keep most people inside, which helped.

It was a highly romantic setting, to be wasted on him. Why am I doing this? What good was it to bait a hunger that could not feed? Just looking at her hurt. He moved closer anyway, more dizzy with her scent than with the wine and the dancing. Her skin was radiantly warm with the exercise; she’d light up a sniper-scope like a torch. Morbid thought. Sex and death seemed too close-connected, somewhere in the bottom of his brain. He was afraid. Everything I touch, I destroy. I will not touch her. He set his glass on the stone railing and shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets. His left fingertips compulsively rotated the little flowers he’d secreted there.

“Lord Mark,” she said, after a sip of wine, “you’re almost a galactic. If you were married, and going to have children, would you want your wife to use a uterine replicator, or not?”

“Why would any couple not choose to use a replicator?” he asked, his head spinning with this sudden new tack in conversation.

“To, like, prove her love for him.”

“Good God, how barbaric! Of course not. I’d think it would prove just the opposite, that he didn’t love her.” He paused. “That was a strictly theoretical question, wasn’t it?”

“Sort of.”

“I mean, you don’t know anyone who’s seriously having this debate—not your sisters or anything?” he asked in worry. Not you, surely? Some barbarian needed his head stuck in a bucket of ice water, if so. And held under for a good long time, like till he stopped wriggling.

“Oh, none of my sisters are married yet. Though it’s not for lack of offers. But Mama and Da are holding out. It’s a strategy,” she confided.

“Oh?”

“Lady Cordelia encouraged them, after the second of us girls came along. There was a period soon after she immigrated here, when galactic medicine was really spreading out, and there was this pill you could take to choose the sex of your child. Everyone went crazy for boys, for a while. The ratio’s evened up again lately. But my sisters and I are right in the middle of the girl-drought. Any man who won’t agree in the marriage contract to let his wife use a uterine replicator is having a real hard time getting married, right now. The go-betweens won’t even bother dealing for him.” She giggled. “Lady Cordelia’s told Mama if she plays the game well, every one of her grandchildren could be born with a Vor in front of their names.”

“I see,” Mark blinked. “Is that an ambition of your parents?”

“Not necessarily,” Kareen shrugged. “But all else being equal, that prefix does give a fellow an edge.”

“That’s … good to know. I guess.” He considered his wine, and did not drink.

Ivan came out of one of the ballroom doors, saw them both, and gave them a friendly wave, but kept on going. He had not a glass but an entire bottle swinging from his hand, and he cast a slightly hunted look back over his shoulder before disappearing down the walkway. Glancing over the balustrade a few minutes later, Mark saw the top of his head pass by on a descending path.

Mark took a gulp of his drink then. “Kareen … am I possible?”

“Possible for what?” She tilted her head and smiled.

“For—for women. I mean, look at me. Square on. I really do look like a toad. All twisted up, and if I don’t do something about it soon, I’m going to end up as wide as I am … short. And on top of it all, I’m a clone.” Not to mention the little breathing problem. Summed up that way, hurling himself head-first over the balustrade seemed a completely logical act. It would save so much pain in the long run.

“Well, that’s all true,” she allowed judiciously.

Dammit, woman, you’re supposed to deny it all, to be polite.

“But you’re Miles’s clone. You have to have his intelligence, too.”

“Do brains make up for all the rest? In the female view?”

“Not to every woman, I suppose. Just to the smart ones.”

“You’re smart.”

“Yes, but it would be rude of me to say so.” She raked her curls and grinned.

How the hell was he to construe that? “Maybe I don’t have Miles’s brains,” he said gloomily. “Maybe the Jacksonian body-sculptors stupified me, when they were doing all the rest, to keep me under control. That would explain a lot about my life.” Now there was a morbid new thought to wallow in.

Kareen giggled. “I don’t think so, Mark.”

He smiled wryly back at her. “No excuses. No quarter.”

“Now you sound like Miles.”

A young woman emerged from the ballroom. Dressed in some pale blue silky stuff, she was athletically trim, glowingly blonde, and nearly as tall as Ivan. “Kareen!” she waved. “Mama wants us all.”

“Now, Delia?” said Kareen, sounding quite put-out.

“Yes.” She eyed Mark with alarmingly keen interest, but drawn by whatever daughterly duty, swung back inside.

Kareen sighed, pushed away from the stonework upon which she had been leaning, dusted futilely at a snag in her raspberry gauze, and smiled farewell. “It was nice meeting you, Lord Mark.”

“It was nice talking with you too. And dancing with you.” It was true. He waved, more casually than he felt, as she vanished into the warm light of the Residence. When he was sure she was out of sight, he knelt and surreptitiously collected the last of the tiny flowers she had shed, and stuffed them into his pocket with the rest.

She smiled at me. Not at Miles. Not at Admiral Naismith. Me, myself, Mark. This was how it could have been, if he hadn’t bankrupted himself at Bharaputra’s.

Now that he was alone in the dark as he had wished, he discovered he didn’t much care for it. He decided to go find Ivan, and struck off down the garden walkways. Unfortunately, the paths divided and re-divided, presumably to more than one destination. He passed couples who had taken to the sheltered benches despite the chill, and a few other men and women who’d just wandered down here for private talks, or to cool off. Which way had Ivan gone? Not this way, obviously; a little round balcony made a dead-end. He turned back.

Someone was following him, a tall man in red-and-blues. His face was in shadow. “Ivan?” said Mark uncertainly. He didn’t think it was Ivan.

“So you’re Vorkosigan’s clowne.” Not Ivan’s voice. But his skewed pronunciation made the intended insult very clear.

Mark stood square. “You’ve got that straight, all right,” he growled. “So who in this circus are you, the dancing bear?”

“A Vor.”

“I can tell that by the low, sloping forehead. Which Vor?” The hairs were rising on the back of his neck. The last time he’d felt such exhilaration combined with intense sickness to his stomach had been in the alley in the caravanserai. His heart began to pound. But he’s made no threat yet, and he’s alone. Wait.

“Offworlder. You have no concept of the honor of the Vor,” the man grated.

“None whatsoever,” Mark agreed cheerfully. “I think you’re all insane.”

“You are no soldier.”

“Right again. My, we are quick tonight. I was trained strictly as a lone assassin. Death in the shadows is a sort of specialty of mine.” He began counting seconds in his head.

The man, who had started to move forward, sagged back again. “So it seems,” he hissed. “You’ve wasted no time, promoting yourself to a Countship. Not very subtle, for a trained assassin.”

“I’m not a subtle man.” He centered his balance, but did not move. No sudden moves. Keep bluffing.

“I can tell you this, little clowne.” He gave it the same insulting slur as before. “If Aral Vorkosigan dies, it won’t be you who steps into his place.”

“Well, that’s just exactly right,” purred Mark. “So what are you all hot about, Vor bore?” Shit. This one knows that Miles is dead. How the hell does he know? Is he an Imp Sec insider? But no Horus-eye stared from his collar; he bore a ship insignia of some kind, which Mark could not quite make out. Active-duty type. “What, to you, is one more little spare Vor drone living off a family pension in Vorbarr Sultana? I saw a herd of them up there tonight, swilling away.”

“You’re very cocky.”

“Consider the venue,” said Mark in exasperation. “You’re not going to carry out any death threats here. It would embarrass ImpSec. And I don’t think you want to annoy Simon Illyan, whoever the hell you are.” He kept on counting.

“I don’t know what hold you think you have on ImpSec,” the man began furiously.

But he was interrupted. A smiling servant in the Residence’s livery walked down the path carrying a tray of glasses. He was a very physically-fit young man.

“Drinks, gentlemen?” he offered.

The anonymous Vor glowered at him. “No, thank you.” He turned on his heel and strode off. Shrubbery whipped in his wake, scattering droplets of dew.

“I’ll take one, thanks,” said Mark brightly. The servant proffered the tray with a slight bow. For his abused stomach’s sake Mark stuck with the same light wine he’d been drinking most of the evening. “Eighty-five seconds. Your timing is lousy. He could have killed me three times over, but you interrupted just as the talk was getting interesting. How do you fellows pick this stuff out, real-time? You can’t possibly have enough people upstairs to be following every conversation in the building. Automated key-word searches?”

“Canape, sir?” Blandly, the servant turned the tray and offered the other side.

“Thank you again. Who was that proud Vor?”

The servant glanced down the now-empty pathway. “Captain Edwin Vorventa. He’s on personal leave while his ship is in orbital dock.”

“He’s not in ImpSec?”

“No, my lord.”

“Oh? Well, tell your boss I’d like to talk to him, at his earliest convenience.”

“That would be Lord Voraronberg, the castellan’s food and beverage manager.”

Mark grinned. “Oh, sure. Go away, I’m drunk enough.”

“Very good, my lord.”

“Not come morning. Ah! One more thing. You wouldn’t know where I could find Ivan Vorpatril right now, would you?”

The young man stared absently over the balcony a moment, as though listening, though no earbug showed. “There is a sort of gazebo at the bottom of the next left-hand turn, my lord, near a fountain. You might try there.”

“Thank you.”

Mark followed his directions, through the cool night mist. In a stray ray of light, fog droplets on his uniform sleeve shone like a cloud across the little silver rivers of the embroidery. He soon heard the plash of the fountain. A petite stone building, no walls, just deeply shadowed arches, overlooked it.

It was so quiet in this pocket of the garden, he could hear the breathing of the person inside. Only one person; good, he wasn’t about to diminish his already low popularity still further by interrupting a tryst. But it was strangely hoarse. “Ivan?”

There was a long pause. He was trying to decide whether to call again or tiptoe off when Ivan’s voice returned an uninviting growl of, “What?”

“I just … wondered what you were doing.”

“Nothing.”

“Hiding from your mother?”

“… Yeah.”

“I, ah, won’t tell her where you are.”

“Good for you,” was the sour reply.

“Well … see you later.” He turned to go.

“Wait.”

He waited, puzzled.

“Want a drink?” Ivan offered after a long pause.

“Uh … sure.”

“So, come get it.”

Mark ducked inside, and waited for his eyes to adjust. The usual stone bench, and Ivan a seated shadow. Ivan proffered the gleaming bottle, and Mark topped up his glass, only to find too late that Ivan wasn’t drinking wine, but rather some sort of brandy. The accidental cocktail tasted vile. He sat down by the steps with his back to a stone post, and set his glass aside. Ivan had dispensed with the formality of a glass.

“Are you going to be able to make it back to your ground car?” asked Mark doubtfully.

“Don’t plan to. The Residence’s staff will cart me out in the morning, when they pick up the rest of the trash.”

“Oh.” His night vision continued to improve. He could pick out the glittery bits on Ivan’s uniform, and the polished glow of his boots. The reflections of his eyes. The gleam of wet tracks down his cheeks. “Ivan, are you—” Mark bit his tongue on crying, and changed it in mid-sentence to, “all right?”

“I,” Ivan stated firmly, “have decided to get very drunk.”

“I can see that. Why?”

“Never have, at the Emperor’s Birthday. It’s a traditional challenge, like getting laid here.”

“Do people do that?”

“Sometimes. On a dare.”

“How entertaining for ImpSec.”

Ivan snorted a laugh. “Yeah, there is that.”

“So who dared you?”

“Nobody.”

Mark felt he was running out of probing questions faster than Ivan was running out of monosyllabic replies.

But, “Miles and I,” Ivan said in the dark, “used to work this party together, most every year. I was surprised … how much I missed the little bugger’s slanderous political commentary, this time around. Used to make me laugh.” Ivan laughed. It was a hollow and unfunny noise. He stopped abruptly.

“They told you about finding the empty cryo-chamber, didn’t they,” said Mark.

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Couple of days ago. I’ve been thinking about it, since. Not good.”

“No.” Mark hesitated. Ivan was shivering, in the dark. “Do you … want to go home and go to bed?” I sure do.

“Never make it up the hill, now,” shrugged Ivan.

“I’ll give you a hand. Or a shoulder.”

“… All right.”

It took some doing, but he hoisted Ivan to his unsteady feet, and they navigated back up the steep garden. Mark didn’t know what charitable ImpSec guardian angel passed the word, but they were met at the top not by Ivan’s mother, but by his aunt.

“He’s, ah …” Mark was not sure what to say. Ivan peered around blearily.

“So I see,” said the Countess.

“Can we spare an armsman, to drive him home?” Ivan sagged, and Mark’s knees buckled. “Better make it two armsmen.”

“Yes.” The Countess touched a decorative comm pin on her bodice. “Pym … ?”

Ivan was thus taken off his hands, and Mark breathed a sigh of relief. His relief grew to outright gratitude when the Countess commented that it was time for them to quit, too. In a few minutes Pym brought the Count’s groundcar around to the entrance, and the night’s ordeal was over.

The Countess didn’t talk much, for a change, in the groundcar going back to Vorkosigan House. She leaned back against her seat and closed her eyes in exhaustion. She didn’t even ask him anything.

In the black-and-white paved foyer the Countess handed off her cloak to a maid, and headed left, toward the library.

“You’ll excuse me, Mark. I’m going to call ImpMil.”

She looked so tired. “Surely they’d have called you, ma’am, if there was any change in the Count’s condition.”

“I’m going to call ImpMil,” she said flatly. Her eyes were puffy slits. “Go to bed, Mark.”

He didn’t argue with her. He trudged wearily up the stairs to his bedroom corridor.

He paused outside the door to his room. It was very late at night. The hallway was deserted. The silence of the great house pressed on his ears. On an impulse, he turned back and stepped down the hall to Miles’s room. There he paused again. In all his weeks on Barrayar, he had not ventured in here. He had not been invited. He tried the antique knob. The door was not locked.

Hesitantly, he entered, and keyed up the lights with a word. It was a spacious bedchamber, given the limits of the house’s old architecture. An adjoining antechamber once meant for personal servants had long ago been converted to a private bathroom. At first glance the room seemed almost stripped, bare and neat and clean. All the clutter of childhood must have been boxed and put away in an attic, in some spasm of maturity. He suspected Vorkosigan House’s attics were astonishing.

Yet a trace of the owner’s personality remained. He walked slowly around the room, hands in his pockets like a patron at a museum.

Reasonably enough, the few mementos that had been retained tended heavily to reminders of successes. Miles’s diploma from the Imperial Service Academy, and his officer’s commission, were normal enough, though Mark wondered why a battered old Service issue weather manual was also framed and placed exactly between them. A box of old gymkhana awards going back to youth looked like they might be heading for an attic very soon. Half a wall was devoted to a massive book-disk and vid collection, thousands of titles. How many had Miles actually read? Curious, he took the hand-viewer off its hook on the wall nearby, and tried three disks at random. All had at least a few notes or glosses entered in the margin-boxes, tracks of Miles’s thought. Mark gave up the survey, and passed on.

One object he knew personally; a cloissone-hilted dagger, which Miles had inherited from old General Piotr. He dared to take it down and test its heft and edge. So when in the past two years had Miles stopped carting it around, and sensibly began leaving it safely at home? He replaced it carefully on the shelf in its sheath.

One wall-hanging was ironic, personal, and obvious: an old metal leg-brace, crossed, military-museum fashion, with a Vor sword. Half-joke, half-defiance. Both obsolete. A cheap photonic reproduction of a page from an ancient book was matted and mounted in a wildly expensive silver frame. The text was all out of context, but appeared to be some sort of pre-Jump religious gibberish, all about pilgrims, and a hill, and a city in the clouds. Mark wasn’t sure what that was all about; nobody had ever accused Miles of being the religious type. Yet it was clearly important to him.

Some of these things aren’t prizes, Mark realized. They are lessons.

A holovid portfolio box rested on the bedside table. Mark sat down, and activated it. He expected Elli Quinn’s face, but the first videoportrait to come up was of a tall, glowering, extraordinarily ugly man in Vorkosigan Armsmen’s livery. Sergeant Bothari, Elena’s father. He keyed through the contents. Quinn was next, then Bothari-Jesek. His parents, of course. Miles’s horse, Ivan, Gregor: after that, a parade of faces and forms. He keyed through faster and faster, not recognizing even a third of the people. After the fiftieth face, he stopped clicking.

He rubbed his face wearily. He’s not a man, he’s a mob. Right. He sat bent and aching, face in his hands, elbows on his knees. No. I am not Miles.

Miles’s comconsole was the secured type, in no way junior to the one in the Count’s library. Mark walked over and examined it only by eye; his hands he shoved back deep into his trouser pockets. His fingertips encountered Kareen Koudelka’s crumpled flowerlets.

He drew them out, and spread them on his palm. In a spasm of frustration, he smashed the blooms with his other hand, and threw them to the floor. Less than a minute later he was on his hands and knees frantically scraping the scattered bits up off the carpet again. I think I must be insane. He sat on his knees on the floor and began to cry.

Unlike poor Ivan, no one interrupted his misery, for which he was profoundly grateful. He sent a mental apology after his Vorpatril cousin, Sorry, sorry … though odds were even whether Ivan would remember anything about his intrusion come the morning. He gulped for control of his breath, his head aching fiercely.

Ten minutes delay downside at Bharaputra’s had been all the difference. If they’d been ten minutes faster, the Dendarii would have made it back to their drop shuttle before the Bharaputrans had a chance to blow it up, and all would have unfolded into another future. Thousands of ten-minute intervals had passed in his life, unmarked and without effect. But that ten minutes had been all it took to transform him from would-be hero to permanent scum. And he could never recover the moment.

Was that, then, the commander’s gift: to recognize those critical minutes, out of the mass of like moments, even in the chaos of their midst? To risk all to grab the golden ones? Miles had possessed that gift of timing to an extraordinary degree. Men and women followed him, laid all their trust at his feet, just for that.

Except once, Miles’s timing had failed… .

No. He’d been screaming his lungs out for them to keep moving. Miles’s timing had been shrewd. His feet had been fatally slowed by others’ delays.

Mark climbed up off the floor, washed his face in the bathroom, and returned and sat in the comconsole’s station chair. The first layer of secured functions was entered by a palm-lock. The machine did not quite like his palm-print; bone growth and subcutaneous fat deposits were beginning to distort the pattern out of the range of recognition. But not wholly, not yet; on the fourth try it took a reading that pleased it, and opened files to him. The next layer of functions required codes and accesses he did not know, but the top layer had all he needed for now: a private, if not secured, comm channel to ImpSec.

ImpSec’s machine bounced him to a human receptionist almost immediately. “My name is Lord Mark Vorkosigan,” he told the corporal on night-duty, whose face appeared above the vid plate. “I want to speak with Simon Illyan. I suppose he’s still at the Imperial Residence.”

“Is this an emergency, my lord?” the corporal asked.

“It is to me,” growled Mark.

Whatever the corporal thought of that, he patched Mark on through. Mark insisted his way past two more layers of subordinates before the ImpSec chief’s tired face materialized.

Mark swallowed. “Captain Illyan.”

“Yes, Lord Mark, what is it?” Illyan said wearily. It had been a long night for ImpSec, too.

“I had an interesting conversation with a certain Captain Vorventa, earlier this evening.”

“I am aware. You offered him some not-too-oblique threats.”

And Mark had assumed that ImpSec guard/servant had been sent to protect him … ah, well.

“So I have a question for you, sir. Is Captain Vorventa on the list of people who are supposed to know about Miles?”

Illyan’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Well, he does.”

“That’s … very interesting.”

“Is that helpful for you to know?”

Illyan sighed. “It gives me a new problem to worry about. Where is the internal leak? Now I’ll have to find out.”

“But—better to know than not.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Can I ask a favor in return?”

“Maybe.” Illyan looked extremely non-committal. “What kind of favor?”

“I want in.”

“What?”

“I want in. On ImpSec’s search for Miles. I want to start by reviewing your reports, I suppose. After that, I don’t know. But I can’t stand being kept alone in the dark any more.”

Illyan regarded him suspiciously. “No,” he said at last. “I’m not turning you loose to romp through my top-secret files, thank you. Good night, Lord Mark.”

“Wait, sir! You complained you were understaffed. You can’t turn down a volunteer.”

“What do you imagine you can do that ImpSec hasn’t?” Illyan snapped.

“The point is, sir—ImpSec hasn’t. You haven’t found Miles. I can hardly do less.”

He hadn’t put that quite as diplomatically as he should have, Mark realized, as Illyan’s face darkened with anger. “Good night, Lord Mark,” Illyan repeated through his teeth, and cut the link with a swipe of his hand.

Mark sat frozen in Miles’s station chair. The house was so quiet the loudest sound he could hear was his own blood in his ears. He should have pointed out to Illyan how clever he’d been, how quick on the uptake; Vorventa had revealed what he knew, but in no way had Mark cross-revealed that he knew Vorventa knew. Illyan’s investigation must now take the leak, whatever it was, by surprise. Isn’t that worth something? I’m not as stupid as you think I am.

You’re not as smart as I thought you were, either, Illyan. You are not … perfect. That was disturbing. He had expected ImpSec to be perfect, somehow; it had anchored his world to think so. And Miles, perfect. And the Count and Countess. All perfect, all unkillable. All made out of rubber. The only real pain, his own.

He thought of Ivan, crying in the shadows. Of the Count, dying in the woods. The Countess had kept her mask up better than any of them. She had to. She had more to hide. Miles himself, the man who had created a whole other personality just to escape into… .

The trouble, Mark decided, was that he had been trying to be Miles Vorkosigan all by himself. Even Miles didn’t do Miles that way. He had co-opted an entire supporting cast. A cast of thousands. No wonder I can never catch up with him.

Slowly, curiously, Mark opened his tunic and removed Gregor’s comm card from his inner breast pocket, and set it on the comconsole desk. He stared hard at the anonymous plastic chip, as if it bore some coded message for his eyes only. He rather fancied it did.

You knew. You knew, didn’t you, Gregor you bastard. You’ve just been waiting for me to figure it out for myself.

With spasmodic decision, Mark jammed the card into the comconsole’s read-slot.

No machines this time. A man in ordinary civilian clothing answered immediately, though without identifying himself. “Yes?”

“I’m Lord Mark Vorkosigan. I should be on your list. I want to talk to Gregor.”

“Right now, my lord?” said the man mildly. His hand danced over a keypad array to one side.

“Yes. Now. Please.”

“You are cleared.” He vanished.

The vid plate remained dark, but the audio transmitted a melodious chime. It chimed for quite a long time. Mark began to panic. What if—but then it stopped. There was a mysterious clanking sound, and Gregor’s voice said, “Yes?” in a bleary tone. No visuals.

“It’s me. Mark Vorkosigan. Lord Mark.”

“Yeah?”

“You told me to call you.”

“Yes, but it’s …” a short pause, “five in the bleeding morning, Mark!”

“Oh. Were you asleep?” he carolled frantically. He leaned forward and heat his head gently on the hard cool plastic of the desk. Timing. My timing.

“God, you sound just like Miles when you say that,” muttered the Emperor. The vid plate activated; Gregor’s image came up as he turned on a light. He was in some sort of bedroom, dim in the hack-ground, and was wearing nothing but loose black silky pajama pants. He peered at Mark, as if making sure he wasn’t talking to a ghost. But the corpus was too corpulant to be anyone but Mark. The Emperor heaved an oxygenating sigh and blinked himself to focus. “What do you need?”

How wonderfully succinct. If he answered in full, it could take him the next six hours.

“I need to be in on ImpSec’s search for Miles. Illyan won’t let me. You can override him.”

Gregor sat still for a minute, then barked a brief laugh. He swiped a hand through sleep-bent black hair. “Have you asked him?”

“Yes. Just now. He turned me down.”

“Mm, well … it’s his job to be cautious for me. So that my judgment may remain untrammeled.”

“In your untrammeled judgment, sir. Sire. Let me in!”

Gregor studied him thoughtfully, rubbing his face. “Yes …” he drawled slowly after a moment. “Let’s … see what happens.” His eyes were not bleary now.

“Can you call Illyan right now, sire?”

“What is this, pent-up demand? The dam breaks?”

I am poured out like water … where did that quote come from? It sounded like something of the Countess’s. “He’s still up. Please. Sire. And have him call me back at this console to confirm. I’ll wait.”

“Very well,” Gregor’s lips twisted up in a peculiar smile, “Lord Mark.”

“Thank you, sire. Uh … good night.”

“Good morning.” Gregor cut the comm.

Mark waited. The seconds ticked by, stretched out of all recognition. His hangover was starting, but he was still slightly drunk. The worst of both worlds. He had started to doze when the comconsole chimed at last, and he nearly spasmed out of his chair.

He slapped urgently at the controls. “Yes. Sir?”

Illyan’s saturnine face appeared over the vid plate. “Lord Mark.” He gave Mark the barest nod. “If you come to ImpSec headquarters at the beginning of normal business hours tomorrow morning, you will be permitted to review the files we discussed.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Mark sincerely.

“That’s two-and-one-half hours from now,” Illyan mentioned with, Mark thought, an understandable hint of sadism. Illyan hadn’t slept either.

“I’ll be there.”

Illyan acknowledged this with a shiver of his eyelids, and vanished.

Damnation through good works, or grace alone? Mark meditated on Gregor’s grace. He knew. He knew it before I did. Lord Mark Vorkosigan was a real person.