Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

  "May I suggest that the name couldn't have held it together without you?" His free hand tightened around hers, on the coverlet. Hers tightened back.

  He started up again. "Wait—shouldn't you be in biotainer gear?"

  "Not any more. Lie down, drat it. What's the last thing you remember?"

  "My last clear memory is of being on the Barrayaran ship about four days out from Quaddiespace. Cold."

  Her smile didn't change, but her eyes grew dark with memory. "Cold is right. The blood filters fell behind, even with four of them running at once. We could see the life just draining out of you; your metabolism couldn't keep up, couldn't replace the resources being siphoned off even with the IVs and nutrient tubes running flat out, and multiple blood transfusions. Captain Clogston couldn't think of any other way to suppress the parasites but to put you, Bel, and them into stasis. A cold hibernation. The next step would have been cryofreeze."

  "Oh, no. Not again . . . !"

  "It was the ultimate fallback, but it wasn't needed, thank heavens. Once you and Bel were sedated and chilled enough, the parasites stopped multiplying. The captains and crews of our little convoy were very good about rushing us along as fast as was safe, or a little faster. Oh—yes, we're here; we arrived in orbit around Rho Ceta . . . yesterday, I guess it was."

  Had she slept since then? Not much, Miles suspected. Her face, though cheerful now, was drawn with fatigue. He reached for it again, to lightly touch her lips with two fingers as he habitually did her holovid image.

  "I remember that you wouldn't let me say good-bye to you properly," he complained.

  "I figured it would give you more motivation to fight your way back to me. If only for the last word."

  He snorted a laugh, and let his hand fall back to the coverlet. The artificial gravity probably wasn't turned up to two gees in this chamber, despite his arm feeling as though it were hung with lead weights. He had to admit, he didn't feel exactly . . . chipper. "What, then, am I all clear of those hell-parasites?"

  Her smile returned. "All better. Well, that is, that frightening Cetagandan lady doctor the haut Pel brought with her has pronounced you cured. But you're still very debilitated. You're supposed to rest."

  "Rest, I can't rest! What else is happening? Where's Bel?"

  "Sh, sh. Bel's alive too. You can see Bel soon, and Nicol too. They're in a cabin just down the corridor. Bel took . . ." She frowned hesitantly. "Took more damage from this than you did, but is expected to recover, mostly. In time."

  Miles didn't quite like the sound of that.

  Ekaterin followed his glance around. "Right now we're aboard the haut Pel's own ship—that is, her Star Crèche ship, that she brought from Eta Ceta. The women from the Star Crèche had you and Bel carried across to treat you here. The haut ladies wouldn't let any of our men aboard to guard you, not even Armsman Roic at first, which caused the most stupid argument; I was ready to slap everybody concerned, till they finally decided that Nicol and I could come with you. Captain Clogston was very upset that he wouldn't be allowed to attend. He wanted to hold back giving them the replicators till they cooperated, but you can bet I put my foot down on that idea."

  "Good!" And not just because Miles had wanted those little time bombs off Barrayaran hands at the earliest possible instant. He could not imagine a more psychologically repugnant or diplomatically disastrous ploy, at this late hour. "I remember trying to calm down that idiot Guppy, who was hysterical about being carried back to the Cetagandans. Making promises . . . I hope I wasn't lying through my chattering teeth. Was it true he was still harboring a reservoir of parasites? Did they fix him, too? Or . . . not? I swore on my name that if he'd cooperate in testifying, Barrayar would protect him, but I expected to be conscious when we arrived. . . ."

  "Yes, the Cetagandan doctor treated him, too. She claims the latent residue of parasites wouldn't have fired up again, but really, I don't think she was sure. Apparently, no one has ever survived this bioweapon before. I gathered the impression that the Star Crèche wants Guppy for research purposes even more than Cetagandan Imperial Security does for criminal charges, and if they have to arm wrestle for him, the Star Crèche will win. Our men did carry out your order; he's still being held on the Barrayaran ship. Some of the Cetagandans aren't too pleased about that, but I told them they'd have to deal with you on the subject."

  He hesitated, and cleared his throat. "Um . . . I also seem to remember recording some messages. To my parents. And Mark and Ivan. And to little Aral and Helen. I hope you didn't . . . you didn't send them off already, did you?"

  "I set them aside."

  "Oh, good. I'm afraid I wasn't very coherent by then."

  "Perhaps not," she admitted. "But they were very moving, I thought."

  "I put it off too long, I guess. You can erase them now."

  "Never," she said, quite firmly.

  "But I was babbling."

  "Nevertheless, I'm going to save them." She stroked his hair, and her smile twisted. "Perhaps they can be recycled someday. After all . . . next time, you might not have time."

  The door to the chamber slid aside, and two tall, willowy women entered. Miles recognized the senior of them at once.

  The haut Pel Navarr, Consort of Eta Ceta, was perhaps the number-two woman in the strange secret hierarchy of the Star Crèche, after the Empress, haut Rian Degtiar herself. In appearance, she was unchanged from when Miles had first met her a decade ago, except perhaps for her hairstyle. Her immensely long, honey-blond hair was gathered today into a dozen braids, hanging from a level running around the back of her head from one ear to the other, their decorated ends swinging around her ankles along with her skirt hem and draperies. Miles wondered if the unsettling, faintly Medusa-like effect was intended. Her skin was still pale and perfect, but she could not, even for an instant, be mistaken for young. Too much calm, too much control, too much cool irony . . .

  Outside the innermost sanctuaries of the Celestial Garden, the high haut women normally moved in the privacy and protection of personal force bubbles, screened from unworthy eyes. The fact that she strode here unveiled was alone enough to tell Miles that he now lay in a Star Crèche reserve. The dark-haired woman beside her was old enough to have streaks of silver in the hair looping down her back among her long robes, and skin that, while unblemished, was distinctly softened with age. Chill, deferential, unknown to Miles.

  "Lord Vorkosigan." The haut Pel gave him a relatively cordial nod. "I am pleased to find you awake. Are you quite yourself again?"

  Why, who was I before? He was afraid he could guess. "I think so."

  "It was quite a surprise to me that we should meet again this way, although not, under the circumstances, an unwelcome one."

  Miles cleared his throat. "It was all a surprise to me, too. Your babies in their replicators—you have them back? Are they all right?"

  "My people completed their examinations last night. All seems to be well with them, despite their horrific adventures. I'm sorry that the same was not so for you."

  She gave a nod to her companion; the woman proved to be a physician, who, with a few brusque murmurs, completed a brief medical examination of their Barrayaran guest. Signing off her work, Miles guessed. His leading questions about the bioengineered parasites met polite evasion, and then Miles wondered if she were physician—or ordnance designer. Or veterinarian, except that most veterinarians he'd met showed signs of actually liking their patients.

  Ekaterin was more determined. "Can you give me any idea of what long-term side-effects we should watch for from this unfortunate exposure, for the Lord Auditor and Portmaster Thorne?"

  The woman motioned for Miles to refasten his garment, and turned to speak over his head. "Your husband," she made the term sound utterly alien, in her mouth, "does suffer some muscular and circulatory micro-scarring. Muscle tone should recover gradually over time to near his prior levels. However, added to his earlier cryo-trauma, I would expect greater chance of circulatory mishaps later in
his life. Although as short-lived as you people are, perhaps the few decades difference in life expectancy will not seem significant."

  Quite the reverse, madam. Strokes, thromboses, blood clots, aneurysms, Miles supposed was what this translated to. Oh, joy. Just add them to the list, along with needler guns, sonic grenades, plasma fire, and nerve disruptor beams. And hot rivets and hard vacuum.

  And seizures. So, what interesting synergies might be expected when this circulatory micro-scarring crossed paths with his seizure disorder? Miles decided to save that question for his own physicians, later. They could use a challenge. He was going to be a damned research project, again. Military as well as medical, he realized with a chill.

  The haut woman continued to Ekaterin, "The Betan suffered notably more internal damage. Full recovery of muscle tone may never occur, and the herm will need to be on guard against circulatory stress of all kinds. A low- or zero-gravity environment might be the safest for it during its convalescence. I gathered from its partner, the quaddie female, that this may actually be easy to provide."

  "Whatever Bel needs will be arranged," Miles vowed. For such a debilitating injury in the Emperor's service, it shouldn't even take an Imperial Auditor to get ImpSec off Bel's neck, and maybe rustle up a little medical pension in the bargain.

  The haut Pel gave a tiny jerk of her chin. The physician favored the planetary consort with an obeisant bow, and excused herself.

  Pel turned back to Miles. "As soon as you feel sufficiently recovered, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, ghem-General Benin begs the opportunity to speak with you."

  "Ah! Dag Benin's here? Good! I want to talk to him, too. Does he have the ba in his custody yet? Has it been made crystal clear that Barrayar was an innocent dupe in your ba's illicit travels?"

  Pel replied, "The ba was of the Star Crèche; the ba has been returned to the Star Crèche. It is an internal matter, although we are, of course, grateful to ghem-General Benin for his assistance dealing with any persons outside our purview who may have aided the ba in its . . . mad flight."

  So, the haut ladies had their stray back. Miles suppressed a slight twinge of pity for the ba. Pel's quelling tone of voice did not invite further questions from outlander barbarians. Tough. Pel was the most venturesome of the planetary consorts, but his likelihood of ever getting her alone, face-to-face, after this moment was slight, and her likelihood of discussing the matter frankly in front of anyone else even slighter.

  He forged on. "I finally deduced the ba must be a renegade, and not, as I'd first thought, an agent of the Star Crèche. I'm most curious about the mechanics of this bizarre kidnapping. Guppy—the Jacksonian smuggler, Russo Gupta—could only give me an exterior view of events, and that only from his first point of contact, when the ba off-loaded the replicators from what I assume was the annual child-ship to Rho Ceta, yes?"

  Pel inhaled, but conceded stiffly, "Yes. The crime was long planned and prepared, it now appears. The ba slew the Consort of Rho Ceta, her handmaidens, and the crew of the ship by poison just after their last jump. They were all dead by the time of the rendezvous. It set the ship's auto-navigation to take the vessel into the sun of the system thereafter. To the ba's credit, this was intended as a befitting pyre, of sorts," she conceded grudgingly.

  Given his prior exposure to the arcana of haut funeral practices, Miles could almost follow this evident point in the prisoner's favor without his brain cramping. Almost. But Pel spoke of the ba's intention as fact, not conjecture; therefore, the haut ladies had already had more luck in their interrogation of the deranged ba in one night than Miles's security people had gained on their whole voyage here. Luck, I suspect, has nothing to do with it. "I thought the ba should have been carrying a greater variety of bioweapons, if it had any time to loot the child-ship before the vessel was abandoned and destroyed."

  Pel was normally rather sunny, as haut planetary consorts went, but this elicited a freezing frown. "These matters are altogether not for discussion outside the Star Crèche."

  "Ideally, no. But unfortunately, your . . . private items managed to travel quite a way outside the Star Crèche indeed. As I can personally testify. They became a source of very public concern for us, when apprehending the ba on Graf Station. At the time I left there, no one was certain if we'd identified and neutralized every contagion, or not. "

  Reluctantly, Pel admitted, "The ba had planned to steal the complete array. But the haut lady in charge of the consort's . . . supplies, although dying, managed to destroy them before her death. As was her duty." Pel's eyes narrowed. "She will be remembered among us."

  The dark-haired woman's opposite number, perhaps? Did the chilly physician guard a similar arsenal on Pel's behalf, perhaps aboard this very ship? Complete array, eh. Miles filed that tacit admission silently away, for later sharing with ImpSec's highest echelons, and swiftly redirected the conversation.

  "But what was the ba actually trying to do? Was it acting alone? If it was, how did it defeat its loyalty programming?"

  "That is an internal matter, too," she repeated darkly.

  "Well, I'll tell you my guesses," Miles burbled on, before she could turn away and end the exchange. "I believe this ba to be very closely related to Emperor Fletchir Giaja, and therefore, to his late mother. I'm guessing this ba was one of the old Dowager Empress Lisbet's close confidants during her reign. Her bio-treason, her plan to split the haut into competing subgroups, was defeated after her death—"

  "Not treason," haut Pel objected faintly. "As such."

  "Unsanctioned unilateral redesign, then. For some reason, this ba was not purged with the others of her inner cadre after her death—or maybe it was, I don't know. Demoted, perhaps? But anyway, I'm guessing this whole escapade was some sort of misguided effort to complete its dead mistress's—or mother's—vision. Am I close?"

  The haut Pel eyed him with extreme distaste. "Close enough. It is truly done now, in any case. The emperor will be pleased with you—again. Some token of his gratitude may well be forthcoming at the child-ship landing ceremonies tomorrow, to which you and your lady-wife are invited. The first outlanders—ever—to be so honored."

  Miles waved aside this little distraction. "I'd trade all the honors for some scrap of understanding."

  Pel snorted. "You haven't changed, have you? Still insatiably curious. To a fault," she added pointedly.

  Ekaterin smiled dryly.

  Miles ignored Pel's hint. "Bear with me. I don't think I've quite got it, yet. I suspect the haut—and the ba—are not so post-human yet as to be beyond self-deception, all the more subtle for their subtlety. I saw the ba's face, when I destroyed that freezer case of genetic samples in front of it. Something shattered. Some last, desperate . . . something." He had slain men's bodies, and bore the mark, and knew it. He did not think he'd ever before slain a soul, yet left the body breathing, bereft and accusing. I have to understand this.

  Pel was clearly not pleased to go on, but she understood the depth of a debt that could not be paid off with such trivialities as medals and ceremonies. "The ba, it seems," she said slowly, "desired more than Lisbet's vision. It planned a new empire—with itself as both emperor and empress. It stole the haut children of Rho Ceta not just as a core population for its planned new society, but as . . . mates. Consorts. Aspiring to even more than Fletchir Giaja's genetic place, which, while part of the goal of haut, does not imagine itself the whole. Hubris," she sighed. "Madness."

  "In other words," breathed Miles, "the ba wanted children. In the only way it could . . . conceive."

  Ekaterin's hand, which had drifted to his shoulder, tightened.

  "Lisbet . . . should not have told it so much," said Pel. "She made a pet of this ba. Treated it almost as a child, instead of a servitor. Hers was a powerful personality, but not always . . . wise. Perhaps . . . self-indulgent in her old age, as well."

  Yes—the ba was Fletchir Giaja's sibling, perhaps the Cetagandan emperor's near-clone. Elder sibling. Test run, and the test judged succes
sful—and decades of observant service in the Celestial Garden thereafter, with the question always hovering—so why was not the ba, instead of its brother, given all that honor, power, wealth, fertility?

  "One last question. If you will. What was the ba's name?"

  Pel's lips tightened. "It shall be nameless now. And forevermore."

  Erased. Let the punishment fit the crime.

  Miles shivered.

  * * *

  The luxurious lift van banked over the palace of the Imperial Governor of Rho Ceta, the sprawling complex shimmering in the night. The vehicle began to drop into the vast dark garden, laced with veins of lights along its roads and paths, which lay to the east of the buildings. Miles stared in fascination out his window as they swooped down, then up over a small range of hills, trying to guess if the landscape was natural, or artificially carved out of Rho Ceta's surface. Partly carved, at any rate, for on the opposite side of the rise a grassy bowl of an amphitheater sheltered in the slope, overlooking a silky black lake a kilometer across. Beyond the hills on the lake's other side, Rho Ceta's capital city made the night sky glow amber.