Ivan chuckled. "No, thanks. I have no desire to diet for the Emperor. Vorloupulous's law, y'know."
Miles's smile died on his lips. Ivan's chuckle drained away like something going down the sink. They stared at each other in stunned silence.
"Oh, shit..." said Miles at last. "I forgot about Vorloupulous's law. It never even crossed my mind."
"Surely nobody could interpret this as raising a private army," Ivan reassured him feebly. "Not proper livery and maintenance. I mean, they're not liege-sworn to you or anything—are they?"
"Only Baz and Arde," said Miles. "I don't know how Barrayaran law would interpret a mercenary contract. They're not for life, after all—unless you happen to be killed..."
"Who is that Baz fellow, anyway?" asked Ivan. "He seems to be your right-hand man."
"I couldn't have done this without him. He was an Imperial Service engineer, before he—" Miles choked himself off, "quit." Miles tried to guess what the laws might be about harboring deserters. He hadn't, after all, originally intended to be caught doing so. Upon reflection, his nebulous plan for returning home with Baz and begging his father to arrange some sort of pardon began to feel more and more like a man falling from an aircraft making plans to land on that soft fluffy cloud rushing up below him. What looked solid at a distance might well turn to fog at closer range.
Miles glanced at Ivan. Then he gazed at Ivan. Then he stared at Ivan. Ivan blinked back in innocent inquiry. There was something about that cheerful, frank face that made Miles hideously uneasy.
"You know," Miles said at last, "the more I think about your being here, the weirder it seems."
"Don't you believe it," said Ivan. "I had to work for my passage. That old bird was the most insatiable—"
"I don't mean your getting here—I mean your being sent in the first place. Since when do they pull first-year cadets out of class and send them on Security missions?"
"I don't know. I assumed they wanted somebody who could identify the body or something."
"Yes, but they've got almost enough medical data on me to build a new one. That idea only makes sense if you don't think about it too hard."
"Look, when a General Staff admiral calls a cadet in the middle of the night and says go, you go. You don't stop to debate with him. He wouldn't appreciate it."
"Well—what did your recorded orders say?"
"Come to think of it, I never saw my recorded orders. I assumed Admiral Hessman must have given them to Captain Dimir personally."
Miles decided his uneasiness stemmed from the number of times the phrase "I assumed" was turning up in this conversation. There was something else—he almost had it.... "Hessman? Hessman gave you your orders?"
"In person," Ivan said proudly.
"Hessman doesn't have anything to do with either Intelligence or Security. He's in charge of Procurement. Ivan, this is getting screwier and screwier."
"An admiral is an admiral."
"This admiral is on my father's shit list, though. For one thing, he's Count Vordrozda's pipeline to Imperial Service Headquarters, and Father hates his officers getting involved in party politics. Father also suspects him of peculating Service funds, some kind of sleight-of-hand in shipbuilding contracts. At the time I left home, he was itchy enough to put Captain Illyan on it personally, and you know he wouldn't waste Illyan's talents on anything minor."
"All that's way over my head. I've got enough problems with navigational math."
"It shouldn't be over your head. Oh, as a cadet, sure—but you're also Lord Vorpatril. If anything happened to me, you'd inherit the Countship of our district from my father."
"God forbid," said Ivan. "I want to be an officer, and travel around, and pick up girls. Not chase around through those mountains trying to collect taxes from homicidal illiterates and keep chicken-stealing cases from turning into minor guerilla wars. No insult intended, but your district is the most intractable on Barrayar. Miles, there are people back behind Dendarii Gorge who live in caves." Ivan shuddered. "And they like it."
"There are some great caves back there," Miles agreed. "Gorgeous colors when you get the right light on the rock formations." Homesick remembrance twinged through him.
"Well, if I ever inherit a Countship, I'm praying it will be of a city," Ivan concluded.
"You're not in line for any I can think of," grinned Miles. He tried to recapture the thread of their conversation, but Ivan's remarks made lines of inheritance map themselves in his head. He traced his own descent through his Grandmother Vorkosigan to Prince Xav to Emperor Dorca Vorbarra himself. Had the great Emperor ever foreseen what a turn his law, that finally broke the private armies and the private wars of the Counts forever, would give his great-great-grandson?
"Who's your heir, Ivan?" Miles asked idly, staring out at the Dendarii ships, but dreaming of the Dendarii Mountains. "Lord Vortaine, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but I expect to outlive the old boy any minute. His health wasn't too good, last I heard. Too bad this inheritance thing doesn't work backwards, I'd be in for a bundle."
"Who does get his bundle?"
"His daughter, I guess. His titles go to—let me think—Count Vordrozda, who doesn't even need 'em. From what I've heard of Vordrozda, he'd rather have the money. Don't know if he'd go as far as marrying the daughter to get it, though, she's about fifty years old."
They both gazed into space.
"God," said Ivan after a while, "I hope those orders Dimir got when I ducked out weren't to go home or something. They'll think I've been AWOL for three weeks—there won't be enough room on my record for all the demerits. Thank God they've eliminated the old-style discipline parades."
"You were there when Dimir got his orders? And you didn't stick around to see what they were?" asked Miles, astonished.
"It was like pulling teeth to get that pass out of him. I didn't want to risk it. There was this girl, you see—I wish now I'd taken my beeper."
"You left your comm link?"
"There was this girl—I really did almost really forget it. But he was opening the stuff by then, and I didn't want to go back in and get nabbed."
Miles shook his head hopelessly. "Can you remember anything unusual about the orders? Anything out of the ordinary?"
"Oh, sure. It was the damnedest packet. In the first place, it was delivered by an Imperial Household courier in full livery. Lessee, four data discs, one green for Intelligence, two red for Security, one blue for Operations. And the parchment, of course."
Ivan had the family memory, at least. What would it be like to have a mind that retained nearly everything, but never bothered to put it in any kind of order? Exactly like living in Ivan's room, Miles decided. "Parchment?" he said. "Parchment?"
"Yeah, I thought that was kind of unusual."
"Do you have any idea how bloody—" He surged up, sat back down, squeezed his temples with the heels of his hands in an effort to get his brain into motion. Not only was Ivan an idiot, but he generated a telepathic damping field that turned people nearby into idiots too. He would point this out to Barrayaran Intelligence, who would make of his cousin the newest weapon in their arsenal—if anyone could be found who could remember what they were doing once they closed on him.... "Ivan, there are only three kinds of thing written on parchment any more. Imperial edicts, the originals of the official edicts from the Council of Counts and from the Council of Ministers, and certain orders from the Council of Counts to their own members."
"I know that."
"As my father's heir, I am a cadet member of that Council."
"You have my sympathy," said Ivan, his gaze wandering back to the window. "Which of those ships out there is the fastest, d'you think, the Illyrican cruiser or the—"
"Ivan, I'm psychic," Miles announced suddenly. "I'm so psychic, I can tell what color the ribbon was on that parchment without even seeing it."
"I know what color it was," said Ivan irritably. "It was—"
"Black," Miles cut across him. "Black, you id
iot! And you never thought to mention it!"
"Look, I have to take that stuff from my mother and your father, I don't have to take it from you, too—" Ivan paused. "How did you know?"
"I know the color because I know the contents." Miles rose to pace uncontrollably back and forth. "You know them too, or you would if you ever stopped to think. I've got a joke for you. What's white, taken from the back of a sheep, tied up with black bows, shipped thousands of light-years, and lost?"
"If that's your idea of a joke, you're weirder than—"
"Death." Miles's voice fell to a whisper, making Ivan jump. "Treason. Civil war. Betrayal, sabotage, almost certainly murder. Evil..."
"You haven't had any more of that sedative you're allergic to, have you?" asked Ivan anxiously.
Miles's pacing was becoming frenetic. The urge to pick Ivan up and shake him, in the hope that all that information floating randomly around inside his head would start to polymerize into some chain of reason, was almost overwhelming.
"If Dimir's courier ship's Necklin rods were sabotaged during the stopover at Beta Colony, it would be weeks before the ship was missed. For all the Barrayaran embassy would know, it left on its mission, made the jump—no way for Beta Colony to know if it came out the other side or not. What a thorough way to get rid of the evidence." Miles imagined the dismay and terror of the men aboard as the jump began to go wrong, as their bodies began to run and smear like watercolors in the rain—he forced his mind back to abstract reason.
"I don't understand. Where d'you think Dimir is?" asked Ivan.
"Dead. Quite thoroughly dead. You were meant to be quite thoroughly dead too, but you missed the boat." A high, wheeing laugh escaped Miles. He took hold of himself, literally, wrapping his arms around his torso. "I guess they figured if they were going to all that trouble to get rid of that parchment, they'd throw you in at the same time. There's a certain economy in the plot—you might expect it from a mind that ended up in Procurement."
"Back up," demanded Ivan. "What do you figure the parchment was, anyway—and who the devil are 'they'? You're beginning to sound as paranoid as old Bothari."
"The black ribbon. It had to have been a capital charge. An Imperial order for my arrest on a capital charge laid in the Council of Counts. The charge? You said it yourself. Violation of Vorloupulous's law. Treason, Ivan! Now ask yourself—who would benefit by my conviction for treason?"
"Nobody," said Ivan promptly.
"All right." Miles rolled his eyes upward. "Try it this way. Who would suffer by my conviction for treason?"
"Oh, it would destroy your father, of course. I mean, his office overlooks the Great Square. He could stand at his window and watch you starve to death every working day." An embarrassed laugh escaped Ivan. "It would have to about drive him crazy."
Miles paced. "Take his heir, by execution or exile, break his morale, bring him down and his Centrist coalition with him—or—force him to make the false charges real, attempting my rescue. Then bring him down for treason as well. What a demonic fork!" His intellect admired the plot's abstract perfection, even while rage at its cruelty nearly took his breath away.
Ivan shook his head. "How could anything like that get this far and not be quashed by your father? I mean, he may be famous for impartiality, but there are limits even for him."
"You saw the parchment. If Gregor himself had been worked over into a state of suspicion..." Miles spoke slowly. "A trial clears as well as convicts. If I showed up voluntarily, it would go a long way toward proving I had no treasonable intent. That cuts both ways, of course—if I don't show, it's a strong presumption of guilt. But I could hardly show up if I weren't informed it was taking place, could I?"
"The Council of Counts is such a cantankerous body of old relics," argued Ivan. "Your plotters would be taking an awful chance they could swing the vote their way. Nobody would want to get caught voting for the losing side in something like that. Either way, there'd be blood drawn at the end."
"Maybe they were forced. Maybe my father and Illyan finally moved in on Hessman, and he figured the best defense would be a counterattack."
"So what's in it for Vordrozda? Why doesn't he just throw Hessman to the wolves?"
"Ah," said Miles. "There I'm... I really wonder if I haven't gone a little paro, but—follow this chain. Count Vordrozda, Lord Vortaine, you, me, my father—who is my father heir to?"
"Your grandfather. He's dead, remember? Miles, you can't convince me that Count Vordrozda would knock off five people to inherit the Dendarii Province. He's the Count of Lorimel, for God's sakes! He's a rich man. Dendarii would drain his purse, not fill it."
"Not my grandfather. We're talking about another title altogether. Ivan, there is a large faction of historically minded people on Barrayar who claim, defensibly, that the Salic bar to Imperial inheritance has no foundation in Barrayaran law or custom. Dorca himself inherited through his mother, after all."
"Yes, and your father would like to ship every one of that faction off to, er, summer camp."
"Who is Gregor's heir?"
"Right now, nobody, which is why everybody is on his back to marry and start swiving—"
"If Salic descent were allowed, who would be his heir?"
Ivan refused to be stampeded. "Your father. Everybody knows that. Everybody also knows he wouldn't touch the Imperium with a stick, so what? This is pretty wild, Miles."
"Can you think of another theory that will account for the facts?"
"Sure," said Ivan, happily continuing the role of devil's advocate. "Easy. Maybe that parchment was addressed to someone else. Dimir took it to him, which is why he hasn't shown up here. Have you ever heard of Occam's Razor, Miles?"
"It sounds simpler, until you start to think about it. Ivan, listen. Think back on the exact circumstances of your midnight departure from the Imperial Academy, and that dawn liftoff. Who signed you out? Who saw you go? Who do you know, for certain, who knows where you are right now? Why didn't my father give you any personal messages for me—or my mother or Captain Illyan either, for that matter?" His voice became insistent. "If Admiral Hessman took you off to some quiet, isolated place right now and offered you a glass of wine with his own hands, would you drink it?"
Ivan was silent for a long, thoughtful time, staring out at the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet. When he turned back to Miles, his face was painfully somber. "No."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He tracked them down finally in the crew's mess of the Triumph, now parked in Docking Bay 9. It was an off-hour for meals, and the mess was nearly empty but for a few die-hard caffeine addicts swilling an assortment of brews.
They sat, dark heads close, opposite each other. Baz's hand lay open, palm-up, on the small table as he leaned forward. Elena's shoulders were hunched, her hands shredding a napkin in her lap. Neither looked happy.
Miles took a deep breath, carefully adjusted his own expression to one of benevolent good cheer, and sauntered up to them. He no longer bled inside, the surgeon had assured him. Couldn't prove it now. "Hi."
They both started. Elena, still hunched, shot him a look of resentment. Baz answered with a hesitant, dismayed "My lord?" that made Miles feel very small indeed. He suppressed an urge to turn tail and slither out under the door.
"I've been thinking over what you said," Miles began, leaning against an adjoining table in a pose of nonchalance. "Your arguments made a lot of sense, when I came to really examine them. I've changed my opinion. For what it's worth, you're welcome to my blessing."
Baz's face lit with honest delight. Elena's posture opened like a daylily in sudden noon, and as suddenly closed again. The winged brows drew down in puzzlement. She looked at him directly, he felt, for the first time in weeks. "Really?"
He supplied her with a chipper grin. "Really. And we shall satisfy all the forms of etiquette, as well. All it takes is a little ingenuity."
He pulled a colored scarf from his pocket, secreted there for the occasion, and walked around
to Baz's side of the table. "We'll start over, on the right foot this time. Picture, if you will, this banal plastic table bolted to the floor before you as a starlit balcony, with a pierced lattice window crawling with those little flowers with the long sharp thorns that make you itch like fire, behind which is, rightly and properly, concealed your heart's desire. Got that? Now—Armsman Jesek, speaking as your liege-lord, I understand you have a request."
Miles's pantomime gestures cued the engineer. Baz leaned back with a grin, and picked up his lead.
"My lord, I ask your permission and aid to wed the first daughter of Armsman Konstantine Bothari, that my sons may serve you."
Miles cocked his head, and smirked. "Ah, good, we've all been watching the same vid dramas, I see. Yes, certainly, Armsman; may they all serve me as well as you do. I shall send the Baba."
He flipped the scarf into a triangle and tied it around his head. Leaning on an imaginary cane, he hobbled arthritically over to Elena's side of the table, muttering in a cracked falsetto. Once there, he removed the scarf and reverted to the role of Elena's liege-lord and guardian, and grilled the Baba as to the suitability of the suitor she represented. The Baba was sent bobbing back twice to Baz's liege-commander, to personally check and guarantee his a) continued employment prospects and b) personal hygiene and absence of head-lice.
Muttering obscene little old lady imprecations, the Baba returned at last to Elena's side of the table to conclude her transaction. Baz by this time was cackling with laughter at assorted Barrayaran in-jokes, and Elena's smile had at last reached her eyes.
When his clowning was over and the last somewhat scrambled formula was completed, Miles hooked a third chair into its floor bolts and fell into it.
"Whew! No wonder the custom is dying out. That's exhausting."
Elena grinned. "I've always had the impression you were trying to be three people. Perhaps you've found your calling."
"What, one-man shows? I've had enough of them lately to last a lifetime." Miles sighed, and grew serious. "You may consider yourselves well and officially betrothed, at any rate. When do you plan to register your marriage?"