Lois McMaster Bujold - 12 Komarr

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Komarr
Lois McMaster Bujold
CHAPTER ONE
The last gleaming sliver of Komarr’s true-sun melted out of sight beyond the low hills on the western horizon. Lagging behind
it in the vault of the heavens, the reflected fire of the solar mirror sprang out in brilliant contrast to the darkening, purple-tinged
blue. When Ekaterin had first viewed the hexagonal soletta-array from downside on Komarr’s surface, she’d immediately
imagined it as a grand Winterfair ornament, hung in the sky like a snowflake made of stars, benign and consoling. She leaned now
on her balcony overlooking Serifosa Dome’s central city park, and gravely studied the lopsided spray of light through the glassy
arc overhead. It sparkled deceptively in contrast to the too-dark sky. Three of the six disks of the star-flake shone not at all, and
the central seventh was occluded and dull.
Ancient Earthmen, she had read, had taken alterations in the clockwork procession of their heavens - comets, novae, shooting
stars - for disturbing omens, premonitions of disasters natural or political; the very word, disaster, embedded the astrological
source of the concept. The collision two weeks ago of an out-of-control inner-system ore freighter with the insolation mirror that
supplemented Komarr’s solar energy was surely most literally a disaster, instantly so for the half-dozen Komarran members of the
soletta’s station-keeping crew who had been killed. But it seemed to be playing out in slow motion thereafter; it had so far barely
affected the sealed arcologies that housed the planet’s population. Below her, in the park, a crew of workers was arranging
supplemental lighting on high girders. Similar stopgap measures in the city’s food-producing greenhouses must be nearly
complete, to spare them and this equipment to such an ornamental task. No, she reminded herself; no vegetation in the dome was
merely ornamental. Each added its bit to the biological reservoir that ultimately supported life here. The gardens in the domes
would live, cared for by their human symbiotes.
Outside the arcologies, in the fragile plantations that labored to bio-transform a world, it was another question altogether. She
knew the math, discussed nightly at her dinner table for two weeks, of the percentage loss of insolation at the equator. Days gone
winter-cloudy - except that they were planetwide, and going on and on, until when? When would repairs be complete? When
would they start, for that matter? As sabotage, if it had been sabotage, the destruction was inexplicable; as half-sabotage, doubly
inexplicable. Will they try again? If it was a they at all, ghastly malice and not mere ghastly accident.
She sighed, and turned away from the view, and switched on the spotlights she’d put up to supplement her own tiny balcony
garden. Some of the Barrayaran plants she’d started were particularly touchy about their illumination. She checked the light with a
meter, and shifted two boxes of deerslayer vine closer to the source, and set the timers. She moved about, checking soil
temperature and moisture with sensitive and practiced fingers, watering sparingly where needed. Briefly, she considered moving
her old bonsai’d skellytum indoors, to provide it with more controlled conditions, but it was all indoors here on Komarr, really.
She hadn’t felt wind in her hair for nearly a year. She felt an odd twinge of identification with the transplanted ecology outside,
slowly starving for light and heat, suffocating in a toxic atmosphere... Stupid. Stop it. We’re lucky to be here.
"Ekaterin!" Her husband’s inquiring bellow echoed, muffled, inside the residence tower.
She poked her head through the door to the kitchen. "I’m on the balcony."
"Well, come down here!"
She set her gardening tools in the box seat, closed the lid, sealed the transparent doors behind her, and hurried across the room
into the hall and down the circular staircase. Tien was standing impatiently beside the double doors from their apartment to the
building’s corridor, a comm link in his hand.
"Your uncle just called. He’s landed at the shuttleport. I’ll get him."
"I’ll get Nikolai, and go with you."
"Don’t bother, I’m just going to meet him at the West Station locks. He said to tell you, he’s bringing a guest. Another
Auditor, some sort of assistant to him, it sounded like. But he said not to worry, they’ll both take pot luck. He seemed to imagine
we’d feed them in the kitchen or something. Eh! Two Imperial Auditors. Why ever did you have to invite him, anyway?"
She stared at him in dismay. "How can my Uncle Vorthys come to Komarr and not see us? Besides, you can’t say your
department isn’t affected by what he’s investigating. Naturally he wants to see it. I thought you liked him."
He slapped his hand arrhythmically on his thigh. "Back when he was just the old weird Professor, sure. Eccentric Uncle
Vorthys, the Vor tech. This Imperial appointment of his took the whole family by surprise. I can’t imagine what favors he called
in to get it."
Is that your only idea of how men advance? But she did not speak the weary thought aloud. "Of all political appointments,
surely Imperial Auditor is the least likely to be gained that way," she murmured.
"Naive Kat." He smiled shortly, and hugged her around the shoulders. "No one gets something for nothing in Vorbarr Sultana.
Except, perhaps, your uncle’s assistant, whom I gather is closely related to the Vorkosigan. He apparently got his appointment for
breathing. Incredibly young for the job, if he’s the one I heard about who was sworn in at Winterfair. A lightweight, I presume,
although all your Uncle Vorthys said was that he was sensitive about his height and not to mention it. At least some part of this
mess promises to be a show."
He tucked his comm link away in his tunic pocket. His hand was shaking slightly. Ekaterin grasped his wrist and turned it
over. The tremula increased. She raised her eyes, dark with worry, in silent question to his.
"No, dammit!" He jerked his arm away. "It’s not starting. I’m just a little tense. And tired. And hungry, so see if you can’t pull
together a decent meal by the time we’re back. Your uncle may have prole tastes, but I can’t imagine they’re shared by a Vorbarr
Sultana lordling." He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and looked away from her unhappy frown.
"You’re older now than your brother was then."
"Variable onset, remember? We’ll go soon. I promise."
"Tien... I wish you’d give up this galactic treatment plan. They have medical facilities here on Komarr that are almost as good
as, as Beta Colony or anywhere. I thought, when you won this post here, that you would. Forget the secrecy, just go openly for
help. Or go discreetly, if you insist. But don’t wait any longer!"
"They’re not discreet enough. My career is finally on course, finally paying off. I have no desire to be publicly branded a
mutant now."
If I don’t care, what does it matter what anyone else thinks? She hesitated. "Is that why you don’t want to see Uncle Vorthys?
Tien, he’s the least likely of my relatives - or yours, for that matter - to care if your disease is genetic or not. He will care about
you, and about Nikolai."
"I have it under control," he insisted. "Don’t you dare betray me to your uncle, this close to the real payoff. I have it under
control. You’ll see."
"Just don’t... take your brother’s way out. Promise me!" The lightflyer accident that hadn’t been quite an accident: that had
ushered in these years of chronic, subclinical nightmare waiting and watching....
"I have no intention of doing anything like that. It’s all planned. I’ll finish out this year’s appointment, then we’ll take a long
overdue galactic vacation, you and me and Nikolai. And it will all be fixed, and no one will ever know. If you don’t lose your
head and panic at the last minute!" He grasped her hand, and grimaced an unfelt smile, and strode out the doors.
Wait and I’ll fix it. Trust me. That’s what you said the last time. And the time before that, and the time before that.... Who is
betrayed? Tien, you’re running out of time, can’t you see it?
She turned for her kitchen, mentally revising her planned family dinner to include a Vor lord from the Imperial capital. White
wine? Her limited experience of the breed suggested that if you could get them sufficiently sloshed, it wouldn’t matter what you
fed them. She put another of her precious imported-from-home bottles in to chill. No... make that two more bottles.
She added another place to the table on the balcony off the kitchen that they routinely used for a dining room, sorry now she’d
not engaged a servitor for the evening. But human servants on Komarr were so expensive. And she’d wanted this bubble of
domestic privacy with Uncle Vorthys. Even the staid official newsvid reps were badgering everyone involved in the investigation;
the arrival of not one but two Imperial Auditors on-site in Komarr orbit had not calmed the fever of speculation, but only
redirected it. When she’d first spoken with him shortly after his arrival on-site, on a distance-delayed channel that defeated any
attempt at long conversation, normally-patient Uncle Vorthys’s description of the public briefings into which he’d been roped had
been notably irritated. He’d hinted he would be glad to escape them. Since his years of teaching must have inured him to stupid
questions, Ekaterin wondered if the true source of his irritation was that he couldn’t answer them.
But mostly, she had to admit, she just wanted to recapture the flavor of a happier past, greedily for herself. She’d lived with
Aunt and Uncle Vorthys for two years after her mother had died, attending the Imperial University under their casual supervision.
Life with the Professor and the Professora had somehow been less constrained, and constraining, than in her father’s conservative
Vor household in the South Continent frontier town of her birth; perhaps because they’d treated her as the adult she aspired to be,
rather than the child she had been. She’d felt, a bit guiltily, closer to them than to her real parent. For a while, any future had
seemed possible.
Then she’d chosen Etienne Vorsoisson, or he had chosen her... You were pleased enough at the time. She’d said Yes to the
marriage arrangements her father’s Baba had offered, with all good will. You didn’t know. Tien didn’t know. Vorzohn’s
Dystrophy. Nobody’s fault.
Nine-year-old Nikolai bounded into the kitchen. "I’m hungry, Mama. Can I have a piece of that cake?"
She intercepted fast-moving fingers attempting to sample frosting. "You can have a glass of fruit juice."
"Aw..." But he accepted the proffered substitute, cannily offered in one of the good wineglasses lined up waiting. He gulped it
down, bobbing about as he drank. Excited, or was he picking up parental nerves? Stop projecting, she told herself. The boy had
spent the last two hours in his room, tinkering intently with his models; he was due to shake out the knots.
"Do you remember Uncle Vorthys?" she asked him. "It’s been three years since we visited him."
"Sure." He finished swallowing his snack. "He took me to his laboratory. I thought it would be beakers and bubbly things, but
it was all big machines and concrete. Smelled funny, kind of dusty and sharp."
"From the welders and the ozone, that’s right," she said, impressed with his recall. She rescued the glass. "Hold out your hand.
I want to see how much you have left to grow. Puppies with big paws are supposed to grow up to be big dogs, you know." He
held up his hand to hers, and they met, palm to palm. His fingers were within two centimeters of being as long as her own. "Oh,
my."
He flashed her a self-conscious, satisfied grin, and stared briefly down at his feet, wriggling them in speculation. His right big
toe poked through a new hole in his new sock.
His child-light hair was darkening; it might yet become as brown as hers. He was chest-high to her, though she could have
sworn he had been only hip-high about fifteen minutes ago. His eyes were brown like his Da’s. His grubby hand - where did he
find so much dirt in this dome? - was as steady as his eyes were clear and guileless. No tremula.
The early symptoms of Vorzohn’s Dystrophy were deceptive, mimicking half a dozen other diseases, and could strike any time
from puberty to middle age. But not today, not Nikolai.
Not yet.
Sounds from the apartment’s entryway, and low-pitched masculine voices, drew them out of her kitchen. Nikolai shot ahead of
her. When she arrived behind him, he was already being half picked up by the stout, white-haired man who seemed to fill the
space. "Oof!" He stopped short of swinging Nikolai around. "You’ve grown, Nikki!"
Uncle Vorthys hadn’t changed, despite his awe-inspiring new title: same grand nose and big ears, same rumpled, oversized
tunic and trousers that always looked slept-in, same deep laugh. He deposited his great-nephew on the flagstones, spared a hug for
his niece, which was firmly returned, and bent and felt in his valise. "Something here for you, Nikki, I do believe..." Nikolai
bounced around him; Ekaterin retreated temporarily to wait her turn.
Tien was shouldering through the door with baggage. Only then did she notice the man standing apart, smiling distantly,
watching this homey scene.
She swallowed startlement. He was barely taller than nine-year-old Nikolai, but unmistakably not a child. He had a large head
set on a short neck, and a faintly hunched stance; the rest of him looked lean but solid. He wore tunic and trousers in a subtle gray,
the tunic open on a fine white shirt, and polished half-boots. His clothing was entirely without the pseudo-military ornamentation
usually affected by the high Vor, but the perfection of the fit - it had to be hand-tailored, to fit that odd body - hinted a price
Ekaterin didn’t dare to estimate.
She was uncertain of his age; not much older than herself, perhaps? There was no gray in the dark hair, but laugh-lines around
his eyes, and pain-lines around his mouth, scored his winter-pale skin. He moved stiffly, setting down his valise, wheeling to
watch Nikolai monopolize his great-uncle, but did not otherwise appear very crippled. He was not a figure who blended in, but his
air was notably unobtrusive. Socially uncomfortable? Ekaterin was recalled abruptly to her duties as a daughter of the Vor.
She advanced to him. "Welcome to my household..." ack, Tien hadn’t mentioned his name "... my Lord Auditor."
He held out his hand and captured hers in a perfectly ordinary, businesslike grasp. "Miles Vorkosigan." His hand was dry and
warm, smaller than her own, but bluntly masculine; clean nails. "And you, Madame?"
"Oh! Ekaterin Vorsoisson."
He released her hand without kissing it, to her relief. She stared briefly at the top of his head, level with her collarbone,
realized he would be speaking to her cleavage, and stepped back a little. He looked up at her, still smiling slightly.
Nikolai was already dragging Uncle Vorthys’s larger bag toward the guest room, proudly showing off his strength. Tien
properly followed his senior guest. Ekaterin made a rapid recalculation. She couldn’t possibly put this Vorkosigan fellow up in
Nikolai’s room; the child’s bed would be such an embarrassingly good fit. Invite an Imperial Auditor to sleep on her living room
couch? Hardly. She gestured him to follow her down the opposite hallway, into her planting-room-cum-office. One whole side
was given over to a workbench and shelving, crammed with supplies; cascading lighting arrays climbing the corners nourished
tender new plantings, in a riotous variety of Earth greens and Barrayaran red-browns. A large open area on the floor fronted a fine
wide window.
"We haven’t much space," she apologized. "I’m afraid even Barrayaran administrators here must accept what’s assigned to
them. I’ll order in a grav-bed for you, I’m sure they’ll have it delivered before dinner’s over. But at least the room’s private. My
uncle snores so magnificently.... The bath’s just down the hall to the right."
"It’s fine," he assured her. He stepped to the window and stared out over the domed park. The lights in the encircling buildings
gleamed warmly in the luminous twilight of the half-eclipsed mirror.
"I know it’s not what you’re used to."
One corner of his mouth twitched up. "I once slept for six weeks on bare dirt. With ten thousand extremely grubby Marilacans,
many of whom snored. I assure you, it’s just fine."
She smiled in return, not at all certain what to make of this joke, if it was a joke. She left him to arrange his things as he saw
fit, and scurried to call the rental company and finish setting up dinner.
They all rendezvoused, despite her best intentions for a more formal service, in her kitchen, where the little Auditor foiled her
expectations again by only allowing her to pour him half a glass of wine. "I started today with seven hours in a pressure suit. I’d
be asleep with my face in my plate before dessert." His gray eyes glinted.
She herded them all out to the table on the balcony and presented the mildly spicy stew based on vat-protein that she’d
correctly guessed her uncle would like. By the time she handed round the bread and wine, she’d at last caught up enough to finally
have a word with her uncle herself.
"What’s happening now with your investigation? How long can you stay?"
"Not much more than what you’ve heard on the news, I’m afraid," he replied. "We can only take this downside break while
the probable-cause crews finish collecting the pieces. We’re still missing some fairly important ones. The freighter’s tow was
fully loaded, and had a tremendous mass. When the engines blew, bits of all sizes vectored off in every possible direction and
speed. We desperately want any parts of its control systems we can find. They should have most of it retrieved in three more days,
if we’re lucky."
"So was it deliberate sabotage?" Tien asked.
Uncle Vorthys shrugged. "With the pilot dead, it’s going to be very hard to prove. It might have been a suicide mission. The
crews have found no sign yet of military or chemical explosives."
"Explosives would have been redundant," murmured Vorkosigan.
"The spinning freighter hit the mirror array at the worst possible angle, edge-on," Uncle Vorthys continued. "Half the damage
was done by parts of the mirror itself. With that much momentum imparted to it by the assorted collisions, it just ripped itself
apart."
"If all that result was planned, it had to have been a truly amazing calculation," Vorkosigan said dryly. "It’s the one thing
which inclines me to the belief it might have been a true accident."
Ekaterin watched her husband, watching the little Auditor covertly, and read the silent disturbed judgment, Mutant! in his
eyes. What was Tien going to make of the man, who openly bore, without apparent apology or even self-consciousness, such
stigmata of abnormality?
Tien turned to Vorkosigan, his gaze curious. "I can see why Emperor Gregor dispatched the Professor, the Empire’s foremost
authority on failure analysis and all that. What’s, um, your part in this, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan?"
Vorkosigan’s smile twisted. "I have some experience with space installations." He leaned back, and jerked up his chin, and
smoothed the odd flash of irony from his face. "In fact, as far as the probable-cause investigation goes, I’m merely along for the
ride. This is the first really interesting problem to come along since I took oath as an Auditor three months ago. I wanted to watch
how it was done. With his Komarran marriage coming up, Gregor is vitally interested in any possible political repercussions from
this accident. Now would be a very awkward time for a serious downturn in Barrayar-Komarr relations. But whether accident or
sabotage, the damage to the mirror impinges quite directly on the Terraforming Project. I understand your Serifosa Sector is fairly
representative?"
"Indeed. I’ll take you both on a tour tomorrow," Tien promised. "I’m having a full technical report prepared for you by my
Komarran assistants, with all the numbers. But the most important number is still pure speculation. How fast is the mirror going to
be repaired?"
Vorkosigan grimaced and held out a small hand, palm-up. "How fast depends in part on how much money the Imperium is
willing to spend. And that’s where things become very political indeed. With parts of Barrayar itself still undergoing active
terraforming, and with the planet of Sergyar drawing off immigrants from both the worlds damned near as fast as they can board
ship, some members of the government are wondering openly why we are spending so much Imperial treasure dinking with such a
marginal world as Komarr."
Ekaterin could not tell from his measured tone whether he agreed with those members or not. Startled, she said, "The
terraforming of Komarr was going on for three centuries before we conquered it. We can hardly stop now."
"So are we throwing good money after bad?" Vorkosigan shrugged, declining to answer his own question. "There’s a second
layer of thinking, a purely military one. Restricting the population to the domes makes Komarr more militarily vulnerable. Why
give the citizenry of a conquered world extra territory in which to fall back and regroup? This line of thought makes the
interesting assumption that three hundred or so years from now, when the terraforming is at last complete, the populations of
Komarr and Barrayar will still not have assimilated each other. If they did, then they would be our domes, and we certainly
wouldn’t want them to be vulnerable, eh?"
He paused for a bite of bread and stew, washed down by wine, then went on, "Since assimilation is Gregor’s avowed policy,
and he’s putting his Imperial person where his policy is... the question of motivation for sabotage becomes, er, complex. Could the
saboteurs have been isolationist Barrayarans? Komarran extremists? Either, hoping to publicly throw the blame on the other?
How emotionally attached is the average Komarran-in-the-dome to a goal whom none now living will ever survive to see realized,
or would they rather save the money today? Sabotage versus accident makes no engineering difference, but does make a profound
political one." He and Uncle Vorthys exchanged a wry look.
"So I watch, and listen, and wait," Vorkosigan concluded. He turned to Tien. "And how do you like Komarr, Administrator
Vorsoisson?"
Tien grinned, and shrugged. "It’s all right except for the Komarrans. I’ve found them a damned touchy bunch."
Vorkosigan’s brows twitched up. "Have they no sense of humor?"
Ekaterin glanced up warily, wincing at that dry edge in his drawling voice, but apparently it slipped past Tien, who only
snorted. "They’re divided about equally between the greedy and the surly. Cheating Barrayarans is considered a patriotic duty."
Vorkosigan raised his empty wineglass to Ekaterin. "And you, Madame Vorsoisson?"
She refilled it to the top before he could stop her, cautious of her reply. If her uncle was the technical expert in this Auditorial
duo, did that leave Vorkosigan as the... political one? Who was really the senior member of the team? Had Tien caught any of the
subtle flashing implications in the little lord’s speech? "It hasn’t been easy to make Komarran friends. Nikolai goes to a
Barrayaran school. And I have no work as such."
"A Vor lady hardly needs to work." Tien smiled.
"Nor a Vor lord," added Vorkosigan, almost under his breath, "yet here we are..."
"That depends on your ability to choose the right parents," said Tien, a touch sourly. He glanced across at Vorkosigan.
"Relieve my curiosity. Are you related to the former Lord Regent?"
"My father," Vorkosigan replied, with quelling brevity. He did not smile.
"Then you are the Lord Vorkosigan, the Count’s heir."
"That follows, yes."
Vorkosigan was getting unnervingly dry, now. Ekaterin blurted, "Your upbringing must have been terribly difficult."
"He managed," Vorkosigan murmured.
"I meant for you!"
"Ah." His brief smile returned, and flicked out again.
The conversation was going dreadfully awry, Ekaterin could feel it; she hardly dared open her mouth on an attempt to redirect
it. Tien stepped in, or stepped in it: "Was your father the great Admiral reconciled that you couldn’t have a military career?"
"My grandfather the great General was more set on it."
"I was a ten-years man myself, the usual. In Administration, very dull. Trust me, you didn’t miss much." Tien waved a kindly,
dismissive hand. "But not every Vor has to be a soldier these days, eh, Professor Vorthys? You’re living proof."
"I believe Captain Vorkosigan served, um, thirteen years, was it, Miles? In Imperial Security. Galactic operations. Did you
find it dull?"
Vorkosigan’s smile upon the Professor grew genuine, for an instant of time. "Not nearly dull enough." He jerked up his chin,
evidently a habitual nervous tic. For the first time Ekaterin noticed the fine white scars on either side of his short neck.
Ekaterin fled to the kitchen, to serve the dessert and give the blighted conversation time to recover. When she came out again,
things had eased, or at least, Nikolai had stopped being so supernaturally good, i.e., quiet, and had struck up a negotiation with his
great-uncle for after-dinner attention in the form of a round of his current favorite game. This carried them through till the rental
company arrived at the front door with the grav-bed, and the great engineer went off with the whole male mob to oversee its
installation. Ekaterin turned gratefully to the soothing routine of cleaning up.
Tien returned to report success and the Vor lord suitably settled.
"Tien, were you watching that fellow closely?" asked Ekaterin. "A mutie, a mutie Vor, yet he carried on as if nothing were the
least out of the ordinary. If he can..." she trailed off hopefully, leaving the surely you can for Tien to conclude.
Tien frowned. "Don’t start that again. It’s obvious he doesn’t think the rules apply to him. He’s Aral Vorkosigan’s son, for
God’s sake. Practically the Emperor’s foster brother. No wonder he got this cushy Imperial appointment."
"I don’t think so, Tien. Were you listening to him at all?" All those undercurrents... "I think... I think he’s the Emperor’s
hatchet man, sent to judge the whole Terraforming Project. Powerful... maybe dangerous."
Tien shook his head. "His father was powerful and dangerous. He’s just privileged. Damned high Vor twit. Don’t worry about
him. Your uncle will take him away soon enough."
"I’m not worried about him."
Tien’s face darkened. "I’m getting so tired of this! You argue with everything I say, you practically insult my intelligence in
front of your so-noble relative - "
"I didn’t!" Did I? She began a confused mental review of her evening’s remarks. What in the world had she said, to set him on
edge like this -
"Just because you’re the great Auditor’s niece doesn’t make you anybody, girl! This is disloyalty, that’s what it is."
"No - no, I’m sorry - "
But he was already stalking out. There would be a cold silence between them tonight. She almost ran after him, to beg his
forgiveness. He was under a lot of pressure at work, it was very ill-timed of her to push for a resolution to his medical dilemma
now.... But she was abruptly too weary to try anymore. She finished putting away the last of the food, and took the leftover half
bottle of wine and a glass out onto the balcony. She turned off the cheery colored plant lights and just sat in the dim reflected
illumination from the sealed Komarran city. The crippled star-flake of the insolation mirror had almost reached the western
horizon, following the true-sun into night as the planet turned.
A white shape moved silently in the kitchen, briefly startling her. But it was only the mutie lord, who had shed his elegant gray
tunic and, apparently, his boots. He stuck his head through the unsealed doors. "Hello?"
"Hello, Lord Vorkosigan. I’m just out here watching the mirror set. Would you, um, care for some more wine... ? Here, I’ll get
you a glass - "
"No, don’t get up, Madame Vorsoisson. I’ll fetch it." His pale smile winked out of the shadows at her. A few muted clinks
came from within, then he trod silently onto the balcony. She poured, good hostess, generously into the glass he set beside her
own, then he took it up again and went to the railing to study what could be seen of the sky past the girders of the dome.
"It’s the best aspect of this location," she said. "This bit of western view." The mirror-array was magnified by the atmosphere
close to the horizon, but its normal evening color-effects in the wispy clouds were dimmed by its damage. "Mirror-set’s usually
much prettier than this." She sipped her wine, cool and sweet on her tongue, and felt herself finally starting to become a little furry
in the brain. Furry was good. Soothing.
"I can see that it must be," he agreed, still staring out. He drank deeply. Had he switched, then, from resisting sleep through
alcohol to pursuing it?
"This horizon is so crowded and cluttered, compared to home. I’m afraid I find these sealed arcologies a touch
claustrophobic."
"And where is home, for you?" He turned to watch her.
"South Continent. Vandeville."
"So you grew up around terraforming."
"The Komarrans would say, that wasn’t terraforming, that was just soil conditioning." He chuckled along with her, at her
deadpan rendition of Komarran techno-snobbery. She continued, "They’re right, of course. It wasn’t as though we had to start by
spending half a millennium altering an entire planet’s atmosphere. The only thing that made it hard for us, back in the Time of
Isolation, was trying to do it with practically no technology. Still... I loved the open spaces at home. I miss that wide sky, horizon
to horizon."
"That’s true in any city, domed or not. So you’re a country girl?"
"In part. Though I liked Vorbarr Sultana when I was at university. It had other kinds of horizons."
"Did you study botany? I noticed the library rack on the wall of your plant room. Impressive."
"No. It’s just a hobby."
"Oh? I could have mistaken it for a passion. Or a profession."
"No. I didn’t know what I wanted, then."
"Do you know now?"
She laughed a little, uneasily. When she didn’t answer, he merely smiled, and strolled along the balcony examining her
plantings. He stopped before the skellytum, squatting in its pot like some bright red alien Buddha, tendrils raised in a pose of
placid supplication. "I have to ask," he said plaintively, "what is this thing?"
"It’s a bonsai’d skellytum."
"Really! That’s a - I didn’t know you could do that to a skellytum. They’re usually five meters tall. And a really ugly brown."
"I had a great aunt, on my father’s side, who loved gardening. I used to help her when I was a girl. She was very much a crusty
old frontier woman, very Vor - she’d come to the South Continent right after the Cetagandan War. Survived a succession of
husbands, survived... well, everything. I inherited the skellytum from her. It’s the only plant I brought to Komarr from Barrayar.
It’s over seventy years old."
"Good God."
"It’s the complete tree, fully functional."
"And - ha! - short."
She was afraid for a moment that she’d inadvertently offended him, but apparently not. He finished his inspection, and
returned to the railing, and his wine. He stared out again at the western horizon, and the sinking mirror, his brows lowering.
He had a presence which, by ignoring his elusive physical peculiarities himself, defied the observer to dare comment. But the
little lord had had all his life to adjust to his condition. Not like the hideous surprise Tien had found among his late brother’s
papers, and subsequently confirmed for himself and Nikolai through carefully secret testing. You can get tested anonymously, she
had argued. But I can’t get treated anonymously, he had countered.
Since coming to Komarr, she’d been so close to defying custom, law, and her lord-and-husband’s orders, and unilaterally
taking his son and heir for treatment. Would the Komarran doctors know a Vor mother was not her son’s legal guardian? Maybe
she could pretend the genetic defect had come from her, not from Tien? But the geneticists, if they were any good, would surely
figure out the truth.
After a while, she said elliptically, "A Vor man’s first loyalty is supposed to be to his Emperor, but a Vor woman’s first
loyalty is supposed to be to her husband."
"Historically and legally, that’s so." His voice was amused, or bemused, as he turned again to watch her. "This was not always
to her disadvantage. When he was executed for treason, she was presumed to be only following orders, and got off. Actually, I
wonder if the underlying practical reason was that an underpopulated world just couldn’t spare her labor."
"Haven’t you ever found that oddly asymmetrical?"
"But simpler for her. Most women usually only had one husband at a time, but the Vor were all too frequently presented with a
choice of emperors, and where was your loyalty then? Bad guesses could be lethal. Though when my grandfather General Piotr -
and his army - abandoned Mad Emperor Yuri for Emperor Ezar, it was lethal for Yuri. Good for Barrayar, though."
She sipped again. From where she sat, he was silhouetted against the darkening dome, shadowed, enigmatic. "Indeed. Is your
passion politics, then?"
"God, no! I don’t think so."
"History?"
"Only in passing." He hesitated. "It used to be the military."
"Used to be?"
"Used to be," he repeated firmly.
"And now?"
It was his turn to not answer. He stared down at his glass, tilting it to make the last of the wine swirl about. He finally said, "In
Barrayaran political theory, it all connects. The ordinary subjects are loyal to their Counts, the Counts are loyal to the Emperor,
and the Emperor, presumably, is loyal to the whole Imperium, the body of the Empire in the form of all its, er, bodies. Here I find
it grows a trifle abstract for my taste; how can he be answerable to all, yet not answerable to each? And so we arrive back at
square one." He drained his glass. "How do we be true to one another?"
I don’t know anymore....
Silence fell, as they both watched the last glint of mirror slip behind the hills. A pale glow in the sky still haloed its passing for
a minute or two longer.
"Well. I’m afraid I’m getting rather drunk." He did not seem that drunk to her, but he rolled his glass between his hands and
pushed off from the balcony rail against which he’d been leaning. "Goodnight, Madame Vorsoisson."
"Goodnight, Lord Vorkosigan. Sleep well."
He carried his glass in with him and vanished into the darkened apartment.
CHAPTER TWO
Miles floundered from a dream of his hostess’s hair which, if not exactly erotic, was embarrassingly sensual. Unbound from
the severe style she’d favored yesterday, it had revealed itself a rich dark brown with amber highlights, a mass of silk flowing
coolly through his stubby hands - he presumed they were his hands, it had been his dream, after all. I woke up too soon. Rats. At
least the vision had not been tinged with any of the gory grotesqueries of his occasional nightmares, from which he came awake
cold and damp, with heart racing. He was warm and comfortable, in the silly elaborate grav-bed she had insisted on producing for
him.
It wasn’t Madame Vorsoisson’s fault that she happened to belong to a certain physical type that set off old resonances in
Miles’s memory. Some men harbored obsessions about much stranger things... his own fixation, he had long ago ruefully
recognized, was on long cool brunettes with expressions of quiet reserve and warm alto voices. True, on a world where people
altered their faces and bodies almost as casually as they altered their wardrobes, there was nothing in the least unusual about her
beauty. Till one remembered she wasn’t from here, and realized her ivory-skinned features were almost certainly untouched by
modification.... Had she recognized his idiot-babble, last night on her balcony, as suppressed sexual panic? Had that odd remark
about a Vor woman’s duties been an oblique warning to him to back off? But he hadn’t been on, he didn’t think. Was he that
transparent?
Miles had realized within five minutes of his arrival that he should probably not have let the genial and expansive Vorthys
bully him into accompanying him downside, but the man seemed constitutionally incapable of not sharing a treat. That the
pleasures of this family reunion might not be equally enjoyed by an awkward outsider - or the family into which he’d been thrust -
had clearly never occurred to the Professor.
Miles sighed envy of his host. Administrator Vorsoisson seemed to have achieved a perfect little Vor clan. Of course, he’d had
the wit to start a decade ago. The arrival of galactic sex-selection technologies had resulted in a shortage of female births on
Barrayar. This dearth of women had reached its lowest ebb in Miles’s generation, though parents seemed to be coming back to
their senses now. Still, every Vor woman Miles knew close to his own age was already married, and had been for years. Was he
going to have to wait another twenty years for his own bride?
If necessary. No lusting after married women, boy. You’re an Imperial Auditor now. The nine Imperial Auditors were
expected to be models of rectitude and respectability. He could not recall ever hearing of any kind of sex scandal touching one of
Emperor Gregor’s handpicked agent-observers. Of course not. All the rest of the Auditors are eighty years old and have been
married for fifty of ’em. He snorted. Besides, she probably thought he was a mutant, though thankfully she’d been too polite to say
so. To his face.
So find out if she has a sister, eh?
He wallowed out of the grav-bed’s indolence-inducing clutches and sat up, forcing his mind to switch gears. At a conservative
guess, a couple hundred thousand words of new data on the soletta accident and its consequences would be incoming this shift.
He would, he decided, start with a cold shower.
No comfortable ship-knits today. After selecting among the three new formal civilian suits he’d packed along from Barrayar -
in shades of gray, gray, and gray - Miles combed his damp hair neatly and sauntered out to Madame Vorsoisson’s kitchen, from
which voices and the perfume of coffee wafted. There he found Nikolai munching Barrayaran-style groats and milk,
Administrator Vorsoisson fully dressed and apparently on the verge of leaving, and Professor Vorthys, still in pajamas, sorting
through a new array of data disks and frowning. A glass of pink fruit juice sat untasted at his elbow. He looked up and said, "Ah,
good morning, Miles. Glad you’re up," seconded by Vorsoisson’s polite, "Good morning, Lord Vorkosigan. I trust you slept
well?"
"Fine, thanks. What’s up, Professor?"
"Your comm link arrived from ImpSec’s local office." Vorthys pointed to the device beside his plate. "I notice they didn’t
send me one."
Miles grimaced. "Your father was not so famous in the Komarran conquest."
"True," agreed Vorthys. "The old gentleman fell in that odd generation between the wars, too young to fight the Cetagandans,
too old to aggress on the poor Komarrans. This lack of military opportunity was a source of great personal regret to him, we
children were given to understand."
Miles strapped the comm link onto his left wrist. It represented a compromise between himself and ImpSec Serifosa, which
would otherwise be responsible for his health here. ImpSec had wanted to err on the side of caution and surround him with an
inconvenient mob of bodyguards. Miles had ventured to test his Imperial Auditor’s authority by ordering them to stay out of his
hair; to his delight, it had worked. But the link gave him a straight line to ImpSec, and tracked his location - he tried not to feel
like an experimental animal released into the wild. "And what are those?" He nodded to the data disks.
Vorthys spread the disks like a bad hand of cards. "The morning courier also brought us recordings of last night’s haul of new
bits. And something especially for you, since you kindly volunteered to take over the review of the medical end of things. A new
preliminary autopsy."
"They finally found the pilot?" Miles relieved him of the disks.
Vorthys grimaced. "Parts of her."
Madame Vorsoisson entered from the balcony in time to hear this. "Oh, dear." She was dressed as yesterday in Komarran-style
street wear in dull earthy tones: loose trousers, blouse, and long vest, muffling whatever figure she possessed. She would have
been brilliant in red, or breathtaking in pale blue, with those blue eyes... her hair this morning was soberly tied back again, rather
to Miles’s relief. It would have been unnerving to think he was developing some form of precognition as a result of his late
injuries, along with his damned seizures.
Miles nodded good morning to her and carefully returned his attention to Vorthys. "I must have been sleeping well. I didn’t
hear the courier come in. You’ve reviewed them already?"
"Just a glance."
"What parts of the pilot did they find?" asked Nikolai, interested.
"Never you mind, young man," said his great-uncle firmly.
"Thank you," murmured Madame Vorsoisson to him.
"That makes the last body, though. Good," said Miles. "It’s so distressing for the relatives when they lose one altogether.
When I was - " He cut off the rest, When I was a covert ops fleet commander, we’d move the heavens to try and get the bodies of
our casualties back to their people. That chapter of his life was closed, now.
Madame Vorsoisson, splendid woman, handed him black coffee. She then inquired what her guests would like for breakfast;
Miles maneuvered Vorthys into answering first, and volunteered for groats along with him. As she bustled around serving, and
mopping up after Nikolai, Administrator Vorsoisson said, "My department’s presentation will be ready for you this afternoon,
Auditor Vorthys. This morning Ekaterin wondered if you would like to see Nikolai’s school. And after the presentation, perhaps
there will be time for a flyover of some of our projects."
"Sounds like a fine itinerary." Professor Vorthys smiled at Nikolai. In all the hustle of their hurried departure from Barrayar,
he - or perhaps the Professora - had not forgotten a gift for his great-nephew. I should have brought something for the kid, Miles
decided belatedly. Surest way to please a mother. "Ah, Miles...?"
Miles tapped the stack of data disks beside his bowl. "I suspect I’ll have enough to occupy myself here this morning. Madame
Vorsoisson, I noticed a comconsole in your workroom; may I use it?"
"Certainly, Lord Vorkosigan."
With a polite murmur about getting things in order for them at his department, Vorsoisson took his leave, and the breakfast
party broke up shortly thereafter, each to their assorted destinations. Miles, new disks in hand, returned to Madame Vorsoisson’s
workroom/guest room.
He paused before seating himself at her comconsole, to stare out the sealed window at the park, and the transparent dome
arcing over it to let in the free solar energy. Komarr’s wan sun was not directly visible, risen to the east behind this apartment
block, but the line of its morning light crept across the far edge of the park. The damaged insolation mirror, following it, had not
yet risen over the horizon to double the shadows it cast.
So does this mean seven thousand years bad luck?
He sighed, darkened the window’s polarization - scarcely necessary - seated himself at the comconsole, and began feeding it
data disks. A couple of dozen good-sized new pieces of wreckage had been retrieved overnight; he ran the vids of them turning in
space as the salvage ships approached. Theory was, if you could find every fragment, take precise recordings of all their spins and
trajectories, and then run them backward, you could end up with a computer-generated picture of the very moment of the disaster,
and so diagnose its cause. Real life never worked out quite that neatly, alas, but every little bit helped. ImpSec Komarr was still
canvassing the orbital transfer stations for any casual vid-carrying tourists who might have been panning that section of space at
the time of the whatever-and-collision. Futilely by now, Miles feared; usually, such people came forward immediately, excited
and wanting to be helpful.
Vorthys and the probable-cause crew were now of the opinion that the ore tow had already been in more than one piece at the
moment it had struck the mirror, a speculation which had not yet been released to the general public. So had the evidence-
destroying explosion of the engines been cause or consequence of that catastrophe? And at what point had those tortured
fragments of metal and plastic acquired some of their more interesting distortions?
Miles reran, for the twentieth time that week, the computer’s track of the freighter’s course prior to the collision, and
contemplated its anomalies. The ship had carried only its pilot, on a routine - indeed, dead boring - slow run in from the asteroid
mining belt to an orbital refinery. The engines had not been supposed to be thrusting at the time of the accident; acceleration had
been completed and deceleration was not yet due to begin. The tow ship had been running about five hours ahead of schedule, but
only because it had departed early, not because it had boosted hotter than usual. It had been coasting off-course by about six
percent, within normal parameters and not yet ready for course correction, though the pilot might have been amusing herself
trying to achieve more precision with some unscheduled microboosting. Even with the minor course correction due, the tow ship’s
route had been several hundred comfortable kilometers from the soletta array, in fact farther away than if it had been precisely on
course.
What the course variation had done was take the freighter’s track almost directly across one of Komarr’s unused worm-hole
jump points. Komarr local space was unusually rich in active jump points, a fact of strategic and historic consequence; one of the
jumps was Barrayar’s only gateway to the wormhole nexus. It was for control of the jump points, not for possession of the chilly
planet, that Barrayar’s invasion fleet had poured through here thirty-five years ago. As long as the Imperium’s military held that
high ground, its interest in Komarr’s downside population and their problems was, at best, mild.
This jump point, however, supported neither traffic nor trade nor strategic threat. Explorations through it had dead-ended
either in deep interstellar space, or close to stars that did not support either habitable planets or economically recoverable system
resources. Nobody jumped out through there; nobody should have jumped in through there. The immediate vision of some
unmotivated pirate-villain popping out of the worm-hole, potting the innocent ore freighter - by some weapon that left no traces,
mind you - and popping back in again was currently unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, though the area had been scoured
for it. It was the news media’s current favorite scenario. But none of the five-space trails generated by ships taking wormhole
jumps had been detected, either.
The five-space anomaly of the jump point was not even observable by ordinary means from three-space; it should not, just
sitting there, have affected the freighter in any way even if the ship had passed directly across its central vortex. The freighter was
a dedicated inner-system ship, and lacked Necklin rods and jump capacity. Still... the jump point was there. Nothing else was.
Miles rubbed his neck and turned to the new autopsy report. Gruesome, as always. The pilot had been a Komarran woman in
her mid-fifties. Call it Barrayaran sexism, but female corpses always bothered Miles more. Death was such a malicious destroyer
of dignity. Had he looked that disordered and exposed when he’d gone down to the sniper’s fire? The pilot’s body showed the
usual progression: smashed, decompressed, irradiated, and frozen, all quite typical of deep-space impact accidents. One arm torn
off, somewhere in the initial crunch rather than later, judging from the close-up vids of the freezing-effects of liquids lost at the
stump. It had been a quick death, anyway. Miles knew better than to add, Almost painless. No traces of illicit drugs or alcohol had
been found in her frozen tissues.
The Komarran medical examiner, along with his six final reports, included a message wanting to know if he had Miles’s
permission to release the bodies of the six members of the mirror’s station-keeping crew back to their waiting families. Good God,
hadn’t that been done yet? As an Imperial Auditor, he wasn’t supposed to be running this investigation, just observing and
reporting on it. He did not desire his mere presence to freeze anyone’s initiative. He fired off the permission immediately, right
from Madame Vorsoisson’s comconsole.
He started working his way through the six reports. They were more detailed than the prelims he’d already seen, but contained
no surprises. By this time, he wanted a surprise, something, anything beyond Spaceship blows up for no reason, kills seven. Not to
mention the astronomical property damage bill. With three reports assimilated, and his bland breakfast becoming a regret in his
stomach, he backed out for a short period of mental recovery.
Idly, while waiting for the queasiness to pass, he sorted through Madame Vorsoisson’s data files. The one titled Virtual
Gardens sounded pleasant. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind if he took a virtual stroll through them. The Water Garden enticed him. He
called it up on the holovid plate before him.
It was, as he had guessed, a landscape design program. One could view it from any distance or angle, from a miniature-
looking total overview to a blown-up detailed inspection of a particular planting; one could program a stroll through its paths at
any given eye level. He chose his own, at ahem-mumble-something under five feet. The individual plants grew according to
realistic programs taking into account light, water, gravitation, trace nutrients, and even attacks by programmed pests. This garden
was about a third filled, with tentative arrangements of grasses, violets, sedges, water lilies, and horsetails; it was currently
suffering an outbreak of algae. The colors and shapes stopped abruptly at the unfinished edges, as if an invasion from some alien
gray geometric universe were gobbling it all up.
His curiosity piqued, in best approved ImpSec style he dropped to the program’s underlayer and checked for activity levels.
The busiest recently, he discovered, was one labeled The Barrayaran Garden. He popped back up to the display level, selected his
own eye-height again, and entered it.
It was not a garden of pretty Earth-plants set on some suitably famous site on Barrayar; it was a garden made up entirely and
exclusively of native species, something he would not have guessed possible, let alone lovely. He’d always considered their
uniform red-brown hues and stubby forms boring at best. The only Barrayaran vegetation he could identify and name offhand was
that to which he was violently allergic. But Madame Vorsoisson had somehow used shape and texture to create a sepia-toned
serenity. Rocks and running water framed the various plants - there was a low carmine mass of love-lies-itching, forming a border
for a billowing blond stand of razor-grass, which, he had once been assured, botanically was not a grass. Nobody argued about the
razor part, he’d noticed. Judging from the common names, the lost Barrayaran colonists had not loved their new xenobotany:
damnweed, henbloat, goatbane... It’s beautiful. How did she make it beautiful? He’d never seen anything like it. Maybe that kind
of artist’s eye was something you just had to be born with, like perfect pitch, which he also lacked.
In the Imperial capital of Vorbarr Sultana, there was a small and dull green park at the end of the block beside Vorkosigan
House, on a site where another old mansion had been torn down. The little park had been leveled with more of an eye to security
concerns for the neighboring Lord Regent than any aesthetic plan. Would it not be splendid, to replace it with a larger version of
this glorious subtlety, and give the city-dwellers a taste of their own planetary heritage? Even if it would - he checked - take
fifteen years to grow to this mature climax....
The virtual garden program was supposed to help prevent time-consuming and costly design mistakes. But when all the garden
you could have was what you could pack in your luggage, he supposed it could be a hobby in its own right. It was certainly
neater, tidier, and easier than the real thing. So... why did he guess she found it approximately as satisfying as looking at a holovid
of dinner instead of eating it?
Or maybe she’s just homesick. Regretfully, he closed down the display.
In pure trained habit, he next called up her financial program, for a little quick analysis. It turned out to be her household
account. She ran her home on a quite tight budget, given what Administrator Vorsoisson’s salary ought to be, Miles thought; her
biweekly allowance was rather stingy. She didn’t spend nearly as much on her botanical hobbies as the results suggested she must.
Other hobbies, other vices? The money trail was always the most revealing of people’s true pursuits; ImpSec hired the Imperium’s
best accountants to find ingenious ways to hide their own activities, for that very reason. She spent damn little on clothes, except
for Nikolai’s. He’d heard parents of his acquaintance complain about the cost of dressing their children, but surely this was
extraordinary... wait, that wasn’t a clothing expenditure. Funds squeezed here, here, and there were all being funneled into a
dedicated little private account labeled "Nikolai’s Medical." Why? As dependents of a Barrayaran bureaucrat on Komarr, weren’t
the Vorsoissons’ medical expenses covered by the Imperium?
He called up the account. A year’s worth of savings from her household budget did not make a very impressive pile, but the
pattern of contributions was steady to the point of being compulsive. Puzzled, he backed out again and called up the whole
program list. Clues?
One file, down at the end of the list, had no name. He called it up immediately. It turned out to be the only thing on her
comconsole which required a password for entry. Interesting.
Her comconsole program was the simplest and cheapest commercial type. ImpSec cadets dissected files like this as a class
warmup exercise. A touch of homesickness of his own twinged through him. He dropped to the underlayer and had its password
choked out in about five minutes. Vorzohn’s Dystrophy? Well, that wasn’t a mnemonic he would have guessed offhand. His
reflexes overtook his growing unease. He had the file open simultaneously with belated second thoughts, You’re not in ImpSec
anymore, you know. Should you be doing this?
The file proved to contain a medical course’s worth of articles, culled from every imaginable Barrayaran and galactic source,
on the topic of one of Barrayar’s rarer and more obscure home-grown genetic disorders. Vorzohn’s Dystrophy had arisen during
the Time of Isolation, principally, as its name suggested, among the Vor caste, but had not been medically identified as a mutation
until the return of galactic medicine. For one thing, it lacked the sort of exterior markers that would have caused, well, him for
example, to have had his throat cut at birth. It was an adult-onset disease, beginning with a bewildering variety of physical
debilitations and ending with mental collapse and death. In the harsher world of Barrayar’s past, carriers frequently met their
deaths from other causes after bearing or engendering children, but before the syndrome manifested itself. Enough madness ran in
enough families - including some of my dear Vorrutyer ancestors - from other causes that late onset was frequently identified as
something else anyway. Thoroughly nasty.
But it’s treatable now, isn’t it?
Yes, albeit expensively; that went with the rare part, no economies of scale. Miles scanned rapidly down the articles.
Symptoms were manageable with a variety of costly biochemical concoctions to flush out and replace the distorted molecules;
retrogenetic true cures were available at a higher price. Well, almost true cures: any progeny would still have to be screened for it,
preferably at the time of fertilization and before being popped into the uterine replicator for gestation.
Hadn’t young Nikolai been gestated in a uterine replicator? Good God, Vorsoisson surely hadn’t insisted his wife - and child -
go through the dangers of old-fashioned body-gestation, had he? Only a few of the most conservative Old Vor families still held
out for the old ways, a custom upon which Miles’s own mother had vented the most violently acerbic criticism he’d ever heard
from her lips. And she should know.
So what the hell is going on here? He sat back, mouth tight. If, as the files suggested, Nikolai was known or suspected to carry
Vorzohn’s Dystrophy, one or both of his parents must also. How long had they known?
He suddenly realized what he should have noticed before, in the initial illusion of smug marital bliss which Vorsoisson
managed to project. That was always the hardest part, seeing the absent pieces. About three more children were missing, that was
what. Some little sisters for Nikolai, please, folks? But no. So they’ve known at least since shortly after their son was born. What
a personal nightmare. But is he the carrier, or is she? He hoped it wasn’t Madame Vorsoisson; horrible to think of that serene
beauty crumbling under the onslaught of such internal disruption....
I don’t want to know all this.
His idle curiosity was justly punished. This idiot snooping was surely not proper behavior for an Imperial Auditor, however
much it had been inculcated in an ImpSec covert ops agent. Former agent. Where was all that shiny new Auditor’s probity now?
He might as well have been sniffing in her underwear drawer. I can’t leave you alone for a damn minute, can I, boy?
He’d chafed for years under military regulations, till he’d come to a job with no written regs at all. His sense of having died
and gone to heaven had lasted about five minutes. An Imperial Auditor was the Emperor’s Voice, his eyes and ears and sometimes
hands, a lovely job description till you stopped to wonder just what the hell that poetic metaphor was supposed to mean.
So was it a useful test to ask himself, Can I imagine Gregor doing this or that thing? Gregor’s apparent Imperial sternness hid
an almost painful personal shyness. The mind boggled. All right, should the question instead be, Could I imagine Gregor in his
office as Emperor doing this? Just what acts, wrong for a private individual, were yet lawful for an Imperial Auditor carrying out
his duties? Lots, according to the precedents he’d been reading. So was the real rule, "Ad lib till you make a mistake, and then
we’ll destroy you"? Miles wasn’t sure he liked that one at all.
And even in his ImpSec days, slicing through someone’s private files had been a treatment reserved for enemies, or at least
suspects. Well, and prospective recruits. And neutrals in whose territory you expected to be operating. And... and... he snorted
self-derision. Gregor at least had better manners than ImpSec.
Thoroughly embarrassed, he closed the files, erased all tracks of his entry, and called up the next autopsy report. He studied
what telltales he could glean from the bodily fragmentation. Death had a temperature, and it was damned cold. He paused to turn
up the workroom’s thermostat a few degrees before continuing.
CHAPTER THREE
Ekaterin hadn’t realized how much a visit from an Imperial Auditor would fluster the staff of Nikolai’s school. But the
Professor, a long-time educator himself, quickly made them understand this wasn’t an official inspection, and produced all the
right phrases to put them at their ease. Still, she and Uncle Vorthys didn’t linger as long as Tien had suggested to her.
To burn a bit more time, she took him on a short tour of Serifosa Dome’s best spots: the prettiest gardens, the highest
observation platforms, looking out across the sere Komarran landscape beyond the sealed urban sprawl. Serifosa was the capital
of this planetary Sector - she still had to make an effort not to think of it as a Barrayaran-style District. Barrayaran District
boundaries were more organic, higgly-piggly territories following rivers, mountain ranges, and ragged lines where Counts’ armies
had lost historic battles. Komarran Sectors were neat geometric slices equitably dividing the globe. Though the so-called domes,
really thousands of interconnected structures of all shapes, had lost their early geometries centuries ago, as they were built
outward in random and unmatching spurts of architectural improvement.
Somewhat belatedly, she realized she ought to be dragging the engineer emeritus through the deepest utility tunnels, and the
power and atmosphere cycling plants. But by then it was time for lunch. Her guided tour fetched up near her favorite restaurant,
pseudo-outdoors with tables spilling out into a landscaped park under the glassed-in sky. The damaged soletta-array was now
visible, creeping along the ecliptic, veiled today by thin high clouds as if ashamedly hiding its deformations.
The enormous power of the Emperor’s Voice conferred upon an Auditor hadn’t changed her uncle much, Ekaterin was pleased
to note; he still retained his enthusiasm for splendid desserts, and, under her guidance, constructed his menu choices from the
sweets course backwards. She couldn’t quite say "hadn’t changed him at all"; he seemed to have acquired more social caution,
pausing for more than just technical calculations before he spoke. But it wasn’t as if he could entirely ignore other people’s new
and exaggerated reactions to him.
They put in their orders, and she followed her uncle’s gaze upward as he briefly studied the soletta from this angle. She said,
"There’s not really a danger of the Imperium abandoning the soletta project, is there? We’ll have to at least repair it. I mean... it
looks so unbalanced like that."
"In fact, it is unbalanced at present. Solar wind. They’ll have to do something about that shortly," he replied. "I should
certainly not like to see it abandoned. It was the greatest engineering achievement of the Komarrans’ colonial ancestors, apart
from the domes themselves. People at their best. If it was sabotage... well, that was certainly people at their worst. Vandalism, just
senseless vandalism."
An artist describing the defacement of some great historic painting could hardly have been more vehement. Ekaterin said,
"I’ve heard older Komarrans talk about how they felt when Admiral Vorkosigan’s invasion forces took over the mirror, practically
the first thing. I can’t think that it had much tactical value, at the high speed at which the space battles went, but it certainly had a
huge psychological impact. It was almost as if we had captured their sun itself. I think returning it to Komarran civilian control in
the last few years was a very good political move. I hope this doesn’t mess that up."
"It’s hard to say." That new caution, again.
"There was talk of opening its observation platform to tourism again. Though now I imagine they’re relieved they hadn’t yet."
"They still have plenty of VIP tours. I took one myself, when I was here several years ago teaching a short course at Solstice
University. Fortunately, there were no visitors aboard on the day of the collision. But it should be open to the public, to be seen
and to educate. Do it up right, with maybe a museum on-site explaining how it was first built. It’s a great work. Odd to think that
its principal practical use is to make swamps."
"Swamps make breathable air. Eventually." She smiled. In her uncle’s mind the pure engineering aesthetic clearly
overshadowed the messy biological end view.
"Next you’ll be defending the rats. There really are rats here, I understand?"
"Oh, yes, the dome tunnels have rats. And hamsters, and gerbils. All the children capture them for pets, which is likely where
they came from in the first place, come to think of it. I do think the black-and-white rats are cute. The animal-control
exterminators have to work in dead secret from their younger relatives. And we have roaches, of course, who doesn’t? And - over
in Equinox - wild cockatoos. A couple of pairs of them escaped, or were let loose, several decades ago. They now have these big
rainbow-colored birds all over the place, and people will feed them. The sanitation crews wanted to get rid of them, but the Dome
shareholders voted them down."
The waitress delivered their salads and iced tea, and there was a short break in the conversation while her uncle appreciated
the fresh spinach, mangoes and onions, and candied pecans. She’d guessed the candied pecans would please him. The market-
garden hydroponics production in Serifosa was among Komarr’s best.
She used the break to redirect the conversation toward her greatest current curiosity. "Your colleague Lord Vorkosigan - did
he really have a thirteen-year career in Imperial Security?" Or were you just irritated by Tien?
"Three years in the Imperial Military Academy, a decade in ImpSec, to be precise."
"How did he ever get in, past the physicals?"
"Nepotism, I believe. Of a sort. To give him credit, it seems to have been an advantage he used sparingly thereafter. I had the
fascinating experience of reading his entire classified military record, when Gregor asked me and my fellow Auditors to review
Vorkosigan’s candidacy, before he made the appointment."
She subsided in slight disappointment. "Classified. In that case, I suppose you can’t tell me anything about it."
"Well," he grinned around a mouthful of salad, "there was the Dagoola IV episode. You must have heard of it, that giant
breakout from the Cetagandan prisoner-of-war camp that the Marilacans made a few years ago?"
She recalled it only dimly. She’d been heads-down in motherhood, about that time, and scarcely paid attention to news,
especially any so remote as galactic news. But she nodded encouragement for him to go on.
"It’s all old history now. I understand from Vorkosigan that the Marilacans are engaged in producing a holovid drama on the
subject. The Greatest Escape, or something like that, they’re calling it. They tried to hire him - or actually, his cover identity - to
摘要：

KomarrLoisMcMasterBujoldCHAPTERONEThelastgleamingsliverofKomarr’strue-sunmeltedoutofsightbeyondthelowhillsonthewesternhorizon.Laggingbehinditinthevaultoftheheavens,thereflectedfireofthesolarmirrorsprangoutinbrilliantcontrasttothedarkening,purple-tingedblue.WhenEkaterinhadfirstviewedthehexagonalsolet...

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