The Flowers of Vashnoi

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Her gaze tracked his. Even more thoroughly hidden in the vegetation, some plank verticals… an outbuilding? They both started up toward it. It was much smaller than the hut on stilts, though not as small as a privy, and not raised off the ground, though it seemed to sit on a crude fieldstone foundation. Windowless. Doorless…?

  Enrique fiddled with his scanner. “Now there’s someone inside,” he remarked in a satisfied tone. He pursed his lips. “Or possibly a goat.”

  They walked around it and found that it fronted on a wider clearing. It had a door, to Ekaterin’s relief. Closed, low, barred from the outside by a crooked stick with the gray bark still on, resting in two wooden catches. A scan of the soil around the entry by what Miles called the Old Mark One Eyeball revealed a few odd feathers and dried chicken dung and, yes, goat berries, swept out and scattered by some twiggy broom, not naturally piled. There was nothing like a rematch with motherhood, Ekaterin reflected glumly, to attune one to the messages in feces. The ponies had left no such calling cards—was this a shelter for the smaller animals, then? No, wait, a tell-tale mound of droppings lay off the corner of the shed, a pony-length from where such an animal might be tied by its bridle.

  Ekaterin’s hand closed on the stick—Enrique nodded encouragement—then paused. “Stow your scanner and get ready to catch someone’s goat if it bolts.” Lady Vorkosigan’s rights of trespass were arguable, but wouldn’t be aided by complaints about letting people’s domestic animals escape. And goats were tricky brutes, as Ekaterin recalled clearly from some youthful misadventures on her great-aunt’s South Continent farm.

  Enrique crowding her heels, she opened the door and stepped inside, preparing to let her eyes adjust to the shed’s shadows.

  Instead, it was like walking into a Winterfair light display, or some space station’s observation lounge, or a planetarium show gone wrong. Very wrong.

  From the floor, the walls, the ceiling, there glowed, yes, surely upwards of a hundred flower-like trefoils set in metallic purple gleams, ranging in color from a dull umber to butter-bright, scarcely less radiant than the thin chinks of daylight leaking between the boards. The effect was as enthralling as it was appalling. Some held still; some moved slowly, like wandering planets in this stunning constellation. They ranged in size from no bigger than her thumb to something that would fill her palm. Her gloved palm.

  A hoarse voice from the floor said, “Oh, Ingi! Did you find me some more, huh?”

  Ekaterin’s gaze jerked downward.

  The stout shape huddling there with its back to them wore a man’s old shirt with the sleeves cut off. Its pale arms hung out; three or four especially brilliant thumb-sized radbugs crawled along these waving trackways, clinging with their little claws. A few more skulked among the dark and rather greasy curls on its head. The figure rocked back and forth, turning toward the door without getting up. A couple of larger radbugs nestled in its lap, half-hidden among folds of skirt. A moon-shaped face with a gaping grin looked up into the silhouetting light from the door, small slitted eyes crinkling.

  A girl—a woman? She was near adult-sized, and her thick torso was definitely past puberty, though the wide face was as smooth as an egg. But as the girl stared up at her visitors’ masked and hooded aspects in a shock that entirely reflected their own, the lineless features crumpled into a child’s bewildered terror.

  “The white ghosts! White ghosts!” she shrieked at what must surely be the top of her lungs; the wail echoed off the boards and made Enrique flinch. She scrambled up, shedding radbugs, which bounced among the rough cobbles and scuttled away, save for one unfortunate insect smashed under an, oh God, stumpy bare foot. Thick, uncut toenails ridged up like claws on all six toes, save for the nails cracked and broken off.

  “My bugs!” yelped Enrique back. “Stop stepping on them, you idiot!” Pejorative, or literal classification? With Enrique, at this harried moment, it was hard to be sure. “Settle down!”

  Instead, the girl sprinted for the low door, evading Ekaterin’s lurch. “Grab her!” Ekaterin cried.

  “She’s not a goat!” But he complied, or tried to; she twisted away and struck out hard with her arms and fists, scratching wildly at his faceplate with her stubby fingers. Too many fingers…

  “No, don’t eat me!” she screamed, bounced off the doorjamb, and pelted away. “Ingi! Ingi! The white ghosts are after us! Oh, where are you?”

  Ekaterin stared at the agitated scrub where the howling girl had vanished. The cries stopped before the zigzag movement did, but it was already impossible to discern her direction.

  “I have to get a container,” said Enrique breathlessly, turning, seeming not to know which radbug to grab first. “Before they get out.”

  “This shed seems to have held them so far.” She grasped Enrique’s arm and pulled him out after her, gently flicked an exploring radbug back inside with her bootied toe, closed the low door once more, and retrieved and replaced the stick-lock, such as it was. “We can collect and count them later. First things first.” Which were… what? Ekaterin took a breath. “That child—those two children”—might Ingi be the name of their bug-thief? the girl’s words had suggested it—“can’t be maintaining this place by themselves, and they certainly can’t have built it.” Judging by the weathering and general dilapidation, these shacks were decades old. “There must be grownups of some kind around here, who are responsible for this, this… whatever this is.” And she was developing some very uncomfortable notions about that. “Let’s find them.”

  Enrique nodded and took up his scanner again. As they walked on, he said, “Why did she run away screaming like that? We weren’t going to hurt her.” Now that he was over his initial surprise at finding his missing bugs, he craned his neck in a somewhat distressed fashion toward the scrub where the crying girl had fled. “She seems to have gone to ground in that patch of deadfall, by the way.”

  “Let’s not go after her right away, maybe,” said Ekaterin. “Let her calm down a bit.”

  “And I certainly wasn’t going to eat her!” Enrique added, growing indignant in retrospect. “White ghosts? Was that supposed to be us?”

  “At a guess, someone told her”—what?—“some fairy story to scare her, to keep her from approaching strangers. Or letting them approach her. Strangers in protective garb, anyway.”

  “It must have been a pretty evil grownup, to tell such lies to such a child.” Enrique stared around, plainly perturbed. They checked what turned out to be the privy, on the opposite side of the hut from the graveyard, and found it empty. Regularly and recently used, though, Ekaterin’s nose attested even through her air filters.

  “What, didn’t your parents ever do that? To try to keep you safe when you were too young to understand?”

  “No, not really. They mostly explained things as they were. Well, not subatomic physics, not when I was three. I generally tried to make them read me nonfiction, though, as soon as I was old enough to complain.”

  “Mm.” Ekaterin considered the problem of a pupil less literate, and literal, than the young Enrique. One more frustratingly—perhaps frighteningly—slow. Still, the girl had exhibited speech, reasonably appropriate and grammatical if wrong-headed, which already put her well-up on the ladder of cognition. Not too profoundly impaired—or she wouldn’t have survived out here this long? Ekaterin pictured those smaller, more misshapen skulls. “How do you regard fiction, then? Or parable, myth, fable?”

  Enrique waved a conceding hand. “Consensual lying, perhaps.”

  “That’s actually a, a pretty socially advanced thing.” Though Sasha and Helen seemed to be coming up on it fast. But then, they had Miles for a Da.

  “But if one embeds a lesson in a lie, and the children find out it’s a lie, they’re likely to throw out the lesson as well. I mean, logically. They couldn’t trust anything at that point.”

  “Mm.” Ekaterin wondered if that explained something about adolescence. “At that point, I suppose one has to invent the scientific
method. Or learn it somehow.”

  “I really didn’t get my head around that till I was seven or so,” Enrique confessed, as if it were a regrettable lag.

  Ekaterin’s lips twitched. “You know, Enrique, I suspect you’re going to be a pretty good Da, when you come to it. In your own weird way.”

  “Do you really think so?” Enrique brightened at this measured praise. “You and Miles seem very good at it. I mean, you two never seem to panic.”

  “In Miles’s train, one learns to set a rather high bar for that.” She was not, for example, panicking here, now, yet. Chokingly uneasy wasn’t panic, was it?

  If there was another human being within half a kilometer, it wasn’t apparent to Enrique’s scanner. Ekaterin gave up on it and eyed the distant deadfall. “Just how hot is this patch, really?”

  “It’s on a bit of a spur, coming down from the ridge. We rejected this area for our test plot for just that reason. Rather well drained, I should think.”

  “Hence rather well rinsed?”

  “We could check the rangers’ rad map back in the lightflyer.” Belatedly he added, “Why do you ask?”

  “Let’s see that map.”

  They both clambered into the front seat—her new lightflyer was going to have to be decontaminated inside and out after this, drat it—and Ekaterin called up the vid projection. The grid of their current position showed none of the structures they’d just seen, and it should have, but yes, this patch was one of the cooler ones, interlaced with more distant hot spots and streaks according to the accidents of topography. Her Mark One Eyeball had guessed as much.

  “When you say We rejected this area, just what do you mean?” asked Ekaterin.

  “Well”—Enrique cleared his throat—“actually, Vadim said, ‘That area has too much elevation. Don’t waste time on it.’ Which was true. Do you think he, ah… knew about this place?”

  “After ten years patrolling the zone? He has to.” Therefore deliberately concealing it—maybe even enabling it? Given how long this squatter homestead had plainly been here, maybe more people than Vadim had to know? It smells of collusion would be… reasoning ahead of their data, as Enrique would no doubt put it.

  “You think he lied to me, then?”

  “By omission, anyway.” Which was going to be a problem, later. Or sooner.

  Enrique scowled.

  Ekaterin blew out her breath, swung out of the flyer, and began to unseal her hood-and-mask from her suit.

  “What are you doing?” asked Enrique, alarmed.

  “Going to talk to that girl. She’s not come out. It’s cruel to leave her cowering and crying in the bushes.”

  “I—your husband will be very upset with me if he finds out I let, um…”

  Ekaterin pulled a stray stand of her dark hair free from the seal fasteners and tucked it behind her ear. “Let?” she murmured, dangerously. Then, taking a little pity on him: “You don’t need to mention it.” Which was a rather Milesean approach, come to think, and therefore cosmic justice.

  “Vorkosigans,” muttered Enrique, and flung up his hands.

  Ekaterin smiled at him, tucked her hood prominently under her arm, and aimed back toward the woods. “Stay here. Keep an eye out,” she added, more to give him a feeling of use and keep him from following than because she thought there was much more to discover.

  “These people could be serial killers, you know!” Enrique called at her back, grumpily. “Radioactive serial killers!” She waved without turning around.

  Decontamination for her, after this jaunt, might now extend to an overnight at Hassadar General Hospital, she reflected without joy. The basic chelation treatment, while well understood and practiced there, was going to involve needles and peeing into measured pots and, probably somewhere, feces. It seemed overkill, given that all the children she ever planned to have were already gene-cleaned frozen embryos safely sequestered in a reproductive center in Hassadar, waiting for their parents to have—now, there was a black joke—time. Thank heavens for Aurie Pym, anyway.

  Ekaterin walked, very slowly and quietly, up to within a few meters of the deadfall—three or four trees collapsed and rotting in a tangle, festooned with mostly-green vines, brillberry and feral grape—then sat cross-legged on the ground. She raised her chin and called, in what she hoped was her most maternal and soothing voice, “Hello. I’m sorry we scared you, back in that shed. My name is Ekaterin. What’s yours?”

  Tense silence from the tangle.

  “I’m not a ghost. I’m a live lady. This is just a hat, see?” She put the hood on and then off again, setting it aside. Miles, she couldn’t help thinking, would be naturally better at this sort of beguilement, as he had demonstrated on more than one occasion. But he wasn’t the Vorkosigan on the spot.

  A faint rustle in the brillberry leaves. Ekaterin held herself still. If the child-woman bolted again, should she give chase? No, probably not. Where, after all, did the girl have to go? Well, the entire zone, all three thousand square kilometers of it, but… no, there. A round, sallow, worried face poked cautiously through the leaves. Stared. Blinked.

  “You’re pretty,” said a rough, thin voice.

  Ekaterin controlled an utterly automatic flinch. In the drawing rooms of Vorbarr Sultana, a personal compliment was almost invariably the preamble to a pitch, some campaign to enlist her to facilitate access to her husband’s ear. Well, and a few misguided attempts at dalliance most certainly not intended to come to Lord Vorkosigan’s attention, but she didn’t actually have to evaluate those. She was now about as far from those drawing rooms as it was possible to imagine. So she produced a straightforward, “It’s nice of you to say so,” in return.

  “Are you a princess?”

  “No.” Thankfully. And, Were you expecting one? They couldn’t get many princesses passing through these parts. Or maybe it was some skewed fairy-tale logic—if all princesses were beautiful females, then all beautiful females must be princesses? “So what is your name?”

  A long hesitation. “Jadwiga.”

  “That’s a pretty name.” Almost the only part of the girl that could be so described. As she crept farther out of the tangle, Ekaterin noted her neck was disfigured by a lumpy, discolored growth, as big as Ekaterin’s fist—goiter, thyroid cancer? Both? It explained the choked voice. And made Ekaterin swallow involuntarily.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” said Ekaterin firmly. So try a not-too-long shot—“Do you know Vadim Sammi, the ranger? I just met him for the first time a few days ago. Seemed like a good fellow.”

  At this, the girl came all the way out of the vines, seating herself on the ground cross-legged in unconscious imitation of Ekaterin, if still well out of reach. Ah, name-dropping. It worked in Vorbarr Sultana, too.

  “Do you live in that house up on the tree stumps? That’s a very clever way to build, here.”

  A nod. It made the growth wobble rather horribly; Ekaterin managed not to react.

  “Who all lives here with you? I think it’s good that you’re not alone.” Though Jadwiga was surely alone just now. Why? She hadn’t exactly been locked into that shed, since a person would only have had to lean on the door to break the stick barring it. But someone on the outside must have set it.

  “Ma Roga. And Boris. And Ingisi, he’s my favorite.” The head tilted. “Where d’you live?”

  “Hassadar, some of the time. And some of the time in Vorbarr Sultana. But my favorite is a place on the long lake just at the foot of the Dendarii Mountains, near Vorkosigan Surleau.”

  The girl took this in. “That’s a lot of places.”

  “It feels like it, sometimes.”

  It was hard to tell whether the blank and baffled look deepened. “Are they far away?”

  “Not by lightflyer. It would be a very long way to walk. Have you ever been to Hassadar?”

  A headshake.

  “Have you ever heard of Hassadar?”

  A nod. “Ma and Vadim talk about it, sometimes. He brin
gs us good things to eat from there. And soap.”

  “That… sounds nice.” And explained some of the less-archaic contents of the cabin’s shelves. “Has he ever offered to take you to Hassadar? Or anywhere?”

  She shook her head hard. “If we ever go over the ridge, people will kill us.”

  “That’s not true,” said Ekaterin, though she added in compulsive honesty, “Anymore.” She bit back a wince.

  But Jadwiga seemed unaffected by the historical codicil. Her stare intensified.

  Ekaterin tried, “Is Ingisi a very pale boy, with white hair?”

  Nod. “I like to comb it. It’s softer than the ponies’ manes.”

  Now, there was an arresting image. “Did Ingisi bring you the radbugs?”

  “Huh?”

  “The purple insects with the glowing gold flowers on their backs?”

  A more vigorous nod, and a wide ingenuous smile. “Pretty.”

  “Uh… thank you. I designed them. The man who is with me, Enrique, he made them.”

  The little eyes widened as much as they could. A slight recoil. “Is he a sorcerer?”

  “No, just a scientist. Anyone could do that work.” Scrupulousness compelled her to add, “If they were as smart as he is, and studied how for years and years the way he did.”

  This won only a dubious frown. But the next question took a sharp turn: “Are you married?”

  “Eh? Yes—oh, not to each other. Enrique has a wife named Martya, and I have a husband named Miles.”

  The round face scrunched. “Is she pretty?”

  “Well, yes, she is. Very tall, with soft blond hair, though not as white as Ingisi’s.” Ekaterin hesitated. “You like pretty things?”

  Nod.

  “There is a great deal of natural beauty here in the zone. The plants, the trees, the little streams…”

  “The ponies!”

  Ekaterin considered the surly animals they’d viewed from the air, and tried to come up with a positive remark. Positive seemed to be working, here. “Ponies have fuzzy ears. And velvety noses.”