Mirror Dance b-9

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “A … link in a chain,” Mark offered carefully, to prove he was paying attention.

  “A link in a chain-mail. In a web. So that one weak link is not fatal. Many must fail at once, to achieve a real disaster. Still … one wants as many sound, reliable links as possible, obviously.”

  “Obviously.” Why are you looking at me?

  “So. Tell me what happened on Jackson’s Whole. As you saw it.” Gregor sat up on his perch, hooking one heel and crossing his booted ankles, apparently centered and comfortable, like a raven on a branch.

  “I’d have to start the story back on Earth.”

  “Feel free.” His easy brief smile implied Mark had all the time in the world, and one hundred percent of his attention.

  Haltingly, Mark began to stammer out his tale. Gregor’s questions were few, only interjected when Mark hung up on the difficult bits; few but searching. Gregor was not in pursuit of mere facts, Mark quickly realized. He had obviously already seen Illyan’s report. The Emperor was after something else.

  “I cannot argue with your good intentions,” said Gregor at one point. “The brain transplant business is a loathsome enterprise. But you do realize—your effort, your raid, is hardly going to put a dent in it. House Bharaputra will just clean up the broken glass and go on.”

  “It will make a permanent difference to the forty-nine clones,” Mark asserted doggedly. “Everybody makes that same damned argument. ’I can’t do it all, so I’m not going to do any.’ And they don’t. And it goes on, and on. And anyway, if I had been able to go back via Escobar as I’d planned in the first place—there would have been a big news splash. House Bharaputra might even have tried to reclaim the clones legally, and then there would really have been a public stink. I’d have made sure of it. Even if I’d been in Escobaran detention. Where, by the way, the House Bharaputra enforcers would have had a hard time getting at me. And maybe … maybe it would have interested some more people in the problem.”

  “Ah!” said Gregor. “A publicity stunt.”

  “It was not a stunt,” Mark grated.

  “Excuse me. I did not mean to imply your effort was trivial. Quite the reverse. But you did have a coherent long-range strategy after all.”

  “Yeah, but it went down the waste disintegrator as soon as I lost control of the Dendarii. As soon as they knew who I really was.” He brooded on the memory of that helplessness.

  At Gregor’s prodding, Mark went on to recount Miles’s death, the screw-up with the lost cryo-chamber, their aborted efforts to retrieve it, and their humiliating ejection from Jacksonian local space. He found himself revealing far more of his real thoughts than he was comfortable doing, yet … Gregor almost put him at his ease. How did the man do it? The soft, almost self-effacing demeanor camouflaged a consummately skillful people-handler. In a garbled rush, Mark described the incident with Maree and his half-insane time in solitary confinement, then trailed off into inarticulate silence.

  Gregor frowned introspectively, and was quiet for a time. Hell, the man was quiet all the time. “It seems to me, Mark, that you devalue your strengths. You have been battle-tested, and proved your physical courage. You can take an initiative, and dare much. You do not lack brains, though sometimes … information. It’s not a bad start on the qualities needed for a countship. Someday.”

  “Not any day. I don’t want to be a Count of Barrayar,” Mark denied emphatically.

  “It could be the first step to my job,” Gregor said suggestively, with a slight smile.

  “No! That’s even worse. They’d eat me alive. My scalp would join the collection downstairs.”

  “Very possibly.” Gregor’s smile faded. “Yes, I’ve often wondered where all my body parts are going to end up. And yet—I understand you were set to try it, just two years ago. Including Aral’s countship.”

  “Fake it, yes. Now you’re talking about the real thing. Not an imitation.” I’m just an imitation, don’t you know? “I’ve only studied the outsides. The inner surface I can barely imagine.”

  “But you see,” said Gregor, “we all start out that way. Faking it. The role is a simulacrum, into which we slowly grow real flesh.”

  “Become the machine?”

  “Some do. That’s the pathological version of a Count, and there are a few. Others become … more human. The machine, the role, then becomes a handily-worked prosthetic, which serves the man. Both types have their uses, for my goals. One must simply be sure where on the range of self-delusion the man you’re talking to falls.”

  Yes, Countess Cordelia had surely had a hand in training this man. Mark sensed her trail, like phosphorescent footsteps in the dark. “What are your goals?”

  Gregor shrugged. “Keep the peace. Keep the various factions from trying to kill each other. Make bloody sure that no galactic invader ever puts a boot on Barrayaran soil again. Foster economic progress. Lady Peace is the first hostage taken when economic discomfort rises. Here my reign is unusually blessed, with the terraforming of the second continent, and the opening of Sergyar for full colonization. Finally, now that that vile subcutaneous worm plague is under control. Settling Sergyar should absorb everyone’s excess energies for several generations. I’ve been studying various colonial histories lately, wondering how many of the mistakes we can avoid … well, so.”

  “I still don’t want to be Count Vorkosigan.”

  “Without Miles, you don’t exactly have a choice.”

  “Rubbish.” At least, he hoped it was rubbish. “You just said it’s an interchangeable part. They could find someone else just fine if they had to. Ivan, I guess.”

  Gregor smiled bleakly. “I confess, I’ve often used the same argument. Though in my case the topic is progeny. Bad dreams about the destiny of my body parts are nothing compared to the ones I have about my theoretical future children’s. And I’m not going to marry some high Vor bud whose family tree crosses mine sixteen times in the last six generations.” He contained himself abruptly, with an apologetic grimace. And yet … the man was so controlled, Mark fancied even this glimpse of the inner Gregor served a purpose, or could be made to.

  Mark was getting a headache. Without Miles … With Miles, all these Barrayaran dilemmas would be Miles’s. And Mark would be free to face … his own dilemmas, anyway. His own demons, not these adopted ones. “This is not my … gift. Talent. Interest. Destiny. Something, I don’t know.” He rubbed his neck.

  “Passion?” said Gregor.

  “Yes, that’ll do. A countship is not my passion.”

  After a moment, Gregor asked curiously, “What is your passion, Mark? If not government, or power, or wealth—you have not even mentioned wealth.”

  “Enough wealth to destroy House Bharaputra is so far beyond my reach, it just … doesn’t apply. It’s not a solution I can have. I … I … some men are cannibals. House Bharaputra, its customers—I want to stop the cannibals. That would be worth getting out of bed for.” He became aware his voice had grown louder, and slumped down again in the soft chair.

  “In other words … you have a passion for justice. Or dare I say it, Security. A curious echo of your, um, progenitor.”

  “No, no!” Well … maybe, in a sense. “I suppose there are cannibals on Barrayar too, but they haven’t riveted my close personal interest. I don’t think in terms of law enforcement, because the transplant business isn’t illegal on Jackson’s Whole. So a policeman isn’t the solution either. Or … it would have to be a damned unusual policeman.” Like an ImpSec covert ops agent? Mark tried to imagine a detective-inspector bearing a letter of marque and reprisal. For some reason a vision of his progenitor kept coming up. Damn Gregor’s unsettling suggestion. Not a policeman. A knight-errant. The Countess had it dead-on. But there was no place for knights-errant any more; the police would have to arrest them.

  Gregor sat back with a faintly satisfied air. “That’s very interesting.” His abstracted look resembled that of a man assimilating the code-key to a safe. He slid from his stool t
o wander along the windows and gaze down from another angle. Face to the light, he remarked, “It seems to me your future access to your … passion, depends rather heavily on getting Miles back.”

  Mark sighed in frustration. “It’s out of my hands. They’ll never let me … what can I do that ImpSec can’t? Maybe they’ll turn him up. Any day now.”

  “In other words,” said Gregor slowly, “the most important thing in your life at this moment is something you are powerless to affect. You have my profound sympathies.”

  Mark slipped, unwilled, into frankness. “I’m a virtual prisoner here. I can’t do anything, and I can’t leave!”

  Gregor cocked his head. “Have you tried?”

  Mark paused. “Well … no, not yet, actually.”

  “Ah.” Gregor turned away from the window, and took a small plastic card from his inner jacket pocket. He handed it across the desk to Mark. “My Voice carries only to the borders of Barrayar’s interests,” he said. “Nevertheless … here is my private vidcom number. Your calls will be screened by only one person. You’ll be on their list. Simply state your name, and you will be passed through.”

  “Uh … thank you,” said Mark, in cautious confusion. The card bore only the code-strip: no other identification. He put it away very carefully.

  Gregor touched an audiocom pin on his jacket, and spoke to Kevi. In a few moments there came a knock, and the door swung open to admit Ivan again. Mark, who had started to rock in Gregor’s station chair—it did not squeak—self-consciously climbed out of it.

  Gregor and Ivan exchanged farewells as laconically as they had exchanged greetings, and Ivan led Mark out of the tower room. As they rounded the corner Mark looked back at the sound of footsteps. Kevi was already ushering in the next man for his Imperial appointment.

  “So how did it go?” Ivan inquired.

  “I feel drained,” Mark admitted.

  Ivan smiled grimly. “Gregor can do that to you, when he’s being Emperor.”

  “Being? Or playing?”

  “Oh, not playing.”

  “He gave me his number.” And I think he got mine.

  Ivan’s brows rose. “Welcome to the club. I can count the number of people who have that access without even taking both boots off.”

  “Was … Miles one of them?”

  “Of course.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ivan, apparently acting under orders—from the Countess, was Mark’s first guess—took him out to lunch. Ivan followed a lot of orders, Mark noticed with a slight twinge of sympathy. They went to a place called the caravanserai, a stretched walking distance from Vorhartung Castle. Mark escaped another ground-car ride with Ivan by virtue of the narrowness of the streets—alleys—in the ancient district.

  The caravanserai itself was a curious study in Barrayaran social evolution. Its oldest core was cleaned up, renovated, and converted into a pleasant maze of shops, cafes, and small museums, frequented by a mixture of city workers seeking lunch and obvious provincial tourists, come up to the capital to do the historic shrines.

  This transformation had spread from the clusters of old government buildings like Vorhartung Castle along the river, toward the district’s center; on the fringes to the south, the renovation petered out into the kind of shabby, faintly dangerous areas that had given the caravanserai its original risky reputation. On the way, Ivan proudly pointed out a building in which he claimed to have been born, during the war of Vordarian’s Pretendership. It was now a shop selling overpriced hand-woven carpets and other antique crafts supposedly preserved from the Time of Isolation. From the way Ivan carried on Mark half-expected there to be a plaque on the wall commemorating the event, but there wasn’t; he checked.

  After lunch in one of the small cafes, Ivan, his mind now running on his family history, was seized with the notion of taking Mark to view the spot on the pavement where his father Lord Padma Vorpatril had been murdered by Vordarian’s security forces during that same war. Feeling it fit in with the general gruesome historic tenor of the rest of the morning, Mark agreed, and they set out again on foot to the south. A shift in the architecture, from the low tan stucco of the first century of the Time of Isolation to the high red brick of its last century, marked the marches of the caravanserai proper, or improper.

  This time, by God, there was a plaque, a cast bronze square set right in the pavement; ground-cars ran past and over it as Ivan gazed down.

  “You’d think they’d at least have put it on the sidewalk,” said Mark.

  “Accuracy,” said Ivan. “M’mother insisted.”

  Mark waited a respectful interval to allow Ivan who-knew-what inward meditations. Eventually Ivan looked up and said brightly, “Dessert? I know this great little Keroslav District bakery around the corner. Mother always took me there after, when we came here to burn the offering each year. It’s sort of a hole in the wall, but good.”

  Mark had not yet walked down lunch, but the place proved as delectable on the inside as it was derelict on the outside, and he somehow ended up possessed of a bag of nut rolls and traditional brillberry tarts, for later. While Ivan lingered over a selection of delicacies to be delivered to Lady Vorpatril, and possibly some sweeter negotiation with the pretty counter-girl—it was hard to tell if Ivan was serious, or just running on spinal reflex—Mark stepped outside.

  Galen had placed a couple of Komarran underground spy contacts in this area once, Mark remembered. Doubtless picked up two years ago in the post-plot sweep by Barrayaran Imperial Security. Still, he wondered if he could have found them, if Galen’s dreams of revenge had ever come real. Should be one street down and two over … Ivan was still chatting up the bakery girl. Mark took a walk.

  He found the address in a couple of minutes, to his sufficient satisfaction; he decided he didn’t need to check inside. He turned back and took what looked like a short cut toward the main street and the bakery. It proved to be a cul-de-sac. He turned again and started for the alley’s mouth.

  An old woman and a skinny youth, who had been sitting on a stoop and watched him go in, now watched him coming out. The old woman’s dull eye lit with a faint hostility as he came again into her shortsighted focus.

  “That’s no boy. That’s a mutie,” she hissed to the youth. Grandson? She nudged him pointedly. “A mutie come on our street.”

  Thus prodded, the youth slouched to his feet and stepped in front of Mark. Mark stopped. The kid was taller than he—who wasn’t?—but not much heavier, greasy-haired and pale. He spread his legs aggressively, blocking Mark’s dodge. Oh, God. Natives. In all their surly glory.

  “Shouldn’t ought to be here, mutie.” He spat, in imitation-bully-mode; Mark almost laughed.

  “You’re right,” he agreed easily. He let his accent go mid-Atlantic Earth, non-Barrayaran. “This place is a pit.”

  “Offworlder!” the old woman whined in even sharper disapproval. “You can take a wormhole jump to hell, offworlder!”

  “I seem to have already,” Mark said dryly. Bad manners, but he was in a bad mood. If these slum-louts wanted to bait him, he would bait them right back. “Barrayarans. If there’s anything worse than the Vor it’s the fools under ’em. No wonder galactics despise this place for a hole.” He was surprised at how easily the suppressed rage vented, and how good it felt. Better not go too far.

  “Gonna get you, mutie,” the boy promised, hovering on the balls of his feet in nervous threat. The hag urged her bravo on with a rude gesture at Mark. A peculiar set-up; little old ladies and punks were normally natural enemies, but these two seemed in it together. Comrades of the Imperium, no doubt, uniting against a common foe.

  “Better a mutie than a moron,” Mark intoned with false cordiality.

  The lout’s brows wrinkled. “Hey! Is that back-chat to me? Huh?”

  “Do you see any other morons around here?” At the boy’s eye-flicker, Mark looked over his shoulder. “Oh. Excuse me. There are two more. I understand your confusion.” His adrenalin pumpe
d, turning his late lunch into a lump of regret in his belly. Two more youths, taller, heavier, older, but only adolescents. Possibly vicious, but untrained. Still … where was Ivan now? Where was that bloody invisible supposed outer perimeter guard? On break? “Aren’t you late for school? Your remedial drooling class, perhaps?”

  “Funny mutie,” said one of the older ones. He wasn’t laughing.

  The attack was sudden, and almost took Mark by surprise; he thought etiquette demanded they exchange a few more insults first, and he was just working up some good ones. Exhilaration mixed strangely with the anticipation of pain. Or maybe it was the anticipation of pain that was exhilarating. The biggest punk tried to kick him in the groin. He caught the foot with one hand and boosted it skyward, flipping the kid onto his back on the stones with a wham that knocked the wind out of him. The second one launched a blow with his fist; Mark caught his arm. They whirled, and the punk found himself stumbling into his skinny companion. Unfortunately, now they both were between Mark and the exit.

  They scrambled to their feet, looking astonished and outraged; what kind of easy pickings had they expected, for God’s sake? Easy enough. His reflexes were two years stale, and he was already getting winded. Yet the extra weight made him harder to knock off his feet. Three toone on a crippled-looking fat little lost stranger, eh? You like those odds? Come to me, baby cannibals. The bakery bag was still clutched absurdly in his fist as he grinned and opened his arms in invitation.

  They jumped him both together, telegraphing every move. The purely defensive katas continued to work charmingly; they flowed into, and out of, his momentum-gate to end up both on the ground, shaking their heads dizzily, victims of their own aggression. Mark wriggled his jaw, which had taken a clumsy blow, hard enough to sting and wake him up. The next round was not so successful; he ended up rolling out of reach, finally losing his grip on the bakery bag, which promptly got stomped. And then one of them caught up with him in a grapple, and they took some of their own back, pounding unscientific blows of clenched fists. He was getting seriously out of breath. He planned an arm-bar and a sprint to the street. It might have ended there, a good time having been had by all, if one of the idiot punks, crouching, hadn’t pulled out a battered old shock-stick and jabbed it toward him.