Mirror Dance b-9

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I didn’t realize fast-penta could do that to you.”

  He tried to say, It’s not your fault, but his powers of speech seemed to have relapsed. “D-d-d-i, diddi, do. Bad. Thing?”

  She took far too long to reply. “Maybe it will be all right.”

  Two hours later, they came with a float-pallet and moved him.

  “We’re getting some other patients,” Dr. Chrys of the wing-hair told him blandly. “We need your room.” Lies? Half-truths?

  Where they moved him to puzzled him most of all. He had visions of a locked cell, but instead they took him upstairs via a freight lift tube and deposited him on a camp-bed set up in Rowan’s personal suite. It was one of a row of similar chambers, presumably the Duronas’ residence-floor. Her suite consisted of a sitting room/study and a bedroom, plus a private bath. It was reasonably spacious, though cluttered. He felt less like a prisoner than like a pet, being smuggled against the rules into some women’s dormitory. Though he had seen another male-morph Dr. Durona besides Raven, a man of about thirty Dr. Chrys had addressed as “Hawk.” Birds and flowers, they were all birds and flowers in this concrete cage.

  Later still, a young Durona brought dinner on a tray, and he ate together with Rowan at a little table in her sitting room as the grey day outside faded to dusk. He supposed there was no real change in his prisoner/patient status, but it felt good to be out of the hospital-style room, free of the monitors and sinister medical equipment. To be doing something so prosaic as having dinner with a friend.

  He walked around the sitting room, after they ate. “Mind ’f I look it your things?”

  “Go ahead. Let me know if anything comes up for you.”

  She still would not tell him anything directly about himself, but she low seemed willing at least to talk about herself. His internal picture of the world shifted as they spoke. Why do I have wormhole maps in my head? Maybe he was going to have to recover himself the hard way . Learn everything that existed in the universe, and whatever was left, that dwarfish-man-shaped hole in the center, would be him by process of elimination. A daunting task.

  He stared out the polarized window at the faint glitter hanging in he air, as if fairy dust were falling all around. He recognized the force screen for what it was, now, an improvement in cognition over is initial head-first encounter with it. The shield was military-grade, he realized, impermeable down to viruses and gas molecules, and up to … what? Projectiles and plasma, certainly. Must be a powerful generator around here somewhere. The protection was a late add-on to the building’s architecture, not incorporated into its design. Some history inherent there… . “We are on Jackson’s Whole, aren’ we?” he asked.

  “Yes. What does that mean to you?”

  “Danger. Bad things happenin’. What is this pla’?” He waved around.

  “The Durona Clinic.”

  “Ya, so? What you do? Why’m I here?”

  “We are the personal clinic of House Fell. We do all sorts of medical tasks for them, as needed.”

  “House Fell. Weapons.” The associations fell into place quite automatically. “Biological weapons.” He eyed her accusingly.

  “Sometimes,” she admitted. “And biological defenses, too.”

  Was he a House Fell trooper? A captured enemy trooper? Hell, what army would employ a half-crippled dwarf as any kind of trooper?

  “House Fell give me to you to do?”

  “No.”

  “No? S—why’m I here?”

  “That’s been a great puzzle for us, too. You arrived frozen in a cryo-chamber, with every sign of having been prepped in great haste, a crate addressed to me, via common carrier, with no return address. We hoped if we revived you, you could tell us.”

  “ ’S more goin’ on than that.”

  “Yes,” she said frankly.

  “Bu’ you won’ tell me.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Wha’ happens if I walk outta here?”

  She looked alarmed. “Please don’t. That could get you killed.”

  “Again.”

  “Again,” she nodded.

  “By who?”

  “That … depends on who you are.”

  He veered off the subject, then ran the conversation around to it three more times, but could not lull or trick her into telling him any more about himself. Exhausted, he gave up for the night, only to lie awake on his cot worrying the problem as a predator might worry a carcass. But all his bone-tossing did no good but to freeze his mind with frustration. Sleep on it, he told himself. Tomorrow must bring him something new. Whatever else this situation was, it wasn’t stable. He felt that, felt balanced as though on a knife-edge; below him lay darkness, concealing feathers or sharpened stakes or maybe nothing at all, an endless fall.

  He wasn’t quite sure of the rationale behind the hot bath and the therapeutic massage. Exercise, now, he could see that; Dr. Chrys had lugged in an exercise bicycle to Rowan’s study, and let him sweat himself near to passing out. Anything that painful must be good for him. No push-ups yet, though. He’d tried one, and collapsed with a wide-eyed, muffled squeak of agony, and been yelled at quite firmly by an irate Dr. Chrys for attempting unauthorized bodily motions.

  Dr. Chrys had made notes and gone off again, leaving him to Rowan’s tenderer mercies. He lay now steaming gently in Rowan’s bed, dressed in a towel, while she reviewed skeleto-muscular structure all up and down his back. Dr. Chrys’s fingers, doing massage, had been like probes. Rowan’s hands caressed. Not anatomically equipped to purr, he did manage a small, encouraging moan of appreciation now and then. She worked down to his feet and toes, and started back up.

  Face down, mashed comfortably into her pillows, he became gradually aware that a very important bodily system was reporting for duty, for the first time since his revival. Res-erection indeed. His face flushed in a mixture of embarrassment and delight, and he flung an arm up as-if-casually to conceal his expression. She’s your doctor. She’ll want to know. It wasn’t as if she weren’t intimately familiar with every part of his body, inside and out, already. She’d been up to her bloody elbows in him, literally. He stayed hidden in his arm-cave anyway.

  “Roll over,” Rowan said, “and I’ll do your other side.”

  “Er … d’rather not,” he mumbled into the pillow.

  “Why not?”

  “Um … ’member how you keep askin’ if somethin’ has come up for me?”

  “Yes …”

  “Well … somethin’ has.”

  There was a brief silence, then, “Oh! In that case, definitely roll over. I need to examine you.”

  He took a breath. “Things we do fer science.”

  He rolled over, and she took away his towel. “Has this happened before?” she inquired.

  “No. Firs’ time in my life. This life.”

  Her long cool fingers probed quickly, medically. “That looks good,” she said with enthusiasm.

  “Thank you,” he carolled cheerfully.

  She laughed. He didn’t need a memory to tell him it was a very good sign when a woman laughed at his jokes at this point. Experimentally, gently, he pulled her down to face him. Hooray for science. Let’s see what happens. He kissed her. She kissed him back. He melted.

  Speech and science were both put aside for a time, after that. Not to mention the green coat and all the layers underneath. Her body was as lovely as he’d imagined, a pure aesthetic of line and curve, softness and floral, hidden places. His own body contrasted vividly, a little rack of bones scored with shocking red scars.

  An intense consciousness of his recent death welled up in him, and he found himself kissing her frantically, passionately, as if she were life itself and he could so consume and possess her. He didn’t know if she was enemy or friend, if this was a right or wrong thing. But it was warm and liquid and moving, not icy and still, surely the most opposite thing imaginable to cryo-stasis. Seize the day. Because the night waited, coldly implacable. Th
is lesson burned from his center outward, like radiation. Her eyes widened. Only his shortness of breath forced him to slow down to a more decorous, reasonable pace.

  His ugliness ought to have bothered him, but it didn’t, and he wondered why. We make love with our eyes closed. Who had told him that? The same woman who’d told him, It’s not the meat, it’s the motion? Opening Rowan’s body was like facing that pile of field-stripped weaponry. He knew what to do, what parts counted and which were camouflage, but could not remember how he’d learned it all. The training was there, yet the trainer was erased. It was a more deeply disturbing coupling of the familiar with the strange than any he’d yet experienced here.

  She shivered, sighed, and relaxed, and he kissed his way back up her body to murmur in her ear, “Um … doan’ think I can do pushups, jus’ yet.”

  “Oh.” Her glazed eyes opened, and focused. “My. Yes.” A few moments of experiment found a medically-approved position, flat on his back in great comfort with no pressure or strain on his chest, arms, or abdomen, and then it was his turn. That felt right, ladies first and then he wouldn’t have pillows thrown at him for falling asleep immediately afterwards. A terribly familiar pattern, with all the details wrong. Rowan had done this before too, he judged, though perhaps not often. But great expertise on her part was scarcely required. His body worked just fine… .

  “Dr. D,” he sighed up at her, “yr a gen’ius. Aes … Asku … Aesch … that Greek guy coul’ tak’ lessons in resurr’ction from you.”

  She laughed, and oozed down beside him, body to body. My height doesn’t matter when we’re lying down. He’d known that, too. They exchanged less-hurried, exploratory kisses, savored slowly like after-dinner mints.

  “You’re very good at that,” she murmured wheezily, nibbling on his ear.

  “Yea …” His grin faded, and he stared at the ceiling, brows drawing down in a combination of gentle, post-coital melancholy, and renewed, if purely mental, frustration. ”… wonder if I was married?” Her head drew back, and he could have bitten his tongue at her stricken look. “Doan’ think so,” he added quickly.

  “No … no,” she settled back again. “You’re not married.”

  “Which ever one I am?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Huh.” He hesitated, winding her long hair in his fingers, spreading it idly out in a fan across the burst of red lines on his torso. “So who d’you think you were makin’ love to, jus’ now?”

  She touched a long index finger gently to his forehead. “You. Just you.”

  This was most pleasing, but … “Wuzzat love, or therapy?”

  She smiled quizzically, tracing his face. “A little of both, I think. And curiosity. And opportunity. I’ve been pretty immersed in you, for the past three months.”

  It felt like an honest answer. “Seems t’me you made t’ opportunity.”

  A small smirk escaped her lips. “Well … maybe.”

  Three months. Interesting. So he’d been dead a bit over two months. He must have absorbed a lot of the Durona Group’s resources, in that time. To begin with, three months of this woman’s labor were not cheap.

  “Why you doin’ this?” he asked, frowning at the ceiling as she snuggled carefully around his shoulder. “I mean t’whole thing. What d’you expect me to do for you?” Half-crippled, tongue-tied, blank and stupid, not a dollar to his non-existent name. “You’re all hangin’ on m’recovery like I’m your hope ’f heaven.” Even the brutally efficient physical therapist Chrys he’d come to see as pushing him for his good. He almost liked her best, for her merciless drive. He resonated to it. “Who else wants me, tha’ you should hide me? Enemies?” Or friends?

  “Enemies for certain,” Rowan sighed.

  “Mm.” He lay back in lassitude; she dozed, he didn’t. He touched her net of hair and wondered. What did she see in him? I thought it as the enchanted knight’s crystal coffin … I picked out enough grenade fragments to be certain you weren’t a bystander… . So, there was work to be done. Nor did the Durona Group want any ordinary mercenary. If this was Jackson’s Whole, they could hire ordinary thugs by the boatload.

  But then, he’d never thought he was an ordinary man. Not even for a minute.

  Oh, milady. Who do you need me to be?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The re-discovery of sex fairly immobilized him for the next three days, but his instinct for escape surfaced one afternoon when Rowan left him sleeping, but he wasn’t. He unlidded his eyes, and traced the pattern of scars on his chest, and thought it over. Out was clearly a wrong direction. In was one he hadn’t tried yet. Everybody here seemed to go to Lilly with their problems. Very well. He would go to Lilly too.

  Up, or down? As a Jacksonian leader, she ought traditionally to lodge in either a penthouse or a bunker. Baron Ryoval lived in a bunker, or at least there was a dim image in his head associated with that name, involving shadowy sub-basements. Baron Fell took the penthouse at apogee, looking down on it all from his orbital station. He seemed to have a lot of pictures in his head of Jackson’s Whole. Was it his home? The thought confused him. Up. Up and in.

  He dressed in his grey knits, borrowed some of Rowan’s socks, and slipped into the corridor. He found a lift tube and took it to the top floor, just one above Rowan’s. It was another floor of residence suites. At its center he found another lift tube, palm-locked. Any Durona could use it. A spiral staircase wound around it. He climbed the stairs very slowly, and waited, near the top, till he had all his breath back. He knocked on the door.

  It slid aside, and a slim Eurasian boy of about ten regarded him gravely. “What do you want?” The boy frowned.

  “I want to see your … grandmother.”

  “Bring him in, Robin,” a soft voice called.

  The boy ducked his head, and motioned him inside. His sock feet trod noiselessly across a deep carpet. The windows were polarized against the dark grey afternoon, and pools of warmer, yellower lamplight fought the gloom. Beyond the window, the force field revealed itself with tiny scintillations, as water droplets or particulars matter were detected and repelled or annihilated.

  A shrunken woman sat in a wide chair, and watched him approach her through dark eyes set in a face of old ivory. She wore a high-necked black silk tunic and loose trousers. Her hair was pure white, and very long; a slim girl, most literally twin to the boy, was brushing it over the back of the chair, in long, long strokes. The room was very warm. Regarding her regarding him, he wondered how he could ever have thought that worried old woman with the cane might be Lilly. Hundred-year-old eyes looked at you differently.

  “Ma’am,” he said. His mouth felt suddenly dry.

  “Sit down,” she nodded to a short sofa set around the corner of the low table in front of her. “Violet, dear,” a thin hand, all white wrinkles and blue ropy veins, touched the girl’s hand which had paused protectively on her black silk shoulder. “Bring tea now. Three cups. Robin, please go downstairs and get Rowan.”

  The girl arranged the hair in a falling fan around the woman’s upright torso, and the two children vanished in un-childlike silence. Clearly, the Durona Group did not employ outsiders. No chance of a mole ever penetrating their organization. With equal obedience, he sank into the seat she’d indicated.

  Her vowels had a vibrato of age, but her diction, containing them, was perfect. “Have you come to yourself, sir?” she inquired.

  “No, ma’am,” he said sadly. “Only to you.” He thought carefully about how to phrase his question. Lilly would not be any less medically careful than Rowan about yielding him clues. “Why can’t you identify me?”

  Her white brows rose. “Well put. You are ready for an answer, I think. Ah.”

  The lift tube hummed, and Rowan’s alarmed face appeared. She hurried out. “Lilly, I’m sorry. I thought he was asleep—”

  “It’s all right, child. Sit down. Pour the tea,” for Violet reappeared around the corner bearing a large tray. Lilly whispered to the g
irl behind a faintly trembling hand, and she nodded and scampered off. Rowan knelt in what appeared to be a precise old ritual—had she once held Violet’s place? he rather thought so—and poured green tea into thin white cups, and handed it round. She sat at Lilly’s knees, and stole a brief, reassuring touch of the white hair coiled there.

  The tea was very hot. Since he’d lately taken a deep dislike to cold, this pleased him, and he sipped carefully. “Answers, ma’am?” he reminded her cautiously.

  Rowan’s lips parted in a negative, alarmed breath; Lilly crooked up one finger, and quelled her.

  “Background,” said the old woman. “I believe the time has come to tell you a story.”

  He nodded, and settled back with his tea.

  “Once upon a time,” she smiled briefly, “there were three brothers. A proper fairy tale, ai? The eldest and original, and two young clones. The eldest—as happens in these tales—was born to a magnificent patrimony. Title—wealth—comfort—his father, if not exactly a king, commanded more power than any king in pre-Jump history. And thus he became the target of many enemies. Since he was known to dote upon his son, it occurred to more than one of his enemies to try and strike at him through his only child. Hence this peculiar multiplication.” She nodded at him. It made his belly shiver. He sipped more tea, to cover his confusion.

  She paused. “Can you name any names yet?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Mm.” She abandoned the fairy tale; her voice grew more clipped. “Lord Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar was the original. He is now about twenty-eight standard years old. His first clone was made right here on Jackson’s Whole, twenty-two years ago, a purchase by a Komarran resistance group from House Bharaputra. We do not know what this clone names himself, but the Komarrans’ elaborate substitution plot failed about two years ago, and the clone escaped.”

  “Galen,” he whispered.

  She glanced sharply at him. “He was the chief of those Komarrans, yes. The second clone … is a puzzle. The best guess is that he was manufactured by the Cetagandans, but no one knows. He first appeared about ten years ago as a full-blown and exceptionally brilliant mercenary commander, claiming the quite legal Betan name of Miles Naismith, in his maternal line. He has shown himself no friend to the Cetagandans, so the theory that he is a Cetagandan renegade has a certain compelling logic. No one knows his age, though obviously he can be no more than twenty-eight.” She took a sip of her tea. “It is our belief that you are one of those two clones.”