"How did you think she got to be your mother? They didn't have uterine replicators on Barrayar back then."
"That was thirty years ago."
"Time enough. South coast, huh? It sounds . . . relaxing. Downright placid, in fact. Warm." It was sleeting in Vorbarr Sultana this morning. Maybe he could persuade Illyan to tell him the name of the place, and once he had this bloody report off his hands . . . but Miles had no one to go on holiday with but Ivan, just at present, and that wasn't the same thing at all. "If it really bothers you, I suppose you could talk to my mother."
"I tried. She's Betan. She thinks it's just great. Good for your cardiovascular system, and endorphin production, and all that. She and my mother probably plotted it all out together, come to think of it."
"Possibly. Look on the bright side. Chances are Aunt Alys'll be so occupied with her own love-life, she won't have any attention left over for trying to arrange yours. Isn't that what you said you always wanted?"
"Yes, but . . ."
"Think back. In the last month, how much has she harassed you about courting eligible girls?"
"In the last month . . . we've all been pretty busy."
"How many of her acquaintances' children's betrothals, weddings, or new babies has she described in detail?"
"Well . . . none, now you mention it. Except Gregor's, of course. Longest she's ever gone without inflicting the high Vor vital statistics roll call on me. Even when I was doing duty at our embassy on Earth, she'd message twice a month."
"Count your blessings, Ivan."
Ivan's mouth screwed up. "Fruit," he muttered. "On little sticks."
It took Miles a full hour to recover his concentration, after evicting Ivan. He did make practical use of the disruption by calling Dr. Chenko at ImpMil, and finally setting up his appointment to calibrate the seizure-control device. Chenko seemed quite anxious to find out if it was going to work. Miles tried not to feel like a large bipedal lab rat.
He was getting ready to step out the front door of Vorkosigan House for that appointment the next afternoon, when he encountered Illyan, just coming in. It was snowing, and white flakes clung to Illyan s civilian jacket, and dusted his thinning hair. His face was red with cold, and exhilarated. He appeared to be alone.
"Where have you been?" Miles asked. He craned his neck as the door swung shut, but didn't see Lady Alys, or a guard, or any other companion departing the entryway.
"I took a walk around town."
"By yourself?" Miles tried to keep the alarm out of his voice. After all this, to lose the man, and have to rout out the municipal guard to go hunting for him, to find him wandering frightened or bewildered and embarrassed in some oddball corner of the city . . . "You got back all right, it seems."
"Yes." Illyan positively grinned. He held out his hand, and displayed the holocube clutched there. "Your lady mother gave me a map. It has the entire North and South Continents and all the populated islands, every city and town and street and mountain range down to the one-meter scale. Now whenever I get lost, I can find my own way back."
"Most people use maps, Simon." I'm an idiot! Why didn't I think of that before this?
"It's been so long since I had to, it didn't even occur to me. It's like an eidetic chip you can hold in your hand. It even remembers things you never knew before. Wonderful!" He unfastened his jacket, and pulled a second device from an inner pocket, a perfectly ordinary, though obviously best-quality, business audionote filer. "She gave me this, too. It cross-references everything automatically by key word. Crude, but perfectly adequate for ordinary use. It's nearly a prosthetic memory, Miles."
The man hadn't had to even think about taking notes for the past thirty-five years, after all. What was he going to discover next, fire? Writing? Agriculture? "All you have to remember is where you put it down."
"I'm thinking of chaining it to my belt. Or possibly around my neck." Illyan started up the curving stairs toward the guest suite, chuckling under his breath.
The following evening Miles broke away from his now almost cross-eyed rechecking of his comconsole data, to attend a quiet dinner at home, just himself, the Countess, and Illyan. He spent the first half of the meal firmly squelching the Countess's broad hints that perhaps Ma Kosti might be made interested in emigrating to Sergyar, in which case a place for her could certainly be found on the Viceroy's household staff.
"She'll never leave Vorbarr Sultana while her son's posted here," Miles asserted.
The Countess looked thoughtful. "Corporal Kosti could be transferred to Sergyar. …"
"No fighting dirty," he said hurriedly. "I found her first, she's mine."
"It was an idea." She smiled fondly at him.
"Speaking of Sergyar, when is Father arriving from there?"
"The day before the betrothal. We'll leave together shortly afterwards. We'll return for the wedding at Midsummer, of course. I'd love to stay longer, but we really both need to get back to Chaos Colony. The shorter his stay in Vorbarr Sultana, the less likely he'll be to get nailed for new jobs by old political comrades. That's one advantage of Sergyar; they have a harder time getting at him there. One still turns up about every month, full of ideas for things Aral can do in his nonexistent spare time, and we have to wine and dine him and shove him gently back out the door." She smiled invitingly across the table at him. "You really should come and visit us there soon. It's perfectly safe. We have an effective treatment for those revolting worms now, you know, much better than the old surgical removal. There's so much to see and do. Especially do."
There was something universal, Miles reflected, about the sinister light in the eye of a mother with a long list of chores in her hand. "We'll see. I expect to have my part of this Auditor's investigation wrapped up for Gregor in a few more days. After that . . . I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with myself."
A short silence fell, while everybody applied themselves appreciatively to the dessert course. At length Illyan cleared his throat, and announced to the Countess, "I signed the lease on my new flat today, Cordelia. It will be ready for occupancy tomorrow."
"Oh, splendid."
"I want to thank you both, especially you, Miles, for your hospitality. And your help."
"What flat?" asked Miles. "I'm afraid I've been living inside my comconsole this week."
"Quite right. Lady Alys helped me find it."
"Is it in her building?" And a very exclusive venue that was, too. Could Illyan afford it? A vice-admiral's half-pay was merely decent, though, come to think of it, he had to have amassed considerable savings by now, given the enforced simplicity of his work-devoured former life.
"I feel I am less of a menace to my neighbors than I used to be, but just in case some old enemy has bad aim . . . it's a couple of streets away from her. It might not be a bad idea to float a few rumors that I am more mentally incapacitated than I actually am, should you get the chance. It will make me a less exciting target."
"Do you think you'll be continuing any ImpSec service, if not as chief, then … I don't know . . . consultant or something?"
"No. Now that my, hm, peculiar assassination has been solved, I'll be opting out. Don't look so shocked, Miles. Forty-five years of Imperial service does not qualify as a career cut tragically short."
"I suppose not. Gregor will miss you. We all will."
"Oh, I expect I'll be around."
Miles finished his Auditor's report late the following afternoon, including the table of contents and the cross-referenced index, and sat back in his comconsole chair, and stretched. It was as complete as he could make it, and as straightforward as his indignation with the central crime would allow. He only now realized, looking over the finished product, just how much subtle spin he used to put on even his most truthful Dendarii field reports, making the Dendarii and Admiral Naismith look good to assure the continued flow of funding and assignments. There was a dry serenity in not having to give a damn what Lord Auditor Vorkosigan looked like, that he quite enjoyed
.
This report was for Gregor's eyes first, not for Gregor's eyes only. Miles had been on the other end of that stick, having to devise Dendarii missions on the basis of all sorts of dubious or incomplete intelligence. He was determined that no poor sod who had to make practical use of the report later would have cause to curse him as he had so often cursed others.
He decanted the final version onto a code-card, and called Gregor's secretary to arrange a formal appointment the following morning to turn it, and his chain of office and seal, over to the Emperor. He then rose for a muscle-unkinking stroll around Vorkosigan House, with an eye to checking his lightflyer. Chenko had promised the final surgical installation of his seizure-control device possibly as early as tomorrow afternoon. Martin, whose long-awaited birthday had gone by unnoticed by Miles sometime during the recent crisis, had delayed his application to the Imperial Service an extra couple of weeks, to save Miles having to break in an interim driver. But Miles knew exactly how anxious the boy was to be gone.
Illyan and his scant belongings had been carried off, most helpfully, by Lady Alys in her car this morning, and the Countess's household staff had restored the guest suite to its original, if slightly sterile, order. Miles wandered through it, to stare out onto the snowy back garden and be glad he wasn't frozen in a cryo-chamber. This really was the most splendid set of rooms in Vorkosigan House, with by far the best windows. Miles remembered the chambers from his grandfather's day, jammed with military memorabilia, thick with the formidable scent of old books, old leather, and the old man. He gazed around the suite's clean-swept emptiness.
"Why not?" he murmured, then more loudly, "Why the hell not?"
His mother found him half an hour later, leading a press-ganged troop consisting of Martin and half her retainers. They were carrying all Miles's possessions down one flight and around the corner from the other wing, and spreading them through the bathroom, bedroom, sitting room, and study under Miles's somewhat random direction. "Miles, love, what are you doing?"
"Taking over Grandfathers rooms. Nobody else is using them now. Why not?" He waited, a little nervously, for some objection from her, mentally marshaling his defensive arguments.
"Oh, good idea. It's about time you got out of that little room upstairs. You've been in it since you were five, for heavens sake."
"That's . . . what I thought."
"We only picked that one for you because Illyan calculated it had the most disadvantageous angle for anyone trying to lob a projectile through the window."
"I see." He cleared his throat, and, emboldened, added, "I thought I'd take over the whole second floor, the Yellow Parlor, the other guest rooms, and all. I might . . . entertain, have people in, something."
"You can have the whole place, when we're off to Sergyar."
"Yeah, but I want a space even when you're here. I never needed it before. I was never around."
"I know. Now you're here and I'm gone. Life is odd like that, sometimes." She wandered away, humming.
With that many porters, the moving job only took an hour. Spread out into a more reasonable area, his life made a thin layer. There was at least a metric ton of Admiral Naismith s possessions back with the Dendarii Fleet, which Miles supposed he ought to retrieve somehow. No one else was likely to be able to use his clothing or his customized space armor, after all. He wandered about, rearranging things, trying to guess how he would use them here. It was all wonderfully unconstrained. He felt a sympathetic twinge of identification with those root-bound plants that had waited too long to be moved to bigger pots, not that he was exactly planning to vegetate. Spacer Quinn would call him a dirt-sucker. Quinn would be … half-right.
He owed her a message. He owed her several, and a major apology, for setting her couple of more recent queries aside in the rush of recent events. He settled himself at his newly moved comconsole. The city lights reflected in an amber haze from the cloudy sky. The back garden, seen out his wide study window, was luminous and soft in the snowy night.
He composed his face and his thoughts, and began. He recorded cheerful reassurances, medical and otherwise, and sent it by tight-beam; she'd receive it in a week or so, depending on where the Dendarii fleet was now. Rather to his surprise, a task that had seemed impossible earlier came easily now. Maybe he'd only needed to free his brain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Miles decided to make a little ceremony out of returning his Auditors chain and seal to Gregor, along with the report. The traditional dignity of the office seemed to demand something more than just handing them back through the Residence door in a plastic bag. So he dressed in his brown-and-silver House uniform again, with all due care. He hesitated a long time before attaching his military decorations to his tunic, perhaps for the last time. But he was planning to ask Gregor for a very personal favor, and he would rather the decorations spoke for him than having to speak for himself.
He had qualms about that favor. It was only a little thing, taken all in all, and he felt obscurely that he ought to be rising above such petty concerns. But it mattered to him, like that extra centimeter of height that no one else noticed. He had Martin deliver him to the Residence's east portico, as before. Martin missed clipping Gregor's gates, this time; his handling of the Counts old groundcar was really vastly improved. Miles was ushered once again into Gregor s office in the north wing by Gregor's majordomo.
Gregor too must have had some ceremonial duties on his agenda this morning, for he was turned out in his Vorbarra House uniform, in his usual sharp style that was the envy of all Vor lords with less superior valets. He was waiting for Miles at his blank comconsole, his attention undivided by any data display.
"Good morning, my Lord Auditor." Gregor smiled.
"Good morning, Sire," Miles responded automatically. He laid down the data card in its security case on the smooth black glass of the desk, carefully pulled the chain and seal over his head, and let the heavy links spill through his hands before clinking them gently to the surface. "There you go. All done."
"Thank you." At a motion from the Emperor, the majordomo brought Miles a chair. Miles seated himself, and licked his lips, mentally thumbing through the several choices of opening lines he'd rehearsed for his request. But Gregor waved a small wait-please to both Miles and his majordomo, and both, necessarily, waited. He opened the security case, and ran the data card through his comconsole's read-slot. Then he handed it in its opened case to his majordomo, saying, "You can take this next door, now, please."
"Yes, Sire." The majordomo departed carrying the report on a small plate, like a servitor delivering some strange dessert.
Gregor sped through a scan of Miles's Auditors report, saying nothing more to indicate his opinion than a muttered "Huh," now and then. Miles's brows rose slightly, and he settled back in his chair. Gregor went back to the beginning, and examined selected sections more slowly. At last he finished, and let the data display fold back into itself, and disappear. He picked up the Auditors chain, and let it turn in the light, fingering the Vorbarra arms incised into the gold. "This was one of my more fortunate snap decisions, I must say, Miles."
Miles shrugged. "Chance put me in a place where I had some useful expertise."
"Was it chance? I seem to recall it was intent."
"The sabotage of Illyan s chip was an inside job; you needed an ImpSec insider to unravel it all. A lot of other men might have done what I did."
"No . . ." Gregor eyed him, measuringly. "I think I needed a former ImpSec insider. And I can't offhand think of any other man I know with both the passion and the dispassion to do what you did."
Miles gave up arguing about it; he only needed to be polite, not ingenuous. Besides, he might never get a better straight-line upon which to open his plea. "Thank you, Gregor." He took a breath.
"I've been thinking about an appropriate reward for a job well done," the Emperor added.
Miles let out his breath again. "Oh?"
"The traditional one is another jo
b. I happen to have an opening for a new Chief of Imperial Security, this week."
Neutrally, Miles cleared his throat. "So?"
"Do you want it? While it has traditionally been held by a serving military officer, there is no law whatsoever saying I can't appoint a civilian to the task."
"No."
Gregor raised his brows at this concise certainty. "Truly?" he asked softly.
"Truly," Miles said firmly. "I'm not playing hard-to-get. It's a desk job stuffed with the most tedious routine, in between the terror-weeks, and the chief of ImpSec not only almost never gets off-planet further than Komarr, he scarcely ever gets out of Cockro—out of ImpSec HQ. I would hate it."
"I think you could do it."
"I think I could do almost anything I had to do, if you ordered it, Gregor. Is this an order?"
"No." Gregor sat back. "It was a genuine question."
"Then you have my genuine answer. Guy Allegre is much better fitted than I am for this job. He has the downside and the bureaucratic experience, and he's well respected on Komarr as well as on Barrayar. He is fully engaged with his work, and cares a lot about it, but he's not distorted by ambition. He's the right age, neither too young nor too old. No one will question his appointment."
Gregor smiled slightly. "That's what I thought you'd say, actually."
"What is this, then, some sort of spiritual exercise?" I think I've had all of those I want for a while, thanks. His heart still seemed to ache, the way an overstrained muscle twinged when one put weight on it. Like muscle strain, it would pass with a little rest, he suspected.
"No," said Gregor. "Just a courtesy. I wanted to give you first refusal."
He did not ask again, which saved Miles the embarrassment of refusing him again. Instead he leaned forward, and put down the gold chain and played with it a moment, arranging the links in a smooth oval pattern. Then he asked, "Would you like some coffee? Tea? Breakfast?"
"No, thanks."
"Something stronger?"
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