Miles in Love

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "Do you need it urgently?"

  "No." Not anymore.

  "The data packet Foscol left on Administrator Vorsoisson's person—have you had a chance to look at it?" Miles went on. He managed to avoid glancing at Madame Vorsoisson.

  "Just a quick scan," said Tuomonen. He did look at Madame Vorsoisson, and away, spoiling Miles's effort at delicacy. Her lips thinned only a little. "I turned it over to the ImpSec financial analyst—a colonel, no less—that HQ sent out to take charge of the financial part of the investigation."

  "Oh, good. I was going to ask if HQ had sent you relief troops yet."

  "Yes, everything you requested. The engineering team arrived on site at the experiment station about an hour ago. The packet Foscol left seems to be documentation of all the financial transactions relating to the, um, payments made by Soudha's group to the Administrator. If it's not all lies, it's going to be an amazing help in sorting out the whole embezzlement part of the mess. Which is really very odd, when you think about it."

  "Foscol clearly had no love for Vorsoisson, but surely everything that incriminates him, incriminates the Komarrans equally. Quite odd, yes." If only his brain hadn't been turned to pulsing oatmeal, Miles felt, he could follow out some line of logic from this. Later.

  An ImpSec tech wearing black fatigues emerged from the back of the apartment. He carried a black box identical to—in fact, possibly the same as—the one which Tuomonen had used at Madame Radovas's, and said to his superior, "I've finished all the comconsoles, sir."

  "Thank you, Corporal. Go back to the office and transfer copies to our files, to HQ Solstice, and to Colonel Gibbs."

  The tech nodded and trod out through the, Miles noticed, still-ruined door.

  "And, oh yes, would you please detail a tech to repair Madame Vorsoisson's front door," Miles added to Tuomonen. "Possibly he could install a somewhat better-quality locking system while he's about it." She shot him a quietly grateful look.

  "Yes, my lord. I will of course keep a guard on duty while you are here."

  A duenna of sorts, Miles supposed. He must try to get Madame Vorsoisson something rather better. Suspecting he'd loaded poor sleepless Tuomonen with enough chores and orders for one session, Miles requested only that he be notified at once if ImpSec caught up with Soudha or any member of his group, and let the captain go off to his suddenly multiplied duties.

  By the time he'd showered and dressed in his last good gray suit, the painkillers had achieved their full effect, and Miles felt almost human. When he emerged, Madame Vorsoisson invited him to her kitchen; Tuomonen's door guard stayed in the living room.

  "Would you care for some breakfast, Lord Vorkosigan?"

  "Have you eaten?"

  "Well, no. I'm not really hungry."

  Likely not, but she looked as pale and washed-out as he felt. Tactically inspired, he said, "I'll have something if you will. Something bland," he added prudently.

  "Groats?" she suggested diffidently.

  "Oh, yes please." He wanted to say, I can get them—mixing up a packet of instant groats was well within his ImpSec survival-trained capabilities, he could have assured her—but he didn't want to risk her going away, so he sat, an obedient guest, and watched her move about. She seemed uneasy, in what should have been this core place of her domain. Where would she fit? Someplace much larger.

  She set up and served them both; they exchanged commonplace courtesies. When she'd eaten a few bites, she worked up an unconvincing smile, and asked, "Is it true fast-penta makes you . . . rather foolish?"

  "Mm. Like any drug, people have varied reactions. I've conducted any number of fast-penta interrogations in the line of my former duties. And I've had it given to me twice."

  Her interest was clearly piqued by this last statement. "Oh?"

  "I, um . . ." He wanted to reassure her, but he had to be honest. Don't ever lie to me, she'd said, in a voice of suppressed passion. "My own reaction was idiosyncratic."

  "Don't you have that allergy ImpSec is supposed to give to its—well, no, of course not, or you wouldn't be here."

  ImpSec's defense against the truth drug was to induce a fatal allergic response in its key operatives. One had to agree to the treatment, but as it was a gateway to larger responsibilities and hence promotions, the security force had never lacked for volunteers. "No, in fact. Chief Illyan never asked me to undergo it. In retrospect, I can't help wondering if my father had a hand, there. But in any case, it doesn't make me truthful so much as it makes me hyper. I babble. Fast-foolish, I guess. The one, um, hostile interrogation I underwent, I was actually able to beat, by continually reciting poetry. It was a very bizarre experience. In normal people, the degree of, well, ugliness, depends a lot on whether you fight it or go along with it. If you feel that the questioner is on your side, it can be just a very relaxing way of giving the same testimony you would anyway."

  "Oh." She did not look reassured enough.

  "I can't claim it doesn't invade your reserve," and she possessed a reserve oceans-deep, "but a properly conducted interview ought not to," shame you, "be too bad." Though if last night's events had not shaken her out of her daunting self-control . . . He hesitated, then added, "How did you learn to underreact the way you do?"

  Her face went blank. "Do I underreact?"

  "Yes. You are very hard to read."

  "Oh." She stirred her black coffee. "I don't know. I've been this way for as long as I can remember." A more introspective look stilled her features for a time. "No . . . no, there was a time . . . I suppose it goes back to . . . I had, I have, three older brothers."

  A typical Vor family structure of their generation: too damned many boys, a token girl added as an afterthought. Hadn't any of those parents possessed a) foresight and b) the ability to do simple arithmetic? Hadn't any of them wanted to be grandparents?

  "The eldest two were out of my range," she went on, "but the youngest was close enough in age to me to be obnoxious. He discovered he could entertain himself mightily by teasing me to screaming tantrums. Horses were a surefire subject; I was horse-mad at the time. I couldn't fight back—I hadn't the wits then to give as good as I got, and if I tried to hit him, he was enough bigger than me—I'm thinking of the time when I was about ten and he was about fourteen—he could just hold me upside down. He had me so well-trained after a while, he could set me off just by whinnying." She smiled grimly. "It was a great trial to my parents."

  "Couldn't they stop him?"

  "He usually managed to be witty enough, he got away with it. It even worked on me—I can remember laughing and trying to hit him at the same time. And I think my mother was starting to be ill by then, though neither of us knew it. What my mother told me—I can still see her, holding her head—was the way to get him to stop was for me to just not react. She said the same thing when I was teased at school, or upset about most anything. Be a stone statue, she said. Then it wouldn't be any fun for him, and he would stop.

  "And he did stop. Or at least, he grew out of being a fourteen-year-old lout, and left for university. We're friends now. But I never unlearned to respond to attack by turning to stone. Looking back now, I wonder how many of the problems in my marriage were due to . . . well." She smiled, and blinked. "My mother was wrong, I think. She certainly ignored her own pain for far too long. But I'm stone all the way through, now, and it's too late."

  Miles bit his knuckles, hard. Right. So at the dawn of puberty, she'd learned no one would defend her, she could not defend herself, and the only way to survive was to pretend to be dead. Great. And if there were a more fatally wrong move some awkward fellow could possibly make at this moment than to take her in his arms and try to comfort her, it escaped his wildest imaginings. If she needed to be stone right now because it was the only way she knew how to survive, let her be marble, let her be granite. Whatever you need, you take it, Milady Ekaterin; whatever you want, you've got it.

  What he finally came up with was, "I like horses." He wondered if that sounded
as idiotic as it . . . sounded.

  Her dark brows crinkled in amused bafflement, so apparently it did. "Oh, I outgrew that years ago."

  Outgrew, or gave up? "I was an only child, but I had a cousin—Ivan—who was as loutish as they come. And, of course, much bigger than me, though we're about the same age. But when I was a kid, I had a bodyguard, one of the Count-my-Father's Armsmen. Sergeant Bothari. He had no sense of humor at all. If Ivan had ever tried anything like your brother, no amount of wit would have saved him."

  She smiled. "Your own bodyguard. Now, there's an idyllic childhood indeed."

  "It was, in a lot of ways. Not the medical parts, though. The Sergeant couldn't help me there. Nor at school. Mind you, I didn't appreciate what I had at the time. I spent half of my time trying to figure out how to get away from his protection. But I succeeded often enough, I guess, to know I could succeed."

  "Is Sergeant Bothari still with you? One of those crusty Old Vor family retainers?"

  "He probably would be, if he were still alive, but no. We were, uh, caught in a war zone on a galactic trip when I was seventeen, and he was killed."

  "Oh. I'm sorry."

  "It was not exactly my fault, but my decisions were pretty prominent in the causal chain that led to his death." He watched for her reaction to this confession; as usual, her face changed very little. "But he taught me how to survive, and go on. The last of his very many lessons." You have just experienced destruction; I know survival. Let me help.

  Her eyes flicked up. "Did you love him?"

  "He was a . . . difficult man, but yes."

  "Ah."

  He offered after a time, "However you came by it, you are very level-headed in emergencies."

  "I am?" She looked surprised.

  "You were last night."

  She smiled, clearly touched by the compliment. Dammit, she shouldn't take in this mild observation as if it were great praise. She must be starving half to death, if such a scrap seems a feast.

  It was the most nearly unguarded conversation she'd ever granted him, and he longed to extend the moment, but they'd run out of groats to push around in the bottom of their dishes, their coffee was cold, and the tech from ImpSec arrived at this moment with the secured comconsole uplink Miles had requested. Madame Vorsoisson pointed out to the tech her late husband's office as a private space to set up the machine. The forensics people had been and gone while Miles slept; after briefly watching the new installation she retreated into housewifery like a red deer into underbrush, apparently intent on erasing all traces of their invasion of her space.

  Miles turned to face the next most difficult conversation of the morning.

  It took several minutes to establish the secure link with Lord Auditor Vorthys aboard the probable-cause team's mothership, now docked at the soletta array. Miles settled himself as comfortably as his aching muscles would allow, and prepared to cultivate patience in the face of the irritating several-second time lag between every exchange. Vorthys, when he at last appeared, was wearing standard-issue ship-knits, evidently in preparation for donning a pressure suit; the close-fitting cloth did not flatter his bulky figure. But he seemed to be well up for the day. The standard-meridian Solstice time kept topside was a few hours ahead of Serifosa's time zone.

  "Good morning, Professor," Miles began. "I trust you've had a better night than we did. At the top of the bad news, your nephew-in-law Etienne Vorsoisson was killed last night in a breath-mask mishap at the Waste Heat experiment station. I'm here now at Ekaterin's apartment; she's holding up all right so far. I'll have a very long transmission in explanation. Over to you."

  The trouble with the time lag was just how agonizingly long one had in which to anticipate the change of expression, and of people's lives, occasioned by the arrival of words one had sent but could no longer call back and edit. Vorthys looked every bit as shocked as Miles had expected when the message reached him. "My God. Go ahead, Miles."

  Miles took a deep breath and began a blunt precis of yesterday's events, from the futile hours of being given the royal runaround at the Terraforming offices, to Vorsoisson's hasty return to drag him out to the experiment station, the revelation of his involvement with the embezzlement scheme, their encounter with Soudha and Madame Radovas, the waking up chained to the railing. He did not describe Vorsoisson's death in detail. Ekaterin's arrival. ImpSec teams called out in force, too late. The business with his seal. Vorthys's expression changed from shocked to appalled as the details mounted.

  "Miles, this is horrible. I'll come downside as soon as I can. Poor Ekaterin. Do please stay with her till I get there, won't you?" He hesitated. "Before this came up, I was actually thinking of requesting you to come topside. We've found some very odd pieces of equipment up here, which have undergone some quite incredible physical distortions. I'd wondered if you might have seen anything like it in your galactic military experiences. There are some traceable serial numbers left here and there in the debris, though, which I'd hoped may prove a lead. I'll just have to leave them to my Komarran boys for the moment."

  "Odd equipment, eh? Soudha and his friends left with a lot of odd equipment, too. At least two lift-vans full. Have your Komarran boys send those serial numbers to Colonel Gibbs, care of ImpSec Serifosa. He's going to be tracing a lot of serial numbers in Terraforming Project purchases that—may not be as bogus as I'd first assumed. There's got to be more connections between here and there than just poor Radovas's body. Look, um . . . ImpSec here wants to fast-penta Ekaterin, on account of Tien's involvement. Do you want me to delay that till you arrive? I thought you might wish to supervise her interrogation, at least."

  Lag. Vorthys's brow wrinkled in worried thought. "I . . . dear God. No. I want to, but I should not. My niece—a clear conflict of interest. Miles, my boy, do you suppose . . . would you be willing to sit in on it, and see that they don't get carried away?"

  "ImpSec hardly ever uses those lead lined rubber hoses anymore, but yes, I planned to do just that. If you do not disapprove, sir."

  Lag. "I should be excessively relieved. Thank you."

  "Of course. I also should very much like to have your evaluation of whatever the ImpSec engineering team turns up out at the experiment station. At the moment I have very little evidence and lots of theories. I'm itching to reverse the proportions."

  Professor Vorthys smiled dry appreciation of this last line, when it arrived. "Aren't we all."

  "I have another suggestion, sir. Ekaterin seems very alone, here. She doesn't seem to have any close Komarran women friends that I've seen so far, and of course, no female relatives . . . I wondered if it might not be a good idea for you to send for the Professora."

  Vorthys's face lit when this one registered. "Not only good, but wise and kind. Yes, of course, at once. Given a family emergency of this nature, her assistant can surely supervise her final exams. The idea should have occurred to me directly. Thank you, Miles."

  "Everything else can wait till you get downside, unless something breaks in the case on ImpSec's end. I'll get Ekaterin in here before I close the transmission. I know she longs to talk with you, but . . . Tien's involvement in this mess is pretty humiliating for her, I suspect."

  The Professor's lips tightened. "Ah, Tien. Yes. I understand. It's all right, Miles."

  Miles was silent for a time. "Professor," he began at last, "about Tien. Fast-penta interrogations tend to be a lot more controllable if the interrogator has some clue what he's getting into. I don't want . . . um . . . can you give me some sense of what Ekaterin's marriage looked like from her family's point of view?"

  The time lag dragged, while Vorthys frowned. "I don't like to speak ill of the dead before their offering is even burned," he said at last.

  "I don't think we're going to have a lot of choice, here."

  "Huh," he said glumly when Miles's words reached him. "Well . . . I suppose it seemed like a good idea to everyone at the time. Ekaterin's father, Shasha Vorvayne, had known Tien's late father—he wa
s recently deceased then. A decade ago already, my word the time has gone fast. Well. The two older men had been friends, both officers in the District government, the families knew each other . . . Tien had just quit the military, and had used his veteran's rights to obtain a job in the District civil service. Good-looking, healthy . . . seemed poised to follow in his father's footsteps, you know, though I suppose it ought to have been a clue that he had put in his ten years and never risen beyond the rank of lieutenant." Vorthys pursed his lips.

  Miles reddened slightly. "There can be a lot of reasons—never mind. Go on."

  "Vorvayne had begun to recover from my sister's untimely death. He had met a woman, nothing unseemly, an older woman, Violie Vorvayne is a charming lady—and begun to think of remarriage. He wanted, I suppose, to see Ekaterin properly settled—to honorably tie off the last of his obligations to the past, if you will. My nephews were all out on their own by then. Tien had called on him, in part as courtesy to his late father's friend, in part to get a reference for his District service application . . . they struck up as much of an acquaintance as might be between two men of such dissimilar ages. My brother-in-law doubtless spoke highly of Ekaterin. . . ."