Miles in Love

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Nikki looked worried. "Will it hurt?"

  "Well, they will certainly have to draw blood, and take some tissue samples."

  Vorkosigan put in, "I've had both done to me, what seems like a thousand times over the years, for various medical reasons. The blood draw hurts for a moment, but not later. The tissue sampling doesn't hurt because they use a medical micro-stun, but when the stun wears off, it aches for a while. They only need a tiny sample from you, so it won't be much."

  Nikki appeared to digest this. "Do you have Vorzohn's thing, Lord Vorkosigan?"

  "No. My mother was poisoned with a chemical called soltoxin, before I was born. It damaged my bones, mainly, which is why I'm so short." He wandered over to the table and sat down with them.

  Ekaterin was expecting Nikki's next to be something along the lines of, Will I be short? but instead, his brown eyes widened in extreme worry. "Did she die?"

  "No, she recovered completely. Fortunately. For us all. She's fine now."

  He took this in. "Was she scared?"

  Nikki, Ekaterin realized, had not yet sorted out just who Lord Vorkosigan's mother was, in relation to the people he'd heard about in his history lessons. Vorkosigan's brows rose in some bemusement. "I don't know. You can ask her yourself, someday, when—if you meet her. I'd be fascinated to hear the answer." He caught Ekaterin's unsettled gaze, but his eyebrows remained unrepentant.

  Nikki regarded Lord Vorkosigan dubiously. "Did they fix your bones with retrogenes?"

  "No, more's the pity. It would have been much easier on me, if it had been possible. They waited till they thought I was done growing, and then they replaced them with synthetics."

  Nikki was diverted. "How d'you replace bones? How do you get them out?"

  "Cut me open," Vorkosigan made a slicing motion with his right hand along his left arm from elbow to wrist, "chop the old bone out, pop the new one in, reconnect the joints, transplant the marrow to the new matrix, glue it up and wait for it to heal. Very messy and tedious."

  "Did it hurt?"

  "I was asleep—anesthetized. You're lucky you can have retrogenes. All you have to have are a few fiddling injections."

  Nikki looked vastly impressed. "Can I see?"

  After an infinitesimal hesitation, Vorkosigan unfastened his shirt cuff and pushed back his left sleeve. "That pale little line there, see?" Nikki stared with interest, both at Vorkosigan's arm and, speculatively, at his own. He wriggled his fingers, and watched his arm flex as the muscles and bones moved beneath his skin.

  "I have a scab," he offered in return. "Want to see?" Awkwardly, he pushed up his pant leg to display the latest playground souvenir on his knee. Gravely, Vorkosigan inspected it, and agreed it was a good scab, and would doubtless fall off very soon now, and yes, perhaps there would be a scar, but his mother was very right to tell him not to pick it. To Ekaterin's relief, everyone then refastened their clothes and the contest went no further.

  The conversation lagging after that high point, Nikki pushed a few last smears of groats and syrup artistically around the bottom of his dish, and asked, "Can I be excused?"

  "Of course," said Ekaterin. "Wash the syrup off your hands," she called after his retreating form. She watched him—run, not walk—out, and said uncertainly, "That went better than I expected."

  Vorkosigan smiled reassurance. "You were matter-of-fact, so you gave him no reason to be otherwise."

  After a little silence Ekaterin said, "Was she scared? Your mother."

  His smile twisted. "Spitless, I believe." His eyes warmed, and glinted. "But not, I understand, witless."

  The two Auditors left for an on-site inspection of the Waste Heat experiment station shortly thereafter. Waiting carefully for a natural break in Nikki's quiet play in his room, Ekaterin called him in to her workroom to read the simplest and most straightforward article she had found on the subject of Vorzohn's Dystrophy. She sat him in her lap in her comconsole station chair, something she seldom did any more now he had become so leggy. It was a measure of his hidden unease this morning, she thought, that he did not resist the cuddle, nor her direction. He read through the article with fair understanding, stopping now and then to demand pronunciations and meanings of unfamiliar terms, or for her to rephrase or interpret some baffling sentence. If he had not been on her lap, she would not have detected the slight stiffening of his body as he read the line: . . . later investigations concluded this natural mutation first appeared in Vorinnis's District near the end of the Time of Isolation. Only with the arrival of galactic molecular biology was it determined that it was unrelated to several old Earth genetic diseases which its symptoms sometimes mimic.

  "Any questions?" Ekaterin asked, when they'd finally wended to the end of the thing.

  "Naw." Nikki elbowed off her lap and slid to his feet.

  "You can read more whenever you want."

  "Huh."

  With difficulty, Ekaterin restrained herself from pursuing some more definite response from him, realizing she wanted it more for her sake than his own. Are you all right, is it all right, do you forgive me? He would not, could not, work through it all in an hour, or a day, or even a year; each day must have the challenge and response appropriate to it. One damn thing after another, Vorkosigan had said. But not, thank heavens, all things simultaneously.

  The addition of Lord Vorkosigan to the expedition to Solstice made startling alterations in Ekaterin's carefully calculated travel plans. Instead of rising in the middle of the night to catch economy-class seats on the monorail, they awoke at a leisurely hour to take passage on an ImpSec suborbital courier shuttle which waited their pleasure, and would cover the intervening time zones with an hour to spare for lunch before Nikki's appointment.

  "I love the monorail," Vorkosigan had confided apologetically at her first startled protest at the news of this change, sprung on her late in the evening when the two Auditors returned from their day's investigations. "In fact, I'm thinking of urging my brother Mark to invest in some of the companies trying to build more of them on Barrayar. But with this case heating up, ImpSec's made it pretty clear they would rather I did not travel by public transportation just now thank you very much my lord."

  They also had two bodyguards. They wore discreet Komarran-style civilian clothes, which made them look exactly like a pair of Barrayaran military bodyguards in civvies. Vorkosigan seemed equally able to deal easily with them, or ignore them as though they were invisible, at will. He brought reports to read on the flight, but only glanced over them, seeming a little distracted. Ekaterin wondered if Nikki's restlessness broke his concentration, and if she ought to try and suppress the boy. But a quiet word from Vorkosigan at apogee won an excited Nikki an invitation to come forward and spend ten minutes in the pilot's compartment.

  "How is the case going this morning?" Ekaterin asked him during this private interlude.

  "Exactly as I predicted, unfortunately," he said. "ImpSec's failure to catch up with Soudha is growing more disturbing by the hour. I really thought they'd have nailed him by now. Between Colonel Gibbs's group, and that team of earnest ImpSec boys we have counting widgets out at the experiment station, my parts list is starting to take shape, but it will be at least another day before it's complete."

  "Did my uncle like the idea?"

  "Heh. He said it was tedious, which I already knew. And then he appropriated it from me, which I take to indicate approval." He rubbed his lips, introspectively. "Thanks to your uncle, we did get one spot of encouragement last night. He'd thought to confiscate Radovas's personal library, when we visited Madame Radovas, and we sent it off to ImpSec HQ for analysis. Their analyst confirmed Radovas's primary interest in jumpship technology and wormhole physics, which does not surprise me much, but then we got a bonus.

  "Soudha or his techs did a superb job of erasing everyone's comconsoles before ImpSec got to them, but evidently no one thought of the library. Some of the technical volumes had notes entered in the margin boxes. The Professor was quite ex
cited about the mathematical fragments, but more obviously, there were reminders to confide this or that thought or calculation to some names jotted next to them. Mostly members of the Waste Heat group, but also a couple of others, including one who appears to be one of the late members of the station-keeping crew at the soletta array. We're now positing that Radovas and his equipment, with inside help, had been smuggled up to the soletta for whatever it was they were trying to do, rather than being aboard the ore freighter. So was the soletta essential to what they were doing, or were they only using it for a test platform? ImpSec has agents out all over the planet today, questioning and requestioning colleagues, relatives, and friends of everyone on the soletta or having anything to do with their resupply shuttle. Tomorrow, I will get to read all those reports."

  Nikki's return dried up this amiable flow of information, and they soon landed at one of ImpSec's own private shuttleports on the edge of the vast sealed city of Solstice. Instead of taking a public bubble-car, they were provided with a floater and driver, who took them down into the restricted tunnels by some dizzying back route that brought them to their destination in about two-thirds the time of the bubble-car system.

  The first stop was a restaurant atop one of Solstice's highest towers, providing diners a spectacular view of the capital glittering halfway to the horizon; though the place was crowded, no one was seated near them while they ate, Ekaterin observed. The bodyguards did not join in the meal.

  The menu had no prices, triggering a moment of panic in Ekaterin's heart. She had no way to direct Nikki, or herself, for that matter, to the cheaper selections. If you have to ask, you can't afford it. Her initial determination to argue possession of her portion of the bill with Vorkosigan sagged.

  Vorkosigan's height and appearance drew the usual covert double-takes. For the first time in his company, she became aware of being mistaken for a couple or even a family. Her chin rose defensively. What, did they think him too odd to attach a woman? It was none of their business anyway.

  The next stop—and Ekaterin was very grateful she did not have to navigate to it herself—was the clinic, a comfortable quarter hour early. Vorkosigan did not appear to notice anything in the least remarkable about the whole magic carpet ride, though Nikki had been enthusiastically diverted throughout. Had Vorkosigan planned that? The boy grew suddenly very much quieter as they took the lift-tubes up to the clinic lobby.

  When they were ushered to the booth of an admissions clerk, Vorkosigan pulled up a chair for himself just behind Ekaterin and Nikki, and the bodyguards faded discreetly out of range. Ekaterin presented identification and civil service payment documentation, and all seemed to go smoothly, until they came to the information that Nikki's father was lately deceased, and the clinic comconsole demanded formal permissions from Nikki's legal guardian.

  That thing is much too well programmed, Ekaterin thought, and embarked on an explanation of the distance to Tien's third cousin back on Barrayar, and the time-constrained need for Nikki's treatment to be completed before their return. The Komarran clerk listened with understanding and sympathy, but the comconsole program did not agree, and after a couple of attempts to override it, the clerk went off to fetch her supervisor. Ekaterin bit her lip and rubbed her palms on her trouser knees. To come so far, to be so close, to get hung up on some legal technicality now . . .

  The supervisor, a pleasant young Komarran man, returned with the clerk, and Ekaterin gave her explanation again. He listened, and rechecked all the documentation, and turned to her with an air of earnest regret.

  "I'm sorry, Madame Vorsoisson. If you were a Komarran planetary shareholder, instead of a Barrayaran subject, the rules would be very different."

  "All Komarran planetary shareholders are Barrayaran subjects," Vorkosigan pointed out from behind her, in a bland tone.

  The supervisor managed a pained smile. "I'm afraid that's not quite what I meant. The thing is, a similar problem came up for us just a few months ago, regarding treatment under quasi-emergency conditions of a Vor child of Komarr-resident Barrayarans. We went with what seemed to us to be the common-sense approach. The child's legal guardian later disagreed, and the judicial, er, negotiations are still going on. It proved to be a very costly error of judgment for the clinic. Given that Vorzohn's Dystrophy is a chronic and not an immediately life-threatening condition, and that you should in theory be able to obtain your legal permissions in a week or two, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to reschedule."

  Ekaterin took a deep breath, whether to argue or scream she was not sure. But Lord Vorkosigan leaned past her shoulder and smiled at the supervisor.

  "Hand me that read-pad, will you?"

  The puzzled supervisor did so; Vorkosigan rummaged in his pocket and pulled out his gold Auditor's seal, which he uncapped and pressed to the pad, along with his right palm. He spoke into the vocorder. "By my order, and for the good of the Imperium, I request and require all assistance, to wit, suitable medical treatment for Nikolai Vorsoisson. Vorkosigan, Imperial Auditor." He handed it back. "See if that doesn't make your machine happier." He murmured aside to Ekaterin, "Just like swatting flies with a laser cannon. The aim's a bit tricky, but it sure takes care of the flies."

  "Lord Vorkosigan, I can't . . ." Her tongue stumbled to a halt. Can't what? This wasn't like waffling over the lunch bill; Tien's benefits would be paying for Nikki's treatment, if only the Komarrans could be persuaded to disgorge it. Vorkosigan's offered contribution was entirely intangible.

  "Nothing your esteemed uncle would not have done for you, if I could have spared him to you today." He gave her one of his ghost-bows, seated.

  The supervisor's expression changed from suspicious to stunned as his comconsole digested this new data. "You are Lord Auditor Vorkosigan?"

  "At your service."

  "I . . . er . . . uh . . . in what capacity are you here, my lord?"

  "Friend of the family." Vorkosigan's smile twisted just slightly. "Red tape cutter and general expediter."

  To his credit, the supervisor managed not to gibber. He dismissed the clerk and sped them through processing, and himself escorted them upstairs and into the hands of the medtechs in the genetics department. He then vanished, but things ran amazingly quickly thereafter.

  "It almost seems unfair," Ekaterin murmured, when Nikki was whisked away briefly by a tech to pee into a sampler. "I think Nikki just jumped the queue, there."

  "Yes, well . . . I found last winter that an Auditor's seal had the same enlivening effect on ImpMil's veteran's treatment division, whose hallways are much draftier and drabber than these, and whose queue times are legendary. Quite miraculous. I was charmed." Vorkosigan's face grew more introspective, and sober. "I'm afraid I've not quite found my balance with this Imperial Auditor thing yet. What is the just use of power, what is its abuse? I could have ordered Madame Radovas to be fast-penta'd, or ordered Tien to land us at the experiment station that first evening, and events would now be . . . well, I don't quite know what they would now be, except different than this. But I did not wish to . . ." He trailed off, and for just a flash, Ekaterin caught an impression of a much younger man beneath his habitual mask of irony and authority. He is no older than me, after all.

  "Did you anticipate that problem with the permissions? I should have thought of it, I suppose, but they took all the information when I made the appointment, and didn't say anything, so I thought, I assumed -"

  "Not specifically. But I hoped I might have a chance to do some little service or another today. I'm pleased it was so easy."

  Yes, she realized enviously, he could just wave all ordinary problems out of his path. Leaving only the extraordinary ones . . . her envy ebbed. It occurred belatedly to Ekaterin that he too might feel some guilt about Tien's death, and that was why he was going to such lengths to assist Tien's widow and orphan. So intense a concern seemed unnecessary, and she wondered how to reassure him that she did not blame him without creating more awkwardness than she erased.

/>   A battery of tests was completed upon Nikki in about half the time Ekaterin had mentally allotted for them. The Komarran physician met with them in her comfortable office very shortly thereafter; Vorkosigan dismissed the bodyguards to lurk in the corridor.

  "Nikki's gene scan shows the dystrophy complex to be very much in the classic mode," the doctor told them, when Ekaterin and Nikki were seated side by side in front of her comconsole desk. Vorkosigan, as usual, took a backseat and just watched. "He has a few idiosyncratic complications, but nothing our lab can't handle."