The Komarran medical examiner, along with his six final reports, included a message wanting to know if he had Miles's permission to release the bodies of the six members of the mirror's station-keeping crew back to their waiting families.
Good God, hadn't that been done yet? As an Imperial Auditor, he wasn't supposed to be running this investigation, just observing and reporting on it. He did not desire his mere presence to freeze anyone's initiative. He fired off the permission immediately, right from Madame Vorsoisson's comconsole.
He started working his way through the six reports. They were more detailed than the prelims he'd already seen, but contained no surprises. By this time, he wanted a surprise, something, anything beyond Spaceship blows up for no reason, kills seven. Not to mention the astronomical property damage bill. With three reports assimilated, and his bland breakfast becoming a regret in his stomach, he backed out for a short period of mental recovery.
Idly, while waiting for the queasiness to pass, he sorted through Madame Vorsoisson's data files. The one titled Virtual Gardens sounded pleasant. Perhaps she wouldn't mind if he took a virtual stroll through them. The Water Garden enticed him. He called it up on the holovid plate before him.
It was, as he had guessed, a landscape design program. One could view it from any distance or angle, from a miniature-looking total overview to a blown-up detailed inspection of a particular planting; one could program a stroll through its paths at any given eye level. He chose his own, at ahem-mumble-something under five feet. The individual plants grew according to realistic programs taking into account light, water, gravitation, trace nutrients, and even attacks by programmed pests. This garden was about a third filled, with tentative arrangements of grasses, violets, sedges, water lilies, and horsetails; it was currently suffering an outbreak of algae. The colors and shapes stopped abruptly at the unfinished edges, as if an invasion from some alien gray geometric universe were gobbling it all up.
His curiosity piqued, in best approved ImpSec style he dropped to the program's underlayer and checked for activity levels. The busiest recently, he discovered, was one labeled The Barrayaran Garden. He popped back up to the display level, selected his own eye-height again, and entered it.
It was not a garden of pretty Earth-plants set on some suitably famous site on Barrayar; it was a garden made up entirely and exclusively of native species, something he would not have guessed possible, let alone lovely. He'd always considered their uniform red-brown hues and stubby forms boring at best. The only Barrayaran vegetation he could identify and name offhand was that to which he was violently allergic. But Madame Vorsoisson had somehow used shape and texture to create a sepia-toned serenity. Rocks and running water framed the various plants—there was a low carmine mass of love-lies-itching, forming a border for a billowing blond stand of razor-grass, which, he had once been assured, botanically was not a grass. Nobody argued about the razor part, he'd noticed. Judging from the common names, the lost Barrayaran colonists had not loved their new xenobotany: damnweed, henbloat, goatbane . . . It's beautiful. How did she make it beautiful? He'd never seen anything like it. Maybe that kind of artist's eye was something you just had to be born with, like perfect pitch, which he also lacked.
In the Imperial capital of Vorbarr Sultana, there was a small and dull green park at the end of the block beside Vorkosigan House, on a site where another old mansion had been torn down. The little park had been leveled with more of an eye to security concerns for the neighboring Lord Regent than any aesthetic plan. Would it not be splendid, to replace it with a larger version of this glorious subtlety, and give the city-dwellers a taste of their own planetary heritage? Even if it would—he checked– take fifteen years to grow to this mature climax. . . .
The virtual garden program was supposed to help prevent time-consuming and costly design mistakes. But when all the garden you could have was what you could pack in your luggage, he supposed it could be a hobby in its own right. It was certainly neater, tidier, and easier than the real thing. So … why did he guess she found it approximately as satisfying as looking at a holovid of dinner instead of eating it?
Or maybe she's just homesick. Regretfully, he closed down the display.
In pure trained habit, he next called up her financial program, for a little quick analysis. It turned out to be her household account. She ran her home on a quite tight budget, given what Administrator Vorsoisson's salary ought to be, Miles thought; her biweekly allowance was rather stingy. She didn't spend nearly as much on her botanical hobbies as the results suggested she must. Other hobbies, other vices? The money trail was always the most revealing of people's true pursuits; ImpSec hired the Imperium's best accountants to find ingenious ways to hide their own activities, for that very reason. She spent damn little on clothes, except for Nikolai's. He'd heard parents of his acquaintance complain about the cost of dressing their children, but surely this was extraordinary . . . wait, that wasn't a clothing expenditure. Funds squeezed here, here, and there were all being funneled into a dedicated little private account labeled "Nikolai's Medical."
Why? As dependents of a Barrayaran bureaucrat on Komarr, weren't the Vorsoissons' medical expenses covered by the Imperium?
He called up the account. A year's worth of savings from her household budget did not make a very impressive pile, but the pattern of contributions was steady to the point of being compulsive. Puzzled, he backed out again and called up the whole program list. Clues?
One file, down at the end of the list, had no name. He called it up immediately. It turned out to be the only thing on her comconsole which required a password for entry. Interesting.
Her comconsole program was the simplest and cheapest commercial type. ImpSec cadets dissected files like this as a class warmup exercise. A touch of homesickness of his own twinged through him. He dropped to the underlayer and had its password choked out in about five minutes. Vorzohn's Dystrophy? Well, that wasn't a mnemonic he would have guessed offhand. His reflexes overtook his growing unease. He had the file open simultaneously with belated second thoughts, You're not in ImpSec anymore, you know. Should you be doing this?
The file proved to contain a medical course's worth of articles, culled from every imaginable Barrayaran and galactic source, on the topic of one of Barrayar's rarer and more obscure home-grown genetic disorders. Vorzohn's Dystrophy had arisen during the Time of Isolation, principally, as its name suggested, among the Vor caste, but had not been medically identified as a mutation until the return of galactic medicine. For one thing, it lacked the sort of exterior markers that would have caused, well, him for example, to have had his throat cut at birth. It was an adult-onset disease, beginning with a bewildering variety of physical debilitations and ending with mental collapse and death. In the harsher world of Barrayar's past, carriers frequently met their deaths from other causes after bearing or engendering children, but before the syndrome manifested itself. Enough madness ran in enough families– including some of my dear Vorrutyer ancestors— from other causes that late onset was frequently identified as something else anyway. Thoroughly nasty.
But it's treatable now, isn't it?
Yes, albeit expensively; that went with the rare part, no economies of scale. Miles scanned rapidly down the articles. Symptoms were manageable with a variety of costly biochemical concoctions to flush out and replace the distorted molecules; retrogenetic true cures were available at a higher price. Well, almost true cures: any progeny would still have to be screened for it, preferably at the time of fertilization and before being popped into the uterine replicator for gestation.