“You’ll play the part of the Admiral for us? We’ll coach you, of course.”
He half-nodded, but managed to blurt out, “What promise—?”
“We’ll take all the clones with us when we go. We’ll put them down somewhere House Bharaputra can’t reach.”
“Elena!” objected Quinn.
“I want,” he did swallow this time, “I want the Barrayaran woman’s word. Your word,” he said to Bothari-Jesek.
Quinn sucked on her lower lip, but did not speak. After a long muse, Bothari-Jesek nodded. “All right. You have my word on it. But you give us your total cooperation, understood?”
“Your word as what?”
“Just my word.”
“… Yes. All right.”
Quinn rose and stared down at him. “But is he even fit to play the part right now?”
Bothari-Jesek followed her look. “Not in that condition, no, I suppose not. Let him clean up, eat, rest. Then we’ll see what can be lone.”
“Baron Fell may not give us time to coddle him.”
“We’ll tell Baron Fell he’s in the shower. That’ll be true enough.”
A shower. Food. He was so ravenous as to be almost beyond hunger, numb in the belly, listless in the flesh. And cold.
“All I can say,” said Quinn, “is that he’s a damn poor imitation of the real Miles Vorkosigan.”
Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.
Bothari-Jesek shook her head in, presumably, exasperated agreement. “Come on,” she said to him.
She escorted him to an officer’s cabin, small but thank-God private. It was disused, blank and clean, military-austere, the air a little stale. He supposed Thorne must now be similarly housed nearby.
“I’ll get some clean clothes sent over for you from the Ariel. And send some food.”
“Food first—please?”
“Sure.”
“Why are you being nice to me?” His voice came out plaintive and suspicious, making him sound weak and paranoid, he feared.
Her aquiline face went introspective. “I want to know … who you are. What you are.”
“You know. I’m a manufactured clone. Manufactured right here on Jackson’s Whole.”
“I don’t mean your body.”
He hunched in an automatic defensive posture, though he knew it emphasized his deformities.
“You are very closed,” she observed. “Very alone. That’s not at all like Miles. Usually.”
“He’s not a man, he’s a mob. He’s got a whole damned army trailing around after him.” Not to mention the harrowing harem. “I suppose he likes it like that.”
Her lips curved in an unexpected smile. It was the first time he’d seen her smile. It changed her face. “He does, I think.” Her smile faded. “Did.”
“You’re doing this for him, aren’t you. Treating me like this because you think he’d want it.” Not in his own right, no, never, but all for Miles and his damned brother-obsession.
“Partly.”
Right.
“But mostly,” she said, “because someday Countess Vorkosigan will ask me what I did for her son.”
“You’re planning to trade Baron Bharaputra for him, aren’t you?”
“Mark …” her eyes were dark with a strange … pity? irony? He could not read her eyes. “She’ll mean you.”
She turned on her heel and left him by himself, sealed in the cabin.
He showered in the hottest water the tiny unit would yield, and stood for long minutes in the heat of the dryer-blast, till his skin flushed red, before he stopped shivering. He was dizzy with exhaustion. When he finally emerged, he found someone had been and gone and left clothes and food. He hastily pulled on underwear, a black Dendarii T-shirt, and a pair of his progenitor’s ship-knit grey trousers, and fell upon the dinner. It wasn’t a dainty Naismith-special-diet this time, but rather a tray of standard ready-to-eat rations designed to keep a large and physically active trooper going strong. It was far from gourmet fare, but it was the first time he’d had enough food on s plate for weeks. He devoured it all, as if whatever fairy had delivered it might reappear and snatch it away again. Stomach aching, he crawled into bed and lay on his side. He no longer shivered as if from cold, nor felt drained and sweating and shaky from low blood sugar, yet a kind of psychic reverberation still rolled like a black tide through is body.
At least you got the clones out.
No. Miles got the clones out.
Dammit, dammit, dammit …
This half-baked disaster was not the glorious redemption of which he’d dreamed. Yet what had he expected the aftermath to be? In all is desperate plotting, he’d planned almost nothing past his projected return to Escobar with the Ariel. To Escobar, grinning, with the clones under his wing. He’d imagined himself dealing with an enraged Miles then, but then it would have been too late for Miles to stop him, too late to take his victory from him. He’d half-expected to be arrested, but to go willingly, whistling. What had he wanted?
To be free of survivor guilt? To break that old curse? Nobody you knew back then is still alive… . That was the motive he’d thought of as driving him, when he thought at all. Maybe it wasn’t so simple, he’d wanted to free himself from something. … In the last two years, reed of Ser Galen and the Komarrans by the actions of Miles Vorkosigan, freed again altogether by Miles on a London street at dawn, he had not found the happiness he’d dreamed of during his slavery to he terrorists. Miles had broken only the physical chains that bound him; others, invisible, had cut so deep that flesh had grown around hem.
What did you think? That if you were as heroic as Miles, they’d lave to treat you like Miles? That they would have to love you?
And who were they? The Dendarii? Miles himself? Or behind Stiles, those sinister, fascinating shadows, Count and Countess Vorkosigan?
His image of Miles’s parents was blurred, uncertain. The unbalanced Galen had presented them, his hated enemies, as black villains, he Butcher of Komarr and his virago wife. Yet with his other hand he’d required Mark to study them, using unedited source materials, heir writings, their public speeches, private vids. Miles’s parents were Nearly complex people, hardly saints, but just as clearly not the foaming sadistic sodomite and murderous bitch of Galen’s raving paranoias.
In the vids Count Aral Vorkosigan appeared merely a grey-haired, thick-set man with oddly intent eyes in his rather heavy face, with a rich, raspy, level voice. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan spoke less often, a tall woman with red-roan hair and notable grey eyes, too powerful to be called pretty, yet so centered and balanced as to seem beautiful even though, strictly speaking, she was not.
And now Bothari-Jesek threatened to deliver him to them …
He sat up, and turned on the light. A quick tour of the cabin revealed nothing to commit suicide with. No weapons or blades—the Dendarii had disarmed him when he’d come aboard. Nothing to hang a belt or rope from. Boiling himself to death in the shower was not an option, a sealed fail-safe sensor turned it off automatically when it exceeded physiological tolerances. He went back to bed.
The image of a little, urgent, shouting man with his chest exploding outward in a carmine spray replayed in slow motion in his head. He was surprised when he began to cry. Shock, it had to be the shock that Bothari-Jesek had diagnosed. I hated the little bugger when he was alive, why am I crying? It was absurd. Maybe he was going insane.
Two nights without sleep had left him ringingly numb, yet he could not sleep now. He only dozed, drifting in and out of near-dreams and recent, searing memories. He half-hallucinated about being in a rubber raft on a river of blood, bailing frantically in the red torrent, so that when Quinn came to get him after only an hour’s rest, it was actually a relief.