Miles glanced at Ivan. Then he gazed at Ivan. Then he stared at Ivan. Ivan blinked back in innocent inquiry. There was something about that cheerful, frank face that made Miles hideously uneasy.
"You know," Miles said at last, "the more I think about your being here, the weirder it seems."
"Don't you believe it," said Ivan. "I had to work for my passage. That old bird was the most insatiable—"
"I don't mean your getting here—I mean your being sent in the first place. Since when do they pull first-year cadets out of class and send them on Security missions?"
"I don't know. I assumed they wanted somebody who could identify the body or something."
"Yes, but they've got almost enough medical data on me to build a new one. That idea only makes sense if you don't think about it too hard."
"Look, when a General Staff Admiral calls a cadet in the middle of the night and says go, you go. You don't stop to debate with him. He wouldn't appreciate it."
"Well—what did your recorded orders say?"
"Come to think or it, I never saw my recorded orders. I assumed Admiral Hessman must have given them to Captain Dimir personally."
Miles decided his uneasiness stemmed from the number of times the phrase "I assumed" was turning up in this conversation. There was something else—he almost had it … "Hessman? Hessman gave you your orders?"
"In person," Ivan said proudly.
"Hessman doesn't have anything to do with either Intelligence or Security. He's in charge of Procurement. Ivan, this is getting screwier and screwier."
"An Admiral is an Admiral."
"This Admiral is on my father's shit list, though. For one thing, he's Count Vordrozda's pipeline to Imperial Service Headquarters, and Father hates his officers getting involved in party politics. Father also suspects him of peculating Service funds, some kind of sleight-of-hand in shipbuilding contracts. At the time I left home, he was itchy enough to put Captain Illyan on it personally, and you know he wouldn't waste Illyan's talents on anything minor."
"All that's way over my head. I've got enough problems with navigational math."
"It shouldn't be over your head. Oh, as a cadet, sure—but you're also Lord Vorpatril. If anything happened to me, you'd inherit the Countship of our district from my father."
"God forbid," said Ivan. "I want to be an officer, and travel around, and pick up girls. Not chase around through those mountains trying to collect taxes from homicidal illiterates and keep chicken-stealing cases from turning into minor guerilla wars. No insult intended, but your district is the most intractable on Barrayar. Miles, there are people back behind Dendarii Gorge who live in caves." Ivan shuddered. "And they like it."
"There are some great caves back there," Miles agreed. "Gorgeous colors when you get the right light on the rock formations." Homesick remembrance twinged through him.
"Well, if I ever inherit a Countship, I'm praying it will be of a city," Ivan concluded.
"You're not in line for any I can think of," grinned Miles. He tried to recapture the thread of their conversation, but Ivan's remarks made lines of inheritance map themselves in his head. He traced his own descent through his Grandmother Vorkosigan to Prince Xav to Emperor Dorca Vorbarra himself. Had the great Emperor ever foreseen what a turn his law, that finally broke the private armies and the private wars of the Counts forever, would give his great-great-grandson?
"Who's your heir, Ivan?" Miles asked idly, staring out at the Dendarii ships, but dreaming of the Dendarii Mountains. "Lord Vortaine, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but I expect to outlive the old boy any minute. His health wasn't too good, last I heard. Too bad this inheritance thing doesn't work backwards, I'd be in for a bundle."
"Who does get his bundle?"
"His daughter, I guess. His titles go to—let me think—Count Vordrozda, who doesn't even need 'em. From what I've heard of Vordrozda, he'd rather have the money. Don't know if he'd go as far as marrying the daughter to get it, though, she's about fifty years old."
They both gazed into space.
"God," said Ivan after a while, "I hope those orders Dimir got when I ducked out weren't to go home or something. They'll think I've been AWOL for three weeks—there won't be enough room on my record for all the demerits. Thank God they've eliminated the old-style discipline parades."
"You were there when Dimir got his orders? And you didn't stick around to see what they were?" asked Miles, astonished.
"It was like pulling teeth to get that pass out of him. I didn't want to risk it. There was this girl, you see—I wish now I'd taken my beeper."
"You left your comm link?"
"There was this girl—I really did almost really forget it. But he was opening the stuff by then, and I didn't want to go back in and get nabbed."
Miles shook his head hopelessly. "Can you remember anything unusual about the orders? Anything out of the ordinary?"
"Oh, sure. It was the damndest packet. In the first place, it was delivered by an Imperial Household courier in full livery. Lessee, four data discs, one green for Intelligence, two red for Security, one blue for Operations. And the parchment, of course."
Ivan had the family memory, at least. What would it be like to have a mind that retained nearly everything, but never bothered to put it any kind of order? Exactly like living in Ivan's room, Miles decided. "Parchment? " he said. "Parchment?"
"Yeah, I thought that was kind of unusual."
"Do you have any idea how bloody—" he surged up, sat back down, squeezed his temples with the heels of his hands in an effort to get his brain into motion. Not only was Ivan an idiot, but he generated a telepathic damping field that turned people nearby into idiots too. He would point this out to Barrayaran Intelligence, who would make of his cousin the newest weapon in their arsenal—if anyone could be found who could remember what they were doing once they closed on him … "Ivan, there are only three kinds of thing written on parchment any more. Imperial edicts, the originals of the official edicts from the Council of Counts and from the Council of Ministers, and certain orders from the Council of Counts to their own members."
"I know that."
"As my father's heir, I am a cadet member of that Council."
"You have my sympathy," said Ivan, his gaze wandering back to the window. "Which of those ships out there is the fastest, d'you think, the Illyrican cruiser or the—"
"Ivan, I'm psychic," Miles announced suddenly. "I'm so psychic, I can tell what color the ribbon was on that parchment without even seeing it."
"I know what color it was," said Ivan irritably. "It was—"
"Black," Miles cut across him. "Black, you idiot! And you never thought to mention it!"
"Look, I have to take that stuff from my mother and your father, I don't have to take it from you, too—" Ivan paused. "How did you know?"
"I know the color because I know the contents." Miles rose to pace uncontrollably back and forth. "You know them too, or you would if you ever stopped to think. I've got a joke for you. What's white, taken from the back of a sheep, tied up with black bows, shipped thousands of light years, and lost?"
"If that's your idea of a joke, you're weirder than—"