Memory

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "I know," said Miles shortly. "I was there." Oh, God, Duv . . .

  "I don't know how much weight to give the fact that your clone-brother shot Galeni's father—"

  "If that were going to be a problem, it would have been a problem before this."

  "Perhaps. But it must have left some residue of feeling. Then, on top of that, you recently became instrumental in destroying his marital plans."

  "He's over that."

  "What marital plans?" asked Gregor.

  Miles gritted his teeth. Haroche, you idiot. "At one time, Duv was rather interested in Laisa. Which is how he came to escort her to your ambassadorial reception, where you met. Duv has since, um, found another love interest."

  "Oh," said Gregor, looking stricken. "I didn't quite realize . . . things were that serious between Laisa and Galeni."

  "It was one-sided."

  Haroche shook his head. "I'm sorry, Miles. But the man called you, and I quote, a 'smarmy goddamn little pimp.' " Haroche's gaze grew abstracted, his expression for a moment so like Illyan giving one of his verbatim quotes from his chip that Miles drew in his breath. "And went on to declaim quite passionately, 'Vor does mean thief. And you goddamn Barrayaran thieves stick together all right. You and your fucking precious Emperor and the whole damn pack of you.' And you seriously expect me to construe he merely felt mild inconvenience?"

  Gregor's eyebrows rose.

  "It was to my face," snapped Miles. From the look on Gregor's, the Emperor did not see why this remark constituted a defense. "Not to my back," Miles tried to explain. "Never to my back, not Galeni. It's . . . not his style." He added to Haroche, "Where the hell did you get that? Does ImpSec have all its analysts' private comconsoles monitored, now? Or had someone targeted Galeni before Illyan ever went down?"

  Haroche cleared his throat. "Not Galeni's comconsole, in fact, my lord. Yours."

  "What!"

  "All the public channels in Vorkosigan House are monitored by the ImpSec chief's own office, for security. They have been for decades. The only three that are not are the Count and the Countess's personal machines, and your personal machine. Surely your parents mentioned this to you before. They knew."

  Monitored by Illyan, of course. His father and mother would not have objected to that. And he'd taken Galeni's call that night in . . . the comconsole station in the guest suite, right. Miles subsided, seething, but mostly with his mind whirling, trying to remember everything he'd said in the last three months to anyone over any comconsole in Vorkosigan House.

  "Your loyalty to your friend does you great credit, Miles," Haroche went on. "But I'm not so sure he's any friend of yours."

  "No," said Miles. "No. I know what Galeni paid to get here. He wouldn't piss it down the wind for some . . . personal ire. This is a trail of smoke and mirrors. And anyway, even granted Galeni has some motivation to frame me, what about the original crime? What motive did he have to take out Illyan in the first place?"

  Haroche shrugged. "Political, perhaps. There are thirty years of bad blood between ImpSec under Illyan, and some Komarrans. I agree the case is not complete by any means, but it should be easier to pursue now that we have a real direction."

  Gregor looked almost distraught. "I had hoped my marriage might do some little part toward healing things with Komarr. A truly unified empire . . ."

  "It will," Miles assured him. "Doubly so, if Galeni ends up marrying a Barrayaran." If he doesn't get jailed first on some trumped-up treason charge, that is. "You know how Imperial fashions go; you're sure to start a big fad in cross-planetary romances. And given the shortage of Barrayaran girl babies our parents created in our generation, a mob of us are going to have to import wives anyway."

  Gregor's lips crooked up, in sad appreciation of Miles's attempted humor.

  Miles gripped his copy of the report. "I want to review this."

  "Please do," said Haroche. "Sleep on it. And if you can find anything in it that I haven't, let me know. I'm not happy to find any of my ImpSec people are disloyal, regardless of their planet of origin."

  Haroche took his farewells; Miles followed immediately, sending a residence servant to find Martin and have his car brought around. If he went back to the party, he'd be jumped by women demanding explanations and action, neither of which he could offer right now. He did not envy Gregor his task of returning and having to socialize as if nothing had happened.

  He was in the Count's groundcar, halfway between the Imperial Residence and ImpSec, when his view through the canopy of some dilapidated buildings, with brightly lit towers behind, suddenly sharpened. They took on an abrupt unreal reality, as if grown denser, overpowering, as if about to be outlined in green fire. He had just time to think, Oh shit oh shit oh shi—before the whole scene dissolved into the familiar colored confetti, then darkness.

  He returned to consciousness laid out on the car's backseat, with Martin's panicked form looming over him in the dim yellow light. His tunic was ripped open. The canopy was raised to the night mist, and he shivered in the cold.

  "Lord Vorkosigan? My lord, oh hell, are you dying? Stop it, stop it!"

  "Unh . . ." he managed. It came out a muffled groan to his ringing ears. His mouth hurt; he touched his wet lips, and his fingers came away smeared, red-brown in this light, with fresh blood.

  " 'S all right, Martin. Only, uh, seizure."

  "Is that what they look like? I couldn't think but what you'd been poisoned or shot or something." Martin looked only slightly relieved.

  He tried to sit up; Martin's big hands opened in hovering uncertainty whether to help him up or shove him back down. Both his tongue and his lower lip were bitten, and bleeding freely over his best House uniform.

  "Should I take you to a hospital or a doctor, my lord? Which one?"

  "No."

  "Let me take you back home, at least, then. Maybe . . ." Martin's harried face brightened with hope. "Maybe your lady mother will be there soon."

  "And take me off your hands?" Miles grunted a pained laugh. She's not going to kiss it and make it well, Martin. No matter how much she might like to.

  He wanted desperately to go on to ImpSec HQ. He'd promised Galeni. . . . But he hadn't properly reviewed the new data, and the team of men he'd want to question about it when he had were undoubtedly gone home to a well-earned night's rest. And he was still shaken, and dizzy with the postseizure lassitude.

  The military medical people were all too right. The stress-triggered aspect of the damned seizures virtually guaranteed they would always occur at the most inconvenient possible moment. Unfit for duty indeed, any duty. Unfit.

  I hate this.

  "Home, Martin," he sighed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Miles woke the next morning with what he was coming to recognize as a postseizure hangover. A couple of painkiller tablets helped only slightly. If anything, the symptoms were getting worse with time, not better. Or maybe he was simply becoming more accurate in identifying them, now that they were not masked by a stunner-migraine or suicidal depression. I have to see Chenko soon.

  He carried a carafe of coffee up to his room, and locked himself in with his comconsole and Haroche's report. He spent, or wasted, the rest of the morning reviewing it, then re-reviewing it.

  The very scantiness of the data made it all the more convincing. If this was supposed to be a double-frame, there ought to be more of it. It was strongly suggestive, but not quite proof. But try as he might, he could spot no flaw in its reasoning, no break in the flow of its logic.

  With nothing more optimistic to report than this, he dreaded seeing Galeni again. ImpSec had held the Komarran-born officer overnight in the temporary cells at ImpSec HQ, a small section which had replaced the more extensive downstairs dungeons of Ezar's times. There Galeni sat, pending the formal leveling of charges, after which he would presumably be moved to some more official, and dreary, military prison. Held on suspicion. Barrayaran military law was a trifle unclear just how long one could be held on
suspicion. Held on bloody paranoia is more like it.

  His sour meditations were interrupted by a call from Dr. Weddell, plaintively demanding to know when he could go home. Miles promised to come take his report and let him out; if he couldn't spring one ImpSec prisoner, he at least might spring another. He donned a fresh, if second-best, House uniform and his Auditor's chain, daubed more stim-salve on his lacerated lip, and called Martin to bring his car around.

  The medicinal and chemical odors of the ImpSec HQ clinic still gave Miles unpleasant fluttering sensations in his belly. He entered and found the laboratory chamber Weddell had taken over. A rumpled cot in the corner gave evidence that the galactic bioexpert was following orders, and had not left the sample or his data unattended. Weddell himself was still wearing his same clothes from yesterday morning, though he'd obviously managed to shave between times. He was somewhat less bleary than Miles, which wasn't saying much.

  "Well, my Lord Auditor. You probably won't be surprised to learn I have positively identified your find as the same prokaryote that was used on Chief Illyan. It's even the same batch." He led Miles to the lab's comconsole, and embarked on a detailed comparison of the two samples, with visual aids and highlights, and mild self-congratulations when the silent Imperial Auditor was not forthcoming with any.

  "I spoke with Illyan," said Miles. "He reports no memory of ever having swallowed a small brown capsule in the last four months. Unfortunately, his memory isn't what it used to be."

  "Oh, it wasn't swallowed," Weddell stated positively. "It was never designed to be swallowed."

  "How do you know?"

  "The capsule was neither permeable nor soluble. It was meant to be broken—a pinch of the fingers would do—and the sample mixed with air and breathed. The vector encapsulation design is obviously meant to be airborne. It's quite sporelike."

  "The which what?"

  "Here." Weddell banished the vid of the molecular chain presently occupying the vid plate, and brought up an image of an object that looked for all the world like a spherical satellite, bristling with antennae. "The actual prokaryotes would have been unmanageably tiny, if someone had simply attempted to load them naked into those large capsules. Instead, they are contained in these hollow sporelike particles"—Weddell pointed to the vid plate—"which float in air until they contact a wet surface, such as mucous membrane or bronchia. At that point, the delivery units dissolve, releasing their load."

  "Could you see them in the air, like smoke or dust? Smell them?"

  "If the light was strong I suppose one might see a brief puff as they were initially distributed, but then they would appear to vanish. They would be odorless."

  "How long . . . would they hang in the air?"

  "Several minutes, at least. Depending on the efficiency of the ventilation."

  Miles stared in fascination at the malignant-looking sphere. "This is new information." Though he did not, offhand, see how it helped much.

  "It was not possible to reconstruct it from the eidetic chip," noted Weddell a bit stiffly, "as no part of the vector encapsulation would ever reach the chip. There were several other potential means of administration."

  "I . . . quite understand. Yes. Thank you." He pictured himself going back to Illyan: Can you remember every breath you took in the last four months? Once, Illyan might have.

  A bleep from the comconsole interrupted his thoughts; the delivery-spore vanished and was replaced by the head of General Haroche.

  "My Lord Auditor." Haroche nodded diffidently at Miles. "My apologies for interrupting you. But since you're in the building, I wonder if you could stop in and see me. At your convenience, of course, when you're done in the labs and so on."

  Miles sighed. "Certainly, General." At least it gave him an excuse to put off seeing Galeni for a few more minutes. "I'll be up to your office shortly."

  Miles took possession of the code-card containing Weddell's report, and the resealed residue of the sample, and released the man, who departed gratefully. Miles's step quickened as he paced down the too-familiar hallways of ImpSec HQ, up and around to Illyan's old office, Haroche's new one. Maybe, pray God, Haroche had found something fresh to share, something to render this whole tangle less painful.

  Haroche locked his office door behind Miles, and courteously pulled up a chair for the Imperial Auditor, close to his comconsole desk. "Have you had any second thoughts since last night, my lord?" Haroche inquired.

  "Not really. Weddell has identified the sample, all right. You'll probably want to make a copy of this."

  He handed Weddell's data card across to Haroche, who nodded and ran it through his comconsole's read-slot. "Thank you." He handed the original back to Miles and went on, "I've been taking a closer look at the other four senior Komarran Affairs analysts in Allegre's department. None were as well positioned as Galeni to know of the existence of the Komarran sample, and two can be eliminated outright by that very test. The other two lack any motivation that I can uncover."

  "The perfect crime," muttered Miles.

  "Almost. The truly perfect crime is the one which is never discovered at all; this came very close. Your frame, now, was by all indications a backup plan of some kind, and necessarily less than perfect."

  "I never rammed a perfect tactical plan through to reality in my whole time with the Dendarii Mercenaries," Miles sighed. "The best I ever did was good enough."

  "You can be assured, Domestic Affairs never did much better," Haroche admitted.

  "This is all very circumstantial, without a confession."

  "Yes. And I'm not sure how to elicit one. Fast-penta is out. I wondered . . . if you might be able to help in that regard. Given your knowledge of the man. Use your noted powers of persuasion on him."

  "I might," said Miles, "if I thought Galeni was guilty."

  Haroche shook his head. "We may want more evidence, but I'm not optimistic that we're going to get more. You often must proceed with the imperfect, because you must proceed. You can't stop."

  "Let the juggernaut roll on, regardless of what gets squashed underneath?" Miles's brows rose. "How are you planning to proceed?"

  "A court-martial, probably. The case must be closed properly. As you pointed out, this one can't be left hanging."

  What would a court-martial make of this, with ImpSec breathing down its neck urging swift decision? Guilty? Not guilty? Or a more foggy, Not proven? He must find a top military attorney, to evaluate the case. . . . "No, dammit. I don't want a panel of military judges guessing, and then going home to dinner. If the outcome is to be guessed, I can guess myself, all day long. I want to know. You have to keep looking. We can't just stop with Galeni."

  Haroche blew out his breath, and rubbed his chin. "Miles, you're asking me to unleash a witch-hunt, here. Potentially very damaging to my organization. You'd have me turn ImpSec upside down, and for what? If the Komarran is guilty—and I'm provisionally convinced he is—you'll have to go very far indeed to produce a suspect more to your taste. Where will you stop?"

  Not here, for damn sure. "The Empress-to-be is not going to be happy with you. Or with me."

  Haroche grimaced. "I'm aware. She seems a very nice young woman, and it gives me no pleasure to think this may cause her distress, but I took my oath to Gregor. So did you."

  "Yes."

  "If you have nothing more concrete to offer, I'm ready to lay the charges and let the court-martial sort it out."

  You can lay the charges, but I'll not light the fuse. . . . "I could decline to close my Auditor's case."

  "If the court-martial convicts, you'll have to close it, my lord."

  No, I won't. The realization made him blink. He could keep his Auditor's inquiry open forever if he so chose, and there wasn't a damned thing Haroche could do about it. No wonder Haroche was being so exquisitely polite today. Miles could even veto the court-martial. . . . But Imperial Auditors were traditionally circumspect with their vast powers. From a large pool of experienced men, they were chosen not for
the glory of their former careers, but for their long records of utmost personal probity. Fifty years of life's tests were normally considered barely enough to smoke out the likely candidates. He ought not to screw with ImpSec's internal rules any more than the bare minimum necessary to—