"Last time I saw her, I noticed she's getting some gray in her hair. You know what that means. I talked recently to old Canaba about it, you remember him. He gives no more than two months between the time she starts to go into serious metabolic failure, and the end. I want you to promise me, you'll let me know in time, time to get out there with the Fleet, or wherever she is, before she goes. I . . . don't want her to be alone, then. It's a promise I made to myself once, that I mean to keep."
She settled back. "All right," she said seriously. After a moment she added, "So . . . did you sleep with her?"
"Um . . ." He swallowed. "She was before your time, Elli." After another minute he was compelled to add, "And after, from time to time. Very rarely."
"Hah. I thought so."
As long as we're being morbid . . . "How . . . about you? Was there ever anyone else, when I was gone?"
"No. I was good. Huh!" She added after a moment, "Now, before your time, that's another Quinn."
That dig, he decided, was within her rights; he let it go by. "It should go without saying, but just in case . . . you do know you are free of any personal obligation to me hereafter?"
"So you can be too? Is that what this is all about?" She touched his face, and smiled. "I don't need you to free me, love. I can free myself, any time I choose."
"That's part, I think, of what I've always loved about you." He hesitated. "But can you choose any time you choose?"
"Well. That's the other question, isn't it," she said softly. They each of them gazed long at the other, as if memorizing the image for some interior cache. After a time she added, with unerring perceptiveness and wry goodwill, "I hope you find your Lady Vorkosigan, Miles. Whoever she is."
"I hope so too, Elli," he sighed. "I dread the search, though."
"Lazy," she murmured.
"That, too. You were a drunkard's dream, Quinn. You've quite spoiled me, you know."
"Shall I apologize?"
"Never."
She came up for breath from the long kiss that followed this to ask, "Till your search prospers, shall we have flings? From time to time?"
"Perhaps . . . I don't know. If we're ever on the same planet at the same time. It's a big universe."
"Then why do I keep running into the same people over and over?"
They fell then to unhurried caresses, without agenda; no future, no past, just a little bubble in time containing Miles and Elli. After that things went much better.
In the afterglow, Elli murmured into his hair, "Do you think you'll like your new job as much as I'll like mine?"
"I'm beginning to suspect so. You are ready, you know. I've lately had some sharp lessons on what a bad idea it is to leave competent subordinates unpromoted for too long. Watch out for that in"—he almost said, my—"your staff."
"So is there, like, a top spot you can go for? Work your way up to First Auditor from Eighth Auditor, say?"
"Only by longevity. Which, come to think of it, could happen; I'm the youngest by three decades. But the Auditors are numbered for convenience. It doesn't denote rank. They all seem to be sort of equal. When they meet, they sit in a circle. Very unusual for hierarchy-conscious Barrayar, really."
"Like the Knights of the Round Table," Elli suggested.
Miles choked on a laugh. "Not if you could see them. . . ." He hesitated. "Well, I don't know. Those original Round Table knights competed for honors, obsessively. I mean, that's why old Arthur had to make the table round in the first place, to defuse all that. But most of the Auditors are . . . I can't say, not ambitious, or they wouldn't all have achieved what they have. Post-ambitious? These old Barrayaran paladins are an amazingly disinterested lot. I'm actually looking forward to getting to know them better." He provided her with a few giggles, by giving a vigorously worded description of his new colleagues' odder quirks.
She ran a hand through her dark curls, grinning despite herself. "Dear godlings, Miles. I begin to think you're going to fit right in after all."
"Have you ever come home, to a place you've never been before? It feels like that. It's . . . very odd. But not at all unpleasant."
She kissed his forehead, for benediction; he kissed her palm, for luck.
"Well, if you insist on being a civilian, you be a good bureaucrat-paladin, then," she told him firmly. "Do me proud."
"I will, Elli."
* * *
Miles's return from Komarr to Barrayar was uneventful. He arrived back at Vorkosigan House in the quiet of a late winter evening, to find it warm and lit and ready for him. Tomorrow he would formally invite company to dinner, he decided, Duv and Delia and the rest of the Koudelkas, by choice. But tonight he dined in the kitchen with his Armsman and Ma Kosti; his cook was a little scandalized, either by his stepping out of his role or by his invading her territory. But he told her a string of jokes until she laughed, and snapped at him with a towel as if he were one of her boys, which amused Pym no end. Corporal Kosti ducked in at the end of his guard shift, to be properly fed as well, and to play with the kittens who now lived in, or rather, obsessively escaped from, a rag-padded box near the stove. The corporal and Ma Kosti caught Miles up on all the news from Martin, now suffering through basic training with all the bragging complaints that entailed.
After his late supper, he took himself off to his wine cellar. Ceremoniously, he selected a bottle of his grandfather's oldest and rarest. Upon opening it, he discovered it was going more than a bit off. He considered drinking it anyway, for the symbolism's sake. Then, decisively, he dumped it down the bathroom sink in his new suite and went back for a bottle from a much more recent batch that he knew to be very good.
With a wineglass of the best crystal this time, he sat in the incredibly comfortable chair by the bay window, to watch a few fat snowflakes dance past in the garden lights, and to hold his own private wake. He toasted his ghostly night-reflection in the window. This was what, Admiral Naismith's third death? Once on Jackson's Whole, once in Illyan's office, third and last and astonishingly painful, resurrected and dispatched again by Lucas Haroche. On his first death he'd been in no position to enjoy a proper wake—frozen lost luggage, he'd been—on the second, his grandfather's dagger, opener for a redder wine, had held more blandishment than the brandy. He settled back, and prepared to ration himself one hour of self-pity along with his wine, and be done with it.
Instead, he found himself leaning back in the warm chair, laughing softly. He swallowed the laugh, wondering if he'd lost his grip at last.
Just the opposite.
Haroche was no miracle-worker. He wasn't even a stage magician. He'd had no power then or ever to give or withhold Naismith, though Miles felt a cryonic chill, thinking how close he'd come to delivering himself into Haroche's hands.
No wonder he was laughing. He wasn't mourning a death. He was celebrating an escape.
"I'm not dead. I'm here." He touched his scarred chest in wonder.
He felt strange and single, not to be in pieces anymore. Not Lord Vorkosigan ascendant, not Naismith lost, but all of him, all at once, all the time. Crowded in there?
Not particularly.
Harra Csurik had been almost right. It wasn't your life again you found, going on. It was your life anew. And it wasn't at all what he'd been expecting. His slow smile deepened. He was beginning to be very curious about his future.
THE END
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