The Flowers of Vashnoi

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Flowers of Vashnoi

  Author’s Note: A Bujold Reading-Order Guide

  About the Author

  Books by Lois McMaster Bujold

  THE FLOWERS OF VASHNOI

  a science fiction novella

  by

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Copyright (c) 2018 by Lois McMaster Bujold

  ~

  Cover by Ron Miller

  The Flowers of Vashnoi

  The lift van banked. Vadim Sammi, the district ranger piloting, pointed through the broad canopy. “The boundary of the Vashnoi exclusion zone is in sight, Lady Vorkosigan. Just… there.”

  Ekaterin peered. The cleared fields and scattered farmsteads had petered out a few kilometers back. Below the van stretched a rolling, undifferentiated carpet of mixed native Barrayaran red-brown and invasive Earth-green vegetation, scrub and trees, broken by an occasional glint of stream or patch of meadow or swamp. “How can you tell?”

  Her husband Miles, who had been uncharacteristically quiet during the half-hour flight from the district capital of Hassadar, leaned over between the front seats. “There are warning signs posted. On stakes or tacked to the trees every ten meters for the whole two-hundred-kilometer perimeter of the zone. One of the ranger cadre’s jobs is to walk the boundary once a year, record the ambient radiation, and replace any signs that have fallen down with their trees or whatever.”

  “We move them inward a few meters every year, where we can,” said Vadim. “It’s something.”

  “And just the signs are enough to keep people out?” asked Enrique Borgos, from the back seat beside Miles.

  Ekaterin turned to smile a bit ruefully at the expatriate Escobaran scientist. “It’s the invisibility problem. When you can’t see the danger anywhere, you tend to see it everywhere. And so the imagination paints poison even where it’s not.”

  Enrique considered this, rubbing his nose. “I’d want a rad scanner, myself.”

  Miles shrugged. “The signs have worked for decades. With the older generation, at least. The younger folks… we’re debating a fence.” He blinked, reflectively. “Progress of sorts, I suppose.”

  “But if Enrique’s project succeeds, maybe we won’t need the fence,” said Ekaterin.

  Miles took a breath. “Yeah.” And, after another moment, “Vadim, catch some altitude and take us a turn around the city. I don’t think Ekaterin’s ever seen it this close.”

  Quite. Despite Ekaterin’s direct involvement in the project back in the Hassadar lab, this would be her first personal visit to the test plot. Miles had been hypocritically twitchy about letting her near the zone, and she’d humored him up to a point. They’d passed that point a while back. They’d been firmly united in leaving the children back in Hassadar with their perfectly competent nanny, however.

  “Certainly, Lord Vorkosigan,” said Vadim. The lift van climbed.

  Ekaterin studied Vadim’s profile. He’d been working with Enrique on the outdoor test plot for some weeks, but today was the first she had met him. The rangy ranger was not quite thirty, above middle height, close-shaved and hair shorn short. His face seemed carved from some mineral that cleaved in blocky angles and planes, but his brown eyes were warmer, if a bit uncertain in the alarming presence of Lord and Lady Vorkosigan. He’d been in the ranger cadre for nearly a decade, she understood. She wasn’t sure how to let him know that his dedication to the Vorkosigan’s District had won his liege lord’s regard in advance; he didn’t need to earn it anew. Well, Miles would have him talked down before the day was done, no doubt.

  A long ridge running northeast-southwest fell away beneath them, and the site of the lost city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi spread out before her eyes. She was able to mark its boundaries only by the curve of the river that had formerly bisected it, and, in a wide, irregular outer ring a few kilometers off, humps and hillocks in the vegetation that might once have been collapsed buildings.

  “I think I was about ten the first time my grandfather, old Count Piotr, flew me over this site,” Miles reminisced, staring out his own window. Twenty-five years ago, Ekaterin’s mind filled in. “There were still these big, glassy patches running here and there, which were said to glow blue in the dark, though that might have been a campfire tale. The scrub and weathering seem to have finally broken them all up.” In the afternoon daylight, nothing glowed now save an occasional reflection off the water.

  “How large was the city?” off-worlder Enrique inquired, his palm to the canopy.

  “In population, upwards of a quarter of a million,” Vadim supplied, in a tour-guide tone that Ekaterin supposed he was often required to adopt when shepherding visitors. “Which was big, for that soon after the end of the Time of Isolation.”

  “And not small by modern standards, either,” Miles added. “Over two hundred thousand people died in the first moments the Cetagandan atomics struck. Another fifty thousand later on, they say, over days and weeks and months, though I’m not sure anyone was organized enough to keep a reliable count by then.” Eighty years ago, that calamity had been, and several wars back, though in the Barrayaran mind the Cetagandan invasion was still the big war, the real war, the crucible of the Imperium. “Most of my grandfather’s immediate family were there that day—both his parents, all of his surviving brothers, a boatload of cousins. Council of war, I believe. Prince Yuri meant to have joined them, but he was delayed in that fighting up north. Though the historians don’t think the Cetagandan ghem-junta was targeting him alone—they wanted to get us all, if they could.” His lips curved grimly. “I can’t say they were wrong in that.”

  As the subsequent world-shaking history of General Count Piotr Vorkosigan had amply proved. Ekaterin had never quite known whether to be glad or sorry that she’d not met Miles till long after that formidable old icon had passed away.

  “My Da says he never saw my grandfather make a memorial burning for that part of his family,” Miles mused. “And nor did I, come to think. I asked him about it once—just about at age ten, probably, that being when I’d first become curious about it all. He said this”—a wave of his hand took in the scene sweeping silently below—“had been burning enough.”

  A grimace of Vadim’s lips signified agreement. Ekaterin wondered if the ranger had district ancestors who’d shared that famous pyre, and what family stories had been passed on to him by age ten. His wasn’t a duty that drew many volunteers.

  “Anyway,” Miles went on, as Miles was prone to do, “after we threw the Cetagandans off this planet and the war was over, my grandfather ended up with title deed to the whole contaminated zone. As personal property, not as an entailment of the countship like the public buildings in Hassadar or Vorkosigan House up in Vorbarr Sultana. The Vorkosigans hadn’t owned all of the area even before its destruction, so he couldn’t have inherited the whole thing outright—I believe he actually bought out some of the other survivors who had claims. Which, back then, was a way of slipping some very proud and traumatized people a bit of charity. When the old man died, he left the whole zone to me. I was seventeen, and still a bit touchy about, ah”—a wave down the short length of his body, vaguely hunched, less than five feet tall—“my appearance. I didn’t take it as a compliment, though I realized no one expected the zone to be habitable again in my father’s lifetime. But the older I get, the less sure I am what he was really thinking.”

  Ekaterin supposed she was even less in a position to guess. But the old man would have had to be blind indeed not to have seen, even then, his birth-damaged only grandson’s growing powers of mind. And heart. Incandescent, someone had once described Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan. Maybe, love, Piotr chose to
pass his wounded lands into hands that he thought could hold them. Maybe he didn’t underestimate you after all. Or maybe she was just too foolishly fond, too much a partisan for level judgment even after four years of marriage. She smiled and stared out, her eye following the route of the river eastward.

  It meandered quietly, carrying its load of contaminants out of the Vorkosigans’ District and undrinkably through the eastern neighboring district, to empty out at last into an abandoned estuary and the sea that swallowed, if not all, much. Maybe not forever-abandoned, now. Let us see what this generation of Vorkosigans can do. She sat up and looked forward eagerly as they banked again and tracked up the ridge that, along with the prevailing winds, had once saved the lands just to the west from the worst of it.

  “What the hell…?” Miles stretched his neck and frowned. “Vadim, what is that crap down there?”

  The ranger turned his head. “Rubbish tip, my lord.”

  Ekaterin followed their gazes; the lift van swooped lower.

  “I’m not sure I approve of that. Maybe we do need that fence… though I don’t suppose it would stop a flyer.”

  “I don’t think anyone lands, my lord. They just shovel it out the back of their lift van or lightflyer while they hover.”

  “That would explain the scatter, yes.” Miles’s scowl deepened. “I expect it does no harm. Seems wrong, though.”

  “Lese-majeste?” Ekaterin inquired, amused by his bristle.

  “Mm, or defacing a graveyard.”

  She let her eyelids droop in a conceding nod.

  In a few more moments, the lift van slid down to thump to a landing at the edge of a patch of woods and meadow otherwise indistinguishable from its surroundings. The occupants of the van busied themselves arranging their protective gear. Miles and Ekaterin wore disposable jumpsuits over their ordinary clothes; Enrique and Vadim, more permanent garb. Flexible galoshes went on over shoes, lab gloves over hands. Miles watched anxiously as Ekaterin pulled on her hood and sealed her face mask, a simple half-cylinder of clear plastic with a filter arrangement. She watched back, a little more sardonically, as he sheepishly adjusted his own. At the last moment, about to jump down from his seat, he bethought himself of his cane and slipped a double layer of lab glove over the ferrule, self-tying it with the floppy fingers. Everyone checked their dosimeters, then finally piled out.

  Ekaterin nodded to the dosimeter hanging at Vadim’s waist. “Does the lifetime limit on exposure curtail your career as a ranger?”

  He shrugged. “It’s less important the older you get. And the treatments keep getting better. I hope to stay just behind that moving line for as long as I can.”

  “Technically,” Miles put in, “I passed my lifetime limit halfway through my space career. You can’t take that stuff too seriously, or you’ll be paralyzed. Anyway, there’s gene cleaning now.”

  Vadim gave a heartened nod at this elastic view of safety protocols, and followed his little liege lord as he stumped toward the experimental plot.

  Ekaterin fell in beside Miles. “Does that radio-insouciance go for me, too?”

  “Of course not.” He gave her a wary glance. “Though the limits are conservative.” And, in a lower mutter, “Besides, they only matter if you’re going to live to grow old.”

  Ekaterin wondered whether to take up the ongoing argument about Miles’s personal conviction that he would not survive to some ripe old age, and had to live fast, cramming in experience, to make up for it. And was so much a part of what made Miles, Miles. Not now, perhaps. There would be time later; she was determined on it. She contented herself with a, “You’d better. Or I’ll have your scalp,” which made his sharp gray eyes crinkle behind his filter mask.

  A faint humming marked the edge of the test plot, a twenty-meter-wide square laid out at the edge of the woods encompassing both scrub and a slice of meadow. At each corner, a force screen generator supported a barrier, half a meter high and a meter deep below ground, to contain the area and its important, if small, experimental inhabitants. Ekaterin and Vadim stepped over it; with a faint yelp, Enrique stumbled through it; Miles, about to hop, planted his cane and stepped over more carefully. It had been quite some time since his knees had last buckled unexpectedly, but this was not a good place to go rolling in the dirt. Ekaterin looked around eagerly for her first view of what she couldn’t help thinking of as her radbugs at work, though really, her design contribution had been small compared to Enrique’s. The exterior was the part everyone saw first, though, and first impressions were psychologically important.

  “There’s one!” Miles pointed with the condomized tip of his cane toward a red-brown Barrayaran weed—henbloat, the botanist-and-gardener part of Ekaterin’s mind noted automatically—and used it to push back the stalk and reveal the insectoid shape contentedly chewing a leaf in the shade beneath.

  The bioengineered creature was six or seven centimeters long, six-legged, beetle-like in form with its glossy wing carapaces. The carapaces, head, and legs were a deep, shimmering purple. Upon its back a clear trefoil shape glowed a butter-yellow. Really glowed; the tiny light was bright enough to reflect off its shadowy surroundings. The general effect was quite enchanting, Ekaterin thought.

  Even before the design modifications, it had been entirely unjust of Miles to dub the earlier, original version ‘the vomit bugs’, or, during the unfortunate time they’d escaped inside Vorkosigan House, ‘those damned pullulating cockroaches’. Butterbugs had been the official name of that parent generation, brought by Dr. Enrique Borgos from his Escobaran laboratory, unfairly lost to—well, be frank—to financial mismanagement. His new lab at Hassadar on Barrayar was being much more shrewdly managed, if not by Enrique. Enrique had better things to do with his brain.

  The butterbugs themselves were just mobile, self-maintaining packaging for the real secret, a suite of bioengineered microbes in their guts that processed any Earth-organic matter the bugs could munch. The butterbugs ate vegetation people could not; regurgitated an extremely nutritious tofu-like substance edible to humans; and excreted one of the best fertilizers Ekaterin-the-gardener had ever tested. Really, there was no downside.

  Except for the bugs’ original appearance, which some people—Ekaterin glanced under her lashes at her husband, still peering under the plant—who had less excuse than most to judge others by their surfaces, had found repulsively off-putting. So, at the other shareholders’ requests, Ekaterin had taken on the packaging problem; the new food-producing butterbugs, renamed glorious bugs, were quite attractive and a hit. Miles… had come around slowly.

  Miles had come around a lot faster, though, when Enrique had floated the tentative notion of a bug that might eat radioactively contaminated matter, chelate the heavy metals to a claylike substance to be regurgitated at collection points, and excrete what was to all intents and purposes clean, fertile soil. The lab had suddenly found itself generously funded for the new project from Lord Vorkosigan’s personal purse. And Dr. Borgos, who was not a slow learner despite his youth—the man was not yet thirty even now—had this time come to Lady Vorkosigan for design tips first.

  She was quite proud of her motif for the bugs, redubbed radbugs for their new task. It had been her notion, though Enrique had carried it out, to make the warning signs built-in to the bugs’ backs glow more brightly the more contaminated the bugs became, the bioluminescence making it instantly apparent when they were safe or not to handle, and to what degree.

  “Dear God. That’s… disturbing,” muttered Miles, staring at the glowing radbug.

  “Oh, but it’s working!” Thrilled, Ekaterin bent down for a closer view; Miles hung back. The little creature munched on, oblivious to the varied emotions of its observers.

  “Aha!” cried Enrique.

  Ekaterin and Miles came quickly across to where he was crouching over a tiny mound of dull gray pellets. He unhooked his rad scanner from his belt and passed it over the pile. Its discontented-sounding twitter rose abruptly in pitch and volume t
o a wail.

  “Wow!” said Enrique, making a hasty record of the readout. “This stuff is hot!”

  Miles took a look past his shoulder at the reading, which Enrique obligingly tilted his way; his eyebrows shot up. “By damn.”

  Enrique straightened. “It looks like we may have to address that disposal problem earlier than we thought. Really, this reverses the usual method of cleanup, which is to dilute and dilute till your matrix is no worse—or little worse—than whatever you suffer for the normal background. This un-dilutes. Concentrates.” He went off to fetch a trowel, kneeling again to scoop up the sample into a lead-lined jar to take back to the lab for further analysis. He handed it off to Vadim, who carted it gingerly away to stash in the lift van.

  “I admit,” said Miles, watching all this closely, “that my desire to make a permanent end to this crap by taking it up to orbit and firing it into the sun is mitigated by visions of some horrible transport accident. Binning it up and sinking it in the most active subduction zone on the planet might be safer as well as cheaper. At least humans don’t pull food from the Barrayaran seas.”

  “Yet,” said Ekaterin. “There are projects in the works, I understand.”

  “Well, if we do nothing, which is what we have been doing for the past eight decades, it ends up in the sea all the same. Just getting it away from the coast has got to be an improvement.”

  “May I suggest final decisions should wait on further testing, Miles,” said Enrique. “Depending on how the profile of other heavy metals works out, there might be commercial applications for this waste. It might even turn out to be a product. It’s already far more concentrated than any natural ore.”

  “What other heavy metals? I thought we were going after the residual strontium, cesium, and samarium, mainly. And that bloody plutonium.” With which the Cetagandans had salted the bomb on purpose, to the outrage of more people than just the Barrayarans.