Brothers in Arms

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "I had a kind of foster-brother once—a little older than me—" the clone paused, took a deep breath, "raised with me. But not educated with me. I taught him to read, a little. . . . Shortly before the Komarrans came and got me, the laboratory people took him away. It was sheer chance that I saw him again afterwards. I'd been sent on an errand to pick up a package at the shuttleport, though I wasn't supposed to go into town. I saw him across the concourse, entering the first-class passenger lounge. Ran up to him. Only it wasn't him any more. There was some horrible rich old man, sitting in his head. His bodyguard shoved me back. . . ."

  The clone wheeled, and snarled at Miles. "Oh, I knew the score. But once, once, just this once, a Jackson's Whole clone is turning it around. Instead of you cannibalizing my life, I shall have yours."

  "Then where will your life be?" asked Miles desperately. "Buried in an imitation of Miles, where will Mark be then? Are you sure it will be only me, lying in my grave?"

  The clone flinched. "When I am emperor of Barrayar," he said through his teeth, "no one will be able to get at me. Power is safety."

  "Let me give you a hint," said Miles. "There is no safety. Only varying states of risk. And failure." And was he letting his old only-child loneliness betray him, at this late date? Was there anybody home, behind those too-familiar gray eyes staring back at him so fiercely? What snare would hook him? Beginnings, the clone clearly understood beginnings; it was endings he lacked experience of. . . .

  "I always knew," said Miles softly—the clone leaned closer—"why my parents never had another child. Besides the tissue damage from the soltoxin gas. But they could have had another child, with the technologies then available on Beta Colony. My father always pretended it was because he didn't dare leave Barrayar, but my mother could have taken his genetic sample and gone alone.

  "The reason was me. These deformities. If a whole son had existed, there would have been horrendous social pressure put on them to disinherit me and put him in my place as heir. You think I'm exaggerating, the horror Barrayar has of mutation? My own grandfather tried to force the issue by smothering me in my cradle, when I was an infant, after he lost the abortion argument. Sergeant Bothari—I had a bodyguard from birth—who stood about two meters tall, didn't dare draw a weapon on the Great General. So the sergeant just picked him up, and held him over his head, quite apologetically—on a third-story balcony— until General Piotr asked, equally politely, to be let down. After that, they had an understanding. I had this story from my grandfather, much later; the sergeant didn't talk much.

  "Later, my grandfather taught me to ride. And gave me that dagger you have stuck in your shirt. And willed me half his lands, most of which still glow in the dark from Cetagandan nuclears. And stood behind me in a hundred excruciating, peculiarly Barrayaran social situations, and wouldn't let me run away, till I was forced to learn to handle them or die. I did consider death.

  "My parents, on the other hand, were so kind, and careful—their absolute lack of suggestion spoke louder than shouting. Overprotected me even as they let me risk my bones in every sport, in the military career—because they let me stifle my siblings before they could even be born. Lest I think, for one moment, that I wasn't good enough to please them. . . ." Miles ran down abruptly, then added, "Perhaps you're lucky not to have a family. They only drive you crazy after all."

  And how am I to rescue this brother I never knew I had? Not to mention survive, escape, foil the Komarran plot, rescue Captain Galeni from his father, save the emperor and my father from assassination, and prevent the Dendarii Mercenaries from being put through a meat grinder?

  No. If only I can save my brother, all the rest must follow. I'm right. Here, now, is the place to push, to fight, before the first weapon is ever drawn. Snap the first link, and the whole chain comes loose.

  "I know exactly what I am," said the clone. "You won't make a dead fool of me."

  "You are what you do. Choose again, and change."

  The clone hesitated, meeting Miles's eyes directly for almost the first time. "What guarantee could you possibly give me, that I could trust?"

  "My word as Vorkosigan?"

  "Bah!"

  Miles considered this problem seriously, from the clone's— Mark's—point of view. "Your entire life to date has been centered on betrayal, on one level or another. Since you've had zero experience with unbroken trust, naturally you cannot judge with confidence. Suppose you tell me what guarantee you would believe?"

  The clone opened his mouth, closed it, and stood silent, reddening slightly.

  Miles almost smiled. "You see the little fork, eh?" he said softly. "The logical flaw? The man who assumes everything is a lie is at least as mistaken as the one who assumes everything is true. If no guarantee can suit you, perhaps the flaw is not in the guarantee, but in you. And you're the only one who can do anything about that."

  "What can I do?" muttered the clone. For a moment, anguished doubt flickered in his eyes.

  "Test it," breathed Miles.

  The clone stood locked. Miles's nostrils flared. He was so close—so close—he almost had him—

  The door burst open. Galen, dusky with fury, stormed in, flanked by the startled Komarran guards.

  "Damn, the time . . . !" the clone hissed. He straightened guiltily, his chin jerking up.

  Damn the timing! Miles screamed silently in his head. If he had had just a few more minutes—

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" demanded Galen. His voice blurred with rage, like a sled over gravel.

  "Improving my chances of survival past the first five minutes I set foot on Barrayar, I trust," said the clone coolly. "You do need me to survive a little while, even to serve your purposes, no?"

  "I told you, it was too damn dangerous!" Galen was almost, but not quite, shouting. "I've had a lifetime of experience fighting the Vorkosigans. They are the most insidious propagandists ever to cloak self-serving greed with pseudo-patriotism. And this one is stamped from the same mold. His lies will trip you, trap you—he's a subtle little bastard, and he never takes his eye off the main chance."

  "But his choice of lies was very interesting." The clone moved about like a nervous horse, kicking at the carpet, half-defiant, half-placating. "You've had me study how he moves, talks, writes. But I've never been really clear on how he thinks."

  "And now?" purred Galen dangerously.

  The clone shrugged. "He's loony. I think he really believes his own propaganda."

  "The question is, do you?"

  Do you, do you? thought Miles frantically.

  "Of course not." The clone sniffed, jerked up his chin, twang.

  Galen jerked his head toward Miles, gathering in the guards by eye. "Take him back and lock him up."

  He followed on untrustingly as Miles was untied and dragged out. Miles saw his clone, beyond Galen's shoulder, staring at the floor, still scuffing one booted foot across the carpet.

  "Your name is Mark!" Miles shouted back to him as the door shut. "Mark!"

  Galen gritted his teeth and swung on Miles, a sincere, unscientific, roundhouse blow. Miles, held by the guards, could not dodge, but did flinch far enough that Galen's fist landed glancingly and did not shatter his jaw. Fortunately, Galen shook out his fist and did not strike again, regaining a thin crust of control.

  "Was that for me, or him?" Miles inquired sweetly through an expanding bubble of pain.

  "Lock him up," growled Galen to the guards, "and don't let him out again until I, personally, tell you to." He pivoted and swung away up the hall, back to the study.

  Two on two, thought Miles sharply as the guards prodded him down the lift tube to the next level. Or at any rate, two on one and a half. The odds will never be better, and the time margin can only get worse.

  As the door to his cell-room swung open, Miles saw Galeni—asleep on his bench, the sodden, sullen, despairing ploy of a man shutting out inescapable pain in the only way left to him. He'd spent most of last night pacing the cell sil
ently, restless to the point of being frantic—the sleep that had eluded him then was now captured. Wonderful. Now, just when Miles needed him on his feet and primed like an overtightened spring.

  Try anyway. "Galeni!" Miles yelled. "Now, Galeni! Come on!"

  Simultaneously, he plunged backward into the nearest guard, going for a nerve-pinching grip on the hand that held the stunner. A joint snapped in one of Miles's fingers, but he shook the stunner loose and kicked it across the floor toward Galeni, who was lumbering bewilderedly up off his bench like a wart-hog out of the mud. Despite his half-conscious state, he reacted fast and accurately, lunging for the stunner, scooping it up, and rolling across the floor out of the line of fire from the door.

  Miles's guard wrapped an arm around Miles's neck and lifted him off his feet, lurching around to face the second guard. The little gray rectangle of the business end of the second guard's weapon was so close Miles almost had to cross his eyes to bring it into focus. As the Komarran's finger tightened on the trigger the stunner's buzz fragmented, and Miles's head seemed to explode in a burst of pain and colored lights.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He woke in a hospital bed, an unwelcome but familiar environment. In the distance, out his window, the towers of the skyline of Vorbarr Sultana, capital city of Barrayar, glowed strangely green in the darkness. Imp Mil, then, the Imperial Military Hospital. This room was undecorated in the same severe style he had known as a child, when he'd been in and out of its clinical laboratories and surgeries for painful therapies so often Imp Mil had seemed his home away from home.

  A doctor entered. He appeared to be about sixty: clipped graying hair, pale lined face, body thickening with age. dr. galen, his name badge read. Hyposprays clanked together in his pockets. Copulating and breeding more, perhaps. Miles had always wondered where hyposprays came from.

  "Ah, you're awake," said the doctor gladly. "You're not going to go away on us again this time, now, are you?"

  "Go away?" He was tied down with tubes and sensor wires, drips and control leads. It hardly seemed he was going anywhere.

  "Catatonia. Cloud-cuckoo-land. Ga-ga. In short, insane. In short is the only way you can go, I suppose, eh? It runs in the family. Blood will tell."

  Miles could hear the susurration of his red blood cells in his ears, whispering thousands of military secrets to each other, cavorting drunkenly in a country dance with molecules of fast-penta which were flipping their hydroxyl groups at him like petticoats. He blinked away the image.

  Galen's hand rummaged in his pocket; then his face changed. "Ow!" He yanked his hand out, shook off a hypospray, and sucked at his bleeding thumb. "The little bugger bit me." He glanced down, where the young hypospray skittered about uncertainly on its spindly metal legs, and crunched it underfoot. It died with a tiny squeak.

  "This sort of mental slippage is not at all unusual in a revived cryo-corpse, of course. You'll get over it," Dr. Galen reassured him.

  "Was I dead?"

  "Killed outright, on Earth. You spent a year in cryogenic suspension."

  Oddly enough, Miles could remember that part. Lying in a glass coffin like a fairy-tale princess under a cruel spell, while figures flitted silent and ghostlike beyond the frosted panels.

  "And you revived me?"

  "Oh, no. You spoiled. Worst case of freezer-burn you ever saw."

  "Oh," Miles paused, nonplused, and added in a small voice, "Am I still dead, then? Can I have horses at my funeral, like Grandfather?"

  "No, no, no, of course not." Dr. Galen clucked like a mother hen. "You aren't allowed to die, your parents would never permit it. We transplanted your brain into a replacement body. Fortunately, there was one ready to hand. Pre-owned, but hardly used. Congratulations, you're a virgin again. Was it not clever of me, to get your clone all ready for you?"

  "My cl— my brother? Mark?" Miles sat bolt upright, tubes falling away from him. Shivering, he pulled out his tray table and stared into the mirror of its polished metal surface. A dotted line of big black stitches ran across his forehead. He stared at his hands, turning them over in horror. "My God. I'm wearing a corpse."

  He looked up at Galen. "If I'm in here, what have you done with Mark? Where did you put the brain that used to be in this head?"

  Galen pointed.

  On the table at Miles's bedside squatted a large glass jar. In it a whole brain, like a mushroom on a stem, floated rubbery, dead, and malevolent. The pickling liquid was thick and greenish.

  "No, no, no!" cried Miles. "No, no, no!" He struggled out of bed and clutched up the jar. The liquid sloshed cold down over his hands. He ran out into the hall, barefoot, his patient gown flapping open behind him. There had to be spare bodies around here; this was Imp Mil. Suddenly, he remembered where he'd left one.

  He burst through another door and found himself in the combat-drop shuttle over Dagoola IV. The shuttle hatch was jammed open; black clouds shot with yellow dendrites of lightning boiled beyond. The shuttle lurched, and muddy, wounded men and women in scorched Dendarii combat gear slid and screamed and swore. Miles skidded to the open hatch, still clutching the jar, and stepped out.

  Part of the time he floated, part of the time he fell. A crying woman plummeted past him, arms reaching for help, but he couldn't let go of the jar. Her body burst on impact with the ground.

  Miles landed feet first on rubbery legs and almost dropped the jar. The mud was thick and black and sucked at his knees.

  Lieutenant Murka's body, and Lieutenant Murka's head, lay just where he'd left them on the battleground. His hands cold and shaking, Miles pulled the brain from the jar and tried to shove the brainstem down the plasma-bolt-cauterized neck. It stubbornly refused to hook in.

  "He doesn't have a face anyway," criticized Lieutenant Murka's head from where it lay a few meters off. "He's going to look ugly as sin, walking around on my body with that thing sticking up."

  "Shut up, you don't get a vote, you're dead," snarled Miles. The slippery brain slithered through his fingers into the mud. He picked it back out and tried clumsily to rub the black goop off on the sleeve of his Dendarii Admiral's uniform, but the harsh cloth scrubbed up the convoluted surface of Mark's brain, damaging it. Miles patted the tissue surreptitiously back into place, hoping no one would notice, and kept trying to shove the brain stem back in the neck.

  Miles's eyes flipped open and stared wide. His breath caught. He was shaking and damp with sweat. The light fixture burned steadily in the unwavering ceiling of the cell; the bench was hard and cold on his back. "God. Thank God," he breathed.

  Galeni loomed over him in worry, one arm supporting himself against the wall. "You all right?"

  Miles swallowed, breathed deeply. "You know it's a bad dream when waking up here is an improvement."

  One of his hands caressed the cool, reassuring solidity of the bench. The other found no stitches across his forehead, though his head did feel as if somebody had been doing amateur surgery on it. He blinked, squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again, and with an effort made it up on his right elbow. His left hand was swollen and throbbing. "What happened?"

  "It was a draw. One of the guards and I stunned each other. Unfortunately, that left one guard still on his feet. I woke up maybe an hour ago. It was max stun. I don't know how much time we've lost."

  "Too much. It was a good try, though. Dammit." He stopped just short of pounding his bad hand on the bench in frustration. "I was so close. I almost had him."

  "The guard? It looked like he had you."

  "No, my clone. My brother. Whatever he is." Flashes of his dream came back to him, and he shuddered. "Skittish fellow. I think he's afraid he's going to end up in a jar."

  "Eh?"

  "Eugh." Miles attempted to sit up. The stun had left him feeling nauseated. Muscles spasmed jerkily in his arms and legs. Galeni, clearly in no better shape, tottered back to his own bench and sat.

  Some time later the door opened. Dinner, thought Miles.

  The guard jerked his st
unner at them. "Both of you. Out." The second guard backed him up from behind, several meters beyond hope of reach, with another stunner. Miles did not like the looks on their faces, one solemn and pale, the other smiling nervously.

  "Captain Galeni," Miles suggested in a voice rather higher in pitch than he'd meant it to come out as they exited, "I think it might be a good time for you to talk to your father, now."

  A variety of expressions chased across Galeni's face: anger, mulish stubbornness, thoughtful appraisal, doubt.

  "That way." The guard gestured them toward the lift tube. They dropped down, toward the garage level.

  "You can do this, I can't," Miles coaxed Galeni in a sotto voce singsong out of the corner of his mouth.

  Galeni hissed through his teeth: frustration, acquiescence, resolve. As they entered the garage, he turned abruptly to the closer guard and jerked out unwillingly, "I wish to speak to my father."

  "You can't."

  "I think you had better let me." Galeni's voice was dangerous, edged, at last, with fear.

  "It's not up to me. He gave us our orders and left. He's not here."

  "Call him."

  "He didn't tell me where he would be." The guard's voice was tight and irritated. "And if he had, I wouldn't anyway. Stand over there by that lightflyer."

  "How are you going to do it?" asked Miles suddenly. "I really am curious to know. Think of it as my last request." He sidled over toward the lightflyer, his eyes shifting in search of cover, any cover. If he could vault over or dodge around the vehicle before they fired . . .

  "Stun you, fly you out over the south coast, drop you in the water," the guard recited. "If the weights work loose and you wash ashore, the autopsy would show only that you'd drowned."

  "Not exactly a hands-on murder," Miles observed. "Easier for you that way, I expect." These men were not professional killers, if Miles read them right. Still, there was a first time for everything. That pillar over there was not wide enough to stop a stun bolt. The array of tools on the far wall presented possibilities . . . his legs were cramping furiously. . . .