Cryoburn

by Lois M. Bujold

  He pushed his blanket aside and looked around the rooftop refuge. All of the castlelike details had faded, to be replaced by a utilitarian flat quadrangle with a couple of exchanger towers supporting the canvas room. Or barn. Or zoo. In addition to the bird-of-prey on its perch, elegant and haughty and clearly the Vor lord of all it surveyed, some battered metal shelving displayed the cages harboring the black-and-white rat collection, along with several glass-walled terrariums. Though most of their occupants were out of sight behind artfully-arranged vegetation, he was fairly sure he saw a turtle. Along the wall opposite his bedroll, three boxes lined with shredded flimsies made nests for the chicken population; Twig, the brown hen, still dozed in hers. Miles eyed the clothesline still tied around his ankle. Have I been collected? He'd known worse fates.

  And here was his zookeeper. Jin, sitting at the little round table, turned around and smiled at him. "Oh good, you're awake!"

  Freed of an upwhacked brain chemistry's re-imaging, Jin proved a skinny kid just shy of puberty, with a shock of straight black hair in need of a cut and bright brown eyes, his features typical of the multi-racial blends of the local founder populations. He was dressed in a shirt too large for him, the sleeves rolled up and the shirttail trailing down over a pair of baggy shorts. Worn sport shoes without socks slopped on his feet. "Would you like breakfast?" Jin asked. "I have fresh eggs this morning-three of 'em!"

  A proud young farmer; Miles could see that eggs loomed in his near future. "In a bit. I'd like to wash up first."

  "Wash?" said Jin, as if this were a novel notion.

  "Do you have any soap?" Miles went on. "I don't expect you have any depilatory."

  Jin shook his head at this last, but jumped up to rummage on his crowded shelves and came up with a bar of rather dry soap, a plastic basin, and a grayish towel. Miles had to ask for Jin's help un-knotting the safety line, then accepted the soap and supplies with thanks and shuffled around the exchanger tower to the working water tap, where he stripped off his clothes, what was left of them, knelt, and managed a wash and rinse not only of his face, but head and whole body, including a good soaping of his sore feet and knees. The latter were contused and scabbed this morning, but showed no sign of infection, good. Jin tagged along to watch, frowning curiously at the pale scars lacing his torso. Miles slid back into his ragged and somewhat smelly garb, combed his hair with his fingers, and shuffled back to sink gratefully into the lone chair, toward which his young host gestured him.

  Jin set a metal pot of water to boil on an ordinary, if battered, rechargeable camp heater. The boy's rooftop realm was clearly furnished out of back-alley scavenges, but some fruitful ones. The water heated quickly, and Jin slipped his three eggs, precious treasures, gently in. "Twig laid the brown one," Jin informed Miles, "and Galli the other two. They're fresh last night. And I have salt!"

  Jin bustled about and produced a couple of plastic plates, the bottle of water refilled and ready for sharing between them, and half a loaf of what proved to be surprisingly excellent bread, if a trifle dry. With an air of confession, Jin lowered his voice. "Eggs come out of chickens' butts, you know."

  "Yes, I knew that," Miles returned gravely. "We have Earth chickens, and other birds, where I come from, too."

  Jin relaxed. "Oh, good. Some people get upset when they first find that out."

  "Some people think Barrayar is a primitive world," Miles offered.

  Jin brightened. "Does it have many animals?"

  "Yes, the usual Earth imports, atop its own native ecosystem. The native animals are mostly small, like bugs, though. There are larger creatures in the seas."

  "Do people fish?"

  "Not in the seas. In stocked lakes, yes. The Barrayaran plants and animals are mostly toxic to humans."

  Jin nodded wisely. "Around here, the native stuff they first found on the equator was mostly microorganisms. They figure that's where the oxygen came from, before the last big freeze. They set up a lot of Earth plants to follow the melting glaciers, north and south. But not many animals."

  "Kibou-daini is a lot like Komarr-that's the second planet of my Empire," Miles said. "A cold world, being slowly terraformed. Sergyar-that's the third world-you'd probably like it. It has a fully-developed native ecosystem, and lots of amazing animals, or so my mother tells me. It's only been colonized in the last generation, so scientists are still finding out new things about the biota."

  Jin looked at Miles more warmly. It seemed he had just risen in the boy's estimation-were adults who could make sensible conversation rare in Jin's world, perhaps? For a certain value of sensible equating to zoological, apparently.

  "I don't suppose you have any coffee. Or tea," Miles said, without much hope.

  Jin shook his head. "I have a couple of cola bulbs, though." He darted back to his shelves to return with a pair of bright plastic drink bulbs. "Except they're warm."

  Miles took one up and squinted at the ingredients label, a vile concoction of cheap sugars and chemicals, and decided he couldn't manage this before breakfast even if one of the chemicals might be caffeine. So, when did you grow so nice, my Lord Auditor? Or was it grow so old? The eggs, bread and water would be challenge enough for his queasy stomach. He shook his head no-thanks and set the bulb down.

  The eggs were still simmering. Miles looked around and said, "Interesting place, this. Not at all like anything I've been shown on Kibou so far." Not with the cryocorps stage-managing the tours, certainly. "How many other people live here?"

  Jin shrugged. "A hundred-two hundred? I'm not sure. Suze-san would know."

  Miles's eyebrows rose. "That many!" They stayed out of sight well. He supposed a community of illegal squatters would have to be discreet in order to last. "How did you come here?"

  Another shrug. "I just found it. Or it found me. A couple of folks out collecting tripped over me sleeping in a park, and sort of collected me, too."

  A tradition, it seemed. "Do you have other family here?"

  "No."

  An atypically short response, from the chatty-lonely?-child. "Family anywhere?"

  "My dad's dead." A hesitation. "My mom's frozen."

  A distinction with a difference, on this planet. "Siblings?"

  "I have a little sister. Somewhere. With relatives."

  That last word had almost been spit out. Miles controlled his brows, maintaining an empty, inviting silence.

  "She was too little to take with me," Jin went on, a bit defensively, "and she didn't understand anything that was going on anyway."

  "And what was, er, going on?"

  The shrug again. Jin jumped up. "Oh, the eggs are done!"

  So was Jin an orphan? A runaway? Both? Miles dimly thought Kibou-daini maintained the sort of children's social services usual to technologically advanced planets, if perhaps not up to the relentless standards of, say, Beta Colony. Jin was a mystery, but not, alas, the most pressing one on his hands this morning.

  Jin rolled hot eggs onto their plates, making sure Miles got the special brown one, and Miles kept the wits not to argue about his guestly double-portion. Jin handed over a restaurant packet of salt from someplace called Ayako's Cafe, and they divided the bread and shared the water. "Excellent," said Miles around a mouthful. "Couldn't be fresher." Jin smiled.

  Miles swallowed a bite of bread, and said, "So, you said someone around here had a comconsole? Would they let me use it?"

  "Suze-san." Jin nodded. "She might. If you get to her early in the day, when she's not so grouchy." He added more reluctantly, "I could take you."

  Was he regretting untying that ankle-rope? "I'd like that very much, thanks. It's rather important to me."

  The I'm-pretending-I-don't-care shrug again. As if the only way Jin could imagine keeping any living thing was by tying it up and feeding it, lest it run away and never be seen again.

  Jin bustled about after breakfast to feed meat shreds to the falcon, bread bits to the chickens, and other carefully sorted scraps to the rats and the residents
of the glass boxes. He cleaned cages and swished out and refilled water pans with fresh drinks all round. Miles was quietly impressed with his thoroughness, though the boy might have also been dragging his feet, reluctant to end this visit. In due course, and feeling much stronger and less dizzy, Miles followed his guide cautiously down the ladder once more.

  Chapter Three

  Miles trailed Jin through another unlocked metal door, down some stairs into a disturbingly darkened corridor, through a utility tunnel, and into yet another building. Subliminal sounds and smells, as well as better lighting, suggested this one was occupied, and indeed, around another turn they came to what had obviously once been an employee kitchen and cafeteria. About a dozen people lingered there, some cooking, some eating. All watched in wary silence as the pair passed, except for a young woman working at an industrial-sized mixer who spotted Jin, waved a large spoon in the air, and called him to breakfast.

  Jin faltered, sniffing at the aroma of baked goods wafting from her vicinity, but then smiled and shook his head. "Later, Ako! I got a guest!" Miles stared back over his shoulder as Jin drew him onward.

  Along a corridor two flights up, they passed a row of doors to what formerly, Miles thought, might have been offices, but now seemed to be living quarters. Through the open ones he saw filtered daylight, and piles of personal junk variously tidy or messy, the sort of shabby, battered goods that only folks who feared they couldn't get more would ever use, or save. The people he glimpsed seemed to be mostly dozing in bedrolls on the floor, or puttering quietly. A few residents squinted back at Miles as they passed. While they seemed a mix of ages, a disproportionate number were elderly. Maybe the able-bodied young ones, like Ako-the-cook, were out doing things?

  This place was drawing power and water enough to maintain decency, if not such luxuries as lift tubes. No signs of buckets used as chamber pots, stairwells doubling as urinals, or cookfires set in wastebaskets or bathtubs. So where was the power coming from, and the sewage going to? Was someone here paying for utilities, or were they being secretly siphoned from the municipal systems? The answers, Miles thought, might be revealing, if only he had time to pursue them.

  Up another floor lay a corridor with fewer doors. Jin stopped at one on the end and knocked briskly. He waited a minute, leaning his shoulders on the wall and swinging one foot, then rapped again, louder.

  "Yah, yah," a gruff voice sounded from within. "I hear you. Don't get your undies in a knot."

  The door opened a hand-span. Miles dropped his gaze to not much higher than his own eyelevel, and found a seamed face scowling back at him. "What's this?" the grumbling voice demanded sharply. "Oh, it's you, Jin. What are you doing, bringing a stranger up here?"

  "Yani and I found him last night," said Jin. "He was lost."

  The red-rimmed eyes narrowed. "What, is that Yani's druggie?"

  Miles cleared his throat, conscious of his piratical beard stubble. "Drugged, ma'am, but not a druggie. I had an unfortunate allergic reaction to some medication, in the course of which I was robbed and stumbled into the Cryocombs. It took me quite a while to find my way out again."

  "You're not from around here."

  "No, ma'am."

  Jin jumped in: "He wants to use your comconsole, Suze-san."

  The scowl deepened. "You can't call out on it. It only inloads."

  This seemed unlikely to Miles, but for starters, he would take whatever he could get. It was plain this Suze really didn't like him here. An un-trusted outsider who Saw Too Much could come to a bad end, in a secretive community. Granted he hadn't spotted any bully boys, but murder didn't take muscle; slyness would do as well. "I just want to check the news, ma'am. Till I get my wallet and IDs back, I have to beg kindness from strangers."

  Suze snorted. "You find many kindly strangers where you come from?"

  "I've always found enough." A dozen times over, Miles's life had been handed back to him by people he barely knew. "I figure it gives me an obligation to take my turn being one."

  "Huh," said Suze.

  "Jinni and Lucky both like him," Jin testified in anxious aid.

  Thin lips quirked. "Oh, well, if the rat and the cat both agree, who am I to argue . . . ​?" After another moment, the door swung open, and Jin shooed him in.

  Suze might have been any age from a hard-worn eighty to a well-preserved century. She had certainly, Miles thought, been a head taller a couple of decades back; now she would need sturdy shoes to top five feet, but instead wore flat plastic sandals that snapped her dry-skinned heels as she stepped. That head was covered with frizzed and unruly gray curls. She might have seemed younger if she'd smiled, but the frown-grooves were deeply set around her pursed mouth. Her loose trousers, shirt, and over-shirt were not a set, but being black, black, and black, they could not mis-match.

  Her quarters consisted of two rooms. An antechamber filled with much the same sort of junk storage Miles had glimpsed below-stairs might once have been the domain of some receptionist. The room beyond, a generous corner office with windows on two sides, had surely been executive territory. A rumpled bedroll lay along one inner wall; he spied the comconsole, with desk and chair, along the other. A battered table held a ewer and washbasin, damp towels, and a faint scent of soap competing with the close, old-woman air of the place. The tall storage cupboard, doors shut, might have held anything. A couple of spare swivel chairs, a couch leaking stuffing, and two armchairs, all used office furniture, suggested that Suze might not be as reclusive as she looked.

  Suze gestured him to the comconsole. "It's open."

  "Thank you, ma'am," Miles said, sliding into the station chair. Suze and Jin watched over his shoulder. Finding the local news feeds took only moments. He selected Nexus standard English from a menu of some dozen supported local language options, half of which he could not identify. Although Barrayaran Russian was most certainly not among them, which might come in handy should he need private speech with his bodyguard-if Roic was still alive. . . . ​

  As he'd suspected, yesterday morning's uproar at the cryo-conference was well covered. The vid commentary, as usual, was cursory and not too informative, but the detail-supplements proved more useful; they included a complete list of the kidnapped, with pictures, and pleas from the local authorities for anyone with information to step forward. Roic and Miles were both on the list, as was Dr. Durona, unfortunately. Two different extremist organizations, neither of which Miles had previously heard of-so much for his ImpSec reports on Kibou-daini-were claiming credit, or blame, for the kidnappings.

  "That's you!" said Jin in excitement, pointing to Miles's face on the holovid. Miles didn't think it a flattering shot, but apparently it was recognizable. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not, just now. Jin went on, "Miles Vor-vor-vorkaseegain."

  "Vor-ko-suh-g'n," Miles corrected automatically.

  "So, you were caught up in that stupid mess," said Suze. "Galactic, are you?"

  She was not as unaware of the news as Jin. Interesting. "The kidnappers seemed to be targeting off-worlders. A group of us had been assembled in the lobby for a guided tour. It was listed on the public schedule, so the snatch wasn't necessarily an inside job."

  "You just said you were robbed."

  "So I was, right down to my shoes. But the sedative they jabbed me with as they were dragging me off was an unfortunate choice. Instead of knocking me out, it made me manic. I broke away."

  "Why didn't you go back to the hotel?"

  "Well, and then there were the hallucinations. About ten hours of them, I think."

  Suze regarded him in deep suspicion. Miles hoped it sounded too screwy a tale to have been made up.

  Nine delegates taken-no, eight, subtracting Miles, although the kidnappers hadn't confessed to losing him. The Barrayaran consulate here, tiny as it was, would surely already have reported this, though the message could not yet have arrived home. Damn. Admiral Miles Naismith, free mercenary, had never owned a home address, nor hostages to f
ortune. Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan did. He couldn't not report in. And yet, what an interesting chance to become temporarily invisible had been handed to him. . . . ​

  His old covert ops instincts were kicking in, and he wasn't at all sure he wanted them. He could walk out of here and into any store or restaurant, and sooner or later find someone who would let him call and get help and a pick-up. The call would, of course, be unsecured and wide-open to anyone else looking for him, not limited to the authorities. Yet if the authorities, or at any rate, the powerful people who he suspected ran them, hadn't drawn his negative attention night before last, he'd not hesitate to do just that. But he was hesitating now.

  Suze pulled up a swivel chair and plumped down on it, watching more closely as he read on. Jin shifted from foot to foot, growing bored as Miles, frowning, sped through holoscreens of mostly non-useful data. "Hey Suze-san, you want me to bring you some cinnamon rolls? Ako was just getting them out of the oven."

  "Do they have coffee down there?" Miles asked, diverted. "Can you bring me coffee? Black?"

  Jin wrinkled his nose. "I don't know how anybody can stand to drink that stuff."

  "It's a taste you acquire when you're older. Rather like an interest in girls."

  Suze made a noise in her throat that might have been either a laugh, or phlegm.

  Jin's nose wrinkled further, but he bobbed a sort of nod with his whole body, and trotted off.

  "Two coffees!" Suze called after him. He waved an acknowledging hand as he thumped out the door.

  Miles turned in his chair and looked after him-the boy was out of earshot already. "Nice kid, that."

  "Yah."

  "Good of you to take him in. What do you know about him?" Prime the pump, my Lord Auditor. "He told me his father was dead and his mother was frozen, making him an orphan of sorts, I suppose. I'd think his mother would have been too young for long-term cryo-sequestration. Usually at that age it's only used as a last-ditch emergency procedure to hold people till they can be treated." As Miles had once been. He couldn't even add, To my cost, because despite the imperfections of his revival, his life and everything in it for the past decade had been its grant. And a gift of the kindness of strangers, don't forget them. The Durona Group being about as strange as they came.