Cryoburn

by Lois M. Bujold

  "And, er, will you be applying that model to Komarr?" Miles asked.

  "Unfortunately, no. There is no one there to trade with." Although he sighed, Wing did not seem to be especially distressed by this. Miles read that as, We plan to be a monopoly.

  "This is all quite stunning," Miles said honestly. "And what do you think of it all, Vorlynkin?" He cast the consul a jovial wink. "Ready to sign up? I suppose it's all old hat to you, though."

  "Not . . . ​really," said Vorlynkin. "Most of my work has dealt with the concerns of the living. I had to expedite returning the remains of one poor Barrayaran tourist who was killed glacier-diving last year-very dangerous sport-and sign off on the delivery of a couple of Kibou business people who'd died of natural causes in the Empire and been shipped home. One frozen, one as ashes. There were complaints about the latter from the kin, which I forwarded to those responsible." Vorlynkin added diplomatically-how else?-"I do appreciate this behind-the-scenes view, Wing-san. It's proving an eye-opener for me." The glance under his lashes was at Miles, though.

  They were all gathered up again and conveyed to lunch, which was served in a low building overlooking more gardens and a koi pond. The space was all paper screens and tatami mats, plus more art glass and those flower arrangements consisting of a handful of pebbles, three sticks, two buds, and a blossom. They sat on silk cushions at a couple of low lacquer tables. Miles had Wing on one side and Aida on the other, all to himself; Storrs hosted Vorkynkin, Roic, and Raven at the second table. A pair of servers brought in a succession of delicate dishes all looking like miniature sculptures, and Miles finally allowed Aida to serve him an odd-tasting clear wine in a flat ceramic cup. He wondered if the vessel's design was meant to be self-limiting; anyone too drunk must spill the contents down their front. He managed not to, barely.

  Aida facilitated the conversation onto a series of pleasant, neutral topics, all the while inching nearer, her coat and undercoat loosened to strategically reveal the swell of her breasts beneath her low-cut top. Miles suspected pheromone perfumes, but the message hardly needed the boost; this young lady could be part of his bribe if he wished. Alas, Aida had shown no sign of knowing enough dirt to cultivate, and anyway he didn't need to look every kind of corruptible. There was such a thing as artistic restraint. Miles pulled out his holovid cube and showed off pictures of his magnificent wife and adorable children, and she backed off, although he also vented a few complaints about the high costs of raising a family, and Wing inched nearer, encouraging him in this vein. Miles drank more weird wine and grinned foolishly.

  WhiteChrys would have kept refilling Miles's cup till he slid under the table, he was sure. He only wound up the party by repeated hints about Vorlynkin needing to get back to his duties. Aida slipped across to entertain the other group, while Wing took Miles on a turn around the pond, "to clear our heads." Miles's head, at least, cleared quite quickly when Wing at last got down to some very specific details about how Miles's new shares were to be secretly transferred. He supposed he shouldn't think of it as Quick work, my Lord Auditor; from foreplay to coitus in one afternoon. But who was being screwed? And why, why, why was he being bribed?

  "I truly believe in the Komarr project," Wing told him, with apparent sincerity. And a touch of euphoria, though Miles couldn't tell if it was induced by the wine or the closing of the negotiations; to Wing, he suspected, they were interchangeable. The man harbored an almost Jacksonian passion for winning in the Deal. "In fact, I've switched all my own stock and options from WhiteChrys to WhiteChrys Solstice. I've even placed my own cryo-contract with the new facility, that's how much I'm behind it. So you see I've put my money and my life where my mouth is." His dark eyes almost sparkled with this revelation.

  And Miles, connections boiling up at last, thought, Ye gods. I think you've just handed me your head.

  Chapter Eight

  The wolf spider was perky and sharp in a black coat with white stripes and neat dots, like an aristocrat in a historical holovid dressed for a night on the town. Jin could clearly count all eight eyes in its fierce little face, two bright black buttons looking back at him, crowned by four more above, and another on each side of its head. Beneath its-no, beneath her abdomen clung a bundle of fine white fluff, like a tiny cotton ball-an egg case? Was she going to be a mama spider? Prone on the floor of the musty garden shed, Jin stiffened with excitement, then drew slowly backwards, careful not to startle her into scuttling into the cracks in the floor or walls before he could find something to capture her in. She was a good size for her breed, over three centimeters, quite as long and wide as the end joint of Jin's thumb, so she was certainly a grownup spider. She seemed to wait patiently for him.

  Jin stared around the shed in some frustration. It was taking a lot longer to walk from his aunt and uncle's outlying northwest suburb to the near south side of the city than he had imagined. It was partly from Mina lagging and complaining as soon as she'd grown tired, just as Jin had expected, but mostly he was afraid he'd got turned around and lost during their long trudge last night. Streets curved unexpectedly, mixing him up, and the towers of the city center, glimpsed now and then from a hill or clear space, looked much the same from any direction.

  This shelter had been a splendid find, early this morning. They'd stopped to buy half-liters of milk in a corner store of a neighborhoody area, then spent the next few blocks looking for a place to hide out during school hours. One house had a For Sale sign out front, and a peek through the windows revealed it cleared of furniture and empty of people, safe. It had been locked up tight, but the door to the shed around back proved unlatched. The garden was high-walled and full of sheltering bushes and trees, good to hide them from prying busybodies. Better yet, they'd found an outdoor spigot with the water still turned on. Mina's lunch bars were holding out, if getting boring, but finding water had been more of a problem, though during the long march yesterday they'd twice lucked out with city parks that offered not only drinking fountains, but bathrooms. Mina had proved very cranky about going behind a bush, even in the concealing dark.

  The shelves of this shed had been cleared of likely containers, unfortunately, as well as of garden tools except for one bent and rusty trowel. Jin's eye fell on his sleeping sister, curled up with her jacket folded under her head, her zippered yellow backpack beside her, decorated with smiling but anatomically mis-drawn bees. He squatted down and began rooting through it. Ah, there!

  "Hey!" mumbled Mina, sitting up and yawning. Her sleep-pale face was marked with creases from her makeshift pillow, and her hair hung every which way. What was it about sleeping in the daytime that made people so hot and rumpled? "Are you stealing my money?"

  Jim popped open the clear plastic box she kept her coins in and dumped the contents back into the pack. "No! I just need the box."

  "What for?" asked Mina, enduring this rummage, but at least not theft, of her possessions with no more than a frown.

  "Spider house."

  "Eew! I don't like spiders. Their webs stick in your mouth."

  "She's a wolf spider. They don't spin webs."

  "Oh." Mina blinked, considering this. She didn't look altogether convinced, but at least she didn't set up any stupid shrieking. She did keep her distance till Jin had snuck up on and captured his prey. But once the lady spider was safe behind the transparent barrier, Mina was at least willing to take a closer look, as Jin pointed out the manifold, if miniature, splendors of fur and eyes and mandibles, and the promising egg case.

  "She really does have eight eyes!" said Mina, crossing her own as if trying to imagine the spider's view of her. Emboldened by her brother's example, she tapped on the plastic lid.

  "Hey, don't. You'll scare her."

  "Will she be able to breathe in there?" asked Mina.

  Jin regarded the box in new doubt. It was certainly secure, but it did seem rather airtight. The wolf spider scratched futilely at the walls of her prison with fine claws. "For a while, anyway."

  "Wha
t's her name?"

  "I haven't named her yet."

  "She needs a name."

  Jin nodded full agreement. All right, sometimes Mina could be sensible. It was said there were thousands of wolf spider species back on old Earth, but the Kibou terraformers, stingily, had only imported half a dozen or so for their new ecosystem. But with no comlink here, he couldn't look up his new pet's real scientific name. He hoped it would turn out to be something as sophisticated as the spider herself.

  "You could call her Spinner. Except you said she doesn't spin. Wolfie?"

  "Sounds like a boy's name," Jin objected. "It ought to be a lady's name, to fit her. Something from old Earth."

  Mina scowled in thought a moment, then brightened. "Lady Murasaki! That's the oldest lady's name I know of."

  Jin, about to pooh-pooh her idea in brotherly reflex, paused. He eyed his spider. The name did fit. "All right."

  Mina grinned in triumph. "What does she eat?"

  "Littler bugs. I should catch her some in the garden before we leave. I'm not sure how much longer it will take us to get, um. Home."

  Growing more interested after all this, Mina said, "Can I help feed her?"

  "Sure."

  Mina stretched, and, perhaps reminded of food, dug in her pillaged backpack for another lunch bar. "Maybe we better split this. To make them last."

  "Good idea," Jin admitted. He set the spider box aside and went out to rinse and fill their milk bottles with water from the garden spigot.

  When he slipped back inside the shed, closing the door with a creak, Mina asked, "What time is it out there?"

  "I'm not sure. Afternoon, anyway."

  "Do you think school's out yet? Can we go on the streets again?"

  "Pretty soon."

  They divided the lunch bar and the water.

  "Maybe you should put Lady Murasaki in one of our water bottles, instead," said Mina, draining hers and holding it up to the light falling through the shed's one grimy window. "We could poke breath-holes through it."

  "I was going to rinse those out and fill them up with water to take with us. You know how you were yammering you were so hot and thirsty yesterday afternoon."

  "My feet were so sweaty inside my shoes," Mina said. "They felt nasty." She looked up at him, still a bit puffy-eyed from their uncomfortable day's sleep. "How much longer is it going to take to get to your place?"

  "Hard to say." Jin shrugged uneasily. "I've been gone way longer than I'd planned. I sure hope Miles-san is taking care of all my creatures."

  "That's your galactic friend, right?"

  During their winding journey, the past day and a half, Jin had slowly unburdened himself of what he suspected were far too many of his secrets to Mina, partly to shut up her incessant questions, mostly because, well, he hadn't had any other kids to talk to for so long.

  "Yah."

  Jin's own abysmal failure as a courier troubled his mind. Would Miles-san believe Jin hadn't stolen his money? How was he getting along with Gyre? You had to be gentle but firm with the bird. The chickens were easier, except for the part about climbing down and carrying them back up the ladder or the stairs when they fluttered over the parapet. With that cane, could Miles-san manage both an indignant chicken and the stairs?

  "Does Miles-san have any children?" Mina asked.

  Jin frowned. "He didn't say. He's pretty old-thirty-something, he said. But he's kind of funny-looking. I don't know if he could get a girl." Once the drug effects had worn off Miles-san had been a nice enough fellow, with that face where smiles seemed at home. Plus, he had seemed to understand Jin's creatures, which made him quite smart, for a grownup. Jin wasn't sure whether to wish him a short, understanding bride, or not.

  After a long, thoughtful pause, Mina said, "Do you think he'd like some?"

  "What?"

  "Children. Like, if he's lonely."

  At Jin's baffled stare, Mina forged on: "We read this book for school this year, about two orphans adopted by a man from Earth. He took them there and they saw everything about where our ancestors came from." She added enticingly, "They got new pets . . ."

  Jin vaguely remembered that one from his own second school year, otherwise made burdensome by the infliction of beginning kanji. There had been a lot of sickly stuff about the girl getting a fancy kimono, but there had also been a chapter about going to the seaside which had featured some Earth sea creatures-much too short an episode, but at least there'd been pictures-and a cat who'd capped her excellence by having kittens at the end. "Miles-san isn't from Earth. He's from Barrayar, he said."

  "Where's that?"

  "Somewhere beyond Escobar, I guess." Escobar, Jin knew, was Kibou's closest nexus trading partner, by a shortish multi-jump route. Farther worlds didn't much come up till galactic history in high school, except for Earth. Jin had studied a lot about Earth on his own, because of the zoology. Now, if only some benefactor would come along and offer to take Jin to Earth . . .  Although come to think, Barrayar as Miles-san had described it might be almost as good, with its double biota.

  A sudden picture bloomed in Jin's mind of the odd little fellow living all alone in a cottage in the country-no, better, a big rambling old house with a vast overgrown garden. Like the book with that old professor who had taken in two children from the city during wartime-Jin didn't know what war, except it was from a period before anybody got frozen. There'd been a horse that drew a cart, and wonderful adventures involving a cave with blind white fish. Jin had seen a horse in the Northbridge Zoo, once, on a class field trip. The braver children had all been allowed to pat its glossy neck, while one of the keepers held its lead; Jin remembered the huge beast blowing air out its soft, bellowslike nostrils in a warm whoosh across his cheek. Jin understood there were littler versions bred just for children, called ponies. Mina wouldn't be scared of one that size. The looming beast at the zoo had alarmed even Jin, but he'd been younger then, too. A great rambling house, and animals, and . . . ​

  It was all rubbish. Miles-san wasn't a professor, or their uncle of any kind, great or regular, and for all Jin knew he lived in a cramped city apartment and wasn't lonely at all. Jin decided he didn't like that country daydream. It hurt too much when it stopped. He frowned at Mina. "Nobody's going to adopt us and take us away from here. That's a stupid idea."

  Mina looked offended. She turned one shoulder to him and began pulling on her socks. They were blotched with pinkish-brown stains where her blisters had popped and bled, and Jin gulped faint guilt. They both donned their shoes, Lady Murasaki was safely lodged in Mina's backpack, where, Jin argued, she would endure less bouncing than in his pocket, and they sneaked out onto the street once more.

  A winding kilometer farther on, during which Jin kept looking for, and not getting, a glimpse of the downtown towers for orientation, they came upon a busier street with a tube-tram station entry.

  Mina's footsteps had grown short and gimpy already. She looked at the entrance in some longing. "If you want to go on the tram"-she swallowed a bit-"I'll pay our fares."

  "No, the police have vidcams in the stations. That's how I got trapped day before yesterday. We can't go in there." But Jin's eye was caught by a big colorful display on the outside of the entry kiosk. A map! He peered up carefully for scanning vidcams on this side, didn't spot any, and ventured nearer, Mina trailing.

  The lighted You Are Here arrow horrified Jin. They were nowhere near the south side of town, as he'd hoped from how far they'd trudged. They'd somehow ended up on the residential east side, instead, and still had maybe thirty kilometers left to hike before they reached the light industrial zone of the south, quite as far as they'd already come. Well, that explained why the houses were so nice around here. Jin stepped closer, squinting.

  Just two stops farther on this line was the very station he'd exited to reach the Barrayaran consulate. It was about a three-kilometer walk above ground. Jin stared, thinking. He had dimly planned to offer Mina's money to Miles-san, when t
hey arrived at their destination, but his sister was proving pretty tight-fisted, in Jin's view. She was sure to set up a screech, even though Jin was nearly certain Miles-san would replace it as soon as he could. But if he stopped at the consulate first and explained his loss, editing his situation a bit maybe, would they give him more money for the Barrayaran? Miles-san seemed fairly important to them. And they wouldn't turn Jin in, because they were protecting their own secrets, right?

  Contemplating this confession made him feel a little sick, but not as sick as going all the way back to Miles-san empty-handed as well as three days late. He stared harder at the map, trying to memorize the streets and turns.

  "I know where we're going now," he said to Mina, trying to sound confident and big-brotherly. "Come on."

  After the WhiteChrys groundcar dropped them all off again at the consulate, Roic followed m'lord upstairs and watched him down two headache tabs and several glasses of water. Returning to the entry hall, m'lord stuck his head into the room Roic thought of as the parlor, where Raven Durona had been left to cool his heels, and said, "Debriefing downstairs again, I think."

  Raven nodded and unfolded himself to tag along. There had been little conversation on the way home; Aida had still been escorting, m'lord had settled into himself heavy-eyed, Vorlynkin had stared out the canopy with a set jaw, Roic considered himself an observer, and Raven had been disinclined to buck the obvious trend. They arrived downstairs at the door to the tight-room to discover it closed and locked.

  M'lord hit the intercom. "Vorlynkin? Are you in there? Open up."

  "Just a moment, m'lord," Vorlynkin's voice came from the speaker. The moment turned into several minutes, while m'lord tapped his foot and Raven sat on the nearby step and yawned.

  "Reminds me of a house with only one bathroom when the relatives have come to visit," remarked Roic, as the wait stretched.