Cryoburn-ARC

by Lois M. Bujold

  A sharp rap fell on the operating room door. Roic, awake again? He wasn't going to greet the news of their fool's errand with any joy, either. Miles stretched his back, grabbed his cane, walked to the door, and glanced through the narrow glass. And was immediately glad he hadn't just yelled, Come in, Roic! Because standing outside was Consul Vorlynkin, looking harried, with Jin and Mina in tow, one tugging on each arm.

  Miles slipped through the door and stood with his back pressed to it. "What are you doing here? You were supposed to wait at the consulate till I called." As if he couldn't tell, by the way Vorlynkin was being pulled about. He supposed it was a good thing the children seemed to have lost all fear of the man, but it would be better if he hadn't turned to putty in their hands. Yeah, like I should talk.

  "They insisted," Vorlynkin explained, unnecessarily. "I told them she wouldn't be awake till tomorrow—you told them how unappetizing you looked when you came out of cryo—but they still insisted. Even if they could only see her through the glass. I don't think they slept all night. Woke me up three times . . . I thought maybe if they could just see, they'd settle down. Take naps later, something." Vorlynkin's voice slowed as he took in Miles's grim stance. So he only mouthed, and did not voice, the words What's wrong?

  Miles wasn't ready for this now. Hell, he wasn't ready for this ever. He'd had the unenviable task before of informing next-of-kin or the friends who stood in that place, but they'd always been adults. Never children, never so wide open and unarmored.

  Mina and Jin's excitement was quelled, as they looked at him. Because if things had gone well, wouldn't he be puffing it off already, taking the credit? There was no way to make this better, and only one way to make it over. He wanted to kneel, to grovel, but it seemed only right to look Jin in the eye. He took a deep breath.

  "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Something went wrong with the cryorevi—no, with the cryoprep. There was nothing Raven-sensei could do. We tried . . . ​we think your mother died during her cryoprep eighteen months ago, or sometime soon after."

  Jin and Mina stood still in shock. But not crying, not yet. They just stared at Miles. Stared and stared.

  "But we wanted to see her," said Mina, in a thin little voice. "You said we would see her."

  Jin's voice was throaty, husky, entirely unlike himself. "You promised . . ."

  The trio had fallen apart from each other at the blow of this news. Quite spontaneously and uncharacteristically, Jin's hand found Mina's. Mina's other hand wavered and gripped Vorlynkin's again; he looked down at her in dismay. "Now?" he said. "Are you sure . . . ​?" His hard gaze rose as if to nail Miles to the wall.

  "They have a right," said Miles in reluctance. "Though I don't know if an ugly memory is better than no memory. I just . . . ​don't know."

  "Neither do I," admitted Vorlynkin.

  Mina's chin jutted out. "I want to see. I want to see her."

  Jin gulped and nodded.

  "Wait a moment, then . . ." Miles slipped—fled—back through the door and said, "Raven, we have visitors. Next of kin. Can we, ah, tidy her up a bit?"

  Raven the supposed Jacksonian hard-ass looked deeply shaken at this news. "Oh gods, it's not those poor kids? What are they doing here? Must they come in?"

  "They've a right," Miles repeated, wondering why those words seemed to resonate in his mind. He ought to know, but these days he couldn't blame every memory lapse on his own ten-year-old cryorevival.

  Raven, Tanaka and Miles hurried to get the silent figure decently draped, to remove the useless tangle of technology from about her, tubes and electrodes and the strange cap. Miles smoothed the short black hair back over the ears. Its slickness rendered the middle-aged female face sophisticated yet skull-like, and Miles wondered how the children's mother had worn her hair. Weird little things like that could matter all out of proportion. A swift and useless tidying-up, this.

  Over, let it be over. Miles went to the door and held it wide.

  Jin and Mina and Vorlynkin filed through. The look Vorlynkin flicked at Miles in passing had very little love in it. Jin took the consul's free hand as they came up to the tableside. Because who else was there left to hang onto, in this spinning hour?

  The children stared some more. Mina's lips parted in bewilderment; Jin raised his eyes to Miles with a half-voiced Huh?

  Drawing back in something between outrage and scorn, Mina said, "But that's not our mommy!"

  Chapter Twelve

  Miles just barely kept himself from blurting, idiotically, Are you sure? Neither set young face held the least doubt. "Then who," he choked, wheeling to stare at Raven, at the draped figure on the table, "was it that we just . . ." Murdered was unfair, as well as inaccurate. And, he suspected, would also be deeply offensive to the upset cryorevival specialist. "That we just . . ." Fortunately, no one here seemed to expect him to fill in the blank.

  "Her numbers were right," said Raven. ". . . Or anyway, her numbers were the ones you gave me."

  So either Miles had grabbed the wrong drawer code from the cryo-storage data, which he knew very well he had not, or the numbers had been fudged somewhere upstream. By somebody. For some reason. Concealment? To protect Lisa Sato's cryo-corpse from kidnapping by her supporters, or someone like the N.H.L.L.? Or by Miles—no, Miles didn't think anyone on Kibou-daini could have imagined a nosy Barrayaran Imperial Auditor taking this interest. Or might it have been a genuine error? In which case—Miles pictured the millions of cryo-drawers in, under, or around Northbridge alone, and his heart sank. The thought that nobody might actually know where Lisa Sato had been stashed was too horrible to contemplate for more than an instant.

  Or—and the notion was so arresting, Miles caught his breath—someone else had been ahead of him, with the exact same idea. In which case . . . No. Before his inner visions could proliferate madly, he'd better fasten them down with at least a few facts. Physical ones, not all these trailing tenuous tentacled inductions.

  Miles took a deep breath, to slow his hammering heart. "All right. All right. We'll start with what we can know. First is to ID that poor, um, patron. Make that a priority for your autopsy, Raven. I'll go back to the consulate tight-room and—" Miles broke off as Vorlynkin cleared his throat, ominously.

  Vorlynkin nodded to Jin and Mina, clinging together in white-faced silence. Miles wasn't sure whether to read their postures as fear, or anger, though at least they weren't weeping. In either case, Vorlynkin was probably right—it wouldn't do to discuss the gruesome details of an autopsy in front of them just now, even if the subject wasn't their mother after all. Children, as Miles had reason to know, ranged naturally from deeply sensitive to remarkably bloody-minded; sometimes, confusingly, the same child at different times. Was dealing with women practice for dealing with children? It was likely just as well he didn't have time to follow up that thought. With a sweep of his arms, Miles shepherded Vorlynkin and his charges back out into the corridor.

  "I'm so sorry about all this," Miles repeated inanely. "I promise you"—damn, he really needed to cull that phrase from his vocabulary—"I'm still going to look for your mommy. The problem has just suddenly become a lot more interesting. Er, difficult. It's just become a bit more difficult. I need more data, d—" Need more data, dammit, was an old mantra of his, almost comforting in its familiarity. Some setbacks were simply setbacks. Others were opportunities breaking down the door in disguise. He was reasoning ahead of his data—remember, data?—to imagine this was the second sort. Well, that was what experience could grant one—a high degree of certainty while making one's mistakes . . . ​

  Mina said, "But what's going to happen to us, now?"

  Jin added anxiously, "You're not going to make us go back to Aunt Lorna and Uncle Hikaru, are you?"

  "No. Or at least, not yet. Consul Vorlynkin will take you back to the consulate for the moment, until we get somewhere with all this, or . . ."

  "Or?" Vorlynkin repeated, as Miles trailed off.

  "We'll get somewhere." I just don'
t know where. "I'll stay here for the clean-up, then join you all there later. When you get back, Vorlynkin, put Lieutenant Johannes on a preliminary data sweep-search for me. I want to try to find that Dr. Leiber, the one who was associated with Lisa Sato's group here in Northbridge eighteen months ago." Not much of a clue, but he had to go with what little was in hand. Miles wondered just how common that surname was on Kibou. Well, he'd find out shortly.

  Vorlynkin nodded, and herded the kids off. Jin looked around as if regretting his lost refuge. Mina reached up and took the consul's hand, which made him twitch a little, possibly with guilt, but he manfully endured. This was clearly distressing for the children. Hell, it's distressing for me.

  Roic, sleep-rumpled, stuck his head out the door of the improvised bunk room and squinted as the trio vanished around the corner. "I heard voices. What's going on?"

  Miles brought him up to date. His expression, when he learned that they'd just deftly snatched the wrong body, was all that Miles had pictured. Of, course, you had to have been around Roic for a while to read all the nuances of bland his face and posture could convey. Was there some sort of secret school for armsmen to learn this, or was it all apprenticeship? Armsman-commander Pym was a master, but Roic was catching up.

  "Y'know," said Roic, as Pym would not have, because Pym would have had an exact bland to cover it, "if you'd quit while you were winning, right after Wing, we'd be on our way home right now."

  "Well, I can't quit now," said Miles tartly.

  "I can see that, m'lord." With a sigh, Roic followed him back into the lab.

  Raven had tidied up and was getting ready for his next task. Medtech Tanaka was laying out an array of rather disturbing instruments on a tray next to the cryorevival table. She looked up at their entry and asked, "Will we still get our free cryorevivals, then?"

  "Yes, of course," said Miles automatically. "Rent, after all." He was surprised she still trusted them for the task, but was vaguely heartened that she evidently agreed with Raven's analysis. He did not add, And we might be back; he was growing more cautious. Belatedly.

  Raven tapped his fingers on the table and looked over the instruments. "Do you want me to send any samples out to a commercial lab for analysis, or try to set up something here?"

  "Which is faster, and which is better?"

  "If I wanted to do a good job here in-house, I'd need to bring some of my team from Escobar. This would likely take more time than sending samples out. Either risks drawing attention. Results ought to be the same."

  "Hm. My instinct is to keep this close till we know what we're dealing with. I'd say, go as far as you can on your own, and then we'll take stock. My working hypothesis is that this was a deliberate substitution, sometime in the past eighteen months. If we knew who this woman was, where she came from, it might tell us something about who could have put her in Lisa Sato's place." Or not. "Makes a difference if she was just swapped out, or if she was actually frozen in place of Sato from the get-go, in which case . . ."

  Raven frowned. "You think Jin and Mina's mother might still be alive out there? In that case, why didn't she let her poor kids know?"

  "Depends entirely on how dangerous that knowledge might have been."

  Raven's frown deepened.

  "Well, I can tell you one thing straight off," said Medtech Tanaka, bending to retrieve a scrap of plastic caul from the waste bin and holding it up to the light. "This woman here wasn't frozen in place of the one you're looking for, not in the past eighteen months at least. This is an older style of wrapping."

  Three heads turned abruptly toward her. "How old?" said Miles. "And how do you know?"

  Her wrinkled eyelids narrowed. "Oh, heavens. I haven't seen this brand with the hexagonal netting inside since my student days. At least thirty years old, maybe fifty?"

  Miles groaned. "So this woman could have come from any time in the last two hundred and fifty years?"

  "No, because there were other styles and brands before then. And after. This type was only on the market for about three decades."

  "Thank you, Medtech Tanaka," said Miles. "That's a start."

  His mystery, it seemed, had just split into two. Mystery mitosis. It seemed a retrograde sort of progress.

  Raven lifted his first instrument and bent to his patient-turned-subject.

  It was very quiet in the lift van for the first part of the trip back to the consulate. Jin's throat was choked with disappointment. Mina, strapped in the middle of the next seat to the rear, was pale and withdrawn. Vorlynkin negotiated traffic by hand till they were well away from Suze-san's, then linked to the municipal control grid and leaned back with a sigh.

  He hitched around sideways to regard Jin and Mina both. "I'm really sorry about all this mix-up."

  "It wasn't your fault," Jin conceded.

  Vorlynkin opened his mouth to say something, evidently thought better of it, and substituted simply, "Thank you." After a moment he added, "Although if you two had been my daughter, I'd have been furious to have you dragged into something like this."

  Before Jin could say, But I thought we dragged you in, Mina piped up eagerly, "You have a daughter? How old is she? Can she play with us?"

  Vorlynkin grimaced. "Annah's six, so she probably would like to play with you, but I'm afraid not. She's on Escobar. With her mother."

  "Are they coming back soon?" asked Mina.

  "No." Vorlynkin hesitated. "We're divorced."

  Both Jin and Mina flinched a little at the scary word.

  "Why are you divorced?" asked Mina. If they'd been sitting together, Jin could have kicked her in the ankle to shut her up, but unfortunately she was out of reach.

  Vorlynkin shrugged. "It wasn't anyone's fault, really. She was an Escobaran. I met her when I was stationed at the embassy there as a junior secretary. When we first married, I thought it was understood that she would follow where my career took me. But by the time I was offered the promotion and the transfer to the Barrayaran embassy on Pol, Annah had come along. And my wife changed her mind. With a baby to look out for, she didn't want to leave the security of her family and her homeworld. Or she didn't trust me enough. Or something."

  After a silence, which Jin endured in faint embarrassment and Mina, apparently, in deep fascination, Vorlynkin added, "My ex-wife remarried recently. Another Escobaran. She wrote me that her new husband wants to adopt Annah. I don't know. It might be better for her than a father she sees for maybe three days every three years. It's hard to decide. To let go." He had been talking to his lap but, unexpectedly, he raised his shrewd blue glance to Jin and Mina. "What do you think?"

  Mina blinked, and blurted, "I'd want my real daddy."

  Vorlynkin didn't look terribly cheered by this reply. Jin said more cautiously, "It depends, I guess. If he's a nice guy or not."

  "I assume so. I haven't met him yet. I suppose I ought to take some time and go do that, before signing off. Maybe visiting again would just confuse Annah. Surely she can't remember much about me."

  "Don't you send her messages and stuff?" asked Mina, frowning.

  "Sometimes."

  Jin said slowly, "Couldn't you have chosen to stay with your wife back then? Instead of going to Pol?" Wherever that was. Pretty far from Escobar, it sounded like. "Being a diplomat isn't like being a soldier, is it? Aren't you allowed to quit?"

  Vorlynkin gave Jin an ironic salute, just a finger-touch to his forehead, and Jin felt even more uncomfortable. Maybe he shouldn't have pointed that out?

  "Yes, I could have made that choice. Then. I couldn't go back now, of course. That chance has gone beyond recall."

  Mina's frown deepened to a scowl. "It sounds like you already picked."

  "My younger self did, yes. I have to wonder about him, some days . . ." The autopilot beeped as they approached the consulate, and somewhat to Jin's relief Vorlynkin turned away to re-take the controls.

  Back in the consulate kitchen, Vorlynkin fixed them all a snack, then went off to the officelike front r
oom to see about something his clerk wanted. Mina snitched Lucky and went upstairs. Jin went outside to check on all his creatures. By the time he arrived in the bedroom he shared with his sister, she was curled up on her bed around the cat, possessively. Lucky endured being clutched like a stuffed toy without protest beyond a lazy tail-twitch or two.

  Jin was much too old to take a nap in the daytime, but his bed did look awfully inviting. He supposed if he tried to take Lucky away from Mina, she'd just set up a screech. Maybe wait till she fell asleep? Her face was stiff and blotchy, her eyes red, as if she'd been crying.

  As he sat on his bed and plotted his recapture of the cat, Mina sniffed and said, "They lied."

  "Grownups always lie." Jin brooded. "Mom lied. She always said everything was going to be all right, and it wasn't."

  "Huh." Mina curled tighter, face scrunching, and sniffed again. In a little while, both face and grip relaxed, and Jin bent over and fished Lucky back, careful not to wake Mina. He stroked the cat till she purred in concession to the trade, then went to curl up with her on his own bed. It was a nice bed, nicer than anything he'd had at Suze-san's, but he still wished he was back there. Maybe grouchy old Yani had been right after all to want to leave Miles-san in the street . . . ​

  He was wakened by Roic calling his name, big hand gently shaking his shoulder. Mina was already sitting up and rubbing the creases from her pillow out of her face. Lucky had gone off somewhere. The light on the carpet had shifted around. Jin glanced at the clock and realized that a couple of hours had slipped away.

  "Sorry to wake you," said Roic. "M'lord wants you to take a look at something on the comconsole in the tight-room."

  Roic waited patiently while both children visited the bathroom, making sure they'd washed their hands before following him downstairs. Now that he was getting used to the big man, Jin kind of liked Roic. For Miles-san, it must be like owning your own private grownup, following you around and doing stuff for you. Except you got to tell him what to do, instead of the other way around. Jin wished he owned a Roic.