She illustrated her talk with a holovid of the actual offending chromosomes, and a computer-generated vid of exactly how the retrovirus would deliver the splice that would work to supplement their deficiencies. Nikki did not ask as many questions as Ekaterin had hoped he would—was he intimidated, weary, bored?
"I believe our gene techs can have the retrovirus personalized for Nikki in about a week," the doctor concluded. "I'm going to have you return for the injection then, Nikki. Plan to stay overnight in Solstice for a recheck the following day, Madame Vorsoisson, and if possible, visit us again just before you leave Komarr. Nikki will need reexamined monthly thereafter for three months, which you can have done at a clinic I will recommend to you in Vorbarr Sultana. We'll give you a disk with all the records, and they should be able to pick it up from there. After that, assuming all goes well, a yearly checkup should suffice."
"That's all?" said Ekaterin, weak with relief.
"That's all."
"There was no damage yet? We are in time?"
"No, he's fine. It's hard to project, with Vorzohn's Dystrophy, but I would guess in his case the onset of detectable gross cellular damage would have begun to appear in his late teens or early twenties. You are in good time."
Ekaterin held Nikki's hand hard as they exited, her steps firm, to keep her feet from dancing. With an, "Aw, Mama," Nikki extracted himself, and walked with independent dignity beside her. Vorkosigan, his hands shoved deep in his gray trouser pockets, followed smiling.
Nikki fell asleep in the shuttle, with his head pillowed on Ekaterin's lap. She watched him fondly, and stroked his hair, lightly so as not to wake him.
Vorkosigan, sitting across from them with his reader on his knees again, watched her in turn, and murmured, "Is it well?"
"It's well," she said softly. "But it feels so strange . . . Nikki's illness has been the whole focus of my life for so long. I gradually pared away all the other impossibilities to concentrate wholly on this, the one main thing. It feels as though I had been steeling myself to batter down some unscaleable wall. And then, when I finally took a deep breath and put my head down and charged, it just . . . fell, all in a heap, like that. And now I'm stumbling around in the dust and the bricks, blinking. I feel very unbalanced. Where am I now? Who am I now?"
"Oh, you'll find your center. You can't have mislaid it totally, even if you have been revolving around other people. Give yourself time."
"I thought my center was to be Vor, like the women before me." She glanced across at him, feeling inarticulate and urgent. "When I chose Tien . . . you have to understand, it was my choice. My marriage was arranged, offered, but it wasn't forced. I wanted it, wanted to have children, form a family, carry on the pattern. Make my place in this, I don't know, generational pageant."
"I am the eleventh of my name. I know about the Vor pageant."
"Yes," she said gratefully. "It wasn't that I didn't chose what I wanted, or gave away my center, or any of those things. But somehow, I didn't end up with the beautiful Vor pattern-weave I was trying to make. I ended up with this . . . tangle of strings." Her fingers wriggled in air, miming chaos.
His lips quirked, introspective and ironic. "I know tangles, too."
"But do you know—well, of course you would, but . . . The business with the brick wall. Failure, failure was grown familiar to me. Comfortable, almost, when I stopped struggling against it. I did not know achievement was so devastating."
"Huh." He was leaning back, now, his reader forgotten on his lap, regarding her with his entire attention. "Yes . . . vertigo at apogee, eh? And the reward for a job well done is another job, and what have you done for us lately, and is that all, Lieutenant Vorkosigan, and . . . yes. Achievement is devastating, or at least disorienting, and they don't warn you in advance. It's the sudden change of momentum and direction, I think."
She blinked. "How very strange. I expected you to tell me I was being foolish."
"Deny your perfectly correct perception? Why should you expect that?"
"Habit . . . I suppose."
"Mm. You can learn to enjoy the sensation of winning, you know, once you get over the initial queasiness. It's an acquired taste."
"How long did it take you to acquire it?"
He smiled slowly. "Once."
"That's not a taste, that's an addiction."
"It's one that would look well on you."
His eyes were uncomfortably bright. Challenging? She smiled in confusion, and stared out the port at the darkening Komarran sky as the shuttle began its descent. He rubbed his lips, not quite erasing their odd quirk, and returned his attention to his reports.
Uncle Vorthys met them at the apartment door, data disks in his hand and a vague distracted smile on his face. He gave Ekaterin's hand a warm grasp, and fended off Nikki's immediate attempt to appropriate him and carry him off to hear about the wonders of the ImpSec shuttle.
"Just a moment, Nikki. We shall go to the kitchen for dessert, and you can tell me all about it. Ekaterin. I've heard from the Professora. She's taken ship on Barrayar, and will be here in three days time. I didn't like to tell you till she was sure she could get away."
"Oh!" Ekaterin almost jumped with delight, mitigated immediately by concern. "Oh, no, sir, do you meant to say you are dragging that poor woman through five wormhole jumps from Barrayar to Komarr for me? She gets so jumpsick!"
"It was Lord Vorkosigan's idea, actually," said Uncle Vorthys.
Vorkosigan put on a bright, trapped smile at this, and shrugged warily.
"Although I had fully intended to drag her here for my own sake," Uncle Vorthys continued, "at the end of the term. This just advanced the timetable. She does like Komarr, once she gets here and has a day to recover from the jump-lag. I thought you would like it."
"You shouldn't have—but oh, I do like it, very much."
Vorkosigan straightened at these words, and his smile relaxed into a self-satisfaction that amused her vastly. Ekaterin wasn't sure if she was reading the subtleties of his expression better now, or if he was concealing them less.
"If I get you a ticket, would you go out to meet her at the jump-point station?" Uncle Vorthys added. "I'm afraid I won't have time, and she hates traveling alone. You could see her a day earlier, and have some time together on the last leg downside."
"Certainly, sir!" Ekaterin almost shivered with the realization of how much she longed to see her aunt. She'd been living in Tien's orbit so long, she'd become used to her isolation as the norm. Ekaterin counted the Professora as one of the few nondisheartening relatives she possessed. A friend—an ally! The Komarran women Ekaterin had met were nice enough, but there was so much they didn't understand. . . . Aunt Vorthys might make acerbic comments, but she understood deeply.
"Yes, yes, Nikki—" said Uncle Vorthys. "Miles. When you are ready, I'll meet you in my room, and we can go over today's progress on the comconsole."
"Have we some? Is it interesting?"
Uncle Vorthys made a balancing gesture with his free hand. "I'd be interested in what pattern you see emerging, if any."
"At your convenience. Knock on my door when you're ready." Vorkosigan smiled at Nikki, gave the Professor a vague salutelike gesture, and withdrew.
Nikki, impatiently waiting his turn, now dragged his great-uncle off to the kitchen as promised; Ekaterin could only be grateful that of his day's events the ImpSec shuttle seemed to loom so much larger than the medical examinations. She followed, satisfied.
Chapter Sixteen
Early the next morning Miles, in shirt and trousers but bare foot, stepped into the hallway with his toiletries case in hand. He must remind Tuomonen to return his medical kit. The ImpSec techs couldn't have found any interesting explosive devices in it, or he would have been informed by now. His bleary meditations suffered a check when he discovered Ekaterin, still dressed in a robe and with her hair in unusual but fetching disarray, leaning against the hall bathroom door.
"Nikki," she hissed. "Open this door
at once! You can't hide all day in there."
A muffled young voice returned mulishly, "Yes, I can."
Lips tight, she tapped again, urgently but quietly, then jumped a little as she saw Miles, and clutched the neck of her robe.
"Oh. Lord Vorkosigan."
"Good morning, Madame Vorsoisson," he said civilly. "Ah . . . trouble?"
She nodded ruefully. "I thought yesterday went awfully easily. Nikki tried to insist he was too sick to go to school today, because of his Vorzohn's Dystrophy. I explained again it didn't work that way, but he got more and more stubborn. He begged to stay home. No, not just stubborn. Scared, I think. This isn't the usual malingering." She jerked her head toward the locked door. "I tried getting firm. It was not the right tactic. Now he's panicked."
Miles bent to glance at the lock, which was an ordinary mechanical one. Too bad it wasn't a palm lock; he knew some tricks with those. This one didn't even have screws, but some kind of rivets. It was going to take a pry bar. Or subterfuge . . .
"Nikki," called Ekaterin hopefully. "Lord Vorkosigan is out here. He needs to get washed and dressed, so he can go to work."
Silence.
"I'm torn," murmured Ekaterin in lower tones. "We're leaving in a few weeks. A few missed lessons wouldn't matter, but . . . that's not the point."
"I went to a private Vor school rather like his, when I was his age," Miles murmured back. "I know what he's afraid of. But I think your instincts are correct." He frowned thoughtfully, then set his case down and rummaged for his tube of depilatory cream, which he smeared liberally over his night's bristles. "Nikki?" he called more loudly. "Can I come in? I'm all over depilatory cream, and if I don't wash it off, it'll start eating through my skin."
"Won't he realize you can wash in the kitchen?" Ekaterin whispered.
"Maybe. But he's only nine, I'm gambling depilation is still a bit of a mystery."
After a moment Nikki's voice came, "You can come in. But I'm not coming out. And I'm locking it again."
"That's fair," Miles allowed.
Some rustling near the door. "Should I grab him when it opens?" Ekaterin asked, very dubiously.
"Nope. It would violate our tacit agreement. I'll go in, then we'll see what happens. At least you'll have a spy inside the gate, at that point."
"It seems wrong to use you so."
"Mm, but kids only dare defy those whom they really trust. The fact that I'm still mostly a stranger to him gives me an advantage, which I invite you to use."
"True enough. Well . . . all right."
The door opened a cautious crack. Miles waited. It opened a little wider. He sighed, turned sideways, and slipped through. Nikki shut it again immediately,and snapped the lock.
The boy was dressed for school, in his braided uniform of sober gray and maroon, but minus his shoes. The shoes presumably had been the sticking point, with their implicit commitment to going out. Nikki backed up and seated himself on the edge of the tub; Miles laid out his toiletries kit on the counter and rolled up his sleeves, trying to think fast before coffee. Or think at all. His eloquence had inspired his soldiers to face death, in the past, or so he dimly recalled. Now let's try something really hard. Playing for time and inspiration, he methodically brushed his teeth, by which time the depilatory had finished working. He washed off the resultant goo, rubbed his face dry with the towel, flung it over his shoulder, and leaned with his back against the door, slowly unrolling his sleeves and fastening his cuffs.
"So, Nikki," he said at last. "What's the trouble with going to school this morning?"
Moisture smeared around the boy's defiant eyes glistened when it caught the light. "I'm sick. I've got Vorzohn's thing."
"It's not catching. You can't give it to anybody." Except for the way you got it. From the blank look on Nikki's face, the idea of being dangerous to anyone else had never crossed his mind. Ah, the self-centeredness of childhood. Miles hesitated, wondering how to approach the real problem. For almost the first time, he wondered how certain aspects of his childhood had looked from his parents' point of view. The doubled vision was dizzying. How the devil did I wind up on the enemy side?
"You know," Miles essayed, "no one will even know you have it unless you tell them. It's not like they can smell it on you, eh?"
The mulish look redoubled. "That's what Mama said."
Scratch that trial balloon. There was an inherent problem in suggesting secrecy anyway, as Tien's life demonstrated. Suppressing a passing desire to strangle the boy for inflicting yet more distress on Ekaterin just now, Miles asked, "Have you had breakfast yet?"
"Yeah."
Starving him out or bribing him with food would be too slow, then. "Well . . . deal. I won't tell you you're blowing it all out of proportion if you won't tell me I don't understand."
Nikki glanced up from his seat, his attention arrested. Yeah. See me, kid. Miles considered, and immediately discarded, any argument that smacked of threat, that attempted to chivvy Nikki in the right direction by upping the pressure. For instance, the one that started out, How do you ever expect to have the courage to jump through wormholes if you haven't the courage to face this? Nikki was up against the wall now, driven into this untenable retreat. Upping the pressure would just squash him. The trick was to lower the wall. "I went to a private school a bit like yours. I can't remember a time I wasn't dealing with being a mutie Vor, in my classmates eyes. By the time I was your age, I had a dozen strategies. Some of them were pretty counterproductive, I admit."
He'd gone through medical hell in his childhood with a stiff lip. But a few still-remembered playfellows, upon discovering that his brittle bones made physical harassment too dangerous—to themselves, when they found they couldn't conceal the evidence—had learned to reduce him to humiliated tears with words alone. Sergeant Bothari, delivering Miles daily to this academic purgatory, quickly made a routine of an expert shakedown, relieving him of weapons ranging from kitchen knives to a military stunner stolen from Captain Koudelka's holster. After that, Miles had gone to war in a subtler fashion. It had taken almost two years to teach certain of his classmates to leave him alone. Learning all round. Upon reflection, offering his own age nine-to-twelve solutions might not be the best idea . . . in fact, letting Nikki even find out what some of them had been could be a supremely bad idea. "But that was twenty years ago, on Barrayar. Times have changed. What exactly do you think your friends here will do to you?"
Nikki shrugged. "Dunno."
"Well, give me some guesses. You can't plan a strategy without good intelligence."
Nikki shrugged again. After a time he added, "It's not what they'll do. It what they'll think."
Miles blew out his breath. "That's . . . a little tenuous for me to work with, y'know. What you fear someone will think, in the future. I usually have to use fast-penta to find out what people really think. And even fast-penta won't tell me what they're going to think."
Nikki hunched. Miles regretfully gave up the notion of telling him that if he kept making those turtle-backed gestures, his spine would freeze like that, just as Miles's had. There was a faint, awful possibility the boy might believe him.
"What we need," Miles sighed, "is an ImpSec agent. Someone to scout unknown territory, not knowing what the strangers they meet are going to do or think. Listen carefully, watch and remember, report back. And they have to do it over and over, in new places all the time. It's bloody daunting, the first time."
Nikki looked up. "How do you know? You said you were a courier."
Damn, the kid was sharp. "I'm, um, not supposed to talk about it. You're not cleared. But do you think your school is as dangerous as, say, Jackson's Whole, or Eta Ceta? Just to pick a couple of, ah, random examples."
Nikki stared in silent and, Miles feared, justified scorn of this adult floundering.
"Tell you something I did learn, though."
Nikki was drawn, or at least, looked up.
Go with it; he won't give you more. "It's not as dauntin
g the second time. I wished later I could have started with the second time. But the only way to get to the second time is to do the first time. Seems paradoxical, that the fastest way to get to easy is through hard. In any case, I can't spare you an ImpSec agent to check out your school for antimutant activity."
Nikki snorted warily, alive to the least hint of patronization.
Miles's grin twisted in bleak appreciation. "Besides, it would be overkill, don't you think?"
"Prob'ly." Grouchy hunching.
"The ideal ImpSec scout would be someone who could blend in, anyway. Someone who knew the territory like that back of his hand, and wouldn't make dangerous mistakes out of ignorance. Someone who could keep his own counsel and not let his assumptions get in the way of his observations. And not get into fights, because it would blow his cover. Very practical people, the successful Imperial agents I've known." He eyed Nikki meditatively. This was not going well. Try another. "The youngest subagent I ever employed was about ten. It wasn't on Barrayar, needless to say, but I don't think you're any less bright or competent than she was."
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