To Miles's temporary relief, they took him up, not down the lift tube. Not that they couldn't perfectly well kill him someplace other than the garage sublevel. Galeni, now, they might murder in the garage to avoid having to lug the body, but Miles's own dead weight, so to speak, would not present nearly the logistic load.
The room into which the two men now shoved him was some sort of study or private office, bright despite the polarized window. Library data files filled a transparent shelf on the wall; an ordinary comconsole desk occupied one corner. The comconsole vid was presently displaying a fish-eye view of Miles's cell. Galeni still lay stunned on the floor.
The older man who had seemed in charge of Miles's kidnapping the night before sat on a beige-padded chrome bench before the darkened window, examining a hypospray just taken from its case, which lay open beside him. So. Interrogation, not execution, was the plan. Or at any rate, interrogation before execution. Unless they simply contemplated poisoning him.
Miles tore his gaze from the glittering hypo as the man shifted, his head tilting to study Miles through narrowed blue eyes. A flick of his gaze checked the comconsole. It was a momentary accident of posture, a handgripping the edge of the bench, that snapped Miles's realization into place, for the man did not greatly resemble Captain Galeni except perhaps in the paleness of his skin. He appeared to be about sixty. Clipped graying hair, lined face, body thickening with age, clearly not that of an outdoorsman or athlete. He wore conservative Earther clothes a generation removed from the historical fashions of the parading teenagers that Miles had enjoyed in the shopping arcade. He might have been a businessman or a teacher, anything but a hairy terrorist.
Except for the murderous tension. In that, in the coil of the hands, flare of the nostril, iron of the mouth, stiffness of the neck, Ser Galen and Duv Galeni were as one.
Galen rose and stalked slowly around Miles with the air of a man studying a sculpture by an inferior artist. Miles stood very still, feeling smaller than usual in his sock feet, stubbled and grubby. He had come to the center at last, the secret source from which all his coiling troubles had been emanating these past weeks. And the center was this man, who orbited him staring back with hungry hate. Or perhaps he and Galen were both centers, like the twin foci of an ellipse, brought together and superimposed at last to create some diabolical perfect circle.
Miles felt very small and very brittle. Galen could very well begin by breaking Miles's arms with the same absent, nervous air that Elli Quinn bit her nails, just to release tension. Does he see me at all? Or am I an object, a symbol representing the enemy—will he murder me for the sake of sheer allegory?
"So," Ser Galen spoke. "This is the real thing at last. Not very impressive, to have seduced my son's loyalty. What can he see in you? Still, you represent Barrayar very well. The monster son of a monster father, Aral Vorkosigan's secret moral genotype made flesh for all to see. Perhaps there is some justice in the universe after all."
"Very poetic," choked Miles, "but biologically inaccurate, as you must know, having cloned me."
Galen smiled sourly. "I won't insist on it." He completed his circuit and faced Miles. "I suppose you couldn't help being born. But why have you never revolted from the monster? He made you what you are—" an expansive gesture of Galen's open hand summed up Miles's stunted and twisted frame. "What dictator's charisma does the man possess, that he's able to hypnotize not only his own son but everyone else's too?" The prone figure in the vid console seemed to pluck at Galen's eye. "Why do you follow him? Why does David? What corrupt kick can my son get out of crawling into a Barrayaran goon-uniform and marching behind Vorkosigan?" Galen's voice feigned light banter very badly; the undertones twisted with anguish.
Miles, glowering, clipped out, "For one thing, my father has never abandoned me in the presence of an enemy."
Galen's head jerked back, all pretense of banter extinguished. He turned abruptly away and went to take up the hypospray from the bench.
Miles silently cursed his own tongue. But for that stupid impulse to grab the last word, to return the cut, he might have kept the man talking, and learned something. Now the talking, and the learning, would all be going the other way.
The two guards took him by the elbows. The one on the left pushed up his shirt sleeve. Here it came. Galen pressed the hypospray against the vein on the inside of Miles's elbow, a hiss, a prickling bite. "What is it?" Miles had just time to ask. His voice sounded unfortunately weak and nervous in his own ears.
"Fast-penta, of course," replied Galen easily.
Miles was not surprised, though he cringed inwardly, knowing what was to come. He had studied fast-penta's pharmacology, effects, and proper use in the Security course at the Barrayaran Imperial Academy. It was the drug of choice for interrogation, not only for the Imperial Service but galaxy-wide. The near-perfect truth serum, irresistible, harmless to the subject even with repeated doses. Irresistible and harmless, that is, except to the unfortunate few who had either a natural or artificially-induced allergic reaction to it. Miles had never even been considered as a candidate for this last conditioning, his person being judged more valuable than any secret information he might contain. Other espionage agents were less lucky. Anaphylactic shock was an even less heroic death than the disintegration chamber usually reserved for convicted spies.
Despairing, Miles waited to go ga-ga. Admiral Naismith had sat in on more than one real fast-penta interrogation. The drug washed all reason out to sea on a flood of benign good feeling and charitable cheer. Like a cat on catnip, it was highly amusing to watch—in somebody else. In moments he would be mellow to the point of drooling idiocy.
Ugly, to think of the resolute Captain Galeni having been so shamefully reduced. Four times running, he'd said. No wonder he was twitchy.
Miles could feel his heart racing, as though he'd overdosed on caffeine. His vision seemed to sharpen to an almost painful focus. The edge lines of every object in the room glowed, the masses they enclosed palpable to his exacerbated senses. Galen, standing back by the pulsing window, was a live wiring diagram, electric and dangerous, loaded with deadly voltage awaiting some triggering discharge.
Mellow, this wasn't.
He had to be slipping into natural shock. Miles took his last breath. Would his interrogator ever be surprised. . . .
Rather to Miles's own surprise, he kept on panting. Not anaphylactic shock, then. Just another damned idiosyncratic drug reaction. He hoped the stuff wouldn't bring on those ghastly hallucinations like that bloody sedative he'd been given once by an unsuspecting surgeon. He wanted to scream. His eyes flashed white-edged to follow Galen's least motion.
One of the guards shoved a chair up behind him and sat him down. Miles fell into it gratefully, shivering uncontrollably. His thoughts seemed to explode in fragments and reform, like fireworks being run forward and then in reverse through a vid. Galen frowned down at him.
"Describe the security procedures for entry and exit from the Barrayaran embassy."
Surely they must have squeezed this basic information out of Captain Galeni already—it must merely be a question to check the effect of the fast-penta, " . . . of the fast-penta," Miles heard his own voice echoing his thoughts. Oh, hell. He'd hoped his odd reaction to the drug might have included the ability to resist spilling his mind out his mouth. "—what a repulsive image . . ." Head swaying, he stared down at the floor in front of his feet as if he might see a pile of bloody brains vomited there.
Ser Galen strode forward and yanked his head up by the hair, and repeated through his teeth, "Describe the security procedures for entry and exit from the Barrayaran embassy!"
"Sergeant Barth's in charge," Miles began impulsively. "Obnoxious bigot. No savoir faire at all, and a jock to boot—" Unable to stop himself Miles poured out not only codes, passwords, scanner perimeters, but also personnel schedules, his private opinions of each and every individual, and a scathing critique of the Security net's defects. One thought triggered another and then the next in an explosive chain like a string of firecrackers. He couldn't stop; he babbled.
Not only could he not stop himself, Galen couldn't stop him either. Prisoners on fast-penta tended to wander by free association from the topic unless kept on track by frequent cues from their interrogators. Miles found himself doing the same on fast-forward. Normal victims could be brought up short by a word, but only when Galen struck him hard and repeatedly across the face, shouting him down, did Miles halt, and sit panting.
Torture was not a part of fast-penta interrogation because the happily drugged subjects were impervious to it. For Miles the pain pulsed in and out, at one moment detached and distant, the next flooding his body and whiting out his mind like a burst of static. To his own horror, he began to cry. Then stopped with a sudden hiccup.
Galen stood staring at him in repelled fascination.
"It's not right," muttered one of the guards. "He shouldn't be like that. Is he beating the fast-penta, some kind of new conditioning?"
"He's not beating it, though," Galen pointed out. He glanced at his wrist chrono. "He's not withholding information. He's giving more. Too much more."
The comconsole began chiming insistently.
"I'll get it," volunteered Miles. "It's probably for me." He surged up out of his seat, his knees gave way, and he fell flat on his face on the carpet. It prickled against his bruised cheek. The two guards dragged him off the floor and propped him back up in the chair. The room jerked in a slow circle around him. Galen answered the comconsole.
"Reporting in." Miles's own crisp voice in its Barrayaran-accented incarnation rang from the vid.
The clone's face seemed not quite as familiar as the one Miles shaved daily in his mirror. "His hair's parted on the wrong side if he wants to be me," Miles observed to no one in particular. "No, it's not . . ." No one was listening, anyway. Miles considered angles of incidence and angles of reflection, his thoughts bouncing at the speed of light back and forth between the mirrored walls of his empty skull.
"How's it going?" Galen leaned anxiously across the comconsole.
"I nearly lost it all in the first five minutes last night. That big Dendarii sergeant-driver turned out to be the damned cousin." The clone's voice was low and tense. "Blind luck, I was able to carry off my first mistake as a joke. But they've got me rooming with the bastard. And he snores."
"Too true," Miles remarked, unasked. "For real entertainment, wait'll he starts making love in his sleep. Damn, I wish I had dreams like Ivan's. All I get are anxiety nightmares—playing polo naked against a lot of dead Cetagandans with Lieutenant Murka's severed head for the ball. It screamed every time I hit it toward the goal. Falling off and getting trampled . . ." Miles's mutter trailed off as they continued to ignore him.
"You're going to have to deal with all kinds of people who knew him, before this is done," said Galen roughly to the vid. "But if you can fool Vorpatril, you'll be able to carry it off anywhere—"
"You can fool all of the people some of the time," chirped Miles, "and some of the people all of the time, but you can fool Ivan anytime. He doesn't pay attention."
Galen glanced over at him in irritation. "The embassy is a perfect isolated test-microcosm," he went on to the vid, "before you go on to the larger arena of Barrayar itself. Vorpatril's presence makes it an ideal practice opportunity. If he tumbles to you, we can find some way to eliminate him."
"Mm." The clone seemed scarcely reassured. "Before we started, I thought you'd managed to stuff my head with everything it was possible to know about Miles Vorkosigan. Then at the last minute you find out he's been leading a double life all this time—what else have you missed?"
"Miles, we've been over that—"
Miles realized with a start that Galen was addressing the clone with his name. Had he been so thoroughly conditioned to his role that he had no name of his own? Strange . . .
"We knew there'd be gaps over which you'd have to improvise. But we'll never have a better opportunity than this chance visit of his to Earth has given us. Better than waiting another six months and trying to maneuver in on Barrayar. No. It's now or never." Galen took a calming breath. "So. You got through the night all right."
The clone snorted. "Yeah, if you don't count waking up being strangled by a damned animated fur coat."
"What? Oh, the live fur. Didn't he give it to his woman?"
"Evidently not. I nearly peed myself before I realized what it was. Woke up the cousin."
"Did he suspect anything?" Galen asked urgently.
"I passed it off as a nightmare. It seems Vorkosigan has them fairly often."
Miles nodded sagely. "That's what I told you. Severed heads . . . broken bones . . . mutilated relatives . . . unusual alterations to important parts of my body . . ." The drug seemed to be imparting some odd memory effects, part of what made fast-penta so effective for interrogation, no doubt. His recent dreams were coming back to him far more clearly than he'd ever consciously remembered them. All in all, he was glad he usually tended to forget them.
"Did Vorpatril say anything about it in the morning?" asked Galen.
"No. I'm not talking much."
"That's out of character," Miles observed helpfully.
"I'm pretending to have a mild episode of one of those depressions in his psych report—who is that, anyway?" The clone craned his neck.
"Vorkosigan himself. We've got him on fast-penta."
"Ah, good. I've been getting calls all morning over a secured comm link from his mercenaries, asking for orders."
"We agreed you'd avoid the mercenaries."
"Fine, tell them."
"How soon can you get orders cut getting you out of the embassy and back to Barrayar?"
"Not soon enough to avoid the Dendarii completely. I broached it to the ambassador, but it appears Vorkosigan's in charge of the search for Captain Galeni. He seemed surprised I'd want to leave, so I backed off for now. Has the captain changed his mind about cooperating yet? If not, you'll have to generate my return-home orders from out there and slip them in with the courier or something."
Galen hesitated visibly. "I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, keep trying."
Doesn't Galen know we know the courier's compromised? Miles thought in a flash of near-normal clarity. He managed to keep the vocalization to a low mumble.
"Right. Well, you promised me you'd keep him alive for questions until I left, so here's one. Who is Lieutenant Bone, and what is she supposed to do about the surplusage from the Triumph? She didn't say what it was a surplus of."
One of the guards prodded Miles. "Answer the question."
Miles struggled for clarity of thought and expression. "She's my fleet accountant. I suppose she should dump it into her investment account and play with it as usual. It's a surplus of money," he felt compelled to explain, then cackled bitterly. "Temporary, I'm sure."
"Will that do?" asked Galen.
"I think so. I told her she was an experienced officer and to use her discretion, and she seemed to go off satisfied, but I sure wondered what I'd just ordered her to do. All right, next. Who is Rosalie Crew, and why is she suing Admiral Naismith for half a million GSA federal credits?"
"Who?" gaped Miles in genuine astonishment as the guard prodded him again. "What?" Miles was confusedly unable to convert half a million GSA credits to Barrayaran Imperial marks in his drug-scrambled head with any precision beyond "lots and lots and lots"; for a moment the association of the name remained blocked, then clicked in. "Ye gods, it's that poor clerk from the wine shop. I saved her from burning up. Why sue me? Why not sue Danio, he burned down her store—of course, he's broke . . ."
"But what do I do about it?" asked the clone.
"You wanted to be me," said Miles in a surly voice, "you figure it out." His mental processes clicked on anyway. "Slap her with a countersuit for medical damages. I think I threw my back out, lifting her. It still hurts."
Galen overrode this. "Ignore it," he instructed. "You'll be out of there before anything can come of it."
"All right," said the Miles-clone doubtfully.
"And leave the Dendarii holding the bag?" said Miles angrily. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying desperately to think in the wavering room. "But of course, you don't care anything about the Dendarii, do you? You must care! They put their lives on the line for you—me—it's wrong—you'll betray them, casually, without even thinking about it, you scarcely know what they are—"
"Quite," sighed the clone, "and speaking of what they are, just what is his relationship with this Commander Quinn, anyway? Did you finally decide he was screwing her, or not?"
"We're just good friends," caroled Miles, and laughed hysterically. He lunged for the comconsole—the guards grabbed for him and missed—and climbing across the desk snarled into the vid, "Stay away from her, you little shit! She's mine, you hear, mine, mine, all mine—Quinn, Quinn, beautiful Quinn, Quinn of the evening, beautiful Quinn," he sang off-key as the guards dragged him back. Blows ran him down into silence.
"I thought you had him on fast-penta," said the clone to Galen.
"We do."
"It doesn't sound like fast-penta!"
"Yes. There's something wrong. Yet he's not supposed to have been conditioned. . . . I'm beginning to seriously doubt the utility of keeping him alive any longer as a data bank if we can't trust his answers."
"That's just great." The clone scowled. He glanced over his shoulder. "I've got to go. I'll report again tonight. If I'm still alive by then." He vanished with an irritated bleep.
Galen turned back to Miles with a list of questions, about Barrayaran Imperial Headquarters, about Emperor Gregor, about Miles's usual activities when quartered in Barrayar's capital city of Vorbarr Sultana, and question after question about the Dendarii Mercenaries. Miles, writhing, answered and answered and answered, unable to stop his own rapid gabble. But partway through he hit on a line of poetry, and ended by reciting the whole sonnet. Galen's slaps could not derail him; the strings of association were too strong to break into. After that he managed to jump off the interrogation repeatedly. Works with strong meter and rhyme worked best, bad narrative verse, obscene Dendarii drinking songs, anything a chance word or phrase from his interrogators could trigger. His memory seemed phenomenal. Galen's face was darkening with frustration.
"At this rate we'll be here till next winter," said one of the guards in disgust.
Miles's bleeding lips peeled back in a maniacal grin. " 'Now is the winter of our discontent,' " he cried, " 'made glorious summer by this sun of York—' "
It had been years since he'd memorized the ancient play, but the vivid iambic pentameter carried him along relentlessly. Short of beating him into unconsciousness, there seemed nothing Galen could do to turn him off. Miles was not even to the end of Act I when the two guards dragged him back down the lift tube and threw him roughly back into his prison room.
Once there, his rapid-firing neurons drove him from wall to wall, pacing and reciting, jumping up and down off the bench at appropriate moments, doing all the women's parts in a high falsetto. He got all the way through to the last Amen! before he collapsed on the floor and lay gasping.
Captain Galeni, who had been scrunched into the corner on his bench with his arms wrapped protectively around his ears for the last hour, lifted his head cautiously from their circle. "Are you quite finished?" he said mildly.
Miles rolled over on his back and stared blankly up at the light. "Three cheers for literacy . . . I feel sick."
"I'm not surprised." Galeni looked pale and ill himself, still shaky from the aftereffects of the stun. "What was that?"
"The play, or the drug?"
"I recognized the play, thank you. What drug?"
"Fast-penta."
"You're joking."
"Not joking. I have several weird drug reactions. There's a whole chemical class of sedatives I can't touch. Apparently this is related."
"What a piece of good fortune!"
I seriously doubt the utility of keeping him alive. . . . "I don't think so," Miles said distantly. He lurched to his feet, ricocheted into the bathroom, threw up, and passed out.
He awoke with the unblinking glare of the overhead light needling his eyes, and flung an arm over his face to shut it out. Someone—Galeni?—had put him back on his bench. Galeni was asleep now across the room, breathing heavily. A meal, cold and congealed, sat on a plate at the end of Miles's bench. It must be deep night. Miles contemplated the food queasily, then put it down out of sight under his bench. Time stretched inexorably as he tossed, turned, sat up, lay down, aching and nauseated, escape even into sleep receding out of reach.
The next morning after breakfast they came and took not Miles but Galeni. The captain left with a look of grim distaste in his eyes. Sounds of a violent altercation came from the hallway, Galeni trying to get himself stunned, a draconian but surely effective way of avoiding interrogation. He did not succeed. Their captors returned him, giggling vacuously, after a marathon number of hours.
He lay limply on his bench giving vent to an occasional snicker for what might have been another hour before slipping into torpid sleep. Miles gallantly resisted taking advantage of the residual effects of the drug to get in a few questions of his own. Alas, fast-penta subjects remembered their experiences. Miles was fairly certain by now that one of Galeni's personal triggers was in the key word betrayal.
Galeni returned to a thick but cold consciousness at last, looking ill. Fast-penta hangover was a remarkably unpleasant experience; in that, Miles's response to the drug had not been at all idiosyncratic.
Miles winced in sympathy as Galeni made his own trip to the washroom.
Galeni returned to sit heavily on his bench. His eye fell on his cold dinner plate; he prodded it dubiously with an experimental forefinger. "You want this?" he asked Miles.
"No, thanks."
"Mm." Galeni shoved the plate out of sight under his bench and sat back rather nervelessly.
"What were they after," Miles jerked his head doorward, "in your interrogation?"
"Personal history, mostly, this time." Galeni contemplated his socks, which were getting stiff with grime; but Miles was not sure Galeni was seeing what he was looking at. "He seems to have this strange difficulty grasping that I actually mean what I say. He had apparently genuinely convinced himself that he had only to reveal himself, to whistle, to bring me to his heel as I had run when I was fourteen. As if the weight of my entire adult life counted for nothing. As if I'd put on this uniform for a joke, or out of despair or confusion—anything but a reasoned and principled decision."
No need to ask who "he" was. Miles grinned sourly. "What, it wasn't for the spiffy boots?"
"I'm just dazzled by the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism," Galeni informed him blandly.
"Is that how he phrased it? Anyway, it's feudalism, not fascism, apart maybe from some of the late Emperor Ezar Vorbarra's experiments in centralization. The glittering tinsel of neo-feudalism I will grant you."
"I am thoroughly familiar with the principles of Barrayaran government, thank you," remarked Dr. Galeni.
"Such as they are," muttered Miles. "It was all arrived at by improvisation, y'know."
"Yes, I do. Glad to know you aren't as historically illiterate as the average young officer coming up these days."
"So . . ." Miles said, "if it wasn't for the gold braid and the shiny boots, why are you with us?"
"Oh, of course," Galeni rolled his eyes toward the light fixture, "I get a sadistic psychosexual kick out of being a bully, goon, and thug. It's a power trip."
"Hi," Miles waved from across the room, "talk to me, not him, huh? He had his turn."
"Mm." Galeni crossed his arms glumly. "In a sense, it's true, I suppose. I am on a power trip. Or I was."
"For what it's worth, that's not a secret to the Barrayaran high command."
"Nor to any Barrayaran, though people from outside your society seem to miss it regularly. How do they imagine such an apparently caste-rigid society has survived the incredible stresses of the century since the end of the Time of Isolation without exploding? In a way, the Imperial Service has performed something of the same social function as the medieval church once did here on Earth, as a safety valve. Through it, anyone of talent can launder his caste origins. Twenty years of Imperial service, and they step out for all practical purposes an honorary Vor. The names may not have changed since Dorca Vorbarra's day, when the Vor were a closed caste of self-serving horse goons—"
Miles grinned at this description of his great-grandfather's generation.
"—but the substance has altered out of all recognition. And yet through it all the Vor have managed, however desperately, to hang on to certain vital principles of service and sacrifice. To the knowledge that it is possible for a man who would not stop and stoop to take, to yet run down the street for a chance to give. . . ." He stopped short and cleared histhroat, flushing. "My Ph.D. thesis, y'know. 'The Barrayaran Imperial Service, A Century of Change.'"
"I see."
"I wanted to serve Komarr—"
"As your father before you," Miles finished. Galeni glanced up sharply, suspecting sarcasm, but found, Miles trusted, only sympathetic irony in his eyes.
Galeni's hand opened in a brief gesture of agreement and understanding. "Yes. And no. None of the cadets who entered the service when I did have yet seen a shooting war. I saw one from street level—"
"I had suspected you were more intimately acquainted with the Komarr Revolt than the Security reports seemed to believe," remarked Miles.
"As a drafted apprentice to my father," Galeni confirmed. "Some night forays, other missions of sabotage—I was small for my age. There are places a child, idly playing, can pass where an adult would be stopped. Before my fourteenth birthday I had helped kill men. . . . I have no illusions about the glorious Imperial troops during the Komarr Revolt. I saw men wearing this uniform," he waved a hand down the piped length of his green trousers, "do shameful things. In anger or fear, in frustration or desperation, sometimes just in idle viciousness. But I could not see that it made any practical difference to the corpses, ordinary people caught in the cross fire, whether they were burned down by evil invader plasma fire, or blown to bits by good patriotic gravitic implosions. Freedom? We can scarcely pretend that Komarr was a democracy even before the Barrayarans came. My father cried that Barrayar had destroyed Komarr, but when I looked around, Komarr was still there."
"You can't tax a wasteland," Miles murmured.
"I saw a little girl once—" He stopped, bit his lip, plunged on. "What makes a practical difference is that there not be war. I mean—I meant—to make that practical difference. A Service career, an honorable retirement, leverage to a ministerial appointment—then up through the ranks on the civil side, then . . ."
"The viceroyalty of Komarr?" suggested Miles.
"That hope would be slightly megalomanic," said Galeni. "An appointment on his staff, though, certainly." His vision faded, palpably, as he glanced around their cell-room, and his lips puffed on a silent, self-derisive laugh. "Myfather, on the other hand, wants revenge. Foreign domination of Komarr being not merely prone to abuse, but intrinsically evil by first principle. Trying to make it un-foreign by integration is not compromise, it's collaboration, capitulation. Komarran revolutionaries died for my sins. And so on. And on."
"He's still attempting to persuade you to come over to his side, then."
"Oh, yes. I believe he will keep talking till he pulls the trigger."
"Not that I'm asking you to, um, compromise your principles or anything, but I really don't see that it would be any extra skin off my nose if you were to, say, plead for your own life," Miles mentioned diffidently. " 'He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day,' and all that."
Galeni shook his head. "For precisely that logic, I cannot surrender. Not will not—can not. He can't trust me. If I reversed, he would too, and be compelled to argue himself into killing me as hard as he now feigns to be arguing himself out. He's already sacrificed my brother. In a sense, my mother's death came ultimately from that loss, and others he inflicted on her in the name of the cause." He added in a flash of self-consciousness, "I suppose that makes this all seem very oedipal. But—the anguish of making the hard choices has always appealed to the romance in his soul."
Miles shook his head. "I'll allow you know the man better than I do. And yet . . . well, people do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives. The will to be stupid is a very powerful force—"
This surprised a brief laugh from Galeni, and a thoughtful look.
"—but there are always alternatives. Surely it's more important to be loyal to a person than a principle."
Galeni raised his eyebrows. "I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, coming from a Barrayaran. From a society that traditionally organizes itself by internal oaths of fealty instead of an external framework of abstract law—is that your father's politics showing?"
Miles cleared his throat. "My mother's theology, actually. From two completely different starting points they arrive at this odd intersection in their views. Her theory is that principles come and go, but that human souls are immortal, and you should therefore throw in your lot with the greater part. My mother tends to be extremely logical. Betan, y'know."
Galeni sat forward in interest, his hands loosely clasped between his knees. "It surprises me more that your mother had anything to do with your upbringing at all. Barrayaran society tends to be so, er, aggressively patriarchal. And Countess Vorkosigan has the reputation of being the most invisible of political wives."
"Yeah, invisible," Miles agreed cheerfully, "like air. If it disappeared you'd hardly miss it. Till the next time you came to inhale." He suppressed a twinge of homesickness, and a fiercer fear—if I don't make it back this time. . . .
Galeni smiled polite disbelief. "It's hard to imagine that Great Admiral yielding to, ah, uxorial blandishments."
Miles shrugged. "He yields to logic. My mother is one of the few people I know who has almost completely conquered the will to be stupid." Miles frowned introspectively. "Your father's a fairly bright man, is he not? I mean, given his premises. He's eluded Security, he's been able to put together at least temporarily effective courses of action, he's got follow-through, he's certainly persistent. . . ."
"Yes, I suppose so," said Galeni.
"Hm."
"What?"
"Well . . . there's something about this whole plot that bothers me."
"I should think there's a great deal!"
"Not personally. Logically. In the abstract. As a plot, qua plot, there's something that doesn't quite add up even from his point of view. Of course it's a scramble—chances must be taken, it's always like that when you try to convert any plan into action—but over and above the practical problems. Something intrinsically screwy."
"It's daring. But if he succeeds, he'll have it all. If your clone takes the Imperium, he'll stand in the center of Barrayar's power structure. He'll control it all. Absolute power."
"Bullshit," said Miles.
Galeni's brows rose.
"Just because Barrayar's system of checks and balances is unwritten doesn't mean it's not there. You must know the Emperor's power consists of no more than the cooperation he is able to extract, from the military, from the counts, from the ministries, from the people generally. Terrible things happen to emperors who fail to perform their function to the satisfaction of all these groups. The Dismemberment of Mad Emperor Yuri wasn't so very long ago. My father was actually present for that remarkably gory execution, as a boy. And yet people still wonder why he's never tried to take the Imperium for himself!
"So here we have a picture of this imitation me, grabbing for the throne in a bloody coup, followed by a rapid transfer of power and privilege to Komarr, say even granting its independence. Results?"
"Go on," said Galeni, fascinated.
"The military will be offended, because I'm throwing away their hard-won victories. The counts will be offended, because I'll have promoted myself above them. The ministries will be offended, because the loss of Komarr as a tax farm and trade nexus will reduce their power. The people will be offended for all these reasons plus the fact that I am in their eyes a mutant, physically unclean in Barrayaran tradition. Infanticide for obvious birth defects is still going on secretly in the back country, do you know, despite its being outlawed for four decades? If you can think of any fate nastier than being dismembered alive, well, that poor clone is headed straight for it. I'm not sure even I could ride the Imperium and survive, even without the Komarran complications. And that kid's only—what—-seventeen, eighteen years old?" Miles subsided. "It's a stupid plot. Or . . ."
"Or?"
"Or it's some other plot."
"Hm."
"Besides," said Miles more slowly, "why should Ser Galen, who if I'm reading him right hates my father more than he loves—anybody, be going to all this trouble to put Vorkosigan blood on the Barrayaran Imperial throne? It's a most obscure revenge. And how, if by some miracle he succeeds in getting the boy Imperial power, does he then propose to control him?"
"Conditioning?" suggested Galeni. "Threats to expose him?"
"Mm, maybe." At this impasse, Miles fell silent. After long moments he spoke again.
"I think the real plot is much simpler and smarter. He means to drop the clone into the middle of a power struggle just to create chaos on Barrayar. The results of that struggle are irrelevant. The clone is merely a pawn. A revolt on Komarr is timed to rise during the point of maximum uproar, the bloodier the better, back on Barrayar. He must have an ally in the woodwork prepared to step in with enough military force to block Barrayar's wormhole exit. God, I hope he hasn't made a devil's deal with the Cetagandans for that."
"Trading a Barrayaran occupation for a Cetagandan one strikes me as a zero-sum move in the extreme—surely he's not that mad. But what happens to your rather expensive clone?" said Galeni, puzzling out the threads.
Miles smiled crookedly. "Ser Galen doesn't care. He's just a means to an end." His mouth opened, closed, opened again. "Except that—I keep hearing my mother's voice, in my head. That's where I picked up that perfect Betan accent, y'know, that I use for Admiral Naismith. I can hear her now."
"And what does she say?" Galeni's brows twitched in amusement.
"Miles—she says—what have you done with your baby brother?!"
"Your clone is hardly that!" choked Galeni.
"On the contrary, by Betan law my clone is exactly that."
"Madness." Galeni paused. "Your mother could not possibly expect you to look out for this creature."
"Oh, yes she could." Miles sighed glumly. A knot of unspoken panic made a lump in his chest. Complex, too complex . . .
"And this is the woman that—you claim—is behind the man who's behind the Barrayaran Imperium? I don't see it. Count Vorkosigan is the most pragmatic of politicians. Look at the entire Komarr integration scheme."
"Yes," said Miles cordially. "Look at it."
Galeni shot him a suspicious glance. "Persons before principles, eh?" he said slowly at last.
"Yep."
Galeni subsided wearily on his bench. After a time one corner of his mouth twitched up. "My father," he murmured, "was always a man of great—principles."