Chapter Two
When Armsman Roic woke for the second time-or maybe it was the third-the opaque drug-mush in his head had cleared to a thin throbbing haze. He felt for his wristcom and found it, unsurprisingly, gone. Groaning, he turned on his musty mattress thrown on the floor of this . . . place, and opened his eyes to plain daylight and his first clear view of his prison.
It was bare of furnishings. Some kind of old hotel room, he decided after a minute from the shape, stains, outlets, corroded-looking sprinkler overhead, and cheap light above the only door. His mattress lay in what might once have been a clothes niche, opposite a small working bathroom with the door removed. A chain bolted around his ankle led in turn to a bolt on the wall. The links were long enough to let him use the facilities, he remembered that from the blurry night, but not to reach the outer door.
He visited them again, and, hoping to wash out more of the mush, drank thirstily from a flimsy plastic cup apparently left for his use. A long narrow window stretched above a stained bathtub. He stared out onto a featureless rise crowded with tall, arrow-shaped conifers, dark and tangled. He rapped on the glass; it gave back that dull tone that said unbreakable, at least by anyone not armed with a power drill or perhaps a plasma arc.
He tested the length of his chain. It didn't go even halfway to the door, but by standing upright, he found he could see out the front picture window, unobscured by curtains or a polarizing filter. They must not expect visitors. This room seemed to open onto a second-storey gallery. The view beyond the railing ran downhill to a broad patch of flat scrub that curved out of sight, framed by more tangled taiga. Not another building to be seen.
He wasn't in the city any more, that was certain. Had there been any urban glow on the horizon last night? He could only remember the night-light in the loo. He could be ten kilometers from Northbridge or ten thousand, for all he knew. Which could make a difference, later.
He folded his considerable length back onto the mattress, and began working at the bolt in the wall, the only item even remotely resembling a weak point. It didn't budge, and his big fingers could scarcely get a purchase on the annoying little thing. If only he could get it started wriggling . . .
How t' devil did I end up in this mess? He imagined Armsman-commander Pym critiquing his actions of yesterday, and cringed. This was a thousand times worse than the infamous bug butter debacle. Yet it had all started so benignly, four weeks ago.
If abruptly, but there was nothing new to that-Lord Auditor Vorkosigan's galactic assignments from Emperor Gregor usually arrived abruptly. After a dozen off-world trips in m'lord's wake, Roic was getting practiced at the scramble to arrange m'lord's luggage, in his role of sometime-batman, m'lord's and his own travel documents, in his role as personal assistant-the job title Roic traveled under, as explaining the ancient and honorable rank of Armsman to galactics was always a losing game-and m'lord's security. And-though m'lord almost never discussed this aloud-private medtech for m'lord's lingering health issues.
The competent Vorkosigan House staff, under the even more competent supervision of Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan, had actually relieved him of the first of these tasks. Canceling his own affairs had cost more of a pang, as he'd just worked up the courage to invite Miss Pym down to Hassadar to meet his parents for the first time. But as an armsman's child, Aurie had understood perfectly. Courting his commander's daughter had been an oblique process this past year, rather like those Earth insects Lady Vorkosigan had described, where the male approached with painful caution lest he be mistaken for a meal by his intended. But it was Armsman-commander Pym who would tear off Roic's head and eat it if he made a mis-step.
Still, in less than a day they'd boarded the shuttle for orbital transfer to the jumpship, and began three boring, if comfortable, weeks of travel to New Hope II, or Kibou-daini as it was called by the locals to distinguish it from two other planets and a transfer station of the same name in the wormhole nexus. Kibou for short, thankfully. M'lord, accustomed from his old days in Imperial Security not to waste travel time, had handed Roic quantities of homework about their destination, and himself plunged into even larger and more classified reports.
Roic himself couldn't figure this gig out. Granted, Lord Vorkosigan was the only person Roic knew who had actually died and been cryo-revived, making him the hands-on expert in the subject among Gregor's Auditors, the Emperor's personal stable of troubleshooters. And he knew his galactics, no question there. And he had just successfully concluded, in his other hat as the-Count-his-father's voting proxy to the Council of Counts, several years on committees devoted to upgrading Barrayaran law on reproductive technologies to galactic standards. Cryonics, Roic supposed, was the other end of these life-tech issues, and so a logical extension. But the Northbridge Invitational Conference on Cryonics, hosted by a consortium of Kibou-daini cryorevival corporations, had proved as harmless a hotel-full of misty-eyed science boffins and well-fed lawyers as Roic had ever seen.
"Don't underestimate the viciousness of academics when funding is at stake," m'lord had said, when Roic had pointed this out. "Nor attorneys' command of ambush tactics."
"Yeah, but they don't generally use stunners or needlers," Roic had returned. "It's all words. My skills seem wasted. When they start firing off those paragraph grenades, I'd rather hunker down behind you."
He'd spoken too soon, it seemed.
He'd sat in on every program m'lord had attended, in the back of the room where he could watch all the exits, and been hard-put to stay awake, though m'lord recorded everything indiscriminately. He followed m'lord to meals with other attendees and to lavish evening parties provided by the conference's sponsors, at varying distances from looming over m'lord's short shoulder to leaning against the far wall, as m'lord signaled. He learned far more about cryonics and the people who dealt with it than he had ever wanted to know.
And he had just about come to the conclusion that the entire jaunt was a put-up job between Lady Vorkosigan and Empress Laisa, to give Ekaterin a much-needed holiday from a spouse who diagnosed all complaints as a sign of boredom, to be alleviated with an exciting new task. Since Lady Vorkosigan already ran an enormous household, rode herd on four children under the age of six and a teenage son from a prior marriage, played political hostess for her husband in his roles both as an Imperial Auditor and as the Count's heir, had undertaken supervisory responsibilities for agriculture and terraforming in the Vorkosigan's District, and tried desperately, in her spare seconds, to maintain a garden design business, bets were on below-stairs as to when she would break and respond to m'lord's idea of husbandly help by defenestrating the little man from the fourth floor of Vorkosigan House. This trip seemed a reasonable substitute to Roic.
But even the most loyal armsman had to go to the loo sometimes, which was why, economy be hanged, Roic argued constantly for a back-up man, or better, two, on these excursions. He'd returned . . . night before last?-or had he lost more than one day in this dazed captivity?-to the main room of the reception to discover m'lord gone, though a quick ping found him up a floor, past some winding stairs, in an even more private section of the party. Their wristcoms ran a scrambled security channel; no come-here-I-want-you code called, so Roic jittered impatiently and controlled his nerves. When m'lord at last trod back down the winding stairs, spotted Roic, and joined him, tugging down his cuffs in a self-satisfied way, his appearance was anything but reassuring. To anyone who knew him well, that is. It was the manic glitter in his eyes, and the fleeting smile, and the general air of elation. The damndest things could elate him.
"What?" Roic had murmured in alarm, and "Later," m'lord had replied. "The walls have ears."
Roic had to grind his teeth till midnight found them back in their shared room, where m'lord unpacked the anti-bug silencer for the first time, and his message encoder as well. He sat at the room's sole desk and began typing.
"And so?" asked Roic. "Why do you look so happy all of a sudden?"
"I've had my very first break in this case, after days of dead time. Someone just tried to bribe me."
Roic stiffened. An attempt to bribe an Imperial Auditor could warrant the death penalty, on Barrayar. But we're not on Barrayar, more's the pity. "Er . . . and this is a good thing?"
"Where there's smoke, there's fire, they say." M'lord continued cheerfully keying in whatever he was composing for Imperial Eyes Only. "Or maybe mirrors. Mind you, it was a subtle and elegant bribe. I'm almost glad I'm not dealing with idiots, here. Oh, Laisa, you were right, you were right. However did your cute Komarran nose know?"
"What did you say?" asked Roic anxiously.
"That's right, you were never in a galactic mercenary outfit. Or covert ops. They both have tested policies for bribes. Back in my old fleet, the rule was accept everything, register it with Command, and go do exactly what you were going to do anyway. Covert ops was similar-accept and follow up as far as the string leads. Because strings run two ways, you know. Play it out, pull it in . . . see what's on the other end . . . Hah!" He finished his entries with a flourish.
"What kind of bribe?" Roic pressed. "Or-should I not know?" Please, don't make me work in t' damned dark!
"Some very interesting stock options in the Shiragiku‑sha-the White Chrysanthemum Cryonics Corporation, in full. WhiteChrys is the company in process of establishing a franchise on Komarr, you know. I could get in on the ground floor at a very favorable rate, it seems. In fact, they would lend me the money at no interest, to be paid back after my value doubles. Because what could be better for them than to boast a local stockholder with my insanely high connections? Though I am not, curiously enough, offered voting stock. The votes are reserved for their sub-zero patrons."
Of all the brain-bending twists of democracy Roic had encountered, even worse than the secondary market in Komarran planetary voting shares, it was Kibou-daini's custom of votes by the dead that most made his head hurt. Proxies, naturally-left in the hands of the cryocorps that shepherded their frozen charges into an unknown and curiously receding future. Because if you were going to trust a company with your death and next life, your vote was a small thing in comparison.
"It had doubtless," m'lord had remarked crisply, upon first learning this fact, "seemed a good idea at the time." Two, three hundred years ago, when New Hope's strange burial customs, as Roic could not help thinking of them, were just beginning to gain popularity.
"Heh," muttered m'lord, and sent his message on its coded and circuitous way.
Roic knew that Heh. It gave him cold chills.
And so to bed, to rise and face the last day of the conference, which had gone, as near as Roic could tell, as no one had expected, not even m'twisty lord.
And now, oh God, he'd gone and lost the little maniac . . .
Or had he? Belatedly, he wondered if m'lord had been captured in the melee in the lobby as well.
He could be here. Roic abandoned the bolt and shuffled over to rap three times three on his room's side wall. Again. Nothing. He tried the other side of the room, though he had to stretch to reach. Silence. The adjoining rooms could be empty, or his fellow captives still too drugged to hear, or answer. Or maybe it was his captors over there, and he'd just alerted them of his return to consciousness. Damn. Try again later?
He went back to working on his bolt, which was producing blisters on his fingers but no discernable loosening, and brooded. He'd only taken his eyes off m'lord for a moment, and then his old street guard reflexes had cut in, as he'd hustled at least half-a-dozen potential kidnap victims into a lift tube and escape, because they were unarmed civilians but that wasn't his job even though no one else was doing it. He'd sure won a whole lot of angry attention from their attackers by that, at least till the stunner beam had caught him. Maybe m'lord escaped, and will rescue me. An embarrassment, Roic decided, that he could happily live with.
At the sudden clack of the door being unbolted, he started and dropped his hands hastily to his lap. The door opened, and a skinny young man with lank dark hair, and a slitted eye set in a swollen magenta-and-purple contusion, eased through and stared for a suspicious moment at Roic, seated on his mattress. He limped forward to just beyond the arc of Roic's chain, set some sort of commercial Reddi-Meal tray on the floor, and pushed it toward Roic with what appeared to be a broom handle. The tray was still sealed. So, Roic was not to be starved-or poisoned? Don't make premature assumptions, he could almost hear m'lord's voice intone. Roic realized he was terrifically hungry, but he made no move toward the tray.
"I've seen you before," Roic said suddenly. "In the hotel lobby." Up close. Things had been happening too fast at the time for Roic to tell if the snatch had been an amateur or a pro job, but thinking back, he guessed a mix. The marksman who'd clocked him with the stunner had been cool enough, yet the mob of men assigned to control and cart away captives, well, they sure hadn't been up to Roic's idea of a standard-military, paramilitary, or youth scout troop. It had been a mass snatch, however, therefore not targeted especially upon Barrayarans-m'lord's ego would be wounded at that-but Roic wasn't sure if it made things more or less of a puzzle.
The skinny man touched his swollen eye and stepped back a pace, scowling. It seemed he remembered Roic, too.
"Who are you people, anyway?" asked Roic. "Why t'devil did you kidnap me-us?"
Skinny's head jerked up; his good eye lit. "We're the New Hope Legacy Liberators. Because this generation"-he thumped his fist on his chest-"is finally doing what it takes to stand up to the power-grubbing corps. They've grown so fat and corrupt, there's no choice left but to burn the whole rotten structure to the ground and start over. We're standing up to bite the dead hand of the past that grinds us into the dust!"
Roic squinted in dismay as Skinny, impassioned if garbled, elaborated on this theme. The N.H.L.L. appeared to be some sort of local political action group, who, grown frustrated at their inability to win verbal arguments-if this was a sample, Roic could see why-were trying to up the ante with physical demonstrations. Bits and pieces from more considered critiques of local affairs that Roic had overheard at the conference bobbed by in the torrent of complaint, but the gist of harangue seemed to be that Skinny and his fellows were busted and down on their luck, and they figured that if only dead people didn't persist in owning everything in sight, there would be more left for the living. The corps and the corpses seemed muddled together in Skinny's head. Roic refrained from pointing out that actually, the wealth of Kibou-daini was being managed by live people in the name of the dead ones, and even if those were replaced by different live people, it seemed improbable that anyone would choose the N.H.L.L. for the task.
"Burn the dead!" Skinny finished, in much the tone that one might say Amen at the end of a rote prayer.
Burn, bury, freeze, Roic didn't see much to choose, except for the loss of some recycled organics. "But what's that got t'do with us?" said Roic plaintively. "We don't vote here. We're leaving next week. Are you after ransom?"
Skinny made a gesture of proud denial. "No! But we're determined that the Nexus will know of the injustice and suffering and theft on Kibou! No one-not you galactics, not the complacent old salary-folk, fat sheep dreaming only of their own meat lockers, not our own oppressed generation planet-wide-will remain in ignorance after this, no matter how they shut their eyes and ears!"
"Ah," said Roic. "Publicity stunt, huh?" Roic would have preferred ransom, actually. M'lord could have arranged it in a heartbeat, as soon as he was allowed to contact the Barrayaran consul here, and doubtless some sneaky way of recovering the money afterward, too. And yet, Roic had never heard of a political fringe group that wasn't strapped for cash. "It could be ransom," he essayed cautiously. "Or even reward, depending . . ."
Skinny looked scornful, but maybe give the idea time to work? Roic had more pressing concerns. "Lord Vorkosigan-t' fellow I work for, you can't mistake him, top of his head would be about level with your shoulder, carries a cane, talks a blue streak-is he here?"
Was that blank look feigned? Roic wasn't sure. He went on more urgently, "Because if he is, you've got to put us in a room together. I'm his private medtech, and he needs me. He gets these terrible seizures. He's a very important Vor lord, back on Barrayar. They'd pay a lot to get him back unharmed. But if he dies on you, well, you've no idea how ugly it could get." Roic wasn't sure how far to push this theme. M'lord had presumably been keeping a low profile here for a reason, and Roic didn't want to run the ransom price up inadvertently.
Lord Vorkosigan's post-cryorevival seizures actually consisted of him sinking down, shivering with his eyes rolled back for a couple of minutes in an unattractive manner, and then waking up very, very cranky. The fits were unlikely to be fatal, at least since Lady Vorkosigan had extracted his promise never, ever to attempt to drive himself in any powered vehicle-ground car, aircar, lightflyer, shuttle, or mode unnamed. Horses and bicycles had been a compromise, and though m'lord hated the helmets, he did comply.
Skinny didn't need to know this, however, so Roic embroidered the medical facts to the limit of his invention till Skinny, doubt growing in his eyes, weakened and said, "All right! I'll ask." He added-as no professional would have-"I didn't see anyone who looked like that guy here, though."
Skinny withdrew, leaving Roic thinking, Uh-huh. Minion, not master. Skinny seemed a type Roic had met often in his early days as a street guard in the Vorkosigan District capital of Hassadar. While not reliable enough to be put in charge of anything more complicated than a dishwasher, they were very easy to convince that all their troubles were someone else's fault. Roic knew this because they used to tell him so, at great and often incoherent length, while he was hauling them somewhere safe to sleep off their current binge of drink or drugs or arguments. That didn't mean they couldn't be truly dangerous, especially when they found themselves in over their heads, and it didn't take a very deep pool of troubles to manage that, either.
His own pool seemed an abyss, right now. Did the Legacy Liberators' plans for their captives include killing them one by one till their demands were met? Our fringe loonies on Barrayar sure would, Roic thought semi-proudly. Yet the affair had been oddly bloodless, so far-stunners and sleepy-drugs, not needlers and nerve gas. But maybe, maybe-dare he hope?-m'lord wasn't in their queue.
Because if m'lord died on Roic's watch, there would be nothing for it but to file the testimony by secured comlink and slit his own throat right here. Death would be better than making that report to certain persons in person. He pictured the faces of Count and Countess Vorkosigan, of Lady Ekaterin, hearing the news. Of Commander Pym, of Aurie. He imagined Sasha and little Helen, five years old-he'd have to kneel to look them in the eye-Where's Papa, Roic?
He lacked a suitable blade. He'd heard of prisoners choking themselves by swallowing their own tongues-he curled his experimentally-but he doubted it would work for him. There was the wall. Strong enough to hold that damned bolt, certainly. Could he run against that wall hard enough to break his own sturdy neck?
It seemed premature, but it was something to keep in mind. M'lord, now, he was very big on getting a good meal on board before making life-or-death decisions, and so was m'lady, come to think. Roic sighed, crawled over, and collected his Reddi-Meal.
Miles woke in a blink to broad daylight, a canvas roof, and a curious feline face staring into his from a cat's breath away. Glad to discover the weight on his chest was not some alarming new medical condition, he lifted the three-legged beast off and gingerly sat up. Post-drug headache, check. Fatigue, check. No screaming angels, double-check and an exclamation point or two. His vision seemed clear of all unrealities, and his surroundings, though odd, were not out of any nightmare he owned.
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.