Mirror dance (48 page)

Bel whistled. "I knew some of this, but I don't think I'd ever heard the whole story. No wonder Fell and Ryoval hate each other." It glanced at Quinn: she nodded permission to proceed. "Well, about four years ago, Miles brought the Dendarii a little contract. It was for a pick-up. Our Employer—excuse me, Barrayar, I've been calling them Our Employer for so long it's a reflex."

"Keep that reflex," Mark advised.

Bel nodded. "The Imperium wanted to import a galactic geneticist. I don't quite know why." It glanced at Quinn.

"Nor do you need to," said she.

"But a certain Dr. Canaba, who was then one of House Bharaputra's top genetics people, wanted to defect. House Bharaputra takes a lethally dim view of employees departing with a head full of trade secrets, so Canaba needed help. He struck a deal with the Barrayaran Imperium to take him in."

"That's where I come from," Taura put in.

"Yes," said Thorne. "Taura was one of his pet projects. He, um, insisted on taking her along. Unfortunately, the super-soldier project had recently been canceled, and Taura sold to Baron Ryoval, who collects genetic, excuse me Sergeant, oddities. So we had to break her out of House Ryoval, in addition to breaking Canaba out of House Bharaputra. Um, Taura, you'd better say what happened next."

"The Admiral came and rescued me from Ryoval's main biologicals facility," the big woman rumbled. She heaved a large sigh, as if at some sweet memory. "In the process of escaping, we totally destroyed House Ryoval's main gene banks. A hundred-year-old tissue collection went up in smoke. Literally." She smiled, baring her fangs.

"House Ryoval lost about fifty percent of its assets that night, Baron Fell estimated," Thorne added. "At least."

Mark hooted, then sobered. "
That
explains why you all think Baron Ryoval's people will be hunting for Admiral Naismith."

"Mark," said Thorne desperately, "if Ryoval finds Miles first, he'll have him revived just so he can kill him again. And again. And again. That's why we were all so insistent that you play Miles, when we were pulling out of Jackson's Whole. Ryoval has no motive to take revenge on the clone, just on the Admiral."

"I see. Gee. Thanks. Ah, whatever happened to Dr. Canaba? If I may ask."

"He was delivered safely," said Quinn. "He has a new name, a new face, a new laboratory, and a salary that ought to keep him happy. A loyal new subject for the Imperium."

"Hm. Well, that brings me to the other cross-connection. It's not a new or secret one, though I don't know yet what to make of it. Neither does ImpSec, incidently, though as a result of it they've sent agents to check the Durona Group twice. Baronne Lotus Bharaputra, the Baron's wife, is a Durona clone."

Taura's clawed hand flew to her lips. "That girl!"

"Yes,
that
girl. I wondered why she gave me the cold chills. I'd seen her before, in another incarnation. The clone of a clone.

"The Baronne is one of the oldest of Lilly Durona's clone daughters, or sisters, or whatever you want to call the tribe. Hive. She didn't sell herself cheaply. Lotus went renegade for one of the biggest bribes in Jacksonian history—co-control, or nearly so, of House Bharaputra. She's been Baron Bharaputra's mate for twenty years. And now it seems she's getting one other thing. The Durona Group among them have an astonishing range of bio-expertise, but they refuse to do clone-brain transplants. It was written right into Lilly Durona's foundation-deal with House Fell. But Baronne Bharaputra, who must be over sixty-standard, apparently plans to embark on her second youth very shortly. Judging from what we witnessed."

"Rats," muttered Quinn.

"So that's another cross-connection," said Mark. "In fact, it's a damned cat's cradle of cross-connections, once you get hold of the right thread. But it doesn't explain, to me at least, why the Durona Group would conceal Miles
from their own House Fell bosses.
Yet they must have done so."

"If they have him," Quinn said, gnawing on her cheek.

"If," Mark conceded. "Although," he brightened slightly, "it would explain why that incriminating cryo-chamber ended up in the Hegen Hub. The Durona Group wasn't trying to hide it from ImpSec. They were trying to hide it from other Jacksonians."

"It almost all fits," said Thorne.

Mark opened his hands and held them apart palm to palm, as if invisible threads ran back and forth between them. "Yeah. Almost." He closed his hands together. "So here we are. And there we're going. Our first trick will be to re-enter Jacksonian space past Fell's jump point station. Captain Quinn has brought along quite a kit for doctoring our identities. Coordinate your ideas with her on that one. We have ten days to play with it."

The group broke up, to study the new problems each in his, her, or its own way. Bothari-Jesek and Quinn lingered as Mark rose, and stretched his aching back. His aching brain.

"That was quite a pretty piece of analysis, Mark," said Quinn grudgingly. "If it's not all hot air."

She ought to know. "Thank you, Quinn," he said sincerely. He too prayed it wouldn't all turn out to be hallucinatory, an elaborate mistake.

"Yes . . . he's changed a bit, I think," Bothari-Jesek observed judiciously. "Grown."

"Yeah?" Quinn's gaze swept him, up and down. "True . . ."

Mark's heart warmed in hungry anticipation of a crumb of approval.

"—he's fatter."

"Let's get to work," Mark growled.

He could remember studying tongue-twisters, once. He could even picture a whole screen-list of them, black words on pale blue. Had it been for some sort of rhetoric course? Unfortunately, though he could picture the screen, he could only remember one of the actual lines. He struggled to sit upright in bed, and try it. "Sheshells . . . shsh . . . she shells she
shit!
" He took a breath, and started over. Again. Again. His tongue seemed thick as an old sock. It felt staggeringly important to recover control of his speech. As long as he kept talking like an idiot, they were going to keep treating him like one.

It could be worse
. He was eating real food now, not sugar-water or soft sludge. He'd been showering and dressing on his own for two whole days. No more patient gowns. They'd given him a shirt and pants, instead.
Like ship knits.
Their grey color at first pleased him, then worried him because he could not think why it pleased him. "She. Sells. Sea. Shells. By. The. Sea. Shore. Ha!" He lay back, wheezing in triumph. He glanced up to see Dr. Rowan leaning in the doorway, watching him with a slight smile.

Still catching his breath, he waved his fingers at her in greeting. She pushed off and came to sit at his side on his bed. She wore her usual concealing green smock, and carried a sack.

"Raven said you were babbling half the night," she remarked, "but you weren't, were you. You were practicing."

"Yuh," he nodded. "Gotta talk. C'mand—" he touched his lips, and waved vaguely around the room, "obey."

"You think so, do you?" Her brows arched in amusement but her eyes, beneath them, regarded him sharply. She shifted, and swung his tray table across between them. "Sit up, my authoritarian little friend. I brought you some toys."

"Sec'on chil'hd," he muttered glumly, and shoved himself upright again. His chest only ached. At least he seemed done with the more repulsive aspects of his second infancy. A second adolescence still to come? God forbid. Maybe he could skip over that part.
Why do I dread an adolescence I cannot remember?
 

He laughed briefly as she upended the bag and spread about two dozen parts from some disassembled hand weapons across the table. "Test, huh?" He began to pick them up and fit them together. Stunner, nerve disruptor, plasma arc, and a projectile gun . . . slide, twist, click, knock home . . . one, two, three, four, he laid them in a row. "Pow'r cells dea'. Not armin' me, eh? These—extras." He swept half a dozen spare or odd parts aside into a pile. "Ha. Trick." He grinned smugly at her.

"You never pointed those at me or yourself while you were handling them," she observed curiously.

"Mm? Didn' notice." She was right, he realized. He fingered the plasma arc doubtfully.

"Did anything come up for you while you were doing that?" she asked.

He shook his head in renewed frustration, then brightened. " 'Membered som'thin s'mornin, tho'. Inna shar." At speed, his speech slurred into unintelligibility again, a logjam of the lips.

"In the shower," she translated encouragingly. "Tell me. Slow down as much as you need."

"Slow. Is. Death," he enunciated clearly.

She blinked. "Still. Tell me."

"Ah. Well. Think I wuzza boy. Ridin' onna horse. Old man on 'nother horse. Uppa hill. 'S chilly. Horses . . . puffin' lak I 'm." His deep breaths were not deep enough to satisfy. "Trees. Mountain, two, three mountain, covered w' trees, all strung tog'ther wi' new plastic tubes. Runnin' down to a shack a' t' bottom. Gran'da
happy
. . . 'cause tubes are
efficient
." He struggled to get that last word out intact, and succeeded. "Men'r 'appy too."

"What are they doing, in this scene?" she asked, sounding baffled. "These men."

He could see it again in his head, the memory of a memory. "Burnin' wood. Makin' sugar."

"That makes no sense. Sugar comes from biological production vats, not from burning trees," said Rowan.

"Trees," he asserted. "Brown sug'r trees." Another memory wavered up: the old man breaking off a chunk of something that looked like tan sandstone and giving him a taste by popping it in his mouth. The feel of the gnarled old stained fingers cool against his cheek, sweetness tinged with leather and horses. He shivered at the overwhelming sensory blast.
This was real.
But he still could name no names.
Gran'da.
 

"Mountains mine," he added. The thought made him sad, and he didn't know why.

"What?"

"Own 'em." He frowned glumly.

"Anything else?"

"No. 'S all there is." His fists clenched. He straightened them, spreading his fingers carefully on the tray table.

"Are you sure this wasn't a dream from last night?"

"
No
. Inna
shar
," he insisted.

"It's very strange. This, I expected," she nodded to the re-assembled weapons, and began putting them back in the cloth bag. "
That
," a toss of her head indicated his little story, "doesn't fit. Trees made out of sugar sound pretty dream-like to me."

Doesn't fit what?
A desperate excitement surged through him. He grabbed her around one slim wrist, trapping her hand with a stunner still in it. "Doesn' fi' wha'?
Wha' d' you know?
"

"Nothing."

"Na' nothin'!"

"That hurts," she said levelly.

He let go of her instantly. "Na' nothin'," he insisted again. "
Som
'thin.
Wha'
?"

She sighed, finished bagging the weapons, and sat back and studied him. "It was a true statement that we did not know who you were. It is now a truer statement that we are not sure which
one
you are."

"I gotta choice? Tell me!"

"You are at a . . . tricky stage of your recovery. Cryo-revival amnesics seldom recover all of their memories at once. It comes in little cascades. A typical bell-curve. A few at first, then a growing mass. Then it trails off. A few last holes may linger for years. Since you had no other gross cranial injuries, my prognosis is that you will eventually recover your whole personality. But."

A most sinister
but
. He stared at her beseechingly.

"At this stage, on the verge of cascading, a cryo-amnesic can be so hungry for identity, he'll pick up a mistaken one, and start assembling evidence to support it. It can take weeks or months to get it straightened out again. In your case, for special reasons, I think this is not only more than usually possible, it could be more than usually difficult to detangle again. I have to be very, very careful not to suggest anything to you that I am not absolutely certain about. And it's hard, because I'm theorizing in my head probably just as urgently as you are. I have to be sure that anything you give me really comes from you, and is not a reflection of some suggestion on my part."

"Oh." He sagged back in bed, horribly disappointed.

"There is a possible short-cut," she added.

He surged back up again. "Wha'? Gimme!"

"There is a drug called fast-penta. One of its derivatives is a psychiatric sedative, but its usual use is as an interrogation drug. It's actually a misnomer to call it a truth serum, though laymen insist on doing so."

"I . . . know fas'pent'." His brows drew down. He knew something important about fast-penta. What was it?

"It has some extremely relaxing effects, and sometimes, in cryo-revival patients, it can trigger memory cascades."

"Ah!"

"However, it can also be embarrassing. Under its influence people will happily talk about whatever crosses their minds, even their most intimate and private thoughts. Good medical ethics requires me to warn you about that. Also, some people are allergic to the drug."

"Where'd . . . you learn . . . goo' med'cal ethics?" he asked curiously.

Strangely, she flinched. "Escobar," she said, and eyed him.

"Where we
now
?"

"I'd rather not say, just yet."

"How could that contam'nate m' mem'ry?" he demanded indignantly.

"I can tell you soon, I think," she soothed. "Soon."

"Mm," he growled.

She pulled a little white packet from her coat pocket, opened it, and peeled off a plastic-backed dot. "Hold out your arm." He obeyed, and she pressed the dot against the underside of his forearm. "Patch test," she explained. "Because of what I theorize about your line of work, I think you have a higher than normal chance of allergy. Artificially-induced allergy."

She peeled the dot away again—it prickled—and gazed closely at his arm. A pink spot appeared. She frowned at it. "Does that itch?" she asked suspiciously.

"No," he lied, and clenched his right hand to keep from scratching at the spot. A drug to give him his mind back—he had to have it.
Turn white again, blast you
, he thought to the pink splotch.