Miles Errant (98 page)

The re-discovery of sex fairly immobilized him for the next three days, but his instinct for escape surfaced one afternoon when Rowan left him sleeping, but he wasn't. He unlidded his eyes, and traced the pattern of scars on his chest, and thought it over.
Out
was clearly a wrong direction.
In
was one he hadn't tried yet. Everybody here seemed to go to Lilly with their problems. Very well. He would go to Lilly too.

Up, or down? As a Jacksonian leader, she ought traditionally to lodge in either a penthouse or a bunker. Baron Ryoval lived in a bunker, or at least there was a dim image in his head associated with that name, involving shadowy sub-basements. Baron Fell took the penthouse at apogee, looking down on it all from his orbital station. He seemed to have a lot of pictures in his head of Jackson's Whole. Was it his home? The thought confused him. Up. Up and in.

He dressed in his gray knits, borrowed some of Rowan's socks, and slipped into the corridor. He found a lift tube and took it to the top floor, just one above Rowan's. It was another floor of residence suites. At its center he found another lift tube, palm-locked. Any Durona could use it. A spiral staircase wound around it. He climbed the stairs very slowly, and waited, near the top, till he had all his breath back. He knocked on the door.

It slid aside, and a slim Eurasian boy of about ten regarded him gravely. "What do you want?" The boy frowned.

"I want to see your . . . grandmother."

"Bring him in, Robin," a soft voice called.

The boy ducked his head and motioned him inside. His sock feet trod noiselessly across a deep carpet. The windows were polarized against the dark gray afternoon, and pools of warmer, yellower lamplight fought the gloom. Beyond the window, the force field revealed itself with tiny scintillations, as water droplets or particulate matter were detected and repelled or annihilated.

A shrunken woman sat in a wide chair, and watched him approach her through dark eyes set in a face of old ivory. She wore a high-necked black silk tunic and loose trousers. Her hair was pure white, and very long; a slim girl, most literally twin to the boy, was brushing it over the back of the chair, in long, long strokes. The room was very warm. Regarding her regarding him, he wondered how he could ever have thought that worried old woman with the cane might be Lilly. Hundred-year-old eyes looked at you differently.

"Ma'am," he said. His mouth felt suddenly dry.

"Sit down." She nodded to a short sofa set around the corner of the low table in front of her. "Violet, dear," a thin hand, all white wrinkles and blue ropy veins, touched the girl's hand which had paused protectively on her black silk shoulder. "Bring tea now. Three cups. Robin, please go downstairs and get Rowan."

The girl arranged the hair in a falling fan around the woman's upright torso, and the two children vanished in un-childlike silence. Clearly, the Durona Group did not employ outsiders. No chance of a mole ever penetrating their organization. With equal obedience, he sank into the seat she'd indicated.

Her vowels had a vibrato of age, but her diction, containing them, was perfect. "Have you come to yourself, sir?" she inquired.

"No, ma'am," he said sadly. "Only to you." He thought carefully about how to phrase his question. Lilly would not be any less medically careful than Rowan about yielding him clues. "Why can't you identify me?"

Her white brows rose. "Well-put. You are ready for an answer, I think. Ah."

The lift tube hummed, and Rowan's alarmed face appeared. She hurried out. "Lilly, I'm sorry. I thought he was asleep—"

"It's all right, child. Sit down. Pour the tea," for Violet reappeared around the corner bearing a large tray. Lilly whispered to the girl behind a faintly trembling hand, and she nodded and scampered off. Rowan knelt in what appeared to be a precise old ritual—had she once held Violet's place? he rather thought so—and poured green tea into thin white cups, and handed it round. She sat at Lilly's knees, stealing a brief, reassuring touch of the white hair coiled there.

The tea was very hot. Since he'd lately taken a deep dislike to cold, this pleased him, and he sipped carefully. "Answers, ma'am?" he reminded her cautiously.

Rowan's lips parted in a negative, alarmed breath; Lilly crooked up one finger, and quelled her.

"Background," said the old woman. "I believe the time has come to tell you a story."

He nodded, and settled back with his tea.

"Once upon a time," she smiled briefly, "there were three brothers. A proper fairy tale, ai? The eldest and original, and two young clones. The eldest—as happens in these tales—was born to a magnificent patrimony. Title—wealth—comfort—his father, if not exactly a king, commanded more power than any king in pre-jump history. And thus he became the target of many enemies. Since he was known to dote upon his son, it occurred to more than one of his enemies to try and strike at him through his only child. Hence this peculiar multiplication." She nodded at him. It made his belly shiver. He sipped more tea, to cover his confusion.

She paused. "Can you name any names yet?"

"No, ma'am."

"Mm." She abandoned the fairy tale; her voice grew more clipped. "Lord Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar was the original. He is now about twenty-eight standard years old. His first clone was made right here on Jackson's Whole, twenty-two years ago, a purchase by a Komarran resistance group from House Bharaputra. We do not know what this clone names himself, but the Komarrans' elaborate substitution plot failed about two years ago, and the clone escaped."

"Galen," he whispered.

She glanced sharply at him. "He was the chief of those Komarrans, yes. The second clone . . . is a puzzle. The best guess is that he was manufactured by the Cetagandans, but no one knows. He first appeared about ten years ago as a full-blown and exceptionally brilliant mercenary commander, claiming the quite legal Betan name of Miles Naismith, in his maternal line. He has shown himself no friend to the Cetagandans, so the theory that he is a Cetagandan renegade has a certain compelling logic. No one knows his age, though obviously he can be no more than twenty-eight." She took a sip of her tea. "It is our belief that you are one of those two clones."

"Shipped to you like a crate of frozen meat? With my chest blown out?"

"Yes."

"So what? Clones—even frozen ones—can't be a novelty here." He glanced at Rowan.

"Let me go on. About three months ago, Bharaputra's manufactured clone returned home—with a crew of mercenary soldiers at his back that he had apparently stolen from the Dendarii Fleet by the simple expedient of pretending to be his clone-twin, Admiral Naismith. He attacked Bharaputra's clone-crèche in an attempt to either steal, or possibly free, a group of clones slated to be the bodies for brain transplants, a business which I personally loathe."

He touched his chest. "He . . . failed?"

"No. But Admiral Naismith followed in hot pursuit of his stolen ship and troops. In the mêlée that ensued downside at Bharaputra's main surgical facilities, one of the two was killed. The other escaped, along with the mercenaries and most of Bharaputra's very valuable clone-cattle. They made a fool of Vasa Luigi—I laughed myself sick when I first heard about it." She sipped tea demurely.

He could actually almost picture her doing so, though it made his eyes cross slightly.

"Before they jumped, the Dendarii Mercenaries posted a reward for the return of a cryo-chamber containing the remains of a man they claim to have been the Bharaputran-made clone."

His eyes widened. "Me?"

She held up a hand. "Vasa Luigi, Baron Bharaputra, is absolutely convinced that they were lying, and that the man in the box was really their Admiral Naismith."

"Me?" he said less certainly.

"Georish Stauber, Baron Fell, refuses to even guess. And Baron Ryoval would tear a town apart for even a fifty percent chance of laying hands on Admiral Naismith, who injured him four years ago as no one has in a century." Her lips curved in a scalpel-smile.

It all made sense, which made no sense at all. It was like a story heard long ago, in childhood, and re-encountered.
In another lifetime.
Familiarity under glass. He touched his head, which ached. Rowan watched the gesture with concern.

"Don't you have medical records? Something?"

"At some risk, we obtained the developmental records of Bharaputra's clone. Unfortunately, they only go up to age fourteen. We have nothing on Admiral Naismith. Alas, one cannot run a triangulation on one data point."

He turned toward Rowan. "You know me, inside and out. Can't you tell?"

"You're
strange
." Rowan shook her head. "Half your bones are plastic replacement parts, do you know? The real ones that are left show old breaks, old traumas. . . . I'd guess you not only older than Bharaputra's clone ought to be, I'd guess you older than the original Lord Vorkosigan, and that makes no sense. If we could just get one solid, certain clue. The memories you've reported so far are terribly ambiguous. You know weapons, as the Admiral might—but Bharaputra's clone was trained as an assassin. You remember Ser Galen, and only Bharaputra's clone should do that. I found out about those sugar trees. They're called maple trees, and they originate on Earth—where Bharaputra's clone was taken for training. And so on." She flung up her hands in frustration.

"If you're not getting the right answer," he said slowly, "maybe you're not asking the right question."

"So what is the right question?"

He shook his head, mutely. "Why . . ." His hands spread. "Why not turn my frozen body over to the Dendarii and collect the reward? Why not sell me to Baron Ryoval, if he wants me so much? Why revive me?"

"I wouldn't sell a laboratory rat to Baron Ryoval," Lilly stated flatly. She twitched a brief smile. "Old business, between us."

How old? Older than he, whoever he was.

"As for the Dendarii—we may deal with them yet. Depending on who you are."

They were approaching the heart of the matter; he could sense it. "Yes?"

"Four years ago, Admiral Naismith visited Jackson's Whole, and besides counting a most spectacular coup on Ry Ryoval, left with a certain Dr. Hugh Canaba, one of Bharaputra's top genetics people. Now, I knew Canaba. More to the point, I know what Vasa Luigi and Lotus paid to get him here, and how many House secrets he was privy to. They would never have let him go alive. Yet he's gone, and no one on Jackson's Whole has ever been able to trace him."

She leaned forward intently. "Assuming Canaba was not just disposed of out an airlock—Admiral Naismith has shown he can get people out. In fact, it's a speciality he's famous for.
That
is our interest in him."

"You want off-planet?" He glanced around at Lilly Durona's comfortable, self-contained little empire. "Why?"

"I have a Deal with Georish Stauber—Baron Fell. It's a very old Deal, as we are very old dealers. My time is surely running out, and Georish is growing," she grimaced, "unreliable. If I die—or if he dies—or if he succeeds in having his brain transplanted to a younger body, as he has attempted at least once to arrange—our old Deal will be broken. The Durona Group might be offered less admirable deals than the one we have enjoyed so long with House Fell. It might be broken up—sold—weakened so as to invite attack from old enemies like Ry, who remembers an insult or an injury
forever
. It might be forced to work it does not choose. I've been looking for a way out for the last couple of years. Admiral Naismith knows one."

She wanted him to be Admiral Naismith, obviously the most valuable of the two clones. "What if I'm the other one?" He stared at his hands. They were just his hands. No hints there.

"You might be ransomed."

By whom? Was he savior, or commodity? What a choice. Rowan looked uneasy.

"What am I to you if I can't remember who I am?"

"No one at all, little man." Her dark eyes glinted, momentarily, like obsidian chips.

This woman had survived nearly a century on Jackson's Whole. It would not do to underestimate her ruthlessness on the basis of one quirky prejudice about clone-brain transplants.

They finished their tea, and retreated to Rowan's room.

"What in all that seemed familiar to you?" Rowan asked him anxiously when they were alone on her little sofa.

"All of it," he said, in deep perplexity. "And yet—Lilly seems to think I can spirit you all away like some kind of magician. But even if I am Admiral Naismith, I can't remember how I did it!"

"Sh," she tried to calm him. "You're ripe for memory-cascade, I swear. I can almost see it starting. Your speech has improved vastly in just the last few days."

"All that therapuetic kissing." He smiled, a suggestive compliment that won him, as he'd hoped, some more therapy. But when he came up for air he said, "It won't come back to me if I'm the other one. I remember Galen. Earth. A house in London . . . what's the clone's name?"

"We don't know," she said, and at his exasperated grasp of her hands added, "No, we
really
don't."

"Admiral Naismith . . . shouldn't be Miles Naismith. He should be Mark Pierre Vorkosigan." How the hell did he know that? Mark Pierre.
Piotr Pierre. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her
, a taunt from out of a crowd that had put an old man into a terrifying murderous rage, he'd had to be restrained by—the image escaped him.
Gran'da?
"If the Bharaputra-made clone is the third son, he could be named anything." Something wasn't right.

He tried to imagine Admiral Naismith's childhood as a Cetagandan secret covert ops project. His childhood? It must have been extraordinary, if he'd not only escaped at the age of eighteen or less, but evaded Cetagandan Intelligence and established his fortune within a year. But he could think of nothing from such a youth. A complete blank.

"What are you going to do with me if I'm not Naismith? Keep me as a pet? For how long?"

Rowan pursed her lips in worry. "If you are the Bharaputran-made clone—you're going to need to get off Jackson's Whole yourself. The Dendarii raid made an awful mess out of Vasa Luigi's headquarters. He has blood to avenge, as well as property. And pride. If it's the case—I'll try to get you out."