Vorhalas eyed her sullenly.
“Was this the result you intended? I mean, when you chose that particular weapon? That specific poison?”
He looked away from her, speaking to the far wall. “It was what I could grab, going through the armory. I didn’t think you could identify it, and get the antidote all the way from ImpMil in time… .”
“You relieve me of a burden,” she whispered.
“The antidote came from the Imperial Residence,” Vorkosigan explained. “A quarter of the distance. The Emperor’s infirmary there has everything. As for identification … I was there, at the destruction of the Karian mutiny. Just about your age, I think, or a little younger. The smell brought it all back, just now. Boys coughing out their lungs in red blobs… .” He seemed to shrink into himself, into the past.
“I didn’t intend your death particularly. You were just in the way, between me and him.” Vorhalas gestured blindly at her swollen torso. “It wasn’t the result I intended. I meant to kill him. I didn’t even know for sure that you shared the same room at night.” He was looking everywhere, now, except her face. “I never thought about killing your …”
“Look at me,” she croaked, “and say the word out loud.”
“Baby,” he whispered, and burst into sudden, shocking sobs.
Vorkosigan stepped back, beside her. “Wish you hadn’t done that,” he whispered. “Reminds me of his brother. Why am I death to that family?”
“Still want him to eat vengeance?”
He leaned his forehead on her shoulder, briefly. “Not even that. You empty us all out, dear Captain. But, oh …” His hand reached out as if to cup her belly, then drew back in consciousness of their ring of silent watchers. He straightened. “Bring me a full report in the morning, Illyan,” he said, “at the hospital.”
He took her by the arm as they turned to follow the doctor. She could not tell if it was to support her or himself.
She was surrounded by helpers at the Imperial Military Hospital complex, carried along as on a river. Doctors, nurses, corpsmen, guards. Aral was separated from her at the door, and it made her uneasy and alone in the crowd. She said very little to them, empty courtesies, automatic as levers. She wished for shock to take her consciousness, numbness, reality—denying madness, hallucinations, anything. Instead she just felt tired.
The baby was moving within her, flutters, kneading turns; evidently the teratogenic antidote was a very slow-acting poison. They were still granted a little time together, it seemed, and she loved him through her skin, her fingertips moving in a slow massage over her abdomen. Welcome, my son, to Barrayar, the abode of cannibals; this place didn’t even wait the usual eighteen or twenty years to eat you. Ravenous planet.
She was bedded down in a luxurious private room in a VIP wing, hastily cleared for their exclusive use. She was relieved to discover Vorkosigan had been ensconced just across the hall. Dressed already in green military- issue pajamas, he came promptly over to see her tucked into bed. She managed a small smile for him, but did not attempt to sit up. The force of gravity was pulling her down into the center of the world. Only the rigidity of the bed, the building, the planets crust, held her up against it, not her will at all.
He was trailed by an anxious corpsman, saying, “Remember, sir, try not to talk so much, till after the doctor’s had a chance to give your throat the irrigation treatment.”
The grey light of dawn was making the windows pale. He sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand, rubbing it. “You’re cold, dear Captain,” he whispered hoarsely. She nodded. Her chest ached, her throat was raw, and her sinuses burned.
“I should never have let them talk me into taking the job,” he went on. “So sorry …”
“I talked you into it, too. You tried to warn me. Not your fault. It seemed right for you. Is right.”
He shook his head. “Don’t talk. Makes scar tissue on the vocal cords.”
She gave vent to a joyless “Ha!” and laid a finger across his lips as he started to speak again. He nodded, resigned, and they remained looking at each other for a time. He pushed her tangled hair back gently from her face, and she captured the broad hand to hold against her cheek for comfort, until he was hunted out by a posse of doctors and technicians and driven off for a treatment. “We’ll be in to see you shortly, Milady,” their chieftain promised ominously.
They returned after a while, to make her gargle a nasty pink fluid, and breathe into a machine, then rumbled out again. A female nurse brought her breakfast, which she did not touch.
Then a committee of grim-faced doctors entered her room. The one who had come from the Imperial Residence in the night was now smartly groomed and neatly dressed in civilian clothes. Her own personal physician was flanked by a younger, black-browed man in Service greens with captain’s tabs on his collar. She gazed at their three faces and thought of Cerberus.
Her man introduced the stranger. “This is Captain Vaagen, of the Imperial Military Hospital’s research facility. He’s our resident expert on military poisons.”
“Inventing them, or cleaning up after them, Captain?” Cordelia asked.
“Both, Milady.” He stood at a sort of aggressive parade rest.
Her own man had the look about his eyes of someone who had drawn the short straw, although his lips smiled. “My Lord Regent has asked me to inform you of the schedule of treatments, and so on. I’m afraid,” he cleared his throat, “that it would be best if we scheduled the abortion promptly. It is already unusually late in your pregnancy for it, and it would be as well for your recovery to relieve you of the physiological strain as soon as possible.”
“Is there nothing that can be done?” she asked hopelessly, already knowing the answer from their faces.
“I’m afraid not,” said her man sadly. The man from the Imperial Residence nodded confirmation.
“I ran a literature search,” said the captain unexpectedly, staring out the window, “and there was that calcium experiment. True, the results they got weren’t particularly heartening—”
“I thought we’d agreed not to bring that up,” glared the Residence man.
“Vaagen, that’s cruel,” said her own man. “You’re just raising false hopes. You can’t make the Regent’s wife into one of your hapless experimental animals for a lot of untried shots in the dark. You have your permission from the Regent for the autopsy—leave it at that.”
Her world turned right-side-up again in a second, as she looked at the face of the man with ideas. She knew the type; half-right, half-cocked, half-successful, flitting from one monomania to another like a bee pollinating flowers, gathering little fruit but leaving seeds behind. She was nothing to him, personally, but the raw material for a monograph. The risks she took did not appall his imagination, she was not a person but a disease state. She smiled upon him, slowly, wildly, knowing him then for her ally in the enemy camp.
“How do you do, Dr. Vaagen? How would you like to write the paper of a lifetime?”
The Residence man barked a laugh. “She’s got your number, Vaagen.”
He smiled back, astonished to be so instantly understood. “You realize, I can’t guarantee any results… .”
“Results!” interrupted her man. “My God, you’d better let her know what your idea of results is. Or show her the pictures—no, don’t do that. Milady,” he turned to her, “the treatment he’s discussing was last tried twenty years ago. It did irreparable damage to the mothers. And the results—the very best results you could hope for would be a twisted cripple. Perhaps much worse. Indescribably worse.”
“Jellyfish describes it pretty well,” said Vaagen.
“You’re inhuman, Vaagen!” snapped her man, with a glance her way to check the distress quotient.
“A viable jellyfish, Dr. Vaagen?” asked Cordelia, intent.
“Mm. Maybe,” he replied, inhibited by his colleagues’ angry glares. “But there is the difficulty of what happens to the mothers when the treatment is applied in vivo.”
“So, can’t you do it in vitro?” Cordelia asked the obvious question.
Vaagen shot a glance of triumph at her man. “It would certainly open up a number of possible lines of experiment, if it could be arranged,” he murmured to the ceiling.
“In vitro?” said the Residence man, puzzled. “How?”
“What, how?” said Cordelia. “You’ve got seventeen Escobaran-manufactured uterine replicators stored in a closet around here somewhere, carried home from the war.” She turned excitedly to Vaagen. “Do you happen to know a Dr. Henri?”
