Borders of Infinity

At a distance just short of starting the mare bolting off again, Miles stopped Fat Ninny and slid off. He made no move toward the mare, but instead stood still and made a great show of fishing in his pockets. Fat Ninny butted his head against Miles eagerly, and Miles cooed and fed him a bit of sugar. The mare cocked her ears with interest. Fat Ninny smacked his lips and nudged for more. The mare snuffled up for her share. She lipped a cube from Miles's palm as he slid his other arm quietly through the loop of her reins.

'Here you go, Dr. Dea. One horse. No running.'

'No fair,' wheezed Dea, trudging up. 'You had sugar in your pockets.'

'Of course I had sugar in my pockets. It's called foresight and planning. The trick of handling horses isn't to be faster than the horse, or stronger than the horse. That pits your weakness against his strengths. The trick is to be smarter than the horse. That pits your strength against his weakness, eh?'

Dea took his reins. 'It's snickering at me,' he said suspiciously.

'That's nickering, not snickering,' Miles grinned. He tapped Fat Ninny behind his left foreleg, and the horse obediently grunted down onto one knee. Miles clambered up readily to his conveniently-lowered stirrup.

'Does mine do that?' asked Dr. Dea, watching with fascination.

'Sorry, no.'

Dea glowered at his horse. 'This animal is an idiot. I shall lead it for a while.'

As Fat Ninny lurched back to his four feet Miles suppressed a riding-instructorly comment gleaned from his Grandfather's store such as, Be smarter than the horse, Dea. Though Dr. Dea was officially sworn to Lord Vorkosigan for the duration of this investigation, Space Surgeon Lieutenant Dea certainly outranked Ensign Vorkosigan. To command older men who outranked one called for a certain measure of tact.

The logging road widened out here, and Miles dropped back beside Harra Csurik. Her fierceness and determination of yesterday morning at the gate seemed to be fading even as the trail rose toward her home. Or perhaps it was simply exhaustion catching up with her. She'd said little all morning, been sunk in silence all afternoon. If she was going to drag Miles all the way up to the back of beyond and then wimp out on him . . .

'What, ah, branch of the Service was your father in, Harra?' Miles began conversationally.

She raked her fingers through her hair in a combing gesture more nervousness than vanity. Her eyes looked out at him through the straw-colored wisps like skittish creatures in the protection of a hedge.

'District Militia, m'lord. I don't really remember him, he died when I was real little.'

'In combat?'

She nodded. 'In the fighting around Vorbarr Sultana, during Vordarian's Pretendership.'

Miles refrained from asking which side he had been swept up on—most footsoldiers had had little choice, and the amnesty had included the dead as well as the living.

'Ah … do you have any sibs?'

'No, lord. Just me and my mother left.'

A little anticipatory tension eased in Miles's neck. If this judgment indeed drove all the way through to an execution, one misstep could trigger a blood feud among the in-laws. Not the legacy of justice the Count intended him to leave behind. So the fewer in-laws involved, the better. 'What about your husband's family?'

'He's got seven. Four brothers and three sisters.'

'Hm.' Miles had a mental flash of an entire team of huge, menacing hill hulks. He glanced back at Pym, feeling a trifle understaffed for his task. He had pointed out this factor to the Count, when they'd been planning this expedition last night.

'The village Speaker and his deputies will be your back-up,' the Count had said, 'just as for the district magistrate on court circuit.'

'What if they don't want to cooperate?' Miles had asked nervously.

'An officer who expects to command Imperial troops,' the Count had glinted, 'should be able to figure out how to extract cooperation from a backcountry headman.'

In other words, his father had decided this was a test, and wasn't going to give him any more clues. Thanks, Dad.

'You have no sibs, lord?' said Harra, snapping him back to the present.

'No. But surely that's known, even in the back-beyond.'

'They say a lot of things about you,' Harra shrugged.

Miles bit down on the morbid question in his mouth like a wedge of raw lemon. He would not ask it, he would not … he couldn't help himself. 'Like what?' forced out past his stiff lips.

'Everyone knows the Count's son is a mutant.' Her eyes flicked defiant-wide. 'Some said it came from the off-worlder woman he married. Some said it was from radiation from the wars, or a disease from, um, corrupt practices in his youth among his brother-officers—'

That last was a new one to Miles. His brow lifted.

'—but most say he was poisoned by his enemies.'

'I'm glad most have it right. It was an assassination attempt using soltoxin gas, when my mother was pregnant with me. But it's not—' a mutation, his thought hiccoughed through the well- worn grooves —how many times had he explained this?—it's teratogenic, not genetic, I'm not a mutant, not. . . . What the hell did a fine point of biochemistry matter to this ignorant, bereaved woman? For all practical purposes—for her purposes—he might as well be a mutant. '—important,' he finished.

She eyed him sideways, swaying gently in the clop-a-clop rhythm of her mount. 'Some said you were born with no legs, and lived all the time in a float chair in Vorkosigan House. Some said you were born with no bones —'

'—and kept in a jar in the basement, no doubt,' Miles muttered.

'But Karal said he'd seen you with your grandfather at Hassadar Fair, and you were only sickly and undersized. Some said your father had got you into the Service, but others said no, you'd gone off-planet to your mother's home and had your brain turned into a computer and your body fed with tubes, floating in a liquid—'

'I knew there'd be a jar turn up in this story somewhere,' Miles grimaced. You knew you 'd be sorry you asked, too, but you went and did it anyway. She was baiting him, Miles realized suddenly. How dare she . . . but there was no humor in her, only a sharp-edged watchfulness.

She had gone out, way out on a limb to lay this murder charge, in defiance of family and local authorities alike, in defiance of established custom. And what had her Count given her for a shield and support, going back to face the wrath of all her nearest and dearest? Miles. Could he handle this? She must be wondering indeed. Or would he botch it, cave and cut and run, leaving her to face the whirlwind of rage and revenge alone?

He wished he'd left her weeping at the gate.

The woodland, fruit of many generations of terraforming forestry, opened out suddenly on a vale of brown native scrub. Down the middle of it, through some accident of soil chemistry, ran a half-kilometer-wide swathe of green and pink—feral roses, Miles realized with astonishment as they rode nearer. Earth roses. The track dove into the fragrant mass of them and vanished.

He took turns with Pym, hacking their way through with their Service bush knives. The roses were vigorous and studded with thick thorns, and hacked back with a vicious elastic recoil. Fat Ninny did his part by swinging his big head back and forth and nipping off blooms and chomping them down happily. Miles wasn't sure just how many he ought to let the big roan eat—just because the species wasn't native to Barrayar didn't mean it wasn't poisonous to horses. Miles sucked at his wounds and reflected upon Barrayar's shattered ecological history.

The fifty thousand Firsters from Earth had only meant to be the spearhead of Barrayar's colonization. Then, through a gravitational anomoly, the worm-hole jump through which the colonists had come shifted closed, irrevocably and without warning. The terraforming which had begun, so careful and controlled in the beginning, collapsed along with everything else. Imported Earth plant and animal species had escaped everywhere to run wild, as the humans turned their attention to the most urgent problems of survival. Biologists still mourned the mass extinctions of native species that had followed, the erosions and droughts and floods, but really, Miles thought, over the centuries of the Time of Isolation the fittest of both worlds had fought it out to a perfectly good new balance. If it was alive and covered the ground who cared where it came from?

We are all here by accident. Like the roses.