Brothers in Arms

I seriously doubt the utility of keeping him alive. . . 'I don't think so,' Miles said distantly. He lurched to his feet, ricocheted into the bathroom, threw up, and passed out.

He awoke with the unblinking glare of the overhead light needling his eyes, and flung an arm over his face to shut it out. Someone—Galeni?—had put him back on his bench. Galeni was asleep now across the room, breathing heavily. A meal, cold and congealed, sat on a plate at the end of Miles's bench. It must be deep night. Miles contemplated the food queasily, then put it down out of sight under his bench. Time stretched inexorably as he tossed, turned, sat up, lay down, aching and nauseous, escape even into sleep receding out of reach.

The next morning after breakfast they came and took not Miles but Galeni. The captain left with a look of grim distaste in his eyes. Sounds of a violent altercation came from the hallway, Galeni trying to get himself stunned, a draconian but surely effective way of avoiding interrogation. He did not succeed. Their captors returned him, giggling vacuously, after a marathon number of hours.

He lay limply on his bench giving vent to an occasional snicker for what might have been another hour before slipping into torpid sleep. Miles gallantly resisted taking advantage of the residual effects of the drug to get in a few questions of his own. Alas, fast-penta subjects remembered their experiences. Miles was fairly certain by now that one of Galeni's personal triggers was in the key word betrayal.

Galeni returned to a thick but cold consciousness at last, looking ill. Fast-penta hangover was a remarkably unpleasant experience; in that, Miles's response to the drug had not been at all idiosyncratic.

Miles winced in sympathy as Galeni made his own trip to the washroom.

Galeni returned to sit heavily on his bench. His eye fell on his cold dinner plate; he prodded it dubiously with an experimental forefinger. 'You want this?' he asked Miles.

'No, thanks.'

'Mm.' Galeni shoved the plate out of sight under his bench and sat back rather nervelessly.

'What were they after,' Miles jerked his head doorward, 'in your interrogation?'

'Personal history, mostly, this time.' Galeni contemplated his socks; which were getting stiff with grime; but Miles was not sure Galeni was seeing what he was looking at. 'He seems to have this strange difficulty grasping that I actually mean what I say. He had apparently genuinely convinced himself that he had only to reveal himself, to whistle, to bring me to his heel as I had run when I was fourteen. As if the weight of my entire adult life counted for nothing. As if I'd put on this uniform for a joke, or out of despair or confusion—anything but a reasoned and principled decision.'

No need to ask who 'he' was. Miles grinned sourly. 'What, it wasn't for the spiffy boots?'

'I'm just dazzled by the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism,' Galeni informed him blandly.

'Is that how he phrased it? Anyway, it's feudalism, not fascism, apart maybe from some of the late Emperor Ezar Vorbarra's experiments in centralization. The glittering tinsel of neo-feudalism I will grant you.'

'I am thoroughly familiar with the principle of Barrayaran government, thank you,' remarked Dr. Galeni.

'Such as they are,' muttered Miles. 'It was all arrived at by improvisation, y'know.'

'Yes, I do. Glad to know you aren't as historically illiterate as the average young officer coming up these days.'

'So . . .' Miles said, 'if it wasn't for the gold braid arid the shiny boots, why are you with us?'

'Oh, of course,' Galeni rolled his eyes toward the light fixture, 'I get a sadistic psychosexual kick out of being a bully, goon, and thug. It's a power trip.'

'Hi,' Miles waved from across the room, 'talk to me, not him, huh? He had his turn.'

'Mm.' Galeni crossed his arms glumly. 'In a sense, it's true, I suppose. I am on a power trip. Or I was.'

'For what it's worth, that's not a secret to the Barrayaran high command.'

'Nor to any Barrayaran, though people from outside your society seem to miss it regularly. How do they imagine such an apparently caste-rigid society has survived the incredible stresses of the century since the end of the Time of Isolation without exploding? In a way, the Imperial Service has performed something of the same social function as the medieval church once did here on Earth, as a safety valve. Through it, anyone of talent can launder his caste origins. Twenty years of Imperial service, and they step out for all practical purposes an honorary Vor. The names may not have changed since Dorca Vorbarra's day, when the Vor were a closed caste of self-serving horse goons—'

Miles grinned at this description of his great-grandfather's generation.

'—but the substance has altered out of all recognition. And yet through it all the Vor have managed, however desperately, to hang on to certain vital principles of service and sacrifice. To the knowledge that it is possible for a man who would not stop and stoop to take, to yet run down the street for a chance to give. …' He stopped short, and cleared his throat, flushing. 'My Ph.D. thesis, y'know. 'The Barrayaran Imperial Service, A Century of Change.' '

'I see.'

'I wanted to serve Komarr—'

'As your father before you,' Miles finished. Galeni glanced up sharply, suspecting sarcasm, but found, Miles trusted, only sympathetic irony in his eyes.

Galeni's hand opened in a brief gesture of agreement and understanding. 'Yes. And no. None of the cadets who entered the service when I did have yet seen a shooting war. I saw one from street level—'

'I had suspected you were more intimately acquainted with the Komarr Revolt than the Security reports seemed to believe,' remarked Miles.

'As a drafted apprentice to my father,' Galeni confirmed. 'Some night forays, other missions of sabotage—I was small for my age. There are places a child, idly playing, can pass where an adult would be stopped. Before my fourteenth birthday I had helped kill men. … I have no illusions about the glorious Imperial troops during the Komarr Revolt. I saw men wearing this uniform,' he waved a hand down the piped length of his green trousers, 'do shameful things. In anger or fear, in frustration or desperation, sometimes just in idle viciousness. But I could not see that it made any practical difference to the corpses, ordinary people caught in the cross fire, whether they were burned down by evil invader plasma fire, or blown to bits by good patriotic gravitic implosions. Freedom? We can scarcely pretend that Komarr was a democracy even before the Barrayarans came. My father cried that Barrayar had destroyed Komarr, but when I looked around, Komarr was still there.'

'You can't tax a wasteland,' Miles murmured.

'I saw a little girl once—' He stopped, bit his lip, plunged on. 'What makes a practical difference is that there not be war. I mean—I meant—to make that practical difference. A Service career, an honorable retirement, leverage to a ministerial appointment—then up through the ranks on the civil side, then …'

'The viceroyalty of Komarr?' suggested Miles.

'That hope would be slightly megalomanic,' said Galeni. 'An appointment on his staff, though, certainly.' His vision faded, palpably, as he glanced around their cell-room, and his lips puffed on a silent, self-derisive laugh. 'My father, on the other hand, wants revenge. Foreign domination of Komarr being not merely prone to abuse, but intrinsically evil by first principle. Trying to make it un-foreign by integration is not compromise, it's collaboration, capitulation. Komarran revolutionaries died for my sins. And so on. And on.'

'He's still attempting to persuade you to come over to his side, then.'

'Oh, yes. I believe he will keep talking till he pulls the trigger.'

'Not that I'm asking you to, um, compromise your principles or anything, but I really don't see that it would be any extra skin off my nose if you were to, say, plead for your own life,' Miles mentioned diffidently. ' 'He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day,' and all that.'

Galeni shook his head. 'For precisely that logic, I cannot surrender. Not will not— can not. He can't trust me. If I reversed, he would too, and be compelled to argue himself into killing me as hard as he now feigns to be arguing himself out. He's already sacrificed my brother. In a sense, my mother's death came ultimately from that loss, and others he inflicted on her in the name of the cause.' He added in a flash of self-consciousness, 'I suppose that makes this all seem very oedipal. But—the anguish of making the hard choices has always appealed to the romance in his soul.'

Miles shook his head. 'I'll allow you know the man better than I do. And yet . . . well, people do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives. The will to be stupid is a very powerful force