Cetaganda

She sat in a float-chair, clothed from slender neck to ankle in flowing robes of shining white, a dozen shimmering textures lying one atop another. Her hair glinted ebony, masses of it that poured down across her shoulders, past her lap, to coil around her feet. When she stood, it would trail on the floor like a banner. Her enormous eyes were an ice blue of such arctic purity as to make Lady Gelle's eyes look like mud-puddles. Skin . . . Miles felt he had never seen skin before, just blotched bags people wore around themselves to keep from leaking. This perfect ivory surface . . . his hands ached with the desire to touch it, just once, and die. Her lips were warm, as if roses pulsed with blood. . . .

How old was she? Twenty? Forty? This was a haut-woman. Who could tell? Who could care? Men of the old religion had worshipped on their knees icons far less glorious, in beaten silver and hammered gold. Miles was on his knees now, and could not remember how he'd come to be there.

He knew now why they called it 'falling in love.' There was the same nauseating vertigo of free fall, the same vast exhilaration, the same sick certainty of broken bones upon impact with a rapidly rising reality. He inched forward, and laid the Great Key in front of her perfectly shaped, white-slippered feet, and sank back, and waited.

I am Fortune's fool.

CHAPTER SIX

She bent forward, one graceful hand darting down to retrieve her solemn charge. She laid the Great Key in her lap, and pulled a long necklace from beneath her layered white garments. The chain held a ring, decorated with a thick raised bird-pattern, the gold lines of electronic contacts gleaming like filigree upon its surface. She inserted the ring into the seal atop the rod. Nothing happened.

Her breath drew in. She glared down at Miles. 'What have you done to it!'

'Milady, I, I … nothing, I swear by my word as Vorkosigan! I didn't even drop it. What's . . . supposed to happen?'

'It should open.'

'Um . . . um . . .' He would break into a desperate sweat, but he was too damned cold. He was dizzy with the scent of her, and the celestial music of her unfiltered voice. 'There are only three possibilities, if there's something wrong with it. Someone broke it—not me, I swear!' Could that have been the secret of Ba Lura's peculiar intrusion? Maybe the Ba had broken it, and had been seeking a scapegoat upon whom to shuffle the blame? '—or someone's re-programmed it, or, least likely, there's been some kind of substitution pulled. A duplicate, or, or . . .'

Her eyes widened, and her lips parted, moving in some subvocalization.

'Not least likely?' Miles hazarded. 'It would surely be the most difficult, but … it crosses my mind that maybe someone didn't think you would be getting it back from me. If it's a counterfeit, maybe it was meant to be on its way to Barrayar in a diplomatic pouch right now. Or … or something.' No, that didn't quite make sense, but . . .

She sat utterly still, her face tense with panic, her hands clutching the rod.

'Milady, talk to me. If it's a duplicate, it's obviously a very good duplicate. You now have it, to turn over at the ceremony. So what if it doesn't work? Who's going to check the function of some obsolete piece of electronics?'

'The Great Key is not obsolete. We used it every day.'

'It's some kind of data link, right? You have a time-window, here. Nine days. If you think it's been compromised, wipe it and re-program it from your backup files. If that thing in your hand is some kind of a non- working dummy, you've maybe got time to make a real duplicate, and re-program it.' But don't just sit there with death in your lovely eyes. 'Talk to me!'

'I must do as Ba Lura did,' she whispered. 'The Ba was right. This is the end.'

'No, why?! It's just a, a thing, who cares? Not me!'

She held up the rod, her arctic-blue eyes fixing on his face at last. Her gaze made him want to scuttle into the shadows like a crab, to hide his merely human ugliness, but he held fast before her. 'There is no backup,' she said. 'This is the sole key.'

Miles felt faint, and it wasn't just from her perfume. 'No backup?' he choked. 'Are you people crazy?'

'It is a matter of … control.'

'What does the damn thing really do, anyway?'

She hesitated, then said, 'It is the data-key to the haut gene bank. All the frozen genetic samples are stored in a randomized order, for security. Without the key, no one knows what is where. To re-create the files, someone would have to physically examine and re-classify each and every sample. There are hundreds of thousands of samples—one for every haut who has ever lived. It would take an army of geneticists working for a generation to re-create the Great Key.'

'This is a real disaster, then, huh?' he said brightly, blinking. His teeth gritted. 'Now I know I was framed.' He climbed to his feet, and threw back his head, defying the onslaught of her beauty. 'Lady, what is really going on here? I'll ask you one more time, with feeling. What in God's green ninety hells was the Ba Lura ever doing with the Great Key on a space station?'

'No outlander may—'

'Somebody made it my business! Sucked me right into it. I don't think I could escape now if I tried. And I think . . . you need an ally. It took you a day and a half just to arrange this second meeting with me. Nine days left. You don't have time to go it alone. You need … a trained security man. And for some strange reason, you don't seem to want to get one from your own side.'

She rocked, just slightly, in frozen misery, in a faint rustle of fabrics.

'If you don't think I'm worthy of being let in on your secrets,' Miles went on wildly, 'then explain to me how you think I could possibly make things any worse than they are right now!'

Her blue eyes searched him, for he knew not what. But he thought if she asked him to open his veins for her, right here and now, the only thing he'd say would be How wide?

'It was my Celestial Lady's desire,' she began fearfully, and stopped.

Miles clutched at his shredded self-control. Everything she'd spilled so far was either obviously deducible, or common knowledge, at least in her milieu. Now she was getting to the good stuff, and knew it. He could tell by the way she'd stalled out.

'Milady.' He chose his words with extreme care. 'If the Ba did not commit suicide, it was certainly murdered.' And we both have good reason to prefer the second scenario. 'Ba Lura was your servitor, your colleague . . . dare I guess, friend? I saw its body in the rotunda. A very dangerous and daring person arranged that hideous tableau. There was … a deep mischief and mockery in it.'

Was that pain, in those cool eyes? So hard to tell. . .

'I have old and very personal reasons to particularly dislike being made the unwitting target of persons of cruel humor. I don't know if you can understand this.'

'Perhaps …' she said slowly.

Yes. Look past the surface. See me, not this joke of a body. . . . 'And I am the one person on Eta Ceta you know didn't do it. It's the only certainty we share, so far. I claim a right to know who's doing this to us. And the only chance in hell I have to figure out who, is to know exactly why.'

Still she sat silent.