Memory

'About'—Illyan glanced at his chrono—'four minutes.'

'About standard.'

'Lie still. I'll call a medic.'

'I don't need a goddamn medic. I can walk.' He tried to get up. One leg buckled, and he went down again, face mashed in the carpet. His face was sticky—he'd evidently hit his mouth, which was swelling, on the first fall, and his nose, which was bleeding. Illyan handed him a handkerchief, and he pressed it to his face. After about a minute, he suffered Illyan to help him back into the chair.

Illyan half-sat on the edge of his desk, watching him. Watching over him, always. 'You knew,' said Illyan. 'And you lied. To me. In writing. In that damned falsified report, you pissed away . . . everything. I'd have mistrusted my memory chip before I mistrusted you. Why, Miles? Were you that panicked?' The anguish leaked into that level voice like blood into a bruise.

Yes. I was that panicked. I didn't want to lose Naismith. I didn't want to lose . . . everything. 'It doesn't matter now.' He fumbled at his collar. One pin tore the green fabric, coming off in his shaking hands. He thrust the pins blindly at Illyan. 'There. You win.'

Illyan's hand closed over them. 'God save me,' he said softly, 'from another such victory.'

'Fine, good, give me the read-pad. Give me the retinal scan. Let's get this the hell over with. I'm sick of ImpSec, and eating ImpSec shit. No more. Good.' The shaking didn't stop, radiating outward in hot waves from the pit of his belly. He was terrified he was about to start crying in front of Illyan.

Illyan sat back, his closed hand turning inward. 'Take a couple of minutes to compose yourself. Take as long as you need. Then go into my washroom and wash your face. I'm not unlocking my door till you're fit to go out.'

Strange mercies, Illyan. You kill me so courteously. But he nodded, and stumbled to Illyan's little lavatory. Illyan followed him to the door, then, apparently deciding he would stay on his feet this time, left him alone. The face in the mirror was indeed unfit to be seen, bloody and ravaged. It was very like the face he had last seen looking back at him the day Sergeant Beatrice had been killed, except about a hundred years older now. Illyan will not shame a great name. Neither should I. He washed carefully, though he failed to get all the bloodstains out of his torn collar and the cream-colored shirt opened under it.

He returned, to sit docilely, and let Illyan hand him the read-pad for his palm-print, administer the retinal scan, and record his brief, formal words of resignation. 'All right. Let me out,' he said quietly.

'Miles, you're still shaking.'

'I will be, for a while yet. It will pass. Let me out, please.'

'I'll call a car. And walk you to it. You shouldn't be alone.'

Oh, yes I should. 'Very well.'

'Do you wish to go directly to a hospital? You ought to. As a properly discharged veteran, you're entitled to ImpMil treatment in your own right, not just in your father's name. I … figured that would be important.'

'No. I wish to go home. I'll deal with it … later. It's chronic, not critical. Probably be another month before it happens again, if it runs to form.'

'You should go to a hospital.'

'You'—Miles eyed him—'have just lost your authority over my actions. May I remind you. Simon.'

Illyan's hand opened in troubled acquiescence. He walked back around his desk, and pressed the keypad that unlocked his door. He rubbed his hand over his own face, for a moment, as if to wipe away all emotion. And the water standing in his eyes. Miles fancied he could almost feel the coolness of that evaporation, across Illyan's round cheekbones. When Illyan turned back, his face was as bland and closed as Miles had ever seen it.

God, my heart hurts. And his head. And his stomach. And every other part of him. He climbed to his feet, and walked to the door, shrugging away Illyan s hesitant hand under his elbow.

The door hissed open revealing three men, standing in anxious guard near it: Illyan's secretary, General Haroche, and Captain Galeni. Galeni's brows rose, looking at Miles; Miles could tell exactly when he noticed the insignia-stripped collar, for his eyes widened in shock.

Cripes, Duv, what d'you think? That he'd had a fist-fight with Illyan, along with the screaming match? That an enraged Illyan had torn those ImpSec eyes forcibly from Miles's tunic? Circumstantial evidence can be so convincing.

Haroche's lips parted in a breath of disturbed surprise. 'What the hell . . . ?' His hand opened in question to Illyan.

'Excuse us.' Illyan met no one's eyes, pushing through. The assembled ImpSec officers all wheeled to stare after the pair, as they made it to the corridor and turned left.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Conscious of the ImpSec driver's eyes following him, Miles walked carefully through the front door of Vorkosigan House. He did not let his shoulders sag until the doors closed safely behind him. He fell into the first chair he came to, on top of its cover. It was another hour before he stopped shivering.

Not the growing darkness but bladder pressure at last drove him to his feet. Our bodies are our masters, we their prisoners. Free the prisoners. Once up and moving, his only desire was to be still again.I should get drunk. It's traditional, for situations like this, isn't it? He collected a bottle of brandy from the cellar. Wine seemed inadequately poisonous. This burst of activity dwindled to rest in the smallest room he could find, a fourth-floor chamber which, but for its window, might have passed for a closet. It was a former servants' room, but it had an old wing chair in it. After going to all the trouble to find the brandy, he had not the ambition left to open the bottle. He crouched down small in the big chair.

On his next trip to his bathroom, sometime after midnight, he picked up his grandfather's dagger, and brought it back with him to set it beside the sealed brandy bottle on the lamp table by his left hand. The dagger tempted him as little as the drink, but toying with it did provide a few moments of interest. He let the light slide over the blade, and pressed it against his wrists, his throat, along the thin scars from his cryonic prep already slashed there. Definitely the throat, if anything. All or nothing, no playing around.

But he'd died once already, and it hadn't helped. Death held neither mystery nor hope. And there lurked the horrible possibility that those who had sacrificed so much to revive him the last time would be inspired to try it again. And botch it. Or rather, botch it even worse. He'd seen half-successful cryo-revivals, vegetable or animal minds whining brokenly in once-human bodies. No. He didn't want to die. At least not where his body could ever be found. He just couldn't bear being alive right now.

The sanctuary in between the two organic states, sleep, refused to come to him. But if he sat here long enough, eventually he must sleep, surely.

Get up. Get up and run, as fast as you can. Back to the Dendarii, before ImpSec or anyone could stop him. Now was his chance, Naismith's chance. Naismith's last chance. Go. Go. Go.

He sat on, muscles knotted, the litany of escape beating in his head.

He discovered that if he drank no water, he didn't need to get up so often. He still didn't sleep, but in the predawn his thoughts began to slow. A thought an hour. That was all right.

Light seeped into the room again through the window, making the lamplight grow pale and wan. A quadrangle of sun crept slowly across the worn patterned rug, as slowly as his thoughts, left to center to right, then gone.

The sounds of the city outside softened with the oncoming twilight. But his little bubble of personal