Memory

hardly anything else here.'

'Well … if by anything you mean cities, no. It's landlocked away from any chance at the coastal trade. It's always been agricultural, as much so as the mountains permit.'

'There's not much to do up there in the mountains, judging from the number of hillmen who come to Vorbarr Sultana looking for work,' said Martin. 'We make jokes about them. Like, what do you call a Dendarii hillgirl who can outrun her brothers? A virgin.' Martin chuckled.

Miles did not. A distinct chill fell in the cabin of the lightflyer. Martin glanced sideways, and shrank in his seat. 'Sorry, m'lord,' he muttered.

'I've heard it before. I've heard them all.' In fact, his fathers Armsmen, all District men, used to make them up, but that was different, somehow. Some of them had been hillmen themselves, and not lacking in wit. 'It's true that the Dendarii mountain folk have a lot fewer ancestors than you Vorbarr Sultana slugs, but that's because they failed to roll over and surrender to the Cetagandans.' A slight exaggeration: the Cetagandans had occupied the lowlands, where they'd made handy targets for the hillmen led by the terribly young General Count Piotr Vorkosigan to descend upon. The Cetagandans should have moved their lines back fifty kilometers, instead of trying to push them up into the treacherous hills. The Vorkosigan's District had subsequently lagged behind others in development because it was among the most war-torn on Barrayar.

Well . . . that had been a good excuse two generations ago, even one generation ago. But now?

The Imperium plucks us Vorkosigans from our District, and uses us up, and never replaces what it borrows. And then makes jokes about our impoverishment. Odd . . . he'd never thought of his family's ardent service as a hidden tax on the District before.

Miles waited an extra ten minutes more than he'd originally intended to, then said, 'Turn south here. Give us a thousand meters more of altitude, though.'

'Yes, m'lord.' The flyer banked to the right. After a few more minutes, the automated beacon on the ground detected them, and issued the standard bleat over the lightflyer's com, a recorded voice intoning, 'Warning. You are entering a high radiation area. …'

Martin paled. 'M'lord? Should I continue on this heading?'

'Yes. We're all right at this altitude. But it's been years since I flew over the center of the wastelands. It's always interesting to check and see how things are progressing down there.'

The farmland had given way to woodland many kilometers back. Now the woodland grew more sparse, the colors odder and grayer, scraggly and blighted in some areas, strangely dense in others. 'I own almost all of that, y'know,' Miles went on, gazing down at it. 'I mean, personally. Not a figure of speech because my fathers the District Count. My grandfather left it to me. Not to my father like most of the rest of our property. I've always wondered what sort of a message to me that was supposed to be.' Blighted land for a blighted scion, a comment on his early disabilities? Or resigned realization that Count Aral's life would run its course long before the blasted land recovered? 'I've never set foot on it. I plan to put on radiation gear and visit it, sometime after I have children. They say there are some very strange plants and animals down there.'

'There's no people, are there?' said Martin, staring downward in palpable unease. Without being told, he added a few hundred more meters of altitude.

'A few squatters and bandits, who don't expect to live long enough to have cancer or children. The District rangers round them up and run them out, from time to time. It looks deceptively recovered, in spots. In fact, the radioactivity levels in some areas have dropped by half in my lifetime. When I'm old, this will just begin to be usable again.'

'Ten more years, m'lord?' said Martin.

Miles's lips twitched. 'I was thinking, like, fifty more years, Martin,' he said gently.

'Oh.'

After a few more minutes, he craned his neck and stared out the canopy past Martin. 'There on your left. That blotch is the site of Vorkosigan Vashnoi, the old District capital. Huh. It's going gray-green now. It used to be all black, still, when I was a kid. I wonder if it still glows in the dark?'

'We can come back after dark and look,' Martin offered, after a slight pause.

'No . . . no.' Miles settled back in his seat, and stared ahead at the mountains rising to the south. 'That's enough.'

'I could power up some more,' said Martin presently, as the moldy colors on the landscape below fell behind to be replaced by healthier greens and browns and golds. 'See what this flyer can do.' His tone was decidedly longing.

'I know what it can do,' said Miles. 'And I have no reason to hurry, today. Another time, perhaps.'

Martin had dropped a number of such hints, obviously finding his employers taste in travel staid and dull. Miles itched to take over the controls and give Martin a real thrill-ride, through the Dendarii Gorge. That triple-dip through the wild up-and-down drafts beside, and under, the main waterfall could force a sufficiently white-knuckled passenger to throw up.

Alas, even without the seizures, Miles didn't think he was physically or mentally—or morally—up to it anymore, not the way he and Ivan had used to do it, when slightly younger than Martin here. It was a miracle they hadn't killed themselves. At the time they had been convinced it was their superior Vorish skill, but in retrospect it looked more like divine intervention.

Ivan had started the game. Each cousin took a turn at the lightflyer's controls on runs through the deep winding gorge till the other either tapped out, martial arts-fashion, by banging on the dash, or else lost their last meal. For a proper run one had to disable several of the lightflyer's fail-safe circuits first, a trick Miles would just as soon Martin not learn about. Miles had pulled ahead of Ivan in the score early by the simple precaution of not eating first, till Ivan twigged to it and insisted they eat breakfast together, to assure fairness.

Miles won the final round by challenging Ivan to a night run. Ivan took the first turn, and brought them through alive, though he was white and sweating when they popped up over the last rim and leveled out.

Miles lined up for his run, and turned off the flyers lights. All credit to Ivan's nerve, he didn't break and claw, screaming, for the (disabled) emergency-eject button till he realized his cousin was also flying the speed- pattern through the gorge with his eyes closed.

Miles, of course, didn't bother to mention he'd flown the identical pattern over sixty times in daylight during the prior three days, gradually darkening the canopy until fully opaqued.

That had been the last round of that game. Ivan never challenged him again.

'What are you smiling about, m'lord?' Martin inquired.

'Ah . . . nothing, Martin. Bank right here, and head up across the middle of that wooded area. I'm curious to see how my forest is getting along.'

The absentee Vorkosigan sires had gone in heavily for low-supervision sorts of farming. After fifty years of forestry, the fine hardwood trees were almost ready for sustained selective cutting. In another ten years, say? Patches of oak, maple, elm, hickory, and vesper-birch vied in brilliance in the autumn sun. A dark green grace note was added here and there on the steep hillsides by the genetically engineered winter-hardy ebony, a new strain—or rather, new to Barrayar—imported just three decades ago. Miles wondered where it would all end up: in furniture, houses, and other common things? He hoped some of it at least would be used beautifully. For musical instruments, say, or sculpture or inlay.

Miles frowned at a column of smoke rising several ridges away. 'Go over there,' he told Martin, pointing. But upon arrival he discovered it was all right; it was just his terraforming crew, burning off another hillside of poisonous native scrub prior to treating the soil with organic waste of Earth-DNA origin and planting the tiny saplings.

Martin circled above them, and the half-dozen men in breath masks looked up and waved cordially, all unknowing who observed them. 'Give them a wing-waggle back,' Miles told Martin, who complied. Miles wondered what it would be like, to do that job all day every day, terraforming Barrayar the old low-tech way, meter by meter. But at least it would be easy to look back and measure your life's accomplishment.

They left the forest plantation and continued west over the rugged red-brown hills, all patched and embroidered here and there with Earth-descended colors, marking human habitation or feral growth. The gray mountains, snow-dusted, marched ever higher to their left. Miles settled back and closed his eyes a while, weary for