Memory

stand this. If the thing can't be fixed . . . swear you'll cut my throat for me. Don't let it go on forever. I won't be able to do it for myself. Swear to me. Your word as Vorkosigan!'

'God, Simon, I can't promise that!'

'You have to. You can't abandon me to an eternity of this. Swear.'

'I can't,' Miles whispered. 'Is this . . . what you sent Vorberg to get me for?'

Illyan's face changed again, the desperation unfocusing into bewilderment. 'Who's Vorberg?' Then a sudden hard suspicion. 'Who the hell are you?' Illyan shook free of his hand.

Miles went five more rounds, then walked out into the corridor. He leaned against the wall, head down till the nausea passed. His body shook, suppressed shudders that traveled from bottom to top. Dr. Ruibal hovered. Ivan too took the opportunity to step out, and breathe deeply.

'You see what we're up against,' said Ruibal.

'This is … graceless. ' Miles's voice was a whisper, but Ruibal flinched. 'Ruibal. You get him washed. Shaved. Give him some clothes back. There's a complete supply of civvies in his apartment downstairs, I know.' Maybe if Illyan didn't look so much like an animal, they wouldn't treat him so much like one.

'My lord,' said the colonel. 'I'm reluctant to ask my corpsmen to risk losing more teeth. But if you'll stay for it, we'll try. You're the only person I've seen he hasn't tried to slug.'

'Yes. Of course.'

Miles saw the process through. Having a familiar person present did seem to be a calming influence on Illyan. People he'd known for the longest time would be best; then whatever day and year he opened his eyes, every five minutes, he would see a known face, who could tell him a story he might trust. Clothed again, Illyan sat up in a chair, and ate from a tray a corpsman brought, apparently the first meal for a couple of days that he had not tried to turn into a projectile weapon.

An officer appeared at the door, and spoke to Ruibal.

'The briefing you requested has been prepared, my Lord Auditor,' Ruibal told Miles. His obsequious tone wasn't just in honor of Miles's Auditor's menace, because he added wistfully, 'Will you came back, afterwards?'

'Oh, yes. Meantime . . .' Miles's eye fell on Ivan.

'I would rather,' stated Ivan quietly, 'charge a laser-cannon site naked than be in here by myself.'

'I'll keep it in mind,' said Miles. 'In the meanwhile—stay with him till I get back.'

'Yeah.' Ivan took over the chair at Illyan's elbow as Miles vacated it.

As Miles followed Ruibal out the door, he heard Illyan's voice, for a change more amiable than stressed: 'Ivan, you idiot. What are you doing here?'

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The clinic s conference chamber bore a strong generic resemblance to every other ImpSec briefing room in which Miles had ever spent endless hours. A round black table featured a secured holovid projector with a control panel that looked like a jump-ship navcomp. Five station chairs were presently set closely around it, occupied by three men who rose hastily and stood at attention when Ruibal ushered Miles inside. When they were all assembled, there was no one in the room below the rank of colonel except Miles. This was not all that unusual for Vorbarr Sultana; at Imperial Service HQ across town where Ivan worked, the joke was that the colonels carried the coffee.

No: he was neither above nor below them in rank, Miles reminded himself. He was outside them altogether. It was apparent that however accustomed they might be to generals and admirals, this was their first close encounter with an Imperial Auditor. The last Imperial Audit ImpSec had suffered had been almost five years ago, and more traditionally financial in scope. Miles had brushed up against it on the opposite side that time, as the Auditor had choked on certain aspects of mercenary accounting. That investigation had had a dangerous political tinge, from which Illyan had insulated him.

Ruibal introduced the team. Ruibal himself was the neurologist. Next, or perhaps first, in importance was a rear admiral, Dr. Avakli, the biocyberneticist. Avakli was on loan from the medical group who did all the Imperial Service jumpship pilots' neural implants, the one neuroenhancement technology up and running on Barrayar with any resemblance to that which had produced Illyan's eidetic chip. Avakli, in nice contrast to the rounder Ruibal, was long, thin, intense, and balding. Miles hoped the last was a sign of a high intellectual temperature. The other two men were tech support assistants to Avakli.

'Thank you, gentlemen,' Miles said when introductions were complete. He sat; they sat, except for Ruibal, who was apparently elected spokes-goat.

'Where would you like me to begin, my Lord Auditor?' Ruibal asked Miles.

'Um . . . the beginning?'

Obediently, Ruibal began to rattle off a long list of neurological tests, illustrated with holovids of the data and results.

'Excuse me,' said Miles after a few minutes of this. 'I did not phrase myself well. You can skip all the negative data. Go directly to the positive results.'

There was a short silence, then Ruibal said, 'In summation, I did not find evidence of organic neurological damage. The physiological and psychological stress levels, which are quite dangerously high, I judge to be an effect rather than a cause of the biocybernetic breakdown.'

'Do you agree with that assessment?' Miles asked Avakli, who nodded, though with a little judicious lip- pursing to indicate the ever-present possibility of human error. Avakli and Ruibal exchanged a nod, and Avakli took Ruibal's place at the holovid projector.

Avakli had a detailed holovid map of the chip's internal architecture, which he began to display. Miles was relieved. He'd been a little afraid they were going to tell him ImpSec Medical had lost the owner's manual in the intervening thirty-five years, but they appeared to have quite a lot of data. The chip itself was an immensely complex sandwich of organic and inorganic molecular layers about five by seven centimeters broad and half a centimeter thick, which rested in a vertical position between the two lobes of Illyan's brain. The number of neurological connections that ran from it made a jump-pilot's control headset look like a child's toy. The greatest complexity seemed to be in the information retrieval net, rather than the protein-based data storage, though both were not only fiendishly ornate, but largely unmapped—it had been an autolearning-style system which had assembled itself in a highly non-linear fashion after the chip had been installed.

'So is the . . . damage or deterioration we're seeing confined to the organic or the inorganic parts? Or both?' Miles asked Avakli.

'Organic,' said Avakli. 'Almost certainly.'

Avakli was one of those scientists who never placed an unhedged bet, Miles realized.

'Unfortunately,' Avakli went on, 'it was never originally designed to be downloaded. There is no single equivalent of a data-port to connect to; just these thousands and thousands of neuronic leads going into and out of the thing all over its surface.'

In view of the chip's history as Emperor Ezar's ultra-secure data dump, this made sense. Miles would not have been surprised to learn the thing had been customized to be especially nondownloadable.

'Now … I was under the impression the thing worked in parallel with Illyan's original cerebral memory. It doesn't actually replace it, does it?'

'That is correct, my lord. The neurological input is only split from the sensory nerves, not shunted aside altogether. The subjects apparently have dual memories of all their experiences. This appears to have been the major contributing factor to the high incidence of iatrogenic schizophrenia they later developed. A sort of inherent design defect, not of the chip so much as of the human brain.'

Ruibal cleared his throat in polite theoretical, or perhaps theological, disagreement.

Illyan must have been a born spy. To hold more than one reality balanced in your mind until proof arrived, without going mad from the suspense, was surely the mark of a great investigator.

Avakli then went into a highly technical discussion of three projected ideas for extracting some kind of data