Mirror Dance

On the fourth day, Ivan Vorpatril turned up at breakfast. He wore an Imperial lieutenant’s undress greens, neatly setting off his tall, physically-fit frame; with his arrival the Yellow Parlor seemed suddenly crowded. Mark shrank down guiltily as his putative cousin greeted his aunt with a decorous kiss on the cheek and his uncle with a formal nod. Ivan nailed a plate from the sideboard and piled it precariously with eggs, meat, and sugared breads, juggled a mug of coffee, hooked back a chair with his foot, and slid into a place at the table opposite Mark.

“Hello, Mark,” Ivan acknowledged his existence at last. “You look like hell. When did you get so bloated?” He shoved a forkful of fried meat into his mouth and started chewing.

“Thank you, Ivan,” Mark took what refuge he could in faint sarcasm. “You haven’t changed, I see.” Implying no improvement, he hoped.

Ivan’s brown eyes glinted; he started to speak, but was stopped by his aunt’s “Ivan” in a tone of cool reproof.

Mark didn’t think it was for trying to talk with his mouth full, but Ivan swallowed before replying, not to Mark but to the Countess, “My apologies, Aunt Cordelia. But I still have a problem with closets and other small, unvented dark areas because of him.”

“Sorry,” muttered Mark, hunching. But something in him resisted being cowed by Ivan, and he added, “I only had Galen kidnap you to fetch Miles.”

“So that was your idea.”

“It worked, too. He came right along and stuck his head in the noose for you.”

Ivan’s jaw tightened. “A habit he has failed to break, I understand,” he returned, in a tone halfway between a purr and a snarl.

It was Mark’s turn to be silent. Yet in a way, it was almost comforting. Ivan at least treated him as he deserved. A little welcome punishment. He felt himself reviving under the rain of scorn like a parched plant. Ivan’s challenge almost brightened his day. “Why are you here?”

“It wasn’t my idea, believe me,” said Ivan. “I am to take you Out. For an airing.”

Mark glanced at the Countess, but she was focused on her husband. “Already?” she asked.

“It is by request,” said Count Vorkosigan.

“Ah ha,” she said, as if enlightened. No light dawned for Mark; it wasn’t his request. “Good. Perhaps Ivan can show him a bit of the city on the way.”

“That’s the idea,” said the Count. “Since Ivan is an officer, it eliminates the need for a bodyguard.”

Why, so they could talk frankly? A terrible idea. And who would protect him from Ivan?

“There will be an outer perimeter, I trust,” said the Countess.

“Oh, yes.”

The outer perimeter was the guard no one was supposed to see, not even the principals. Mark wondered what prevented the outer perimeter people from just taking the day off, and claiming they’d been there, invisible men. You could get away with the scam for quite a long time, between crises, he suspected.

Lieutenant Lord Vorpatril had his own ground-car, Mark discovered after breakfast, a sporty model featuring lots of red enamel. Reluctantly, Mark slid in beside Ivan. “So,” he said, in an uncertain voice. “Do you still want to scrag me?”

Ivan whipped the car through the residence’s gates and out into Vorbarr Sultana city traffic. “Personally, yes. Practically, no. I need all the bodies I can get to stand between me, and Uncle Aral’s job. I wish Miles had a dozen children. He could have, by now, if only he’d started—in a way, you are a godsend. They’d have me clamped in as heir apparent right now if not for you.” He hesitated, in speech only; the ground-car he accelerated through an intersection, weaving narrowly past four other vehicles bearing down in collision courses. “How dead is Miles really? Uncle Aral was pretty vague, on the vid telling me about it. I wasn’t sure if it was for security, or—I’ve never seen him so stiff.”

The traffic was worse than London’s and, if possible, even more disorderly, or ordered according to some rule involving survival of the fittest. Mark gripped the edges of his seat and replied, “I don’t know. He took a needle-grenade in the chest. Almost as bad as it could be without actually blowing him in half.”

Did Ivan’s lips ripple in suppressed horror? If so, the breezy facade re-closed again almost instantly. “It will take a top-notch revival facility to put his torso back together right,” Mark continued. “For the brain … you never know till revival’s over.” And then it’s too late. “But that’s not the problem. Or not the problem yet.”

“Yeah,” Ivan grimaced. “That was a real screw-up, y’know? How could you lose …” He turned so sharply he trailed an edge, which struck sparks from the pavement, and swore cheerfully at a very large hovertruck which nearly lunged through Mark’s side of the groundcar. Mark crouched down and shut his mouth. Better the conversation should die than him; his life could depend on not distracting the driver. His first impression of the city of Miles’s birth was that half the population was going to be killed in traffic before nightfall. Or maybe just the ones in Ivan’s path. Ivan did a violent U-turn and skidded sideways into a parking space, cutting off two other ground-cars maneuvering toward it, and coming to a halt so abruptly Mark was nearly launched into the front panel.

“Vorhartung Castle,” Ivan announced with a nod and a wave as the engine’s whine died away. “The Council of Counts is not in session today, so the museum is open to the public. Though we are not the public.”

“How … cultural,” said Mark warily, peering out through the canopy. Vorhartung Castle really looked like a castle, a rambling, antiquated pile of featureless stone rising out of the trees. It perched on a bluff above the river rapids that divided Vorbarr Sultana. Its grounds were now a park; beds of cultivated flowers grew where men and horses had once dragged seige engines through icy mud in vain assaults. “What is this really?”

“You are to meet a man. And I am not to pre-discuss it.” Ivan popped the canopy and clambered out. Mark followed.

Ivan, whether by plan or perversity, really did take him to the museum, which occupied one whole wing of the castle and was devoted to the arms and armor of the Vor from the Time of Isolation. As a soldier in uniform, Ivan was admitted free, though he dutifully paid Mark’s way in with a few coins. For a cover, Mark guessed, for members of the Vor caste were also admitted free, Ivan explained in a whisper. There was no sign to that effect. If you were Vor you were presumed to know.

Or maybe it was Ivan’s subtle slur on Mark’s Vor-ness, or lack of same. Ivan played the upper-class lout with the same cultivated thoroughness with which he played the Imperial lieutenant, or any other role his world demanded of him. The real Ivan was rather more elusive, Mark gauged; it would not do to underestimate his subtlety, or mistake him for a simpleton.

So he was to meet a man. What man? If it was another ImpSec debriefing, why couldn’t he have met the man at Vorkosigan House? Was it someone in government, or Prime Minister Count Aral’s Centrist Coalition party? Again, why not come to him? Ivan couldn’t be setting him up for an assassination, the Vorkosigans could have had him killed in secret anytime these past two years. Maybe he was being set up to be accused of some staged crime? Even more arcane plot ideas twisted through his mind, all sharing the same fatal flaw of being totally lacking in motivation or logic.

He stared at a crammed array of dual sword sets in a chronological row on a wall, displaying the evolution of the Barrayaran smiths’ art over two centuries, then hurried to join Ivan in front of a case of chemical-explosive- propelled projectile weapons: highly decorated large-bore muzzle loaders that had once, the card proclaimed, belonged to Emperor Vlad Vorbarra. The bullets were peculiar in being solid gold, massive spheres the size of Mark’s thumbtip. At short range, it must have been like being hit by a terminal-velocity brick. At long range, they probably missed. So what poor peasant or squire had been stuck with the job of going around retrieving the misses? Or worse, the hits? Several of the bright balls in display were flattened or misshapen, and to Mark’s intense bemusement, one card informed the museum patron that this very distorted blob had killed Lord Vor So-and-so during the battle of Such-and-such … “taken from his brain,” after death, Mark presumed. Hoped. Yech. He was only surprised someone had cleaned the ancient gore from the spent bullet before mounting it, given the blood-thirsty gruesomeness of some of the other displays. The tanned and cured scalp of Mad Emperor Yuri, for instance, on loan from some Vor clan’s private collection.

“Lord Vorpatril.” It was not a question. The man speaking had appeared so quietly Mark was not even sure from what direction he had come. He was dressed as quietly, middle-aged, intelligent-looking; he might have been a museum administrator. “Come with me, please.”