Mirror Dance

“So I see,” said the Countess.

“Can we spare an armsman, to drive him home?” Ivan sagged, and Mark’s knees buckled. “Better make it two armsmen.”

“Yes.” The Countess touched a decorative comm pin on her bodice. “Pym … ?”

Ivan was thus taken off his hands, and Mark breathed a sigh of relief. His relief grew to outright gratitude when the Countess commented that it was time for them to quit, too. In a few minutes Pym brought the Count’s groundcar around to the entrance, and the night’s ordeal was over.

The Countess didn’t talk much, for a change, in the groundcar going back to Vorkosigan House. She leaned back against her seat and closed her eyes in exhaustion. She didn’t even ask him anything.

In the black-and-white paved foyer the Countess handed off her cloak to a maid, and headed left, toward the library.

“You’ll excuse me, Mark. I’m going to call ImpMil.”

She looked so tired. “Surely they’d have called you, ma’am, if there was any change in the Count’s condition.”

“I’m going to call ImpMil,” she said flatly. Her eyes were puffy slits. “Go to bed, Mark.”

He didn’t argue with her. He trudged wearily up the stairs to his bedroom corridor.

He paused outside the door to his room. It was very late at night. The hallway was deserted. The silence of the great house pressed on his ears. On an impulse, he turned back and stepped down the hall to Miles’s room. There he paused again. In all his weeks on Barrayar, he had not ventured in here. He had not been invited. He tried the antique knob. The door was not locked.

Hesitantly, he entered, and keyed up the lights with a word. It was a spacious bedchamber, given the limits of the house’s old architecture. An adjoining antechamber once meant for personal servants had long ago been converted to a private bathroom. At first glance the room seemed almost stripped, bare and neat and clean. All the clutter of childhood must have been boxed and put away in an attic, in some spasm of maturity. He suspected Vorkosigan House’s attics were astonishing.

Yet a trace of the owner’s personality remained. He walked slowly around the room, hands in his pockets like a patron at a museum.

Reasonably enough, the few mementos that had been retained tended heavily to reminders of successes. Miles’s diploma from the Imperial Service Academy, and his officer’s commission, were normal enough, though Mark wondered why a battered old Service issue weather manual was also framed and placed exactly between them. A box of old gymkhana awards going back to youth looked like they might be heading for an attic very soon. Half a wall was devoted to a massive book-disk and vid collection, thousands of titles. How many had Miles actually read? Curious, he took the hand-viewer off its hook on the wall nearby, and tried three disks at random. All had at least a few notes or glosses entered in the margin-boxes, tracks of Miles’s thought. Mark gave up the survey, and passed on.

One object he knew personally; a cloissone-hilted dagger, which Miles had inherited from old General Piotr. He dared to take it down and test its heft and edge. So when in the past two years had Miles stopped carting it around, and sensibly began leaving it safely at home? He replaced it carefully on the shelf in its sheath.

One wall-hanging was ironic, personal, and obvious: an old metal leg-brace, crossed, military-museum fashion, with a Vor sword. Half-joke, half-defiance. Both obsolete. A cheap photonic reproduction of a page from an ancient book was matted and mounted in a wildly expensive silver frame. The text was all out of context, but appeared to be some sort of pre-Jump religious gibberish, all about pilgrims, and a hill, and a city in the clouds. Mark wasn’t sure what that was all about; nobody had ever accused Miles of being the religious type. Yet it was clearly important to him.

Some of these things aren’t prizes, Mark realized. They are lessons.

A holovid portfolio box rested on the bedside table. Mark sat down, and activated it. He expected Elli Quinn’s face, but the first videoportrait to come up was of a tall, glowering, extraordinarily ugly man in Vorkosigan Armsmen’s livery. Sergeant Bothari, Elena’s father. He keyed through the contents. Quinn was next, then Bothari- Jesek. His parents, of course. Miles’s horse, Ivan, Gregor: after that, a parade of faces and forms. He keyed through faster and faster, not recognizing even a third of the people. After the fiftieth face, he stopped clicking.

He rubbed his face wearily. He’s not a man, he’s a mob. Right. He sat bent and aching, face in his hands, elbows on his knees. No. I am not Miles.

Miles’s comconsole was the secured type, in no way junior to the one in the Count’s library. Mark walked over and examined it only by eye; his hands he shoved back deep into his trouser pockets. His fingertips encountered Kareen Koudelka’s crumpled flowerlets.

He drew them out, and spread them on his palm. In a spasm of frustration, he smashed the blooms with his other hand, and threw them to the floor. Less than a minute later he was on his hands and knees frantically scraping the scattered bits up off the carpet again. I think I must be insane. He sat on his knees on the floor and began to cry.

Unlike poor Ivan, no one interrupted his misery, for which he was profoundly grateful. He sent a mental apology after his Vorpatril cousin, Sorry, sorry … though odds were even whether Ivan would remember anything about his intrusion come the morning. He gulped for control of his breath, his head aching fiercely.

Ten minutes delay downside at Bharaputra’s had been all the difference. If they’d been ten minutes faster, the Dendarii would have made it back to their drop shuttle before the Bharaputrans had a chance to blow it up, and all would have unfolded into another future. Thousands of ten-minute intervals had passed in his life, unmarked and without effect. But that ten minutes had been all it took to transform him from would-be hero to permanent scum. And he could never recover the moment.

Was that, then, the commander’s gift: to recognize those critical minutes, out of the mass of like moments, even in the chaos of their midst? To risk all to grab the golden ones? Miles had possessed that gift of timing to an extraordinary degree. Men and women followed him, laid all their trust at his feet, just for that.

Except once, Miles’s timing had failed… .

No. He’d been screaming his lungs out for them to keep moving. Miles’s timing had been shrewd. His feet had been fatally slowed by others’ delays.

Mark climbed up off the floor, washed his face in the bathroom, and returned and sat in the comconsole’s station chair. The first layer of secured functions was entered by a palm-lock. The machine did not quite like his palm-print; bone growth and subcutaneous fat deposits were beginning to distort the pattern out of the range of recognition. But not wholly, not yet; on the fourth try it took a reading that pleased it, and opened files to him. The next layer of functions required codes and accesses he did not know, but the top layer had all he needed for now: a private, if not secured, comm channel to ImpSec.

ImpSec’s machine bounced him to a human receptionist almost immediately. “My name is Lord Mark Vorkosigan,” he told the corporal on night-duty, whose face appeared above the vid plate. “I want to speak with Simon Illyan. I suppose he’s still at the Imperial Residence.”

“Is this an emergency, my lord?” the corporal asked.

“It is to me,” growled Mark.

Whatever the corporal thought of that, he patched Mark on through. Mark insisted his way past two more layers of subordinates before the ImpSec chief’s tired face materialized.

Mark swallowed. “Captain Illyan.”

“Yes, Lord Mark, what is it?” Illyan said wearily. It had been a long night for ImpSec, too.

“I had an interesting conversation with a certain Captain Vorventa, earlier this evening.”

“I am aware. You offered him some not-too-oblique threats.”

And Mark had assumed that ImpSec guard/servant had been sent to protect him … ah, well.

“So I have a question for you, sir. Is Captain Vorventa on the list of people who are supposed to know about Miles?”

Illyan’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Well, he does.”