'They always follow me all the time. It hasn't been easy to convince people I was serious about retiring. Before you came I used to amuse myself flushing them out. Do things like go drunk driving in my flyer in those canyons to the south on the moonlit nights. It's new. Very fast. That used to drive them to distraction.'
'Heavens, that sounds positively lethal. Did you really do that?'
He looked mildly ashamed of himself. 'I'm afraid so. I didn't think you'd be coming here, then. It was a thrill. I hadn't gone adrenaline-tripping on purpose since I was a teenager. The Service rather supplied that need.'
'I'm surprised you didn't have a wreck.'
'I did, once,' he admitted. 'Just a minor crack-up. That reminds me, I must check on the repairs. They seem to be taking forever at it. The alcohol made me limp as a rag, I suppose, and I never quite had the nerve to do without the shoulder harness. No harm done, except to the flyer and Captain Negri's agent's nerves.'
'Twice,' commented Bothari unexpectedly.
'I beg your pardon, Sergeant?'
'You wrecked it twice.' The Sergeant's lips twitched. 'You don't remember the second time. Your father said he wasn't surprised. We helped, um, pour you out of the safety cage. You were unconscious for a day.'
Vorkosigan looked startled. 'Are you pulling my leg, Sergeant?'
'No, sir. You can go look at the pieces of the flyer. They're scattered for a kilometer and a half down Dendarii Gorge.'
Vorkosigan cleared his throat, and shrunk down in his seat. 'I see.' He was quiet, then added, 'How— unpleasant, to have a blank like that in one's memory.'
'Yes, sir,' agreed Bothari blandly.
Cordelia glanced up at the following flyer through a gap in the hills. 'Have they been watching us all this time? Me, too?'
Vorkosigan smiled at the look on her face. 'From the moment you set foot in the Vorbarr Sultana shuttleport, I should imagine. I happen to be politically hot, after Escobar. The press, which is Ezar Vorbarra's third hand here, has me set up as a kind of hero-in-retreat, snatching victory spontaneously from the jaws of defeat and so on—absolute tripe. Makes my stomach hurt, even without the brandy. I should have been able to do a better job, knowing what I knew in advance. Sacrificed too many cruisers, covering the troopships—it had to be traded off that way, sheer arithmetic demanded it, though… .'
She could mark by his face as his thoughts wandered into a well-trodden labyrinth of military might-have- beens. Damn Escobar, she thought, and damn your Emperor, damn Serg Vorbarra and Ges Vorrutyer, damn all the chances of time and place that combined to squeeze a boy's dream of heroism into a man's nightmare of murder, crime, and deceit. Her presence was a great palliative for him, but it was not enough; still something remained unwell in him, out of tune.
As they approached Vorbarr Sultana from the south, the hill country flattened out into a fertile plain, and the population grew more concentrated. The city straddled a broad silver river, with the oldest government buildings, ancient converted fortresses most of them, hugging the bluffs and high points commanding the river's edge. The modern city spilled back from them to the north and south.
The newer government offices, efficient blocky monoliths, were concentrated between. They passed through this complex, making for one of the city's famous bridges to cross the river to the north.
'My God, what happened there?' asked Cordelia, as they passed one whole block of burnt-out buildings, blackened and skeletal.
Vorkosigan smiled sourly. 'That was the Ministry of Political Education, before the riots two months ago.'
'I heard a little about those, at Escobar, on my way here. I had no idea they were so extensive.'
'They weren't, really. Quite carefully orchestrated. Personally, I thought it was a damn dangerous way to get the job done. Although I suppose it was a step up in subtlety from Yuri Vorbarra's Defenestration of the Privy Council. A generation of progress, of sorts … I didn't think Ezar was going to get that genie back in the bottle, but he seems to have managed it. As soon as Grishnov was killed all the troops they'd called for, which for some reason all seemed to have been diverted to guard the Imperial Residence—' he snorted, 'turned up and cleared the streets, and the riot just melted away, except for a few fanatics, and some wounded spirits who'd lost kin at Escobar. That got ugly, but it was suppressed in the news.'
They crossed the river and came at length to the large and famous hospital, almost a city within a city, spread out in its walled park. They found Ensign Koudelka alone in his room, lying glumly on his bed in the green uniform pajamas. Cordelia thought at first that he waved to them, but abandoned the idea as his left arm continued to move up and down from the elbow in slow rhythm.
He did sit up and smile as his ex-commander entered, and exchange nods with Bothari. The smile broadened to a grin as he saw her in Vorkosigan's wake. His face was much older than it used to be.
'Captain Naismith, ma'am! Lady Vorkosigan, I should say. I never thought I'd see you again.'
'I thought the same. Glad to be mistaken,' she smiled back.
'And congratulations, sir. Thanks for sending the note. I sort of missed you the past few weeks, but—I can see you had better things to do.' His grin made this comment stingless.
'Thank you, Ensign. Ah—what happened to your arm?'
Koudelka grimaced. 'I had a fall this morning. Something's shorted out. Doc should be coming around to fix it in a few minutes. It could have been worse.'
The skin on his arms, Cordelia noted, was covered with a network of fine red scars, marking the lines of the prosthetic nerve implants.
'You're walking, then. That's good to hear,' Vorkosigan encouraged.
'Yeah, sort of.' He brightened. 'And at least they've got my guts under control now. I don't care that I can't feel anything from that department, now that I've finally got rid of that damned colostomy.'
'Are you in very much pain?' asked Cordelia diffidently.
'Not much,' Koudelka tossed off. She felt he was lying. '—but the worst part, besides being so clumsy and out-of-balance, are the sensations. Not pain, but weird things. False intelligence reports. Like tasting colors with your left foot, or feeling things that aren't there, like bugs crawling all over you, or not feeling things that are there, like heat …' His gaze fell on his bandaged right ankle.
A doctor entered, and conversation stopped while Koudelka removed his shirt. The doctor attached a 'scope to his shoulder, and went fishing for the short circuit with a delicate surgical hand tractor. Koudelka went pale and stared fixedly at his knees, but at last the arm stopped its slow oscillation and lay limply at his side.
'I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave it out of commission for the rest of the day,' apologized the doctor. 'We'll get it tomorrow when you go in for the work on that adductor group on your right leg.'
'Yeah, yeah.' Koudelka waved him away with his working right hand, and he gathered his tools and moved on.
'I know it must seem to you to be taking forever,' said Vorkosigan, looking at Koudelka's frustrated face, 'but it seems to me every time I come in here you've made more progress. You are going to get out of here,' he said confidently.
'Yeah, the surgeon says they're going to kick me out in about two months.' He smiled. 'But they say I'll never be fit for combat again.' The smile slid away, and his face crumpled. 'Oh, sir! They're going to discharge me! All this endless hacking around for nothing!' He turned his face away from them, rigid and embarrassed, until his features were under control again.
Vorkosigan too looked away, not inflicting his sympathy, until the ensign looked back again with his smile carefully re-attached. 'I can see why,' Koudelka said brightly, nodding to the silent Bothari propping up the wall and apparently content just to listen. 'A few good body blows like the ones you used to give me in the practice ring, and I'd be flopping around like a fish. Not a good example to set my men. I guess I'll just have to find—some kind of desk work.' He glanced at Cordelia. 'Whatever happened to your ensign, the one that got hit in the head?'
'The last time I saw him, after Escobar—I visited him just two days before I left home, I guess. He's the same. He did get out of the hospital. His mother quit her job, and stays home to take care of him, now.'
Koudelka's eyes fell, and Cordelia was wrenched by the shame in his face. 'And I bitch my head off about a few twitches. Sorry.'
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
