She bent forward, one graceful hand darting down to retrieve her solemn charge. She laid the Great Key in her lap, and pulled a long necklace from beneath her layered white garments. The chain held a ring, decorated with a thick raised bird-pattern, the gold lines of electronic contacts gleaming like filigree upon its surface. She inserted the ring into the seal atop the rod. Nothing happened.
Her breath drew in. She glared down at Miles. "What have you done to it!"
"Milady, I, I . . . nothing, I swear by my word as Vorkosigan! I didn't even drop it. What's . . . supposed to happen?"
"It should open."
"Um . . . um . . ." He would break into a desperate sweat, but he was too damned cold. He was dizzy with the scent of her, and the celestial music of her unfiltered voice. "There are only three possibilities, if there's something wrong with it. Someone broke it—not me, I swear!" Could that have been the secret of Ba Lura's peculiar intrusion? Maybe the ba had broken it, and had been seeking a scapegoat upon whom to shuffle the blame? "—or someone's re-programmed it, or, least likely, there's been some kind of substitution pulled. A duplicate, or, or . . ."
Her eyes widened, and her lips parted, moving in some subvocalization.
"Not least likely?" Miles hazarded. "It would surely be the most difficult, but . . . it crosses my mind that maybe someone didn't think you would be getting it back from me. If it's a counterfeit, maybe it was meant to be on its way to Barrayar in a diplomatic pouch right now. Or . . . or something." No, that didn't quite make sense, but . . .
She sat utterly still, her face tense with panic, her hands clutching the rod.
"Milady, talk to me. If it's a duplicate, it's obviously a very good duplicate. You now have it, to turn over at the ceremony. So what if it doesn't work? Who's going to check the function of some obsolete piece of electronics?"
"The Great Key is not obsolete. We used it every day."
"It's some kind of data link, right? You have a time-window, here. Nine days. If you think it's been compromised, wipe it and re-program it from your backup files. If that thing in your hand is some kind of a non-working dummy, you've maybe got time to make a real duplicate, and re-program it." But don't just sit there with death in your lovely eyes. "Talk to me!"
"I must do as Ba Lura did," she whispered. "The ba was right. This is the end."
"No, why?! It's just a, a thing, who cares? Not me!"
She held up the rod, her arctic-blue eyes fixing on his face at last. Her gaze made him want to scuttle into the shadows like a crab, to hide his merely human ugliness, but he held fast before her. "There is no backup," she said. "This is the sole key."
Miles felt faint, and it wasn't just from her perfume. "No backup?" he choked. "Are you people crazy?"
"It is a matter of . . . control."
"What does the damn thing really do, anyway?"
She hesitated, then said, "It is the data-key to the haut gene bank. All the frozen genetic samples are stored in a randomized order, for security. Without the key, no one knows what is where. To re-create the files, someone would have to physically examine and re-classify each and every sample. There are hundreds of thousands of samples—one for every haut who has ever lived. It would take an army of geneticists working for a generation to re-create the Great Key."
"This is a real disaster, then, huh?" he said brightly, blinking. His teeth gritted. "Now I know I was framed." He climbed to his feet, and threw back his head, defying the onslaught of her beauty. "Lady, what is really going on here? I'll ask you one more time, with feeling. What in God's green ninety hells was the Ba Lura ever doing with the Great Key on a space station?"
"No outlander may—"
"Somebody made it my business! Sucked me right into it. I don't think I could escape now if I tried. And I think . . . you need an ally. It took you a day and a half just to arrange this second meeting with me. Nine days left. You don't have time to go it alone. You need . . . a trained security man. And for some strange reason, you don't seem to want to get one from your own side."
She rocked, just slightly, in frozen misery, in a faint rustle of fabrics.
"If you don't think I'm worthy of being let in on your secrets," Miles went on wildly, "then explain to me how you think I could possibly make things any worse than they are right now!"
Her blue eyes searched him, for he knew not what. But he thought if she asked him to open his veins for her, right here and now, the only thing he'd say would be How wide?
"It was my Celestial Lady's desire," she began fearfully, and stopped.
Miles clutched at his shredded self-control. Everything she'd spilled so far was either obviously deducible, or common knowledge, at least in her milieu. Now she was getting to the good stuff, and knew it. He could tell by the way she'd stalled out.
"Milady." He chose his words with extreme care. "If the ba did not commit suicide, it was certainly murdered." And we both have good reason to prefer the second scenario. "Ba Lura was your servitor, your colleague . . . dare I guess, friend? I saw its body in the rotunda. A very dangerous and daring person arranged that hideous tableau. There was . . . a deep mischief and mockery in it."
Was that pain, in those cool eyes? So hard to tell . . .
"I have old and very personal reasons to particularly dislike being made the unwitting target of persons of cruel humor. I don't know if you can understand this."
"Perhaps . . ." she said slowly.
Yes. Look past the surface. See me, not this joke of a body. . . . "And I am the one person on Eta Ceta you know didn't do it. It's the only certainty we share, so far. I claim a right to know who's doing this to us. And the only chance in hell I have to figure out who, is to know exactly why."
Still she sat silent.
"I already know enough to destroy you," Miles added earnestly. "Tell me enough to save you!"
Her sculpted chin rose in bleak decision. When she blessed him with her outward attention at last, it was total and terrifying. "It was a long-standing disagreement." He strained to hear, to keep his head clear, to concentrate on the words and not just on the enchanting melody of her voice. "Between the Celestial Lady and the Emperor. My Lady had long thought that the haut gene bank was too centralized, in the heart of the Celestial Garden. She favored the dispersal of copies, for safety. My Lord favored keeping it all under his personal protection—for safety. They both sought the good of the haut, each in their own way."
"I see," Miles murmured, encouraging her with as much delicacy as he could muster. "All good guys here, right."
"The Emperor forbade her plan. But as she neared the end of her life . . . she came to feel that her loyalty to the haut must outweigh her loyalty to her son. Twenty years ago, she began to have copies made, in secret."
"A large project," Miles said.
"Huge, and slow. But she brought it to fruition."
"How many copies?"
"Eight. One for each of the planetary satraps."
"Exact copies?"
"Yes. I have reason to know. I have been the Celestial Lady's supervisor of geneticists for five years, now."
"Ah. So you are something of a trained scientist. You know about . . . extreme care. And scrupulous honesty."
"How else should I serve my Lady?" She shrugged.
But you don't know much, I'll bet, about covert ops chicanery. Hm. "If there are eight exact copies, there must be eight exact Great Keys, right?"
"No. Not yet. My Lady was saving the duplication of the Key to the last moment. A matter of—"
"Control," Miles finished smoothly. "How did I guess?"
A faint flash of resentment at his humor sparked in her eyes, and Miles bit his tongue. It was no laughing matter to haut Rian Degtiar.
"The Celestial Lady knew her time was drawing near. She made me and the Ba Lura the executors of her will in this matter. We were to deliver the copies of the gene bank to each of the eight satrap governors upon the occasion of her funeral, which they would be certain to all attend together. But . . . she died more suddenly than she had expected. She had not yet made arrangements for the duplication of the Great Key. It was a problem of considerable technical and cipher skill, as all of the Empire's resources went into its original creation. Ba Lura and I had all her instructions for the banks, but nothing for how the Key was to be duplicated and delivered, or even when she had planned this to happen. The ba and I were not sure what to do."
"Ah," Miles said faintly. He dared not offer any comment at all, for fear of impeding the free flow, at last, of information. He hung on her words, barely breathing.
"Ba Lura thought . . . if we took the Great Key to one of the satrap governors, he might use his resources to duplicate it for us. I thought this was a very dangerous idea. Because of the temptation to take it exclusively for himself."
"Ah . . . excuse me. Let me see if I follow this. I know you consider the haut gene bank a most private matter, but what are the political side-effects of setting up new haut reproductive centers on each of Cetaganda's eight satrap planets?"
"The Celestial Lady thought the empire had ceased to grow at the time of the defeat of the Barrayar expedition. That we had become static, stagnant, enervated. She thought . . . if the empire could only undergo mitosis, like a cell, the haut might start to grow again, become re-energized. With the splitting of the gene bank, there would be eight new centers of authority for expansion."
"Eight new potential Imperial capitals?" Miles whispered.
"Yes, I suppose."
Eight new centers . . . civil war was only the beginning of the possibilities. Eight new Cetagandan Empires, each expanding like killer coral at their neighbors' expense . . . a nightmare of cosmic proportions. "I think I can see," said Miles carefully, "why perhaps the Emperor was less than enthused by his mother's admittedly sound biological reasoning. Something to be said on both sides, don't you think?"
"I serve the Celestial Lady," said the haut Rian Degtiar simply, "and the haut genome. The Empire's short-term political adjustments are not my business."
"So all this, ah, genetic shuffling . . . would the Cetagandan Emperor, by chance, regard this as treason on your part?"
"How?" said the haut Rian Degtiar. "It was my duty to obey the Celestial Lady."
"Oh."
"The eight satrap governors have all committed treason in it, though," she added matter-of-factly.
"Have committed?"
"They all took delivery of their gene banks last week at the welcoming banquet. Ba Lura and I succeeded in that part of the Celestial Lady's plan, at least."
"Treasure chests for which none of them have keys."
"I . . . don't know. Each of them, you see . . . the Celestial Lady felt it would be better if each of the satrap governors thought that he alone was the recipient of the new copy of the haut gene bank. Each would strive better to keep it secret, that way."
"Do you know—I have to ask this." I'm just not sure I want to hear the answer. "Do you know to which of the eight satrap governors Ba Lura was trying to take the Great Key for duplication, when it ran into us?"
"No," she said.
"Ah," Miles exhaled in pure satisfaction. "Now, now I know why I was set up. And why the ba died."
Fine lines appeared on her ivory brow as she stared at him.
"Don't you see it too? The ba didn't hit us Barrayarans on the way out. It hit us on the way back. Your ba was suborned. Ba Lura did take the key to one of the satrap governors, and received in return not a true copy, because there was no time for the extensive decoding required, but a decoy. Which the ba then was sent to deliberately lose to us. Which it did, although not, I suspect, in quite the manner it had originally planned." Almost certainly not as planned.
He found himself pacing, keyed up and hectic. He ought not to limp before her, it brought attention to his deformities, but he could not keep still. "And while everybody is off chasing Barrayarans, the satrap governor quietly goes home with the only real copy of the Great Key, getting a large jump-start on the haut-competition. After first arranging the ba's reward for its double-treason, and incidentally eliminating the only witness to the truth. Oh. Yes. It works. Or it would have worked, if only . . . the satrap governor had remembered that no battle-plan survives first contact with the enemy." Not when the enemy is me. He stared into her eyes, willing her to believe in him, striving not to melt. "How soon can you analyze this Great Key, and support or explode these theories?"
"I will examine it immediately, tonight. But whatever has been done to it, my examination will not tell me who did it, Barrayaran." Her voice grew glacial with this thought. "I doubt you could have created a true duplicate, but a non-working forgery is certainly within your capabilities. If this one is false—where is the real one?"
"It seems that is just what I must discover, milady, to, to clear my name. To redeem my honor in your eyes." The intrinsic fascination of an intellectual puzzle had brought him to this interview. He'd thought curiosity was his strongest driving force, till suddenly his whole personality had become engaged. It was like being under—no, like becoming an avalanche. "If I can discover this, will you . . ." what? Look favorably upon his suit? Despise him for an outlander barbarian all the same? ". . . let me see you again?"
"I don't . . . know." Reminded, her hand drifted to the control on her float-chair for the concealing force-screen.
No, no, don't go. . . . "We must have some way of communicating," he said hastily, before she could disappear again behind that faintly humming barrier.
Her head tilted, considering this. She drew a small com link from her robes. It was undecorated, utilitarian, but like the nerve disruptor he'd taken from Ba Lura perfectly designed in what Miles was beginning to recognize as the haut style. She whispered a command into it. In a moment, the androgynous ba appeared from its guard post beside the pond. Did its eyes widen just slightly, to see its mistress without her shell?
"Give me your com link, and wait outside," haut Rian Degtiar ordered.
The little ba nodded, turning the device over to her without question, and withdrew silently.
She held the com link out to Miles. "I use this to communicate with my senior servitors, when they run errands outside the Celestial Garden for me. Here."
He wanted to touch her, but scarcely dared. He instead extended his cupped hands toward her like a shy man offering flowers to a goddess. She dropped the com link into them gingerly, as into the hands of a leper. Or an enemy.
"Is it secured?" he dared to ask.
"Temporarily."
In other words, it was the lady's private line only as long as no one in higher-level Cetagandan security troubled to break in. Right. He sighed. "It won't work. You can't send signals into my embassy without causing my superiors to ask a whole lot of questions I'd rather not answer just now. And I can't give you my com link either. I'm supposed to turn it in, and I don't think I can get away with telling them I lost it." Reluctantly, he handed the link back to her. "But we have to meet again somehow." Yes, oh yes. "If I'm going to be risking my reputation and maybe my life on the validity of my reasoning, I'd like to prop it up with a few facts." One fact was almost certain. Someone with enough wit and nerve to murder one of the most senior Imperial servitors under the nose of Cetaganda's own emperor would hardly balk at threatening a decidedly un-senior female Degtiar. The thought was obscene, hideous. A Barrayaran scion's diplomatic immunity would be an even more useless shield, no doubt, but that was merely the price of the game. "I think you could be in grave danger. It might be better to play along for a bit—don't reveal to anyone you have obtained this key from me. I have a funny feeling I'm not following his script, y'see." He paced nervously back and forth before her. "If you can find out anything at all about Ba Lura's real activities in the few days before it died—don't run afoul of your own security, though. They have to be following up on the ba's death."
"I will . . . contact you when and how I can, Barrayaran." Slowly, one pale hand caressed the control pad on the arm of the float-chair, and a dim gray mist coalesced around her like a fairy spell of seeming.
The ba servitor returned to the pavilion to escort not Miles but its mistress away. Miles was left to stumble back through the dark to Yenaro's estate alone.
It was raining.
Miles was not surprised to find that the ghem-woman was no longer waiting on the bench by the red-enameled gate. He let himself in quietly, and paused just outside the lighted garden doors to brush as many of the water droplets as possible off his formal blacks, and to wipe his face. He then sacrificed the handkerchief to the redemption of his boots, and quietly dropped the sodden object behind a bush. He slipped back inside.
No one noticed his entry. The party was continuing, a little louder, with a few new faces replacing some of the previous ones. The Cetagandans did not use alcohol for inebriation, but some of the guests had a late-party dissociated air about them similar to over-indulgers Miles had witnessed at home. If intelligent conversation had been difficult before, it was clearly hopeless now. He felt himself no better off than the ghemlings, drunk on information, dizzy with intrigue. Everyone to their own secret addictions, I suppose. He wanted to collect Ivan and escape, as swiftly as possible, before his head exploded.
"Ah, there you are, Lord Vorkosigan." Lord Yenaro appeared at Miles's elbow, looking faintly anxious. "I could not find you."
"I took a long walk with a lady," Miles said. Ivan was nowhere to be seen. "Where is my cousin?"
"Lord Vorpatril is taking a tour of the house with Lady Arvin and Lady Benello," said Yenaro. He glanced through a wide archway at the room's opposite side, which framed a spiral staircase in a hall beyond. "They've been gone . . . an astonishingly long time." Yenaro's smile attempted to be knowing, but came out oddly puzzled. "Since before you . . . I don't quite . . . ah, well. Would you care for a drink?"
"Yes, please," said Miles distractedly. He took it from Yenaro's hand and gulped without hesitation. His eyes almost crossed, considering the possibilities of Ivan plus two beautiful ghem-women. Though to his haut-dazzled senses, all the ghem-women in the room looked as coarse and dull as backcountry slatterns just now. The effect would wear off with time, he hoped. He dreaded the thought of his own next encounter with a mirror. What had the haut Rian Degtiar seen, looking at him? A simian black-clad gnome, twitching and babbling? He pulled up a chair and sat rather abruptly, the spiral staircase bracketed in his sights. Ivan, hurry up!
Yenaro lingered by his side, and began a disjointed conversation about proportional theories of architecture through history, art and the senses, and the natural esters trade on Barrayar, but Miles swore the man was as focused on the staircase as he was. Miles finished his first drink and most of a second before Ivan appeared in the shadows at the top of the stairs.
Ivan hesitated in the dimness, his hand checking the fit of his green uniform, which appeared fully assembled. Or re-assembled. He was alone. He descended with one hand clutching the curving rail, which floated without apparent support in echo of the stair's arc. He jerked a stiff frown into a stiff smile before entering the main room and the light. His head swiveled till he spotted Miles, toward whom he made a straight line.
"Lord Vorpatril," Yenaro greeted him. "You had a long tour. Did you see everything?"
Ivan bared his teeth. "Everything. Even the light."
Yenaro's smile did not slip, but his eyes seemed to fill with questions. "I'm . . . so glad." A guest called to him from across the room, and Yenaro was momentarily distracted.
Ivan bent down to whisper behind his hand into Miles's ear, "Get us the hell out of here. I think I've been poisoned."
Miles looked up, startled. "D'you want to call down the lightflyer?"
"No. Just back to the embassy in the groundcar."
"But—"
"No, dammit," Ivan hissed. "Just quietly. Before that smirking bastard goes upstairs." He nodded toward Yenaro, who was now standing at the foot of the staircase, gazing upward.
"I take it you don't think it is acute."
"Oh, it was cute all right," Ivan snarled.
"You didn't murder anybody up there, did you?"
"No. But I thought they'd never . . . Tell you in the car."
"You'd better." Miles clambered to his feet. They perforce had to pass Yenaro, who attached himself to them like a good host, seeing them to his front door with suitably polite farewells. Ivan's good-byes might have been etched in acid.
As soon as the canopy sealed over their heads, Miles commanded, "Give, Ivan!"
Ivan settled back, still seething. "I was set up."
This comes as a surprise to you, coz? "By Lady Arvin and Lady Benello?"
"They were the setup. Yenaro was behind it, I'm sure of it. You're right about that damned fountain being a trap, Miles, I see it now. Beauty as bait, all over again."
"What happened to you?"
"You know all those rumors about Cetagandan aphrodisiacs?"
"Yes . . ."
"Well, sometime this evening that son-of-a-bitch Yenaro slipped me an anti-aphrodisiac."
"Um . . . are you sure? I mean, there are natural causes for these moments, I'm told. . . ."
"It was a setup. I didn't seduce them, they seduced me! Wafted me upstairs to this amazing room—it had to have been all arranged in advance. God, it was, it was . . ." his voice broke in a sigh, "it was glorious. For a little while. And then I realized I couldn't, like, perform."
"What did you do?"
"It was too late to get out gracefully. So I winged it. It was all I could do to keep 'em from noticing."
"What?"
"I made up a lot of instant barbarian folklore—I told 'em a Vor prides himself on self-control, that it's not considered polite on Barrayar for a man to, you know, before his lady has. Three times. It was considered insulting to her. I stroked, I rubbed, I scratched, I recited poetry, I nuzzled and nibbled and—cripes, my fingers are cramped." His speech was a bit slurred, too, Miles noticed. "I thought they'd never fall asleep." Ivan paused; a slow smirk displaced the snarl on his face. "But they were smiling, when they finally did." The smirk faded into a look of bleak dismay. "What do you want to bet those two are the biggest female ghem-gossips on Eta Ceta?"
"No takers here," said Miles, fascinated. Let the punishment fit the crime. Or, in this case, the trap fit the prey. Someone had studied his weaknesses. And someone just as clearly had studied Ivan's. "We could have the ImpSec office do a data sweep for the tale, over the next few days."
"If you breathe a word of this I'll wring your scrawny neck! If I can find it."
"You've got to confess to the embassy physician. Blood tests—"
"Oh, yes. I want a chemical scan the instant I hit the door. What if the effect's permanent?"
"Ba Vorpatril?" Miles intoned, eyes alight.
"Dammit, I didn't laugh at you."
"No. That's true, you didn't," Miles sighed. "I expect the physician will find whatever it was metabolizes rapidly. Or Yenaro wouldn't have drunk the stuff himself."
"You think?"
"Remember the zlati ale? I'd bet my ImpSec silver eyes that was the vector."
Ivan relaxed slightly, obviously relieved at this professional analysis. After a minute he added, "Yenaro's done you now, and he's done me. Third time's a charm. What's next, do you suppose? And can we do him first?"
Miles was silent for a long time. "That depends," he said at last, "on whether Yenaro's merely amusing himself, or whether he too is being . . . set up. And on whether there's any connection between Yenaro's backer and the death of Ba Lura."
"Connection? What possible connection?"
"We are the connection, Ivan. A couple of Barrayaran backcountry boys come to the big city, and ripe for the plucking. Somebody is using us. And I think somebody . . . has just made a major mistake in his choice of tools." Or fools.
Ivan stared at his venomous tone. "Have you got rid of that little toy you're packing yet?" he demanded suspiciously.
"Yes . . . and no."
"Oh, shit. I knew better than to trust—what the hell do you mean by Yes and no? Either you have or you haven't, right?"
"The object has been returned, yes."
"That's that, then."
"No. Not quite."
"Miles . . . You had better start talking to me."
"Yes, I think I better had." Miles sighed. They were approaching the legation district. "After you're done in the infirmary, I have a few confessions to make. But if—when—you talk to the ImpSec night-duty officer about Yenaro, don't mention the other. Yet."
"Oh?" drawled Ivan in a tone of deep suspicion.
"Things have gotten . . . complex."
"You think they were simple before?"
"I mean complex beyond the scope of mere security concerns, into genuine diplomatic ones. Of extreme delicacy. Maybe too delicate to submit to the sort of booted paranoids who sometimes end up running local ImpSec offices. That's a judgment call . . . that I'll have to make myself. When I'm sure I'm ready. But this isn't a game anymore, and it's no longer feasible for me to run without backup." I need help, God help me.
"We knew that yesterday."
"Oh, yes. But it's even deeper than I first thought."
"Over our heads?"
Miles hesitated, and smiled sourly. "I don't know, Ivan. How good are you at treading water?"
Alone in his suite's bathroom, Miles slowly peeled off his black House uniform, now in desperate need of attention from the embassy's laundry. He glanced at himself sideways in the mirror, then resolutely looked away. He considered the problem, as he stood in the shower. To the haut, all normal humans doubtless looked like some lower life-form. From the haut Rian Degtiar's foreshortened perspective, perhaps there was little to choose between him and, say, Ivan.
And ghem-lords did win haut wives, from time to time, for great deeds. And the Vor and the ghem-lords were very much alike. Even Maz had said so.
How great a deed? Very great. Well . . . he'd always wanted to save the Empire. The Cetagandan just wasn't the empire he'd pictured, was all. Life was like that, always throwing you curveballs.
You've gone mad, you know. To hope, to even think it . . .
If he defeated the late Dowager Empress's plot, might the Cetagandan emperor be grateful enough to . . . give him Rian's hand? If he advanced the late Dowager Empress's plot, might the haut Rian Degtiar be grateful enough to . . . give him her love? To do both simultaneously would be a tactical feat of supernatural scope.
Barrayar's interests lay, unusually, squarely with the interests of the Cetagandan emperor. Obviously, it was his clear ImpSec duty to foil the girl and save the villain.
Right. My head hurts.
Reason was returning to him, slowly, the astonishing effect of the haut Rian Degtiar wearing off. Wasn't it? She hadn't exactly tried to suborn him, after all. Even if Rian were as ugly as the witch Baba Yaga, he'd still have to be following up on this. To a point. He needed to prove Barrayar had not filched the Great Key, and the only certain way of doing that was to find its real thief. He wondered if one could get a hangover from excess passion. If so, his was apparently starting while he was still drunk, which did not seem quite fair.
Eight Cetagandan satrap governors had been led into treason by the late empress. Optimistic, to think that only one could be a murderer. But only one possessed the real Great Key.
Lord X? Seven chances of guessing wrong, against one of guessing right. Not favorable odds.
I'll . . . figure something out.