Cetaganda

CHAPTER TWELVE

Garden party was a misnomer, Miles decided. He stared past Ambassador Vorob'yev and Ivan as the three of them exited from an ear-popping ride up the lift tube and into the apparently open air of the rooftop. A faint golden sparkle in the air above marked the presence of a lightweight force-screen, blocking unwanted wind, rain, or dust. Dusk here, in the center of the capital, was a silver sheen in the atmosphere, for the half-kilometer high building overlooked the green rings of parkway surrounding the Celestial Garden itself.

Curving banks of flowers and dwarf trees, fountains, rivulets, walkways, and arched jade bridges turned the roof into a descending labyrinth in the finest Cetagandan style. Every turn of the walkways revealed and framed a different view of the city stretching to the horizon, though the best views were the ones that looked to the Emperors shimmering great phoenix egg in the city's heart. The lift-tube foyer, opening onto it all, was roofed with arching vines and paved in an elaborate inlay of colored stones: lapis lazuli, malachite, green and white jade, rose quartz, and other minerals Miles couldn't even name.

Looking around, it gradually dawned on Miles why the protocol officer had them all wearing their House blacks, when Miles would have guessed undress greens to be adequate. It was not possible to be overdressed here. Ambassador Vorob'yev was admitted on sufferance as their escort, but even Vorreedi had to wait in the garage below, tonight. Ivan, looking around too, clutched their invitation a little tighter.

Their putative hostess, Lady d'Har, stood on the edge of the foyer. Apparently being inside her home counted the same as being inside a bubble, for she was welcoming her guests. Even at her advanced age, her haut-beauty stunned the eye. She wore robes in a dozen fine layers of blinding white, sweeping down and swirling around her feet. Thick silver hair flowed to the floor. Her husband, ghem-Admiral Har, whose bulky presence would normally have dominated any room, seemed to fade into the background beside her.

Ghem-Admiral Har commanded half the Cetagandan fleet, and his duty-delayed arrival for the final ceremonies of the Empress's funeral was the reason for tonight's welcome-home party. He wore his Imperial bloodred dress uniform, which he could have hung with enough medals to sink him should he chance to fall in a river. He'd chosen instead to one-up the competition with the neck-ribbon and medallion of the deceptively simple-sounding Order of Merit. Clearing away the other clutter made this honor impossible for the viewer to miss. Or match. It was given, rarely, at the sole discretion of the Emperor himself. There were few higher awards to be had in the Cetagandan Empire. The haut-lady by his side was one of them, though. Lord Har would have pinned her to his tunic too, if he could, Miles felt, for all he had won her some forty years past. The Har ghem-clan's face paint featured mainly orange and green; the patterns lacked definition, crossing with the man's deeply age-lined features, and clashing horribly with the red of the uniform.

Even Ambassador Vorob'yev was awed by ghem-Admiral Har, Miles judged by the extreme formality of his greetings. Har was polite but clearly puzzled; Why are these outlanders in my garden? But he deferred to Lady d'Har, who relieved Ivan of his nervously proffered invitation with a small, cool nod, and directed them, in a voice age-softened to a honeyed alto, to where the food and drinks were displayed.

They strolled on. After he recovered from the shock of Lady d'Har, Ivan's head swiveled, looking for the young ghem-women he knew, without success. "This place is wall-to-wall old crusts," he whispered to Miles in dismay. "When we walked in, the average age here dropped from ninety to eighty-nine."

"Eighty-nine and a half, I'd say," Miles whispered back.

Ambassador Vorob'yev put a finger to his lips, suppressing the commentary, but his eyes glinted in amused agreement.

Quite. This was the real thing; Yenaro and his crowd were shabby little outsiders indeed, by comparison, excluded by age, by rank, by wealth, by ... everything. Scattered through the garden were half-a-dozen haut-lady bubbles, glowing like pale lanterns, something Miles had not yet seen outside the Celestial Garden itself. Lady d'Har kept social contact with her haut-relatives, or former relatives, it appeared. Rian, here? Miles prayed so.

"I wish I could have got Maz in," Vorob'yev sighed with regret. "How did you do this, Lord Ivan?"

"Not me," denied Ivan. He flipped a thumb at Miles.

Vorob'yev's brows rose inquiringly.

Miles shrugged. "They told me to study the power-hierarchy. This is it, isn't it?" Actually, he was not so sure anymore.

Where did power lie, in this convoluted society? With the ghem-lords, he would have said once without hesitation, who controlled the weapons, the ultimate threat of violence. Or with the haut-lords, who controlled the ghem, through whatever oblique means. Certainly not with the secluded haut-women. Was their knowledge a kind of power, then? A very fragile sort of power. Wasn't fragile power an oxymoron? The Star Creche existed because the Emperor protected it; the Emperor existed because the ghem-lords served him. Yet the haut-women had created the Emperor . . . created the haut itself . . . created the ghem, for that matter. Power to create . . . power to destroy ... he blinked, dizzy, and munched on a canape in the shape of a tiny swan, biting off its head first. The feathers were made with rice flour, judging from the taste, the center a spicy protein paste. Vat-grown swan meat?

The Barrayaran party collected drinks, and began a slow circuit of the rooftop garden's walks, comparing views. They also collected stares, from the elderly ghem and haut scattered about; but none came up to introduce themselves, or ask questions, or attempt to start a conversation. Vorob'yev himself was only scouting, so far, Miles thought, but the man would surely pursue the evening's opportunities for contact-making soon. How Miles was to divest himself of the ambassador when his own contact turned up, he was not sure. Assuming this was where his contact was to meet him, and it wasn't all just his hyperactive imagination, or—

Or the next assassination attempt. They'd rounded some greenery to see a woman in haut-white, but with no haut-bubble, standing alone and staring out over the city. Miles recognized her from the heavy chocolate-dark braid falling down her back to her ankles, even at this three-quarters-turned view. The haut Vio d'Chilian. Was ghem-General Chilian here? Was Kety himself?

Ivan's breath drew in. Right. Except for their elderly hostess, this was the first time Ivan had seen a haut-woman outside her bubble, and Ivan lacked the . . . inoculation of the haut Rian. Miles found he could view the haut Vio this time with scarcely a tremor. Were the haut-women a disease that you could only catch once, like the legendary smallpox, and if you survived it you were immune thereafter, however scarred?

"Who is she?" whispered Ivan, enchanted.

"Ghem-General Chilian's haut-wife," Vorob'yev murmured into his ear. "The ghem-general could order your liver fried for breakfast. I would send it to him. The free ghem-ladies can entertain themselves as they please with you, but the married haut are strictly off-limits. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," said Ivan faintly.

The haut Vio was staring as if hypnotized at the great glowing dome of the Celestial Garden. Longing for her lost life, Miles wondered? She'd spent years exiled in the hinterlands at Sigma Ceta with her ghem husband. What was she feeling, now? Happy? Homesick?

Some movement or sound from the Barrayarans must have broken her reverie, for her head turned toward them. For a second, just a second, her astonishing cinnamon eyes seemed copper-metallic with a rage so boundless, Miles's stomach lurched. Then her expression snapped into a smooth hauteur, as blank as the bubble she lacked, and as armored; the open emotion was gone so fast Miles was not sure the other two men had even seen it. But the look was not for them; it had been on her face even as she'd turned, before she could have identified the Barrayarans, blackly dressed in the shadows.

Ivan opened his mouth; Please, no, Miles thought, but Ivan had to try. "Good evening, milady. Wonderful view, eh?"

She hesitated a long moment—Miles pictured her fleeing—but then answered, in a low-pitched, perfectly modulated voice, "There is nothing like it in the universe."

Ivan, encouraged, brightened and moved forward. "Let me introduce myself. I'm Lord Ivan Vorpatril, of Barrayar. . . . And, uh, this is Ambassador Vorob'yev, and this is my cousin, Lord Miles Vorkosigan. Son of You-know-who, eh?"

Miles winced. Watching Ivan babble in sexual panic would normally be entertaining, if it wasn't so excruciatingly embarrassing. It reminded Miles painfully of—himself. Did I look like that much of a fool, the first time I saw Rian? He feared the answer was yes.

"Yes," said the haut Vio. "I know." Miles had seen people talk to their potted plants with more warmth and expression than the haut Vio turned on Ivan.

Give it up, Ivan, Miles urged silently. This woman is married to the first officer of a guy who maybe tried to kill us yesterday, remember? Unless Lord X was Prince Slyke after all—or the haut Rond, or ... Miles ground his teeth.

But before Ivan could dig himself any deeper, a man in Cetagandan military uniform rounded the corner, his face paint crinkling with his frown. Ghem-General Chilian. Miles froze, his hand wrapping Ivan's forearm and biting deep in warning.

Chilian's gaze swept the Barrayarans, his nostrils flaring in suspicion. "Haut Vio," he addressed his wife. "Come with me, please."

"Yes, my lord," she said, her lashes sweeping down demurely, and she escaped around Ivan with a bare nod of farewell. Chilian brought himself to nod also, acknowledging the outlanders' existence; with an effort, Miles felt. The general glanced once back over his shoulder as he whisked his wife away. So what sin had ghem-General Chilian committed to win her?

"Lucky guy," sighed Ivan in envy.

"I'm not so sure," said Miles. Ambassador Vorob'yev just smiled grimly.

They walked on, Miles's brain whirling around this new encounter. Was it accidental? Was it the start of a new setup? Lord X used his human tools like long-handled forks, to keep the heat at a distance. Surely the ghem-general and his wife were too close to him, too obviously connected. Unless, of course, Lord X wasn't Kety after all ...

A glow ahead brought Miles's gaze front and center. A haut-bubble was approaching them along the evergreen-bounded walk. Vorob'yev and Ivan stood aside to let it pass. Instead it stopped in front of Miles.

"Lord Vorkosigan." The woman's voice was melodious even through the filter, but it was not Rian's. "May I speak privately with you?"

"Of course," said Miles, before Vorob'yev could put in an objection. "Where?" Tension shot through him. Was tonight to be his final assault already, upon the new target of Governor Ilsum Kety's ship? Too premature, still too uncertain . . . "And for how long?"

"Not far. We will be about an hour."

Not nearly long enough for a trip to orbit; this was something else, then. "Very well. Gentlemen, will you excuse me?"

Vorob'yev looked about as unhappy as his habitual control would allow. "Lord Vorkosigan ..." His hesitation was actually a good sign; Vorreedi and he must have had a long and extraordinary talk. "Do you wish a guard?"

"No."

"A comm link?"

"No."

"You will be careful?" Which was diplomatic for Are you sure you know what the hell you're doing, boy? "Oh, yes, sir."

"What do we do if you're not back in an hour?" said Ivan.

"Wait." He nodded cordially, and followed the bubble down the garden path.

When they turned into a private nook, lit by low colored lanterns and screened by flowering bushes, the bubble rotated, and abruptly blinked out. Miles found himself facing another haut beauty in white, riding in her float-chair like a throne. This woman's hair was honey-blond, intricately woven and tucked up around her shoulders, vaguely reminiscent of a gilt chain-mail neck guard. He would have guessed her age as forty-standard, which meant she was probably twice that.

"The haut Rian Degtiar instructs me to bring you," she stated. She moved her robes from the left side of the chair, uncovering a thickly padded armrest. "We have not much time." Her gaze seemed to measure his height, or shortness. "You can, um . . . perch here, and ride."

"How . . . fascinating." If only she were Rian . . . But this would test certain theories he had about the mechanical capacities of haut-bubbles, oh yes. "Uh . . . identification, milady?" he added almost apologetically. The last person he suspected of experiencing such a ride had ended up with its throat cut, after all.

She nodded, as if expecting this, and turned her hand outward, displaying the ring of the Star Creche.

That was probably about as good as they could do, under the circumstances. Cautiously, he approached, and eased himself aboard, grasping the back of the chair above her head for balance. Each was careful not to actually touch the other. Her long-fingered hand moved over the control panel embedded in the right armrest, and the force-field snapped on again. The pale white light reflected off the flowered bushes, bringing out their color, and cast a glow before them as they began to move down the path.

Their view was quite clear, scarcely impeded by an eggshell-thin, ghostly sphere of mist that marked the boundary of the force-field as seen from this side. Sound too was transmitted with high clarity, much better than the deliberately muffled reverse effect. He could hear voices, and the clink of glassware, from a balcony above. They passed Ambassador Vorob'yev and Ivan again, who stared curiously, uncertain, of course, if this was the same bubble they'd seen before. Miles squelched an absurd impulse to wave at them, going by.

They came not to the lift-tube foyer, as Miles had expected, but to the edge of the rooftop garden. Their silver-haired hostess was standing waiting. She nodded at the bubble, and coded open the force-screen, letting the bubble pass through onto a small private landing pad. The reflected glow off the pavement darkened, as the haut-woman blacked out her bubble. Miles stared upward at the shimmering night sky, looking for the lightflyer or aircar.

Instead, the bubble moved smoothly to the edge of the building and dropped straight over the side.

Miles clutched the seat-back convulsively, trying not to scream, fling his arms around his hostess-pilot's neck, or throw up all over her white dress. They were free-falling, and he hated heights . . . was this his intended death, his assassin sacrificing herself along with him? Oh, God—!

"I thought these things only went a meter in the air," he choked out, his voice, despite his best efforts, going high and squeaky.

"If you have enough initial altitude, you can maintain a controlled glide," she said calmly. Despite Miles's horrified first impression, they were not actually dropping like a rock. They were arcing outward, across the boulevards far below, and the light-sparked green rings of parks, toward the dome of the Celestial Garden.

Miles thought wildly of the witch Baba Yaga, from the Barrayaran folk tales, who flew in a magic mortar. This witch didn't qualify as old and ugly. But he was not, at this moment, totally convinced she didn't eat bad children.

In a few minutes, the bubble decelerated again to a smooth walking pace a few centimeters above the pavement outside one of the Celestial Garden's minor entrances. A movement of her finger brought back the white glow.

"Ah," she said, in a refreshed tone. "I haven't done that in years." She almost cracked a smile, for a moment nearly . . . human.

Miles was shocked when they passed through the Celestial dome's security procedures almost as if they weren't there, except for a swift exchange of electronic codes. No one stopped or searched the bubble. The sort of uniformed men who'd shaken down the galactic envoys with beady-eyed thoroughness stood back respectfully, with downcast gaze.

"Why don't they stop us?" Miles whispered, unable to overcome the psychological conviction that if he could see and hear them, they could see and hear him.

"Stop me?" repeated the haut-woman in puzzlement. "I am the haut Pel Navarr, Consort of Eta Ceta. I live here."

Their further progress was happily ground-hugging, if faster than the usual walking-pace, through the increasingly familiar precincts of the Celestial Garden to the low white building with the bio-filters on every window. The haut Pel's passage through its automated security procedures was almost as swift and perfunctory as through the dome entrance itself. They passed silently down a set of corridors, but turned in a different direction from the labs and offices at the building's heart, and went up one level.

Double doors parted to admit them to a large circular room done in subdued and subduing tones of silvery gray. Unlike any other place he'd seen in the Celestial Garden, it was devoid of living decorations, neither plant nor animal nor any of those disturbing creations in-between. Hushed, concentrated, undistracting ... It was a chamber in the Star Creche; he supposed he could dub it the Star Chamber. Eight women in white awaited them, sitting silently in a circle. His stomach should not still be turning over, dammit, the free fall was done.

The haut Pel brought her float-chair to a halt in a waiting empty gap in the circle, grounded it, and switched off the force-bubble. Eight extraordinary pairs of eyes focused on Miles.

No one, he thought, should be exposed to this many haut-women at once. It was some kind of dangerous overdose. Their beauty was varied; three were as silver-haired as the ghem-admiral's wife, one was copper-tressed, one was dark-skinned and hawk-nosed, with masses of blue-black ringlets tumbling down around her like a cloak. Two were blonde, his guide with her golden weave and another with hair as pale as oat straw in the sun, and as straight to the floor. One dark-eyed woman had chocolate-brown hair like the haut Vio, but in soft curling clouds instead of bound. And then there was Rian. Their massed effect went beyond beauty; where to, he was not sure, but terror came close. He slipped off the arm of the float chair, and stood away from it, grateful for the propping effect of his stiff high boots.

"Here is the Barrayaran to testify," said the haut Rian.

Testify. He was here as a witness, then, not as the accused. A Key witness, so to speak. He stifled a slightly manic giggle. Somehow he did not think Rian would appreciate the pun.

He swallowed, and got his voice unlocked. "You have the advantage of me, ladies." Though he could make a good guess who they all were, at this point. His gaze swept the circle, and he blinked hard against the vertigo. "I have only met your Handmaiden." He nodded toward Rian. On a low table before her the Empress's entire formal regalia was laid out, including the Seal and the false Great Key.

Rian tilted her head in acknowledgment of the reasonableness of his request, and proceeded to go around the circle with a bewildering slug of haut names and titles—yes, here indeed sat the consorts of the eight satrap planets. With Rian the ninth, sitting in for the late Empress. The creative controllers of the haut-genome, of the would-be master race, were all met here in some extraordinary council.

The chamber was clearly set up for just this purpose; such meetings must also occur when the consorts journeyed home to escort the child-ships. Miles particularly focused on the consorts of Prince Slyke, Ilsum Kety, and the Rond. Kety's woman, the Consort of Sigma Ceta, was one of the silver-haired ones, closer to being contemporary with the late Empress than anyone else in the room. Rian introduced her as the haut Nadina. The oat-straw blonde served Prince Slyke of Xi Ceta, and the brown-curled woman was the Consort of Rho Ceta. Miles wondered anew at the significance of their titles, which named them all consorts of their planets, not of the men.

"Lord Vorkosigan," said the haut Rian. "I would like you to repeat for the consorts how you say you came into possession of the false Great Key, and all the subsequent events."

Miles did not blame her in the least for switching strategies from playing all cards close to her chest to calling in reinforcements. It was not before time, in his opinion. But he disliked being taken by surprise. It would have been nice if she'd at least consulted him, first. Yeah? How?

"I take it you understood my message to abort the infiltration of Prince Slyke's ship," he countered.

"Yes. I expect you will explain why, in due order."

"Excuse me, milady. I do not mean to insult . . . anyone here. But if one of the consorts is a traitoress, in collusion with her satrap governor, this will pipeline everything we know straight to him. How do you know you are entirely among friends?"

There was enough tension in the room to go with any number of treasons, certainly. Rian raised a hand, as if to stem it. "He is an outlander. He cannot understand." She gave him a slow nod. "There is treason, we believe, yes, but not on this level. Further down."

"Oh . . . ?"

"We have concluded that even with the bank and Key in his hands, the satrap governor could not run the haut-genome by himself. The haut of his satrap would not cooperate with such a sudden usurpation, the overturning of all custom. He must plan to appoint a new consort, one under his own control. We think she has already been selected."

"Ah ... do you know who?"

"Not yet," Rian sighed. "Not yet. She is someone, I fear, who does not wholly understand the goal of haut. It is all of a piece. If we knew which governor, we could guess which haut-woman he has suborned; if we knew which woman . . . well."

Dammit, this triangulation had to break soon. Miles chewed on his lower lip, then said slowly, "Milady. Tell me—if you can—something about how your force-bubbles are keyed to their individual operators, and why everyone is so damned convinced they're dead-secure. The keypad on those control panels looks like a palm-lock, but it can't just be a palm-lock; you can get around palm-locks."

"I cannot give you the technical details, Lord Vorkosigan," said Rian.

"I don't expect you to. Just the general logic of it."

"Well . . . they are keyed genetically, of course. One brushes one's hand across the pad, leaving a few skin cells. These are sucked in and scanned."

"Does it scan your entire genome? Surely that would take a lot of time."

"No, of course not. It runs through a tree of a dozen or so critical markers that individually identify a haut-woman. Starting with the presence of an X chromosome pair, and going down a branching list until confirmation is achieved."

"How much chance is there of duplicating the markers in two or more individuals?"

"We do not clone ourselves, Lord Vorkosigan."

"I mean, just of the dozen factors, just enough to fool the machine."

"Vanishingly small."

"Even among closely related members of one's own constellation?"

She hesitated, exchanging a glance with Lady Pel, who raised her brows thoughtfully.

"There's a reason I ask," Miles went on. "When ghem-Colonel Benin interviewed me, he let slip that six haut-bubbles had entered the funeral rotunda during the time period the Ba Lura's body must have been placed at the foot of the bier, and that it presented him with a major puzzle. He didn't tell me which six, but I bet you could get him to disgorge the list. It's a brute-force triage of a major data dump, but—suppose you ran the markers of those six through your records, and checked for accidental duplicates among living haut-women. If the woman is serving the satrap governor, she might have served him in that murder, too. You might finger your traitoress without ever having to leave the Star Creche."

Rian, momentarily alert, sat back with a weary sigh.

"Your reasoning is correct, Lord Vorkosigan. We could do that—if we had the Great Key."

"Oh," said Miles. "Yeah. That." He reverted from an eager parade-rest to a deflated at-ease. "For what it's worth, my strategic analysis and what little physical evidence I've wrung from ghem-Colonel Benin so far suggests either Prince Slyke or the haut Ilsum Kety. With the haut Rond a distant third. But as Rho Ceta and Mu Ceta would bear the brunt of it if open conflict with Barrayar was actually engineered, my own choice has settled pretty firmly between Slyke and Kety. Recent . . . events point to Kety." He glanced again around the circle. "Is there anything any of the consorts have seen or heard, or overheard, that would help pin him more certainly?"

A murmur of negatives; "Unfortunately, no," said Rian. "We have discussed that problem already this evening. Please begin."

On your head be it, milady. Miles took a deep breath, and launched into the full true account, minus most of his opinions, of his experiences on Eta Ceta from the moment the Ba Lura lurched into their personnel pod. He paused occasionally, to give Rian a chance to hint him away from anything she wanted to conceal. She appeared to want to conceal nothing, instead drawing him on with skillful questions and prompts to disgorge every detail.

Rian had seen, he slowly realized, that the secrecy problem cut two ways. Lord X could assassinate Miles, maybe Rian as well. But even the most megalomanic Cetagandan politician must find it excessively challenging to try to get away with disposing of all eight satrap consorts. His voice strengthened.

He felt his underlying assumptions slowly wringing inside-out. Rian seemed less and less like a damsel in distress all the time. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if he was trying to rescue the dragon. Well, dragons need to be rescued too, sometimes. . . . Nobody even blinked at his description of his near-assassination the day before. If anything, there was a subliminal murmur of appreciation for its elegance of form and style, and of faintly sympathetic disappointment at its foiling. The judges had no appreciation for the governor's originality in attempting to muscle in on their own territory, though. The Sigma and Xi Cetan consorts looked increasingly stony, exchanging a raised-brow glance or a nod of understanding now and then.

There was a long silence when he'd finished. Time to present Plan B? "I have a suggestion," Miles said boldly. "Recall all the duplicate gene banks from the satrap governors' ships. If they are all returned, you will have stripped him of his ability to carry out his larger plans. If he resists releasing it, you will have smoked him out."

"Bring them back" said the haut Pel in dismay. "Do you have any idea how much trouble we had getting them up there?"

"But he might take both bank and Key, and flee," objected the brown-curled Consort of Rho Ceta.

"No," said Miles. "That's the one thing he can't do. There are too many Imperially guarded wormhole jumps between him and home. Speaking militarily, open flight is impossible. He'd never make it. He cannot reveal a thing about any of this till he's safely in orbit around . . . Something Ceta. In a weird way, we have him cornered till the funeral is over." Which will be all too soon, now.

"That still leaves the problem of retrieving the real Key," said Rian.

"Once you have the bank back, you may be able to negotiate the Key's return, in exchange for, say, amnesty. Or you can claim he stole it—perfectly true—and set your own security to get it back for you. Once the other governors are freed of the incriminating evidence they're holding, you may be able to cut him out of the herd, so to speak, with their goodwill. In any case, it will open up a lot of tactical options."

"He may threaten to destroy it," worried the Consort of Sigma Ceta.

"You must know Ilsum Kety better than anyone else here, haut Nadina," said Miles. "Would he?"

"He is ... an erratic young man," she said reluctantly. "I am not yet convinced that he is guilty. But I know nothing about him that makes your accusations impossible."

"And your governor, ma'am?" Miles nodded to the Consort of Xi Ceta.

"Prince Slyke is ... a determined and brilliant man. The plot you describe is not beyond his capacities. I'm . . . not sure."

"Well . . . you can re-create the Great Key, eventually, can't you?" Push or shove, the Empress's great plan would be canned for a generation. A very desirable outcome, from Barrayar's point of view. Miles smiled agreeably.

A faint groan went around the room. "Recovering the Great Key undamaged is the highest priority," Rian said firmly.

"He still wants to frame Barrayar," said Miles. "It may have started as cold-blooded astro-political calculation, but I'm pretty sure it's a personal motivation by now."

"If I recall the banks," said Rian slowly, "we will entirely lose this opportunity to distribute them."

The Consort of Sigma Ceta, the silver-haired Nadina, sighed, "I had hoped to live to see the Celestial Lady's vision of new growth carried out. She was right, you know. I have seen the stagnation increasing in my lifetime."

"Other opportunities will come," said another silver-haired lady.

"It must be done more carefully next time," said the brown-curled Consort of Rho Ceta. "Our Lady trusted the governors too much."

"I'm not so sure she did," said Rian. "I was only attempting to go as far as distributing inactive copies for backup. The Ba Lura felt our Mistress's desires keenly, but did not understand her subtlety. It wasn't my idea to attempt to distribute the Key now, and I'm not convinced it was hers, either. I don't know if the Ba had a separate understanding with her, or just a separate misunderstanding. And now I never will." She bowed her head. "I apologize to the Council for my failure." Her tone of voice made Miles think of inward-turning knives.

"You did your best, dear," said the haut Nadina kindly. But she added more sternly, "However, you should not have attempted to handle it all alone."

"It was my charge."

"A little less emphasis on the my, and a little more emphasis on the charge, next time."

Miles tried not to squirm at the general applicability of this gentle correction.

A glum silence reigned, for a time.

"We may need to consider altering the genome to make the haut-lords more controllable," said the Rho Cetan consort.

"For renewed expansion, we need the opposite," objected the dark consort. "More aggression."

"The ghem-experiment, filtering favorable genetic combinations upward from the general population, surely suffices for that" said the haut Pel.

"Our Lady, in her wisdom, aimed at less uniformity, not more," conceded Rian.

"I believe we have long made a mistake in leaving the haut-males so entirely to their own devices," said the Rho Cetan consort stubbornly.

Said the dark one, "But how else should we select among them, if there is no free competition to sort them out?"

Rian held up a restraining hand. "The time for this larger debate . . . must be soon. But not now. I myself have been convinced by these events that further refinement must come before further expansion. But that," she sighed, "is a new Empress's task. Now we must decide what state of affairs she will inherit. How many favor the recall of the gene banks?"

The ayes had it. Several were slow in coming, but in some occult way a unanimous vote was achieved through nothing more than an exchange of unreadable glances. Miles breathed relief.

Rian's shoulders slumped wearily. "Then I so order you all. Return them to the Star Creche."

"As what?" asked the haut Pel in a practical tone.

Rian stared into the air a moment, and replied, "As collections of human genomic materials from your various satrapies, requested by the Lady before her death, and received by us in trust for the Star Creches experimental files."

"That will do nicely on this end," nodded the haut Pel. "And on the other end?"

"Tell your governors . . . we discovered a serious error in the copy, which must be corrected before the genome can be released to them."

"Very good."

The meeting broke up, the women activating their float-chairs, though not yet their private bubbles, and leaving in twos and threes in a murmur of intense discussion. Rian and the haut Pel waited until the room emptied, and Miles perforce waited with them.

"Do you still want me to try and retrieve the Key for you?" Miles asked Rian. "Barrayar remains vulnerable until we nail the satrap governor with solid proof, data a clever man can't diddle. And I especially don't like the toehold he seems to have in your own security."

"I don't know," said Rian. "The return of the gene banks cannot take less than a day. I'll . . . send someone for you, as we did tonight."

"We'll be down to two days left, then. Not much margin. I'd rather go sooner than later."

"It cannot be helped." She touched her hair, a nervous gesture despite its grace.

Watching her, he searched his heart. The impact of his first mad crush was surely fading, in this drought of response, to be replaced by ... what? If she had slaked his thirst with the least little drop of affection, he would be hers body and soul right now. In a way he was glad she wasn't faking anything, depressing as it was to be treated like a ba servitor, his loyalty and obedience assumed. Maybe his proposed disguise as a ba had been suggested by his subconscious for more than practical reasons. Was his back-brain trying to tell him something?

"The haut Pel will return you to your point of origin," Rian said.

He bowed. "In my experience, milady, we can never get back to exactly where we started, no matter how hard we try."

She returned nothing to this but an odd look, as he rode out again on the haut Pel's float-chair.

Pel carried him through the Celestial Garden as before, in reverse. He wondered if she was as uncomfortable with their compressed proximity as he was. He made a stab at light conversation.

"Did the haut-ladies make all this plant and animal life in the garden? Competing, like the ghem bioesthetics fair? I was particularly impressed by the singing frogs, I must say."

"Oh, no," said the haut Pel. "The lower life-forms are all ghem work. That's their highest reward, to have their art incorporated into the Imperial garden. The haut only work in human material."

He didn't recall seeing any monsters around. "Where?"

"We mostly field-test ideas in the ba servitors. It prevents the accidental release of any genomic materials through sexual routes."

"Oh."

"Our highest honor is for a favorable gene complex we have developed to be taken up into the haut-genome itself."

It was like some golden rule in reverse—never do unto yourself what you have not first tried on another. Miles smiled, rather nervously, and did not pursue the subject further. A groundcar driven by a ba servitor waited for the haut Pel's bubble at the side entrance to the Celestial Garden, and they were returned to Lady d'Har's penthouse by more normal routes.

Pel let him out of her bubble in another private nook, in an unobserved moment, and drifted away again. He pictured her reporting back to Rian—Yes, milady, I released the Barrayaran back into the wild as you ordered. I hope he will be able to find food and a mate out there. . . . He sat on a bench overlooking the Celestial Garden, and meditated upon that view until Ivan and Ambassador Vorob'yev found him.

They looked, respectively, scared and angry. "You're late," said Ivan. "Where the hell did you go?"

"I almost called out Colonel Vorreedi and the guards," added Ambassador Vorob'yev sternly.

"That would have been . . . futile," sighed Miles. "We can go now."

"Thank God," muttered Ivan.

Vorob'yev said nothing. Miles rose, wondering how soon the ambassador and Vorreedi were going to stop taking Not yet for an answer.

Not yet. Please, not yet.