Memory

CHAPTER ELEVEN

After Martin jockeyed the lightflyer up out of the trees, Miles located the clearing he sought about a kilometer away. He had Martin put them down in the yard in front of a cabin built of weathered silvery wood. The cabin, with its familiar full-length porch giving a fine view over the valley and the new lake, appeared unchanged, though there were a couple of new outbuildings downslope.

A man came out onto the porch to see what was landing in his yard. It was not the balding, one-armed Speaker Karal. This was a total stranger, a tall fellow with a neatly trimmed black beard. But he leaned, interested, on the porch railing of bark-peeled sapling as if he owned the place. Miles climbed out of the lightflyer, and stood by it for an uncertain moment, staring up at the man, rehearsing explanations for himself and secretly glad of Martins bulk. Perhaps he should have brought a trained bodyguard.

But the stranger's face lit with recognition and excitement. "Lord Vorkosigan!" he cried. He ran down off the porch two steps at a time, and strode toward Miles, his hands out in greeting, smiling broadly. "Great to see you again!" His smile faded. "Nothing wrong, I hope?"

Well, this one remembered Miles, all right, from that judgment of nearly a decade ago. "No, this is purely a social visit," Miles offered, as the man came up and shook his hand—both his hands—with enthusiastic cordiality. "Nothing official."

The man stepped back, looking down at his face, and his smile turned into a sly grin. "Don't you know who I am?"

"Urn . . ."

"I'm Zed Karal."

"Zed?" Zed Karal, Speaker Karal's middle son, had been twelve years old. . . . Miles did a little quick math. Twenty-two, or thereabouts. Yeah. "The last time I saw you, you were shorter than me."

"Well, my ma was a good cook."

"Indeed. I remember." Miles hesitated. "Was? Are your parents, um . . ."

"Oh, they're fine. Just not here. My older brother married this lowlander girl from Seligrad, and went there to work and live. Ma and Da go down to live with them for the winter, 'cause the winters are getting hard for them up here. Ma helps with their kids."

"Is . . . Karal not the Speaker of Silvy Vale anymore, then?"

"No, we have a new Speaker, as of about two years ago. A young hotshot full of Progressive ideas he picked up living in Hassadar, just your type. I think you'll remember him all right. Name's Lem Csurik." Zed's smile broadened.

"Oh!" said Miles. For the first time today a smile tugged at his own lips. "Really. I'd … like to see him."

"I'll take you to him right now, if you'll give me a lift. He's probably working on the clinic today. You won't know where that is, it's bright-new. Just a second." Zed dashed back into his cabin to put something in order, a hint of that former twelve-year-old in his run. Miles felt like banging his head on the lightflyer's canopy, to try to force his spinning brain back into gear.

Zed returned, to hop into the lightflyer's backseat, and give Martin a string of directions interspersed with running commentary as they rose into the air and passed over the next ridge. He brought them down about two kilometers away in front of the rising frame of a six-room building, the biggest structure Miles had ever seen in Silvy Vale. Power lines were already strung to it, feeding a rack of pack-rechargers for power tools. Half a dozen men paused in their labors to watch them land.

Zed clambered out and waved. "Lem, hey Lem! You'll never guess who's here!" Miles followed him toward the building site; Martin sat at the controls and watched in bemusement.

"My lord!" Lem Csurik's recognition was instantaneous too; but then, Miles's appearance was, ah, distinctive. Miles could probably have picked Lem out of the crowd in turn with a moment's study. He was still the wiry hillman of about Miles's age that Miles remembered, though obviously much happier than the day a decade back when he'd been falsely accused of murder, and even more confident-looking than the time Miles had briefly seen him in Hassadar six years ago. Lem too went for an engulfing two-handed greeting.

"Speaker Csurik. Congratulations," Miles said in return. "I see you've been busy."

"Oh, you don't know the half of it, my lord! Come see. We're getting our own clinic—it's going to serve the whole area. I'm pushing to have it undercover before the first snow flies, and all ready by Winterfair. That's when we're getting our doctor, a real one, not just the medtech who flies the circuit once a week. The doc's one of your lady mother's scholarship students from the new school in Hassadar; he's going to serve us here four years in exchange for his schooling. Winterfair's when he's supposed to graduate. We're fixing him up a cabin, too, upslope; it's got a real nice view—"

Lem introduced his crew all around, and took Miles on a tour of, if not the clinic yet, the dream of the clinic that burned in his imagination so hotly, Miles could see its ghostly outlines all complete.

"I saw the electric dam in the valley, coming in," Miles said, when Lem at last paused for breath. "Where did that come from?"

"We built it," said Lem proudly. "You can bet that was a job and a half, with so few power tools. Had to make the power to have the power, of course. We'd been waiting and waiting for the powersat receptor the District promised us, but we were so far down the list, we'd still be waiting. Then I got to figuring. I went over to Dos'tovar and looked at their hydro plant, which they'd had for years. It was low-tech, but it worked. I got a couple of the fellows from there to come help us with the dam, picking the best site and all, and got an engineer from Hassadar whose house I'd helped build to come help us with the electrical system guts. He gets the use of a cabin up from the new lake for a vacation place in the summer in return. We still owe for the generators, but that's all."

"That was the best site, was it?"

"Oh, yes. The shortest span and the biggest drop available, and the most water-flow. We'll outgrow it in time, but that's the whole point. Without basic power, this place was in stasis. Now we can grow. Couldn't have won the lottery from the District for the doctor without power for the clinic, for one thing."

"You didn't let anything stop you, did you?"

"Well, m'lord, you know who I learned that from."

Harra, his wife, of course. Raina's mother. Miles nodded. "Speaking of Harra, where is she today?" He had come up here wanting only to stand silent before the dead, but he was now beginning to want very much to talk to Harra.

"Teaching at the school. I built on another room—we have two teachers now, you know. There's a girl Harra trained who does the little ones, and Harra teaches the older ones."

"Can I, ah, see it?"

"Harra'd skin me alive if I let you get away without seeing her! Come on, I'll take you over there now."

Zed, having turned Miles over to the responsible authority, waved good-bye and headed back home, disappearing among the trees. Lem spoke briefly to his crew, and took over Zed's place as native guide in the back seat of the lightflyer.

Another short hop brought them to an older and more traditional structure: a long cabin with two doors and fieldstone fireplaces on both ends. A large hand-carved sign with scrolling letters above the porch labeled it The Raina Csurik School. Lem led Miles through the door on the left, Martin trailing to linger uncertainly just outside. About twenty teenagers of various sizes sat at handmade wooden desks with comconsole lap-links atop them, listening to the vigorously gesturing woman at the head of the room.

Harra Csurik was still tall and lean, as Miles remembered her. Her straight straw-blond hair was tied back neatly at the nape of her neck, hill-woman fashion, and she wore a hill woman's simple dress, though clean and well made. Like the majority of her students, her feet were bare in this mild weather. But her protuberant gray eyes were lively and warm. She broke off her lecture abruptly as she saw Miles and Lem.

"Lord Vorkosigan! Well, I never expected this!" She advanced upon him much as Zed and Lem had, but not content with a handshake, she hugged him. At least she didn't pick him up bodily. Miles concealed his startlement, recovered his wits quickly enough to hug her back, and took both her hands in a half-swing around as she released him.

"Hello, Harra. You look splendid."

"I haven't seen you since Hassadar."

"Yes, I … should have been round long before this. But they kept me busy."

"I have to tell you, it meant the world to me, when you came to my graduation from the teacher's college there."

"That was a piece of good luck, that I was on-planet at the time. No merit in it."

"That's a matter of opinion. Come, see. . . ." She towed him toward the front of the room. "See, kids, who's come to see us! It's your own Lord Vorkosigan!"

They stared at him with interest, rather than suspicion or revulsion, their eyes shifting to check the odd little man in the flesh before them against the picture on the wall at the front of their classroom. Above the vid projection space three still-portraits were lined up, two by mandate: one of Emperor Gregor in the splendid and gaudy parade dress uniform, and one of their District Count, Miles's father, staring out sternly in the most formal brown-and-silver livery of the Vorkosigans. The third portrait was nonregulation—public offices were not normally required to display a portrait of their Count's heir as well, but Miles's own face smirked back at him from up there. It was one of his younger and stiffer scans, wearing Imperial Service dress greens with light blue ensign's rectangles on the collar. It had to date from his Academy graduation, because no silver Eye-of-Horus pins yet glittered there. Where the devil had Harra obtained it?

She displayed him as proudly to her students as any show-and-tell exhibitor, excited as a six-year-old with a jar of pet bugs. He hadn't come to Silvy Vale expecting to see anyone, let alone speak publicly, and felt decidedly underdressed in an old backcountry-style tunic and worn black trousers left over from a set of Service fatigues, not to mention the battered Service boots he'd muddied by the reservoir. But he managed a few generic, hearty Well done, well done, comments that seemed to please everyone. Harra took him around the front porch into the next room and repeated the show, throwing the young woman teaching there into terminal flusterment, and raising the younger students' wriggle-quotient to something near explosion.

As they were coming back around on the porch, Miles seized Harra's hand to slow her down for a moment. "Harra—I didn't come up here for a surprise inspection, for heaven's sake. I just came up to … well, to tell you the truth, I just wanted to do a little memorial burning on Raina's grave." The tripod and brazier and aromatic wood were stashed in the back of the lightflyer.

"That was good of you, m'lord," said Harra. Miles made a small throwaway gesture, but she shook her head in denial of his denial.

Miles went on, "It seems I'd need a boat to do it now, and I don't want to risk setting fire to the boat I'm sitting in. Or did you folks move the graveyard?"

"Yes, before it was flooded, people moved some of the graves, those who wanted to. We picked a real nice new spot up on the ridge, overlooking the old site. We didn't move my mother's grave, of course. I left her down there. Let even her burial be buried, no burnings for her." Harra grimaced; Miles nodded understanding. "Raina's grave . . . well, I guess it was because the ground was so damp down there by the creek, and she only had that bit of a makeshift crate for a coffin, and she was so tiny anyway . . . we couldn't find her to move. She's gone back to the soil, I guess. I didn't mind. It seemed right, when I thought about it. I really think of this school as her best memorial, anyway. Every day I come here to teach is like burning an offering, only better. Because it makes, instead of destroys." She nodded once, resolute and calm.

"I see."

She looked at him more closely. "You all right, m'lord? You look really tired. And all pale. You haven't been sick or something, have you?"

He supposed three months of death qualified as about as sick as one could get. "Well, yes. Or something. But I'm recovering."

"Oh. All right. Are you headed anywhere, after this?"

"Not really. I'm sort of … on holiday."

"I'd like you to meet our lads, mine and Lem's. Lem's Ma or his sister take care of them while I'm teaching. Won't you come home for lunch with us?"

He'd intended to be back at Vorkosigan Surleau by lunchtime. "Kids?"

"We've two, now. A little boy four and a little girl one."

No one was using uterine replicators up here yet; she'd borne them in her body like her lost firstborn. Dear God but this woman worked. It was an invitation he could not possibly escape. "I'd be honored."

"Lem, show Lord Vorkosigan around a minute—" Harra went back inside, to consult with her team teacher and then with her students, and Lem dutifully took Miles on an outside tour of the architectural highlights of the school. A couple of minutes later, children exploded from the building, shrieking off happily in all directions in early dismissal.

"I didn't mean to disrupt your routine," Miles protested futilely. He was in for it now. He could not for three worlds betray those smiles of welcome.

They descended by lightflyer unannounced upon Lem's sister, who rose to the challenge smoothly. The lunch she provided was, thank God, light. Miles dutifully met and admired Csurik children, nieces, and nephews. He was hijacked by them and taken on a stroll through the woods, and viewed a favorite swimming hole. He waded gravely along with them on the smooth stones with his boots off, till his feet were numb with the chill, and in a voice of Vorish authority pronounced it a most excellent swimming hole, perhaps the finest in his District. He was obviously an anomaly of some fascination, an adult almost their own size.

What with one thing and another, it was late afternoon before they arrived back at the school. Miles took one look at the mob of people streaming into the wide yard, bearing dishes and baskets and flowers, musical instruments and pitchers and jugs, chairs and benches and trestles and boards, firewood and tablecloths, and his heart sank. Despite all his efforts to avoid such things today, it seemed he was in for a surprise party after all.

Phrases like, We should go before dark, Martin's not used to flying in the mountains, died on his lips. They'd be lucky if they got out of here before tomorrow morning. Or—he noted the stone pitchers of Dendarii Mountain maple mead, the deadliest alcoholic beverage ever invented by man—tomorrow afternoon.

It took him a meal, sunset, a bonfire, and rather a lot of carefully rationed sips of maple mead, but eventually, he actually relaxed and began to enjoy it. Then the music began, and enjoyment became no effort at all. Off to the side Martin, at first inclined to turn up his nose a bit at the rustic homemade quality of it all, found himself teaching city dances to a group of eager teens. Miles bit back inflicting any prudent warnings on the boy, such as Maple mead may go down smooth and sweet, but it destroys cell membranes coming back up. Some things you had to learn for yourself, at certain ages. Miles danced traditional steps with Harra, and other women until he lost count. A couple of older folk, who'd been there at his judgment of a decade ago, nodded respectfully at him despite his capering. It was not, after all, a party for him, despite the bombardment of birthday congratulations and jokes. It was a party for Silvy Vale. If he was the excuse for it, well, it was the most use he'd been to anybody for weeks.

But as the party died down with the bonfires embers, his sense of incompletion grew. He'd come up here to . . . what? To try to bring his dragging depression to some kind of head, perhaps, like lancing a boil, painful but relieving. Disgusting metaphor, but he was thoroughly sick of himself. He wanted to take a jug of mead, and finish his talk with Raina. Bad idea, probably. He might end up weeping drunkenly by the reservoir, and drowning himself as well as his sorrows, poor repayment to Silvy Vale for the nice party, and betrayal of his word to Ivan. Did he seek healing, or destruction? Either. It was this formless state in between that was unbearable.

In the end, somehow, after midnight, he fetched up by the waterside after all. But not alone. Lem and Harra came with him, and sat on logs too. The moons were both high, and made faint silky patterns on the wavelets, and turned the rising mist in the ravines to silver smoke. Lem had charge of the jug of mead, and distributed it judiciously, otherwise keeping a mellow silence.

It was not the dead Miles needed to talk to, in the dark, he realized. It was the living. Useless to confess to the dead; absolution was not in their power. But I'll trust your Speaking, Harra, as you once trusted mine.

"I have to tell you something," Miles said to Harra.

"Knew there was something wrong," she said. "I hope you're not dying or something."

"No."

"I was worried it might be something like that. A lot of muties don't live very long lives, even without someone to cut their throats."

"Vorkosigan does it backwards. I had my throat cut all right, but it was for life, not for death. It's a long story and the details are classified, but I ended up in a cryo-chamber out in the galactic backbeyond last year. When they thawed me out, I had some medical problems. Then I did something stupid. Then I did something really stupid, which was to lie about the first thing. And then I got caught. And then I got discharged. Whatever it was about my achievements you admired, that inspired you, it's all gone now. Thirteen years of career effort down the waste-disposer in one flush. Hand me that jug." He swallowed sweet fire, and handed it back to Lem, who passed it to Harra and back to himself. "Of all the things I thought I might be by age thirty, civilian was never on the list."

The moonlight rippled on the water. "And you told me to stand up straight and speak the truth," said Harra, after a long pause. "Does this mean you'll be spending more time in the District?"

"Maybe."

"Good."

"You're ruthless, Harra," Miles groaned.

The bugs sang their soft chorus in the woods, a tiny organic moonlight sonata. "Little man"—Harra's voice in the dark was as sweet and deadly as maple mead—"my mother killed my daughter. And was judged for it in front of all of Silvy Vale. You think I don't know what public shame is? Or waste?"

"Why d'you think I'm telling all this to you?"

Harra was silent for long enough for Lem to pass around the stone jug one last time, in the dim moonlight and shadows. Then she said, "You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on."

"What do you find on the other side? When you go on?"

She shrugged. "Your life again. What else?"

"Is that a promise?"

She picked up a pebble, fingered it, and tossed it into the water. The moon-lines bloomed and danced. "It's an inevitability. No trick. No choice. You just go on."

Miles got Martin and the lightflyer in the air again by noon the next day. Martin's eyes were red and puffy, and his face had a pale greenish cast worthy of a speed run through the Dendarii Gorge. He flew very gently and carefully, which suited Miles exactly. He was not very conversational, but he did manage a, "Did you ever find what you were looking for, m'lord?"

"The light is clearer up here in these mountains than anywhere else on Barrayar, but. . . no. It was here once, but it's not here now." Miles twisted in his seat straps, and stared back over his shoulder at the rugged receding hills. These people need a thousand things. But they don't need a hero. At least, not a hero like Admiral Naismith. Heroes like Lem and Harra, yes.

Martin squinted, perhaps not appreciating that light just at present.

After a time, Miles asked, "How old is middle-age, Martin?"

"Oh . . ." Martin shrugged. "Thirty, I guess."

"That's what I'd always thought, too." Though he'd once heard the Countess define it as ten years older than whatever you were, a moveable feast.

"I had a professor at the Imperial Service Academy once," Miles went on, as the hills grew more gentle beneath them, "who taught the introduction to tactical engineering course. He said he never bothered changing his tests from term to term to prevent cheating, because while the questions were always the same, the answers changed. I'd thought he was joking."

"Unh?" said Martin dutifully.

"Never mind, Martin," Miles sighed. "Just go on."