Borders of Infinity

by Lois McMaster Bujold

“Not yet. I fully intend to quash it before it gets off the ground. But to do so I need more details. So as not to get blindsided, as I have sometimes been in your more tangled affairs—I still remember, if you do not, spending a month in my own prison because of you.” Illyan glowered into the past.

Could his whole career to date have been not desperately needed service to the Imperium, but just a ploy to get a dangerously clumsy Vor puppy out from underfoot?

“So, Grandfather,” he purred at last. “And here we are after all. Satisfied now?” All the chaos of the graduation ceremonies behind, all the mad efforts of the last three years, all the pain, came to this point; but the grave did not speak, did not say, Well done; you can stop now.

And so Admiral Aral’s life took General Piotr’s like an overpowering hand of cards, and where did that leave Ensign Miles? Holding two deuces and the joker. He must surely either concede or start bluffing like crazy . . .

“Everyone knows the Count’s son is a mutant.” Her eyes flicked defiant-wide. “Some said it came from the off-worlder woman he married. Some said it was from radiation from the wars, or a disease from, um, corrupt practices in his youth among his brother-officers—” That last was a new one to Miles. His brow lifted. “—but most say he was poisoned by his enemies.”

The fifty thousand Firsters from Earth had only meant to be the spearhead of Barrayar’s colonization. Then, by a gravitational anomaly, the wormhole jump through which the colonists had come had shifted closed—violently, irrevocably, and without warning. The terraforming which had begun, so careful and controlled in the beginning, collapsed along with everything else. Imported Earth plant and animal species had escaped everywhere to run wild, as the humans turned their attention to the most urgent problems of survival. Biologists still mourned the mass extinctions of native species that had followed, the erosions and droughts and floods, but really, Miles thought, over the centuries of the Time of Isolation the fittest of both worlds had fought it out to a perfectly good new balance. If it was alive and covered the ground who cared where it came from? We are all here by accident. Like the roses.

“It’s not easy for them,” shrugged Dea. “It’s easy for the central authorities to make the rules, but these people have to live every minute of the consequences.

God, thought Miles in jealousy, if I had half the sex-appeal of that bloody horse I’d have more girlfriends than my cousin Ivan.

“Lem, he”—she swallowed—“I’m sure he didn’t kill the babe. There’s never been any of that in our family, I swear it! He says he didn’t, and I believe him.”

“I understand your distress, ma’am. But there will be justice for little Raina. That I have sworn.” “How can there be justice now?” she raged, thick and low. “It’s too late—a world too late—for justice, mutie lordling. What use do I have for your damned justice now?

“I took tests,” Dea complained sotto voce as he worked. “I beat out twenty-six other applicants, for the honor of becoming the prime minister’s personal physician. I have practiced the procedures of seventy separate possible medical emergencies, from coronary thrombosis to attempted assassination. Nobody—nobody—told me my duties would include sewing up a damned horse’s neck in the middle of the night in the middle of a howling wilderness . . .”

“You treat him just like a person, Dea. This is the last animal that the Count-my-grandfather personally trained. He named him. I watched him get born. We trained him together.

“Very well. I swear by my word as Vorkosigan, I shall confine my questions to the facts to which you were an eyewitness. I will not ask you for conjectures about persons or events for which you were not present. There, will that do?”

In the meantime, in view of your youth and ah, apparent mental defectiveness, I shall hold the treason charge.

“I suppose it’s because neither of you ever met my grandfather,” Miles decided. “He died just about a year before you entered my father’s service, Pym. He was born at the very end of the Time of Isolation, and lived through every wrenching change this century has dealt to Barrayar. He was called the last of the Old Vor, but really, he was the first of the new. He changed with the times, from the tactics of horse cavalry to that of flyer squadrons, from swords to atomics, and he changed successfully. Our present freedom from the Cetagandan Occupation is a measure of how fiercely he could adapt, then throw it all away and adapt again. At the end of his life he was called a conservative, only because so much of Barrayar had streamed past him in the direction he had led, prodded, pushed, and pointed all his life. “He changed, and adapted, and bent with the wind of the times. Then, in his age—for my father was his youngest and sole surviving son, and did not himself marry till middle age—in his age, he was hit with me. And he had to change again. And he couldn’t. “He begged for my mother to have an abortion, after they knew more or less what the fetal damage would be. He and my parents were estranged for five years after I was born. They didn’t see each other or speak or communicate. Everyone thought my father moved us to the Imperial Residence when he became regent because he was angling for the throne, but in fact it was because the Count-my-grandfather denied him the use of ...

“No, Jean she hung around. Jean knows me, she knew what I wanted. None of her damn business. And Harra was always there. Harra must not know. Harra must not . . . why should she get off so soft? The poison must be in her. Must have come from her Da, I lay only with her Da and they were all wrong but the one.”

“Killed my babies, to please, to please . . . I don’t know who. And now you call me a murderer? Damn you! What use is your justice to me now? I needed it then—where were you then?”

Miles met Harra’s eyes at that. “I think you all underestimate her. Your excessive tenderness insults both her intelligence and will. She comes from a tough line, that one.”

“You,” said Ma Mattulich, and her loathing came through even the nauseating fast-penta cheer, “you are the worst. All I went through, all I did, all the grief, and you come along at the end. A mutie made lord over us all, and all the rules changed, betrayed at the end by an off-worlder woman’s weakness. You make it all for nothing. Hate you. Dirty mutie . . .”

“It’s all right,” Miles assured the tiny grave. “Pym’s caught me talking to dead people before. He may think I’m crazy, but he’s far too well trained to say so.”

The fundamental principle was clear; the spirit was to be preferred over the letter, truth over technicalities. Precedent was held subordinate to the judgment of the man on the spot. Alas, the man on the spot was himself.

“Not really.” Miles gazed around. “Anything less than Ma Mattulich’s death seems . . . inadequate justice, and yet . . . I cannot see who her death would serve.” “Neither could I. That’s why I took the position I did in the first place.” “No . . .” said Miles slowly, “no, you were wrong in that. For one thing, it very nearly got Lem Csurik killed. I was getting ready to pursue him with deadly force at one point. It almost destroyed him with Harra. Truth is better. Slightly better. At least it isn’t a fatal error. Surely I can do . . . something with it.”

“Barrayar will eat me, if it can.”

I, ah”—Miles cleared his throat— “thought you might name it the Raina Csurik Primary School.”

:'(

“I’ll bet on you,” Miles agreed. “Both of you. Just, ah”—a smile sped across his mouth and vanished—“stand up straight and speak the truth, eh?” Harra blinked understanding. An answering half-smile lit her tired face, equally briefly. “I will. Little man.”

Taxes squeezed from this very district helped maintain the very elite military school he’d just spent—how much of their resources in?

Peace to you, small lady, he thought to Raina. You’ve won a twisted poor modern knight, to wear your favor on his sleeve. But it’s a twisted poor world we were both born into, that rejects us without mercy and ejects us without consultation. At least I won’t just tilt at windmills for you. I’ll send in sappers to mine the twirling suckers, and blast them into the sky . . . He knew who he served now. And why he could not quit. And why he must not fail.

House Dyne, detergent banking—launder your money on Jackson’s Whole. House Fell, weapons deals with no questions asked. House Bharaputra, illegal genetics. Worse, House Ryoval, whose motto was “Dreams Made Flesh,” surely the damndest—Miles used the adjective precisely—procurer in history. House Hargraves, the galactic fence, prim-faced middlemen for ransom deals—you had to give them credit, hostages exchanged through their good offices came back alive, mostly. And a dozen smaller syndicates, variously and shiftingly allied.

You had to give the Betan credit for either optimism or obtuseness . . . or, Miles’s honesty added, genuine feeling. If he turned around now, he knew, he might surprise an essential loneliness in the hermaphrodite’s eyes, never permitted on the lips. He did not turn around.

...

Thorne grinned. “You got it. You’re an almost perfect Betan, y’know? Almost. You have the accent, the in-jokes . . .” Miles went a little still. “Where do I fail?” Thorne touched Miles’s cheek; Miles flinched. “Reflexes,” said Thorne.

“About two hundred years ago—about the time hermaphrodites were being invented”—a peculiar wryness flashed across Thorne’s face—“there was this rush of genetic experimentation on humans, in the wake of the development of the practical uterine replicator. Followed shortly by a rush of laws restricting such, but meanwhile, somebody thought they’d make a race of free-fall dwellers.

Makes me glad I’m an only child.”

“Sh . . .” Oliver’s voice trailed off. He glanced for confirmation, oddly enough, at Suegar. “Is this guy for real?” “He thinks he’s faking it,” said Suegar blandly, “but he’s not. He’s the One, all right and tight.”

“It’s true,” agreed Oliver, “that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow.” “Ah . . . quite,” Miles gulped. “You are a man of acute insight.” “That’s not an insight,” said Oliver. “That’s a personal guarantee.”

“Stop looking at me like that. I used to think I was a healer. It took this place to teach me I was nothing but an interface between the technology and the patient. Now the technology is gone, and I’m just nothing.”