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are."
"You know. I m a manufactured clone. Manufactured right here on Jackson s
Whole."
"I don t mean your body."
He hunched in an automatic defensive posture, though he knew it emphasized his
deformities.
"You are very closed," she observed. "Very alone. That s not at all like
Miles. Usually."
"He s not a man, he s a mob. He s got a whole damned army trailing around
after him."
Not to mention the harrowing harem
.
"I suppose he likes it like that."
Her lips curved in an unexpected smile. It was the first time he d seen her
smile. It changed her face. "He does, I think." Her smile faded. "Did."
"You re doing this for him, aren t you. Treating me like this because you
think he d want it." Not in his own right, no, never, but all for Miles and
his damned brother-obsession.
"Partly."
Right
.
"But mostly," she said, "because someday Countess Vorkosigan will ask me what
I did for her son."
"You re planning to trade Baron Bharaputra for him, aren t you?"
"Mark..." her eyes were dark with a strange... pity? irony? He could not read
her eyes. "She ll mean you."
She turned on her heel and left him by himself, sealed in the cabin.
He showered in the hottest water the tiny unit would yield, and stood for long
minutes in the heat of the dryer-blast, till his skin flushed red, before he
stopped shivering. He was dizzy with exhaustion. When he finally emerged, he
found someone had been and gone and left clothes and food. He hastily pulled
on underwear, a black Dendarii T-shirt, and a pair of his progenitor s
ship-knit grey trousers, and fell upon the dinner. It wasn t a dainty
Naismith-special-diet this time, but rather a tray of standard ready-to-eat
rations designed to keep a large and physically active trooper going strong.
It was far from gourmet fare, but it was the first time he d had enough food
on his plate for weeks. He devoured it all, as if whatever fairy had delivered
it might reappear and snatch it away again. Stomach aching, he crawled into
bed and lay on his side. He no longer shivered as if from cold, nor felt
drained and sweating and shaky from low blood sugar, yet a kind of psychic
reverberation still rolled like a black tide through is body.
At least you got the clones out
.
No
. Miles got the clones out
.
Dammit, dammit, dammit...
This half-baked disaster was not the glorious redemption of which he d
dreamed. Yet what had he expected the aftermath to be? In all his desperate
plotting, he d planned almost nothing past his projected return to Escobar
with the
Ariel
. To Escobar, grinning, with the clones under his wing. He d imagined himself
dealing with an enraged Miles then, but then it would have been too late for
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Miles to stop him, too late to take his victory from him. He d half-expected
to be arrested, but to go willingly, whistling. What had he wanted?
To be free of survivor guilt? To break that old curse?
Nobody you knew back then is still alive....
That was the motive he d thought of as driving him, when he thought at all.
Maybe it wasn t so simple, he d wanted to free himself from something.... In
the last two years, freed of Ser Galen and the Komarrans by the actions of
Miles Vorkosigan, freed again altogether by Miles on a
London street at dawn, he had not found the happiness he d dreamed of during
his slavery to the terrorists. Miles had broken only the physical chains that
bound him; others, invisible, had cut so deep that flesh had grown around hem.
What did you think? That if you were as heroic as Miles, they d have to treat
you like Miles? That they would have to love you
?
And who were they
? The Dendarii? Miles himself? Or behind Miles, those sinister, fascinating
shadows, Count and Countess
Vorkosigan?
His image of Miles s parents was blurred, uncertain. The unbalanced Galen had
presented them, his hated enemies, as black villains, he Butcher of Komarr and
his virago wife. Yet with his other hand he d required Mark to study them,
using unedited source materials, their writings, their public speeches,
private vids. Miles s parents were clearly complex people, hardly saints, but
just as clearly not the foaming sadistic sodomite and murderous bitch of
Galen s raving paranoias.
In the vids Count Aral Vorkosigan appeared merely a grey-haired, thick-set man
with oddly intent eyes in his rather heavy face, with a rich, raspy, level
voice. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan spoke less often, a tall woman with
red-roan hair and notable grey eyes, too powerful to be called pretty, yet so
centered and balanced as to seem beautiful even though, strictly speaking, she
was not.
And now Bothari-Jesek threatened to deliver him to them...
He sat up, and turned on the light. A quick tour of the cabin revealed nothing
to commit suicide with. No weapons or blades -
the Dendarii had disarmed him when he d come aboard. Nothing to hang a belt or
rope from. Boiling himself to death in the shower was not an option, a sealed
fail-safe sensor turned it off automatically when it exceeded physiological
tolerances. He went back to bed.
The image of a little, urgent, shouting man with his chest exploding outward
in a carmine spray replayed in slow motion in his head. He was surprised when
he began to cry. Shock, it had to be the shock that Bothari-Jesek had
diagnosed.
I hated the little bugger when he was alive, why am I crying
? It was absurd. Maybe he was going insane.
Two nights without sleep had left him ringingly numb, yet he could not sleep [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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