Miles winced. “I remember. The possibility that this is some kind of set-up has crossed my mind. That’s one reason I didn’t take off after them twenty hours ago.” Right after the embarrassing, hastily-dismissed full staff meeting. He’d been in the mood for fratricide on the spot. “Assuming, as seems reasonable, that Bel was fooled at first—and I don’t see why not, everybody else was—the time-lag might have given Mark a chance to slip up, and Bel to see the light. But in that case the recall order should have brought the Ariel back.”
“Mark does do an awfully good you,” Quinn observed, from personal experience. “Or at least he did two years ago. If you’re not expecting the possibility of a double, he seems just like you on one of your off days. His exterior appearance was perfect.”
“But Bel does know of the possibility,” Elena put in.
“Yes,” said Miles. “So maybe Bel hasn’t been fooled. Maybe Bel’s been spaced.”
“Mark would need the crew, or a crew, to run the ship,” said Baz. “Though he might have had a new crew waiting, farside.”
“If he’d been planning such outright piracy and murder, he’d hardly have taken a Dendarii commando squad along to resist it.” Reason could be very reassuring, sometimes. Sometimes. Miles took a breath. “Or maybe Bel has been suborned.”
Baz raised his brows; Quinn unconsciously closed her teeth upon, but did not bite through, the little fingernail of her right hand.
“Suborned how?” said Elena. “Not by money.” Her smile twisted up. “D’you figure Bel’s finally given up trying to seduce you, and is looking for the next best thing?”
“That’s not funny,” Miles snapped. Baz converted a suspicious snort into a careful cough, and met his glare blandly, but then lost it and sniggered.
“At any rate, it’s an old joke,” Miles conceded wearily. “But it depends upon what Mark is up to, on Jackson’s Whole. The kind of … hell, outright slavery, practiced by the various Jacksonian body-sculptors, is a deep offense to Bel’s progressive Betan soul. If Mark is thinking of taking some kind of bite out of his old home planet, he just might talk Bel into going along with it.”
“At Fleet expense?” Baz inquired.
“That does … verge on mutiny,” Miles agreed reluctantly. “I’m not accusing, I’m just speculating. Trying to see all the possibilities.”
“In that case, is it possible Mark’s destination isn’t Jackson’s Whole at all?” said Baz. “There are four other jumps out of Jacksonian local space. Maybe the Ariel is just passing through.”
“Physically possible, yes,” said Miles. “Psychologically … I’ve studied Mark, too. And while I can’t say that I have his number, I know Jackson’s Whole looms large in his life. It’s only a gut-feeling, but it’s a strong gut-feeling.” Like a bad case of indigestion.
“How did we get blindsided by Mark this time?” Elena asked. “I thought ImpSec was supposed to be keeping track of him for us.”
“They are. I get regular reports from Illyan’s office,” Miles said. “The last report, which I read at ImpSec headquarters not three weeks ago, put Mark still on Earth. But it’s the damn time-lag. If he left Earth, say, four or five weeks ago, that report is still in transit from Earth to Illyan on Barrayar and back to me. I’ll bet you Betan dollars to anything you please that we get a coded message from HQ in the next few days earnestly warning us that Mark has dropped out of sight. Again.”
“Again?” said Elena. “Has he dropped out of sight before?”
“A couple of times. Three, actually.” Miles hesitated. “You see, every once in a while—three times in the last two years—I’ve tried to contact him myself. Invited him to come in, come to Barrayar, or at least to meet with me. Every time, he’s panicked, gone underground and changed his identity—he’s rather good at it, from all the time he spent as a prisoner of the Komarran terrorists—and it takes Illyan’s people weeks or months to locate him again. Illyan’s asked me not to try to contact Mark any more without his authorization.” He brooded. “Mother wants him to come in so much, but she won’t have Illyan order him kidnapped. At first I agreed with her, but now I wonder.”
“As your clone, he—” began Baz.
“Brother,” Miles corrected, instantly. “Brother. I reject the term ’clone’ for Mark. I forbid it. ’Clone’ implies something interchangeable. A brother is someone unique. And I assure you, Mark is unique.”
“In guessing … Mark’s next moves,” Baz began again, more carefully, “can we even use reason? Is he sane?”
“If he is, it’s not the Komarrans’ fault.” Miles rose and began pacing again around the table, despite Quinn’s exasperated look. He avoided her eyes and watched his boots, grey on grey against the friction matting, instead. “After we finally discovered his existence, Illyan had his agents do every kind of background check on him they could. Partly to make up for the acute embarrassment of ImpSec’s having missed him, all these years, I think. I’ve seen all the reports. Trying and trying to get inside Mark’s mind.” Around the corner, down the other side, and back.
“His life in Bharaputra’s clone-creche didn’t seem too bad—they coddle those bodies—but after the Komarran insurgents picked him up, I gather it got pretty nightmarish. They kept training him to be me, but every time they thought they’d got it, I’d do something unexpected and they had to start over. They kept changing and elaborating their plans. The plot dragged on for years after the time they’d first hoped to bring it off. They were a small group, operating on a shoestring anyway. Their leader, Ser Galen, was half-mad himself, I think.” Around and around.
“Part of the time Galen would treat Mark like the great hope for a Komarran uprising, or pet him and set him up with the idea that they were going to make him Emperor of Barrayar in a coup. But part of the time Galen would slip a cog, and see Mark as the personal genetic representative of our father, and make him whipping-boy for all his hatred of the Vorkosigans and Barrayar. Disguising the most ferocious punishments, tortures really—from himself, and maybe even from Mark—as ’training discipline.’ Illyan’s agent had some of this from a rather illegal fast-penta interrogation of an ex-subordinate of Galen’s, so it’s flat truth.” Around and around.
“For example, apparently Mark’s and my metabolisms are not the same. So whenever Mark’s weight exceeded my parameters, instead of doing the intelligent thing and having Mark’s appetite medically adjusted, Galen would first withhold food for days, then let him gorge, and then force him at shock-stick point to exercise till he vomited. Weird stuff like that, really disturbing. Galen apparently had a hair-trigger temper, at least where Mark was concerned. Or maybe he was deliberately trying to make Mark crazy. Create a Mad Emperor Miles, to replay Mad Emperor Yuri’s reign and destroy the Barrayaran government from the top down. Once—this fellow reported—Mark tried to get a night out, just a night out, and actually got away for a while, till Galen’s goons brought him back. Galen went nuts, accused him of trying to escape, took his shock-stick and—” his eye caught Elena’s paling face, and he hastily edited his nervous outburst, “and did some ugly things.” Which couldn’t have helped Mark’s sexual adjustment any. It had been so bad that Galen’s own goons had begged him to stop, according to the informant.
“No wonder he hated Galen,” said Quinn softly.
Elena’s glance was rather sharper. “There’s nothing you could have done. You didn’t even know Mark existed, back then.”
“We should have known.”
“Right. So to what extent is this retroactive guilt distorting your thinking right now, Admiral?”
“Some, I suspect,” he admitted. “That’s why I called you all here. I feel the need of a cross-check, on this.” He paused, and forced himself to sit again. “That’s not the only reason, however. Before this mess with the Ariel leaped out of the wormhole, I had started out to give you a real, bona fide mission assignment.”