“Yes,” he sighed, “I know.”
“Have you figured out yet why that, that encampment was allowed to go on for so long?”
He grimaced. “I’m going to be having words about that with my rangers tomorrow, once I’m sure I have the full story. It’s… almost a legacy problem, I suppose. In several senses.”
Hiking himself onto the side of her bed, he tapped his fingers on his paper-clad thigh and continued, “The zone boundary has always been more permeable in practice than in theory. In that first generation after the destruction, a lot of people who’d survived in the outlying areas kept trying to sneak back into their homes. A dedicated ranger cadre didn’t yet exist, so it was handled erratically by the district guard, military police and squads, and village speakers.
“Neither side was happy with the other, needless to say. Shooting people to keep them from dying had logical flaws obvious to everyone. At one point it was proposed to burn the standing homesteads, to block people going back. I’d call it a major row, except that in the shadow of Vashnoi, people had a new definition for major.”
Ekaterin nodded understanding. Enrique listened intently.
“Finally, Piotr ruled that anyone over age sixty could return, if they refused to be talked out of it. No children or young people allowed in. There was this weird little geriatric community around the edge of the zone for a while.
“The problem settled down—I suppose it would be too cruelly accurate to say died down—in a few years, well, decades. Younger people had no memory of the places and no desire to go back in. Plus the more sensible majority who wouldn’t go back on a bet. That phase was pretty much all over by the time I came along.”
“Not quite, it seems,” said Ekaterin.
“Yeah,” Miles agreed ruefully. “But it meant that however much it was against the later rules, once there were rules, it was established custom that old people on the fringes of the zone were left alone. So that dispensation Ma Roga claims Piotr gave her had precedent. It is not, mm, totally unreasonable that the newer rangers felt she was, so to speak, grandfathered in, even though she lingered there long past the time she… should have.”
“She could have come out ages ago,” said Ekaterin, considering that ghastly graveyard behind the hut-on-stumps. At least seventeen years, if not thirty. “And maybe saved more of those foundlings. Even if, in her isolation, she didn’t realize it, someone should have. Though, really, she doesn’t seem to have been in anything like a total news blackout. But she did try to take care of the abandoned kids, tried to save them. It seems hypocritical to criticize a woman for doing badly a task no one else was willing to do at all.” Ekaterin frowned into her lap. “I’m wondering if we should run DNA identifications on those bodies buried under the posts.”
“I could,” said Enrique. “What would you do with them?”
“That’s the hard question. Find the parents, plunge them into grief and guilt for a second time, when it all seemed over? To what benefit, for what change?”
Miles opened a gloved hand, full of acknowledgement, empty of solutions. One couldn’t fix the past, only the present.
“What are you going to do about Vadim?” she asked him.
Miles’s grimace this time seemed to go soul-deep. “He has to be fired, for violating any number of ranger regs. Which makes me feel like a faker. So I think we’ll call it terminated for reaching his rad limit, which he can’t prove he hasn’t, and maybe pass him along under the table to Mark. Who could find a dozen different jobs for him to do, yeah.”
“From one Vorkosigan to another?” Ekaterin smirked, secretly pleased. “Is there no escape?”
“Not for the competent. Which he is, but he was placed in a horrible fork.” Miles’s shrug was unrepentant. “I should get one self-indulgence out of all this. Vadim can be it.”
“We did get the milk goats safely to their new paddock at the Ranch,” Enrique offered. “The rangers have been detailed to bring the ponies tomorrow.”
“Oh,” said Ekaterin, “good. That’s one thing at least. Do you suppose you could stop by their room before you leave and tell those kids?”
“Certainly.” He hesitated. “Even I could see their animals meant a lot to them. It gives one hope, rather.”
Ekaterin’s mouth twisted up. “For what, their… rehabilitation, perhaps? No, reintegration is a better term, or would be if they’d ever been integrated in the first place. Really, it’s as if they’d been transported right from the Time of Isolation and plunked down here.” Doubtfully, she considered Jadwiga. There’d been that hint that Boris had once ventured out into the wider district, even if he’d fled back to the zone after. She needed to learn more about that. Ingi seemed both young enough and bright enough for a good social prognosis, but then there was his physical appearance. Or, more accurately, how other district youths would react to it. She glanced under her lashes at Miles.
“I was thinking,” said Enrique, a phrase that made Ekaterin prick her ears, “about that old bunkhouse for hired hands that’s sitting out back at the Ranch. After the docs here are done, it might serve as a sort of halfway house for them, while they acclimatize to modern Barrayar.” He did not add, Such as it is; good for him. “There are all kinds of tasks at all levels around the labs that need doing. Boris might be trained; Ingi absolutely could be.”
“And Jadwiga? …If she gets out of the hospital?” It would be days, if not weeks, before they could learn her medical fate, and there was nothing more Ekaterin could do to speed it up. For once, she identified with Miles’s deep-rooted impatience. She reminded herself sternly that Hassadar was as good as any hospital on Barrayar for treating radiation-related issues, as the fact that Miles hadn’t whisked her elsewhere proved.
Enrique waved a more optimistic hand. “Of course. If she can milk goats, she can do all sorts of responsible things. Maybe not as quickly as some, but the Ranch runs on its own schedule.”
Ekaterin wondered whether Enrique was craftily adding to his large mammal collection, or if Jadwiga’s joy in his bugs had simply won his heart. Maybe both. Did it matter? “That might work. Or at least might be worth trying.”
“Does Martya have time for home schooling? Or interest?” asked Miles cautiously.
“We’ve dozens of employees. Nothing says it all has to fall on one person,” said Enrique.
It was a encouraging vision, Jadwiga and Boris in a sort of ad hoc sheltered workshop, gainfully employed as much for their own pride as any independence. Ekaterin knew all about that. And the labs were nothing if not flexible. Ingi, she suspected, was capable of much more, and in Enrique’s wake would most certainly find out what. The albino boy’s halfway house could well become not destination but launch pad.
Which left one—victim, perpetrator, it was hard to decide, maybe perpetuator—notably uncompensated. Ekaterin blew out her breath. “Should that invitation extend to Ma Roga? She can’t go back to the zone.”
Enrique’s face scrunched up. “I don’t think she should be left with those kids, do you? After what happened?”
“I’d guess that was temporary insanity brought on by her not being able to think past her current horizons, but… no, something seems broken there. I don’t know if it can be mended.” When rehabilitation was rejected, and punishment was pointless, what was left?
“Incarceration for rad poisoning could segue pretty readily into incarceration for attempted murder,” Miles observed.
“It seems circular. Oh.” That was right, Enrique hadn’t heard Ma’s story about how she’d come to her self-run house arrest in the first place, and therefore he could not have told Miles. Ekaterin pulled back her shoulders and recounted it now to both of them—a synopsis of a synopsis, so leaving out who knew what devilish details? She wasn’t sure it helped.