Like a sorcerer in an old tale, the Komarrans dealt with a devil to have a simulacrum made. A bastard clone, he thought with a silent, humorless laugh. But things went wrong. The crippled original boy, poisoned before birth by yet another murderous enemy of his father’s, grew strangely, unpredictably; his genetic duplicate grew straight … that had been his first clue that he was different from the other clones, he reflected. When the other clones went to the doctors for treatment they came back stronger, healthier, growing ever-faster. Every time he went, and he went often, their painful treatments seemed to make him sicklier, more stunted. The braces they put on his bones, neck, back, never seemed to help much. They had made him into this hunchbacked dwarfling as if molding him in a press, die-cut from a cast of his progenitor. I could have been normal, if Miles Vorkosigan had not been crippled.
When he first began to suspect the true purpose of his fellow clones, for rumors passed among the children in wild ways even their careful handlers could not totally control, his growing somatic deformations brought him silent suppressed joy. Surely they could not use this body for a brain transplant. He might be discarded—he might yet escape his pleasant, smiling jailer-servants… .
His real escape, when his Komarran owners came to collect him at age fourteen, was like a miracle. And then the training had begun. The endless harsh tutoring, drill, indoctrination. At first a destiny, any destiny at all, seemed glorious compared to his creche-mates’ end. He determinedly took up the training to replace his progenitor, and strike a blow for dear Komarr, a place he had never seen, against evil Barrayar, a place he had never seen either. But learning to be Miles Vorkosigan turned out to be like running the race in Zeno’s paradox. No matter how much he learned, how frantically he drilled, how harshly his mistakes were punished, Miles learned more, faster; by the time he arrived, his quarry had always moved on, intellectually or otherwise.
The symbolic race became literal once his Komarran tutors actually moved to effect the substitution. They chased the elusive young Lord Vorkosigan halfway around the wormhole nexus, never realizing that when he vanished, he utterly ceased to exist, and Admiral Naismith appeared. The Komarrans had never found out about Admiral Naismith. Not planning but chance had finally brought them together two years ago on Earth, right back where the whole stupid race had started, in pursuit of a vengeance gone twenty years cold.
The time-delay had been critical in a way the Komarrans had not even noticed. When they first began chasing Vorkosigan, their customized clone had been at the peak of his mental conditioning, committed to the goals of the revolt, unreflectingly eager. Had they not saved him from the fate of clones? Eighteen months of watching them screw up, eighteen months of travel, observation, exposure to uncensored news, views, even a few people, had planted secret doubts in his mind. And, bluntly, one could not duplicate even an imitation of a galactic-class education like Vorkosigan’s without inadvertently learning something about how to think. In the middle of it all, the surgery to replace his perfectly sound leg bones with synthetics, just because Vorkosigan had smashed his, had been stunningly painful. What if Vorkosigan broke his neck, next time? Realization had crept over him.
Stuffing his head full of Lord Vorkosigan, in bits over time, was just as much of a brain transplant as anything done with vibra-scalpels and living tissue. He who plots revenge, must dig two graves. But the Komarrans had dug the second grave for him. For the person he never had a chance to become, the man he might have been if he had not been forced at shock-stick point to continually struggle to be someone else.
Some days he was not sure who he hated more, House Bharaputra, the Komarrans, or Miles Naismith Vorkosigan.
He shut off the comconsole with a snort, and rose to pick out his precious data cube from the uniform pocket in which it was still hidden. Upon reflection, he cleaned up and depilated again, before donning fresh Dendarii officer’s undress greys. That was as regulation as he could make himself. Let the Dendarii see only the polished surface, and not the man inside the man inside… .
He steeled himself, exited the cabin, stepped across the corridor, and pressed the buzzer to the hermaphrodite captain’s quarters.
No response. He pressed it again. After a short delay Thorne’s blurred alto voice came, “Yes?”
“Naismith here.”
“Oh! Come in, Miles.” The voice sharpened with interest.
The door slid aside, and he stepped within, to realize that the reason for the delay was that he’d woken Thorne from sleep. The hermaphrodite was sitting up on one elbow in bed, brown hair tousled, its free hand falling away from the keypad which had released the door.
“Excuse me,” he said, stepping backward, but the door had already sealed again.
“No, it’s all right,” the hermaphrodite smiled sleepily, curled its body in a C, and patted the bed invitingly in front of its sheeted … lap. “For you, anytime. Come sit. Would you like a back rub? You look tense.” It was wearing a decidedly frilly nightgown, flowing silk with lace trim edging a plunging vee neckline that revealed the swelling pale flesh of its breasts.
He sidled to a station chair instead. Thorne’s smile took on a peculiarly sardonic tinge, even while remaining perfectly relaxed. He cleared .his throat. “I … thought it was time for that more detailed mission briefing I promised.” I should have checked the duty-roster. Would Admiral Naismith have known the captain’s sleep-cycle?
“Time and past time. I’m glad to see you come up out of the fog. What the hell have you been doing, wherever you went for the past eight weeks, Miles? Who died?”
“No one. Well, eight clones, I suppose.”
“Hm.” Thorne nodded wry acknowledgment. The seductive sinuosity faded from its posture, and it sat up straight, and rubbed the last of the sleep from its eyes. “Tea?”
“Sure. Or, uh, I could come back after your sleep-shift.” Or after you’re dressed.
It swung its silk-swathed legs from the bed. “No way. I’d be up in an hour anyway. I’ve been waiting for this. Seize the day.” It padded across the cabin to do its tea-ritual again. He set up the data cube in the comconsole and paused, both polite and practical, for the captain to take its first sips of the hot black liquid, and come fully awake. He wished it would put its uniform on.
He keyed up the display as Thorne wandered close. “I have a detailed holomap of House Bharaputra’s main medical complex. This data is not more than four months old. Plus guard schedules and patrol patterns—their security is much heavier than a normal civilian hospital, more like a military laboratory, but it’s no fortress. Their everyday concern is more against individual local intruders intent on theft. And, of course, in preventing certain of their less voluntary patients from escaping.” A significant chunk of his former fortune had gone into that map cube.
The color-coded image spread itself in lines and sheets of light above the vid plate. The complex was truly that, a vast warren of buildings, tunnels, therapy-gardens, labs, mini-manufacturing areas, flyer pads, warehouses, garages, and even two shuttle docks for direct departure to planetary orbit.
Thorne put down its cup, leaned over the comconsole, and stared with interest. It took up the remote control and turned the map-image, shrank and expanded and sliced it. “So do we want to start by capturing the shuttle bays?”
“No. The clones are all kept together over here on the west side, in this sort of hospice area. I figure if we land here in this exercise court we’ll be damn near on top of their dormitory. Naturally, I’m not overly concerned about what the drop shuttle damages, coming down.”