“On Jackson’s Whole—merely prudent.” And attachments surely ran two ways. Jackson’s Whole was no place to be alone. But you can’t trust anyone.

If anyone was sane here, he swore it was by accident.

Reading, an exercise that had at first given him a stabbing sensation in the eyes and instant excruciating headaches, was getting easier. He could go for up to ten minutes at a time now before it became too blinding to bear. Holed up in Rowan’s study, he pushed himself to the limits of pain, an information-bite, a few minutes’ rest, and try again. Beginning at the center outward, he read up first on Jackson’s Whole, its unique history, non-governmental structure, and the one hundred and sixteen Great Houses and countless Houses Minor, with their interlocking alliances and vendettas, roiling deals and betrayals. The Durona Group was well on its way to growing into a House Minor in its own right, he judged, budding from House Fell like a hydra, also like a hydra reproducing asexually. Mentions of Houses Bharaputra, Hargraves, Dyne, Ryoval and Fell triggered images in his head that did not come from the vid display. A few of them were even starting to cross-connect. Too few. He wondered if it was significant that the Houses that seemed most familiar were also the ones most famous for dealing in off-planet illegalities.

Whoever I am, I know this place. And yet … his visions tasted small in scope, too shallow to represent a formative lifetime. Maybe he’d been a small person. Still, it was more than he could dredge up from his subconscious regarding the youth of the putative Admiral Naismith, the Cetagandan-produced clone.

Gran’da. Those had been memories with mass, an almost stunning sensory weight. Who was Gran’da? Jacksonian fosterer? Komarran mentor? Cetagandan trainer? Someone huge and fascinating, mysterious and old and dangerous. Gran’da had no source, he seemed to come with the universe.

Sources. Perhaps a study of his progenitor, the crippled Barrayaran lordling Vorkosigan, might yield up something. He’d been made in Vorkosigan’s image, after all, which was a hell of a thing to do to any poor sod. He pulled up a listing of references to Barrayar from Rowan’s comconsole library. There were some hundreds of non-fiction books, vids, documents and documentaries. For the sake of a frame, he began with a general history, scanning rapidly. The Fifty-thousand Firsters. Wormhole collapse. The Time of Isolation, the Bloody Centuries … the Re-discovery … the words blurred. His head felt full to bursting. Familiar, so achingly familiar … he had to stop.

Panting, he darkened the room and lay down on the little sofa till his eyes stopped throbbing. But then, if he’d ever been trained to replace Vorkosigan, it all ought to be very familiar indeed. He’d have had to study Barrayar forward and backward. I have. He wanted to beg Rowan to shackle him to a wall and give him another dose of fast-penta, regardless of what it did to his blood pressure. The stuff had almost worked. Maybe another try …

The door hissed. “Hello?” The lights came up. Rowan stood in the doorway. “Are you all right?”

“Headache. Reading.”

“You shouldn’t try to …”

Take it so fast, he supplied silently, Rowan’s constant refrain of the last few days, since his interview with Lilly. But this time, she cut herself off. He pushed up; she came and sat by him. “Lilly wants me to bring you upstairs.”

“All right—” He made to rise, but she stopped him.

She kissed him. It was a long, long kiss, which at first delighted and then worried him. He broke away to ask, “Rowan, what’s the matter?”

“… I think I love you.”

“This is a problem?”

“Only my problem.” She managed a brief, unhappy smile. “I’ll handle it.”

He captured her hands, traced tendon and vein. She had brilliant hands. He did not know what to say.

She drew him to his feet. “Come on.” They held hands all the way to the entrance to the penthouse lift-tube. When she disengaged to press the palm lock, she did not take his hand again. They rose together, and exited around the chromium railing into Lilly’s living room.

Lilly sat upright and formal in her wide padded chair, her white hair braided today in a single thick rope that wound down over her shoulder to her lap. She was attended by Hawk, who stood silently behind her and to her right. Not an attendant. A guard. Three strangers dressed in grey quasi-military uniforms with white trim were ranged around her, two women seated and a man standing. One of the women had dark curls, and brown eyes that turned on him with a gaze that scorched him. The other, older woman had short light-brown hair barely touched with grey. But it was the man who riveted him.

My God. It’s the other me.

Or … not-me. They stood eye to eye. This one was painfully neat, boots clean, uniform pressed and formal, his mere appearance a salute to Lilly. Insignia glinted on his collar. Admiral … Naismith? Naismith was the name stitched over the left breast of his officer’s pocketed undress jacket. A sharp intake of breath, an electric snap of the grey eyes, and a half-suppressed smile made the short man’s face wonderfully alive. But if he was a bony shadow of himself, this one was him doubled. Stocky, squared-off, muscular and intense, heavy-jowled and with a notable gut. He looked like a senior officer, body-mass balanced over stout legs spread in an aggressive parade rest like an overweight bulldog. So this was Naismith, the famous rescuer so desired by Lilly. He could believe it.

His utter fascination with his clone-twin was penetrated by a growing, dreadful realization. I’m the wrong one. Lilly had just spent a fortune reviving the wrong clone. How angry was she going to be? For a Jacksonian leader, such a vast mistake must feel like counting coup on yourself. Indeed, Lilly’s face was set and stern, as she glanced toward Rowan.

“It’s him, all right,” breathed the woman with the burning eyes. Her hands were clenched in tight fists, in her lap.

“Do I … know you, ma’am?” he said politely, carefully. Her torch-like heat perturbed him. Half-consciously, he moved closer to Rowan.

Her expression was like marble. Only a slight widening of her eyes, like a woman drilled neatly through the solar plexus by a laser beam, revealed a depth of … what feeling? Love, hate? Tension … His headache worsened.

“As you see,” said Lilly. “Alive and well. Let us return to the discussion of the price.” The round table was littered with cups and crumbs—how long had this conference been going on?

“Whatever you want,” said Admiral Naismith, breathing heavily. “We pay and go.”

“Any price within reason.” The brown-haired older woman gave her commander an oddly quelling look. “We came for a man, not an animated body. A botched revival suggests a discount for damaged goods, to my mind.” That voice, that ironic alto voice … I know you.

“His revival is not botched,” said Rowan sharply. “If there was a problem, it was in the prep—”

The hot woman jerked, and frowned fiercely.

“—but in fact, he’s making a good recovery. Measurable progress every day. It’s just too soon. You’re pushing too hard.” A glance at Lilly? “The stress and pressure slow down the very results they seek to hurry. He pushes himself too hard, he winds himself in knots so that—”

Lilly held up a placating hand. “So speaks my cryo-revival specialist,” she said to the Admiral. “Your clone-brother is in a recovering state, and may be expected to improve. If that is in fact what you desire.”

Rowan bit her lip. The hot woman chewed on her fingertip.

“Now we come to what I desire,” Lilly continued. “And, you may be pleased to learn, it isn’t money. Let us discuss a little recent history. Recent in my view, that is.”