Cetaganda Part 7

"In great grief and shame," she said lowly.

"Yeah? Why not at least wait to see if you could coax the key back from me? So why not cut its throat privately, in its own quarters? Why advertise its shame to the entire galactic community? Isn't that a bit unusual? Was the Ba supposed to attend the bier-gifting ceremony?"

"Yes."

"And you were too?"

"Yes..."

"And you believed the Ba's story?"

"Yes!"

"Lady, I think you are lost in the woods. Let me tell you what happened in the personnel pod as I saw it. There were no six soldiers. Just me, my cousin, and the pod pilot. There was no conversation, no begging or pleading, no slurs on the Celestial Lady. Ba Lura just yelped, and ran off. It didn't even fight very hard. In fact, it scarcely fought us at all. Strange, don't you think, in a hand-to-hand struggle for something so important that the Ba slit its own throat over its loss the next day? We were left scratching our heads, holding the d.a.m.ned thing and wondering what the h.e.l.l? Now you know that one of us, me or the Ba, is lying. I know which one."

"Give the Great Key to me," was all she could say. "It's not yours."

"But I think I was framed. By someone who apparently wants to drag Barrayar into a Cetagandan internal... disagreement. Why? What am I being set up for?"

Her silence might indicate that these were the first new thoughts to penetrate her panic in two days. Or... it might not. In any case, she only whispered, "Not yours!"

Miles sighed. "I couldn't agree with you more, milady, and I am glad to return your charge. But in light of the whole situation, I would like to be able to testify-under fast-penta, if need be-just who I gave the Great Key back to. You could be anyone, in that bubble. My Aunt Alys, for all I know. Or Cetagandan security, or... who knows. I will return it to you... face-to-face." He held out his hand half- open, the key resting invitingly across his palm.

"Is that... the last of your price?" if "Yes. I'll ask no more." ff It was a small triumph. He was going to see a haut-woman, and Ivan wasn't. It would doubtless embarra.s.s the old dragon, to reveal herself to outlander eyes, but dammit, given the runaround Miles had suffered, she owed him something. And he was deathly serious about being able to identify where the Great Key went. The haut Rian Degtiar, Handmaiden of the Star Creche, was certainly not the only player in this game.

"Very well," she whispered. The white bubble faded to transparency, and was gone from between them.

"Oh," said Miles, in a very small voice.

She sat in a float-chair, clothed from slender neck to ankle in flowing robes of shining white, a dozen shimmering textures lying one atop another. Her hair glinted ebony, ma.s.ses of it that poured down across her shoulders, past her lap, to coil around her feet. When she stood, it would trail on the floor like a banner. Her enormous eyes were an ice blue of such arctic purity as to make Lady Gelle's eyes look like mud-puddles. Skin... Miles felt he had never seen skin before, just blotched bags people wore around themselves to keep from leaking. This perfect ivory surface... his hands ached with the desire to touch it, just once, and die. Her lips were warm, as if roses pulsed with blood....

How old was she? Twenty? Forty? This was a haut-woman. Who could tell? Who could care? Men of the old religion had worshipped on their knees icons far less glorious, in beaten silver and hammered gold. Miles was on his knees now, and could not remember how he'd come to be there.

He knew now why they called it "falling in love." There was the same nauseating vertigo of free fall, the same vast exhilaration, the same sick certainty of broken bones upon impact with a rapidly rising reality. He inched forward, and laid the Great Key in front of her perfectly shaped, white-slippered feet, and sank back, and waited.

I am Fortune's fool.

CHAPTER SIX.

She bent forward, one graceful hand darting down to retrieve her solemn charge. She laid the Great Key in her lap, and pulled a long necklace from beneath her layered white garments. The chain held a ring, decorated with a thick raised bird-pattern, the gold lines of electronic contacts gleaming like filigree upon its surface. She inserted the ring into the seal atop the rod. Nothing happened.

Her breath drew in. She glared down at Miles. "What have you done to it!"

"Milady, I, I... nothing, I swear by my word as Vorkosigan! I didn't even drop it. What's... supposed to happen?"

"It should open."

"Um... um..." He would break into a desperate sweat, but he was too d.a.m.ned cold. He was dizzy with the scent of her, and the celestial music of her unfiltered voice. "There are only three possibilities, if there's something wrong with it. Someone broke it-not me, I swear!" Could that have been the secret of Ba Lura's peculiar intrusion? Maybe the Ba had broken it, and had been seeking a scapegoat upon whom to shuffle the blame? "-or someone's re-programmed it, or, least likely, there's been some kind of subst.i.tution pulled. A duplicate, or, or..."

Her eyes widened, and her lips parted, moving in some subvocalization.

"Not least likely?" Miles hazarded. "It would surely be the most difficult, but... it crosses my mind that maybe someone didn't think you would be getting it back from me. If it's a counterfeit, maybe it was meant to be on its way to Barrayar in a diplomatic pouch right now. Or... or something." No, that didn't quite make sense, but...

She sat utterly still, her face tense with panic, her hands clutching the rod.

"Milady, talk to me. If it's a duplicate, it's obviously a very good duplicate. You now have it, to turn over at the ceremony. So what if it doesn't work? Who's going to check the function of some obsolete piece of electronics?"

"The Great Key is not obsolete. We used it every day."

"It's some kind of data link, right? You have a time-window, here. Nine days. If you think it's been compromised, wipe it and re-program it from your backup files. If that thing in your hand is some kind of a non-working dummy, you've maybe got time to make a real duplicate, and re-program it." But don't just sit there with death in your lovely eyes. "Talk to me!"

"I must do as Ba Lura did," she whispered. "The Ba was right. This is the end."

"No, why?! It's just a, a thing, who cares? Not me!"

She held up the rod, her arctic-blue eyes fixing on his face at last. Her gaze made him want to scuttle into the shadows like a crab, to hide his merely human ugliness, but he held fast before her. "There is no backup," she said. "This is the sole key."

Miles felt faint, and it wasn't just from her perfume. "No backup?" he choked. "Are you people crazy?"

"It is a matter of... control."

"What does the d.a.m.n thing really do, anyway?"

She hesitated, then said, "It is the data-key to the haut gene bank. All the frozen genetic samples are stored in a randomized order, for security. Without the key, no one knows what is where. To re-create the files, someone would have to physically examine and re-cla.s.sify each and every sample. There are hundreds of thousands of samples-one for every haut who has ever lived. It would take an army of geneticists working for a generation to re-create the Great Key."

"This is a real disaster, then, huh?" he said brightly, blinking. His teeth gritted. "Now I know I was framed." He climbed to his feet, and threw back his head, defying the onslaught of her beauty. "Lady, what is really going on here? I'll ask you one more time, with feeling. What in G.o.d's green ninety h.e.l.ls was the Ba Lura ever doing with the Great Key on a s.p.a.ce station?"

"No outlander may-"

"Somebody made it my business! Sucked me right into it. I don't think I could escape now if I tried. And I think... you need an ally. It took you a day and a half just to arrange this second meeting with me. Nine days left. You don't have time to go it alone. You need... a trained security man. And for some strange reason, you don't seem to want to get one from your own side."

She rocked, just slightly, in frozen misery, in a faint rustle of fabrics.

"If you don't think I'm worthy of being let in on your secrets," Miles went on wildly, "then explain to me how you think I could possibly make things any worse than they are right now!"

Her blue eyes searched him, for he knew not what. But he thought if she asked him to open his veins for her, right here and now, the only thing he'd say would be How wide?

"It was my Celestial Lady's desire," she began fearfully, and stopped.

Miles clutched at his shredded self-control. Everything she'd spilled so far was either obviously deducible, or common knowledge, at least in her milieu. Now she was getting to the good stuff, and knew it. He could tell by the way she'd stalled out.

"Milady." He chose his words with extreme care. "If the Ba did not commit suicide, it was certainly murdered." And we both have good reason to prefer the second scenario. "Ba Lura was your servitor, your colleague... dare I guess, friend? I saw its body in the rotunda. A very dangerous and daring person arranged that hideous tableau. There was... a deep mischief and mockery in it."

Was that pain, in those cool eyes? So hard to tell...

"I have old and very personal reasons to particularly dislike being made the unwitting target of persons of cruel humor. I don't know if you can understand this."

"Perhaps..." she said slowly.

Yes. Look past the surface. See me, not this joke of a body.... "And I am the one person on Eta Ceta you know didn't do it. It's the only certainty we share, so far. I claim a right to know who's doing this to us. And the only chance in h.e.l.l I have to figure out who, is to know exactly why."

Still she sat silent.

"I already know enough to destroy you," Miles added earnestly. "Tell me enough to save you!"

Her sculpted chin rose in bleak decision. When she blessed him with her outward attention at last, it was total and terrifying. "It was a long-standing disagreement." He strained to hear, to keep his head clear, to concentrate on the words and not just on the enchanting melody of her voice. "Between the Celestial Lady and the Emperor. My Lady had long thought that the haut gene bank was too centralized, in the heart of the Celestial Garden. She favored the dispersal of copies, for safety. My Lord favored keeping it all under his personal protection-for safety. They both sought the good of the haut, each in their own way."

"I see," Miles murmured, encouraging her with as much delicacy as he could muster. "All good guys here, right."

"The Emperor forbade her plan. But as she neared the end of her life... she came to feel that her loyalty to the haut must outweigh her loyalty to her son. Twenty years ago, she began to have copies made, in secret."

"A large project," Miles said.

"Huge, and slow. But she brought it to fruition."

"How many copies?"

"Eight. One for each of the planetary satraps."

"Exact copies?"

"Yes. I have reason to know. I have been the Celestial Lady's supervisor of geneticists for five years, now."

"Ah. So you are something of a trained scientist. You know about... extreme care. And scrupulous honesty."

"How else should I serve my Lady?" she shrugged.

But you don't know much, I'll bet, about covert ops chicanery. Hm. "If there are eight exact copies, there must be eight exact Great Keys, right?"

"No. Not yet. My Lady was saving the duplication of the key to the last moment. A matter of-"

"Control," Miles finished smoothly. "How did I guess?"

A faint flash of resentment at his humor sparked in her eyes, and Miles bit his tongue. It was no laughing matter to haut Rian Degtiar.

"The Celestial Lady knew her time was drawing near. She made me and the Ba Lura the executors of her will in this matter. We were to deliver the copies of the gene bank to each of the eight satrap governors upon the occasion of her funeral, which they would be certain to all attend together. But... she died more suddenly than she had expected. She had not yet made arrangements for the duplication of the Great Key. It was a problem of considerable technical and cipher skill, as all of the Empire's resources went into its original creation. Ba Lura and I had all her instructions for the banks, but nothing for how the key was to be duplicated and delivered, or even when she had planned this to happen. The Ba and I were not sure what to do."

"Ah," Miles said faintly. He dared not offer any comment at all, for fear of impeding the free flow, at last, of information. He hung on her words, barely breathing.

"Ba Lura thought... if we took the Great Key to one of the satrap governors, he might use his resources to duplicate it for us. I thought this was a very dangerous idea. Because of the temptation to take it exclusively for himself."

"Ah... excuse me. Let me see if I follow this. I know you consider the haut gene bank a most private matter, but what are the political side-effects of setting up new haut reproductive centers on each of Cetaganda's eight satrap planets?"

"The Celestial Lady thought the empire had ceased to grow at the time of the defeat of the Barrayar expedition. That we had become static, stagnant, enervated. She thought... if the empire could only undergo mitosis, like a cell, the haut might start to grow again, become re-energized. With the splitting of the gene bank, there would be eight new centers of authority for expansion."

"Eight new potential Imperial capitals?" Miles whispered.

"Yes, I suppose."

Eight new centers... civil war was only the beginning of the possibilities. Eight new Cetagandan Empires, each expanding like killer coral at their neighbors' expense... a nightmare of cosmic proportions. "I think I can see," said Miles carefully, "why perhaps the Emperor was less than enthused by his mother's admittedly sound biological reasoning. Something to be said on both sides, don't you think?"

"I serve the Celestial Lady," said the haut Rian Degtiar simply, "and the haut genome. The Empire's short-term political adjustments are not my business."

"So all this, ah, genetic shuffling... would the Cetagandan Emperor, by chance, regard this as treason on your part?"

"How?" said the haut Rian Degtiar. "It was my duty to obey the Celestial Lady."

"Oh."

"The eight satrap governors have all committed treason in it, though," she added matter-of- factly.

"Have committed?"

"They all took delivery of their gene banks last week at the welcoming banquet. Ba Lura and I succeeded in that part of the Celestial Lady's plan, at least."

"Treasure chests for which none of them have keys."

"I... don't know. Each of them, you see... the Celestial Lady felt it would be better if each of the satrap governors thought that he alone was the recipient of the new copy of the haut gene bank. Each would strive better to keep it secret, that way."

"Do you know-I have to ask this." I'm just not sure I want to hear the answer. "Do you know to which of the eight satrap governors Ba Lura was trying to take the Great Key for duplication, when it ran into us?"

"No," she said.

"Ah," Miles exhaled in pure satisfaction. "Now, now I know why I was set up. And why the Ba died."

Fine lines appeared on her ivory brow as she stared at him.

"Don't you see it too? The Ba didn't hit us Barrayarans on the way out. It hit us on the way back.

Your Ba was suborned. Ba Lura did take the key to one of the satrap governors, and received in return not a true copy, because there was no time for the extensive decoding required, but a decoy. Which the Ba then was sent to deliberately lose to us. Which it did, although not, I suspect, in quite the manner it had originally planned." Almost certainly not as planned.

He found himself pacing, keyed up and hectic. He ought not to limp before her, it brought attention to his deformities, but he could not keep still. "And while everybody is off chasing Barrayarans, the satrap governor quietly goes home with the only real copy of the Great Key, getting a large jump-start on the haut-compet.i.tion. After first arranging the Ba's reward for its double-treason, and incidentally eliminating the only witness to the truth. Oh. Yes. It works. Or it would have worked, if only... the satrap governor had remembered that no battle-plan survives first contact with the enemy." Not when the enemy is me. He stared into her eyes, willing her to believe in him, striving not to melt. "How soon can you a.n.a.lyze this Great Key, and support or explode these theories?"

"I will examine it immediately, tonight. But whatever has been done to it, my examination will not tell me who did it, Barrayaran." Her voice grew glacial with this thought. "I doubt you could have created a true duplicate, but a non-working forgery is certainly within your capabilities. If this one is false-where is the real one?"

"It seems that is just what I must discover, milady, to, to clear my name. To redeem my honor in your eyes." The intrinsic fascination of an intellectual puzzle had brought him to this interview. He'd thought curiosity was his strongest driving force, till suddenly his whole personality had become engaged. It was like being under-no, like becoming an avalanche. "If I can discover this, will you..." what? Look favorably upon his suit? Despise him for an outlander barbarian all the same? "... let me see you again?"

"I don't... know." Reminded, her hand drifted to the control on her float-chair for the concealing force-screen.

No, no, don't go.... "We must have some way of communicating," he said hastily, before she could disappear again behind that faintly humming barrier.

Her head tilted, considering this. She drew a small comm link from her robes. It was undecorated, utilitarian, but like the nerve disruptor he'd taken from Ba Lura perfectly designed in what Miles was beginning to recognize as the haut style. She whispered a command into it. In a moment, the androgynous ba appeared from its guard post beside the pond. Did its eyes widen just slightly, to see its mistress without her sh.e.l.l?