dissonance

[isthisart]

Dr. Cheung's at a funeral all day, so Linya decides to go up to London and see if Miles is out of his Mood.

Security has decided to be deeply unhelpful today. She is currently showing them various forms of ID and repeating in a slow, patient voice that she has been here before, there is not more than one of her, and she promises she is not there to assassinate her husband or whatever fool thing has them skittish today. Perhaps she shouldn't drop in while the captain's missing; it seems to make them worse. But she got in before while he was missing...

Comments

[alicornucopia]

Galeni makes an agreeable gesture.

[thisvorlunatic]

"If he is a clone... I can't imagine what horrors they must have put him through, to get him to turn out like this." Miles gestures at himself. "My genes by themselves would've made him six feet tall, healthy, with good bones. I can't imagine the resources it would take for them to poison a lot of fetuses and raise them all until they got one that looked just right... it must have been surgical alterations. God." He shudders. "No wonder he seemed to hate me so much. I would too..."

[alicornucopia]

Galeni winces, sympathetic but without much to contribute.

[thisvorlunatic]

Silence falls. Time passes.



"How long have you known your father wasn't blown up with that bomb?"

[alicornucopia]

Galeni fixes Miles with a look, but then says, "Five days." And: "How did you know?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I had a look at your personnel files. Only close relative without a morgue record."

[alicornucopia]

"We believed he was dead. My brother certainly was... My mother and I had to identify what was left, but there wasn't much. It was easy to believe there was even less of my father, supposedly much closer to the center of the explosion. He was always very big on sacrifices... He talked about Komarr's freedom constantly, and all the sacrifices we had to make for it. Human or otherwise. But he never seemed beyond all the talking to care about the freedom of anyone on Komarr. Until the revolt died and him with it I wasn't free. To make my own judgments, my own choices. Or so I thought. Life's full of surprises."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles glances up at the light fixture. And sighs, and hauls himself off his bench to inspect the room.

It is awfully devoid of escape possibilities. Two benches, neither of which he can detach from its mooring. One light fixture, which he can't reach, and which is sealed tightly behind its panel in any case. The locked door to the outside; the doorless door to the little room containing a toilet and a sink. Miles supposes he could block the toilet and flush repeatedly, or block the sink and run the water. Perhaps if he floods the room sufficiently, the floor will give out and they can tunnel back home. Fuck. He sits back down.

"They feed you, I assume?"

[alicornucopia]

"Two or three times a day I get a share of whatever they're fixing upstairs."

[thisvorlunatic]

"That must be when you made your break..." and probably not much of an opportunity anymore, since the first attempt failed.

[alicornucopia]

"Yes." Galeni shrugs. "It's almost entertaining. The door opens and it might be dinner or death."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles chooses to keep his opinions of Galeni's taste in entertainment to himself.

Hell. So now there's a fake Miles running around... maybe Ivan will notice something's up. Or Elli will. Or - God, if Linya visits him again - Miles clenches his fists until his bones creak, then forces himself to relax. Surely she would notice, before the clone could - he unclenches his fists again. Think about something else. His Dendarii, in the hands of that impostor, probably being neglected, ignored, misused - fuck. Miles resolves firmly not to consider any personal implications, lest he break all his own fingers in impotent rage.

What about the impersonal implications? Imperial implications, even? The purpose of this clone is not to drive Miles crazy - that's just a fringe benefit. The clone is... a weapon, directed at... who? Well. Aral Vorkosigan, of course. Fuck. Aral Vorkosigan and, through him, Barrayar. And what is his objective? Assassination? Intrigue? Miles isn't going to find out from inside this cell, he doesn't think.

He flops down on the hard bench, puts his arm over his eyes to block out the glare of the light, and tries to sleep. Success is mixed at best.

[alicornucopia]

Galeni tries to sleep, too.

In the morning they are delivered breakfast. Galeni eats it without apparent fear of poison, either from experience or a deathwish. There is more or less idle conversation; Galeni yields the tidbit that Miles's clone was cooked up on Jackson's Whole and confirms Miles's suspicion that Aral-Vorkosigan-and-through-him-Barrayar is the target. Galeni thinks the idea is to assassinate Gregor and make the clone the Emperor.

[thisvorlunatic]

"You're fucking kidding me," says Miles. "They'd - they'd have to kill my father and Gregor—" which would hardly prove a deterrent, but it would be difficult as hell.

Not to mention the fact that a little demi-mutant would make an extremely controversial Emperor for the approximately thirty seconds he'd last before someone assassinated him in disgust.

[alicornucopia]

Galeni has little comment on that aspect of the plan.



Before it is reasonably time for lunch, the door opens. "You, come along," says a guard to Miles.

Galeni apparently suspects that the detour isn't going to be good for Miles's health, and lunges for the guards, but the one with the stunner drops him before he closes the distance.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles, out of his available options, chooses to go quietly. It's not like he could overpower even one-half of one of these guards in unarmed close combat, and they're not unarmed. Besides, if they're going to kill him, he'd rather be conscious at the time. Call it Vorkosigan bloody-mindedness.

But in fact they don't kill him. They haul him up to an office of some kind, where a comconsole displays a light-fixture's eye view of Miles's cell, currently containing a stunned Galeni. Miles is dragged over to stand in front of an older man, whose face looks vaguely familiar - perhaps from a scanner-shield-blurred glimpse the night before. The man sits on a comfortable curved bench and toys with a hypospray.

It takes a moment for Miles to make the connection, because the senior Galen doesn't look much like his son. He moves like him, though. Like an inverse of the connection between Miles and his clone - different bodies animated by the same program of coiled murderous tension.

"So," says Galen, rising to circle Miles like a bird of prey. Miles stands very still. "The genuine article at last. Twisted little thing. What a perfect representation of Barrayar - Aral Vorkosigan's secret moral genotype made flesh."

"Poetic," says Miles, "but biologically inaccurate. As you must know, having cloned me."

Galen smiles a horrible false little smile and shakes his head, dismissing the point. "You couldn't help being born, I suppose - no one can. But why do you stay loyal to the monster? He made you into this," with a sharp gesture at Miles's stunted body. "And yet retains your... fealty. What is the man's secret - with what charisma does he hypnotize not only his own son but everyone else's too?" Galen does not quite manage to stop himself looking at the vid feed from the cell. "Why do you follow him? Why does David? What corruption draws my son to wriggle into that uniform and march behind Vorkosigan?"

Miles tries to restrain himself, but fails. "My father is kind to me," he snaps. "You might try it sometime."

The man jerks back as though physically struck. Miles curses inwardly as Galen orbits toward the padded bench where he left his hypospray. The guards hold Miles still, and one rolls up his sleeve. The hypospray is applied.

Fast-penta or poison? Fast-penta or poison? If the former, he should be shifting gears down to a mellow friendly calm any minute now. He doesn't feel mellow, calm, or friendly. He feels anxious as hell. Maybe it's poison after all, an overdose of some stimulant, to make his heart burst in his chest. Or maybe it is fast-penta and he has a natural allergy - he has no implanted one, which they'd surely know, having no doubt accessed all his medical records, but they didn't check for a reaction... sloppy. Won't they be surprised.

And yet, he's still breathing. Hyperventilating, but not fatally. Someone shoves him into a chair; he collapses gratefully. Standing takes too much effort - all those muscles to coordinate - he can barely coordinate the inside of his own brain, just at the moment.

"Describe the security procedures for entry and exit from the Barrayaran embassy," says Galen.

Oh, it's fast-penta after all. Stupid question, though, they're bound to have gotten that out of the other fellow already, unless what they really want is a description of "...how to get Ivan to sneak you in," Miles hears himself saying; it takes him a moment to recognize his own voice saying the words and realize it is happening outside his head. "Fuck, I was hoping my reaction was screwy enough that this part wouldn't work. Sucks to be me. Spilling my brains out my mouth, ugh." The image comes to mind with unpleasant vividness.

"Describe the security procedures for entry and exit from the Barrayaran embassy!" hisses Galen.

"Sergeant Barth's the one in charge. Obnoxious fucker. Won't do what he's bloody told, and I think he thinks I'm a mutie..." Miles runs on, at a rate of about forty percent personal commentary to sixty percent secure data, except where the two categories overlap. Unable to stop himself, he goes on at length about every hole he can think of in the embassy's security net; his increasing agitation only turns the recital into a profanity-laced tirade. Galen has to hit him repeatedly in the face to stop him shouting at the top of his lungs in colourfully obscene terms about how easy it would be to get a weapon in past the security checks using simple sleight of hand.

"Fast-penta s'posed to make you immune to pain," Miles mumbles, "'s not working..." Then it does, and he falls silent in blessed relief - then it doesn't again, and his externalized monologue is stifled by sobs, tears running down his face at the whiteout intensity of the sensation. A few seconds later, tears and sobs and pain all switch off again.

"Is he beating the fast-penta?" wonders a guard.

"'s it fucking look like?" mumbles Miles.

"No..." says Galen, ignoring him. "He's not withholding information. It's hardly possible to stop him giving us more information..."

The comconsole chimes.

"I'll get it!" chirps Miles, and he surges out of his chair, only to fall flat on his bruised face. A guard hauls him back into his seat while Galen answers the com.

[unmarred]

"Reporting in," says other-Miles, in Miles's Barrayaran accent.

"How's it going?" asks Galen, leaning forward.

"Fine, mostly. They've got me rooming with the cousin, though, and he snores like a pig."

[thisvorlunatic]

"You think that's bad? Wait'll he starts making love in his sleep," says Miles. "Lucky bastard, I wish I had dreams like Ivan's... the other night I was playing polo naked against a Cetagandan zombie army with Lieutenant Murka's head for the ball. It screamed every time I hit it."

[unmarred]

"Yeah? Who won?" inquires the clone.

"Never mind that," says Galen irritably, cutting off Miles's mumbled reply. "You're going to have to deal with all kinds of people who knew him, before this is done. But if you can fool Vorpatril, you can fool anybody."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles giggles. "Izzat what you think? Fooling Ivan's easy."

[unmarred]

Galen glares briefly at him before addressing the vid again.

"The embassy is a perfect isolated test case, a practice run before the real thing on Barrayar. If Vorpatril tumbles to you, we can eliminate him before your return, and you'll be that much better prepared."

"About that," says the clone. "We only just found out about this Admiral Naismith business. What else have you missed, in my education? A whole double life is pretty big. I can scarcely imagine where the next major hole is going to be."

"Miles, we've been over that," says Galen. "We knew there'd be gaps over which you'd have to improvise. But we'll never have a better opportunity to insert you into his life. It was now or never." He takes a steadying breath. "So, you got through the night all right...?"

"Yeah, just one thing," says the clone. "His wife showed up for a visit, and she noticed something off. I had to stun her before she had a chance to take her suspicions elsewhere. I—"

[thisvorlunatic]

"YOU WHAT!" shrieks Miles, lunging out of his chair again and this time getting all the way to the comconsole, where he claws at the image projected from the vid plate. "Don't you dare touch my wife, you little shit! Put one hand on her and I'll cut it fucking off!" He starts crying hysterically, babbling an incoherent mixture of threats and prayers, swinging wildly between rage and despair.

[unmarred]

"I just stunned her," the clone says dryly. "Get your mind out of the gutter, Miles. She's currently quite comfortably unconscious in the back of a maintenance closet, wrapped in that fur-blanket thing. While you're alive for questioning, by the way, any bright ideas about what to do with that woman you hauled out of her burning wine shop? She's suing Admiral Naismith for half a million GSA federal credits."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Countersue for medical damages," Miles says promptly. "I threw my back out lifting her. Still fucking hurts... let my wife go, you fucking bastard!"

"Ignore it," says Galen, motioning for the guards to haul Miles back to his seat. "You'll be out of there before it can matter."

"And leave the Dendarii holding the bag?" cries Miles. "You faithless fucks! They bleed for me, they die for me, and you'd just - play polo with their heads - "

[unmarred]

"Is he on fast-penta? He doesn't sound like he's on fast-penta," says clone-Miles. "He sounds like he's on some kind of serious recreational stimulant. Is this another one of his weird drug reactions?"

"It may be," says Galen. "I'm beginning to doubt the utility of keeping him alive as a data bank, if we can't trust his answers."

"I wouldn't throw them out just yet," the clone muses. "Listen to him. He's not exactly inhibited. I think you can trust his answers just fine. Can I have vid records of the interrogation to go over later? I wouldn't want to miss anything."

"Fine," says Galen.

"And now I better get going. I'll report again tonight," the clone promises, and cuts the com.