Lois Bujold - Komarr

Oh, Milady. Can I ever make you look that happy without drugs? Of more immediate importance, would she forgive him for being a party to her ordeal?

“What a very odd experience,” Madame Vorsoisson said neutrally. Her voice was hoarse.

“It was a well-conducted interview,” Miles assured the room at random. “All things considered. I’ve… seen much worse.”

Tuomonen gave him a dry look, and turned to Ekaterin. “Thank you, Madame Vorsoisson, for your cooperation. This has been extremely useful to the investigation.”

“Tell the investigation it is welcome.”

Miles was not just sure how to interpret that one. Instead he said to Tuomonen, “That will be all for her, won’t it?”

Tuomonen hesitated, obviously trying to sort out whether that was a question or an order. “I hope so, my lord.”

Ekaterin looked across at Miles. “I’m sorry about the suitcases, Lord Vorkosigan. I never thought how it might look.”

“No, why should you have?” He hoped his voice didn’t sound as hollow as it felt.

Tuomonen said to Ekaterin, “I both suggest and request you rest for a while, Madame Vorsoisson. My medtech will stay with you for about half an hour, to be sure you’re fully recovered and don’t have any further drug reactions.”

“Yes, I… that would probably be wise, Captain.” Rubbery-legged, she rose; the medtech went to her side and escorted her off toward her bedroom.

Tuomonen shut down his vid recorder. He said gruffly, “Sorry about that last round of questions, my Lord Auditor. It was not my intention to offer an insult to either you or Madame Vorsoisson.”

“Yeah, well… don’t worry about it. What’s next, from ImpSec’s point of view?”

Tuomonen’s weary brow wrinkled. “I’m not sure. I wanted to make certain I conducted this interrogation myself. Colonel Gibbs has everything in hand at the Terraforming offices, and Major D’Emorie hasn’t called to complain yet about anything at the experiment station. What we need next, preferably, is for the field agents to catch up with Soudha and his friends.”

“I can’t be in all three places,” Miles said reluctantly. “Barring an arrest coming through… the Professor is en route, and has had the advantage of a full night’s sleep. You, I believe, have had none. My field instincts say this is the time to knock off for a while. Do I need to make that an order?”

“No,” Tuomonen assured him earnestly. “You have your wrist-comm, I have mine… Field has our numbers and orders to report the news. I’ll be glad to get home for a meal, even if it is last night’s dinner. And a shower.” He rubbed his stubbled chin.

He finished packing the recorder, exchanged farewells with Miles, and went off to consult with his guards, hopefully to apprise them of Madame Vorsoisson’s change of status from suspect/witness to free woman.

Miles considered the couch, rejected it, and wandered into Ekaterin’s-Madame Vorsoisson’s… Ekaterin’s, dammit, in his mind if not on his lips-Ekaterin’s workroom. Automatic lighting still sustained the assortment of young plantings on the trellised shelves in the corners. The grav-bed was gone; oh yes, he’d forgotten she’d had it removed. The floor looked remarkably inviting, though.

A flash of scarlet in the trash bin caught his eye. Investigating, he found the remains of the bonsai’d skellytum bundled up in a square of plastic sheeting, mixed with pieces of its pot and damp loose dirt. Curiously, he dug it out and cleared a place on Ekaterin’s work table, and unrolled the plastic… botanical body bag, he supposed.

The fragments put him in mind of the soletta array and the ore ship, and also of a couple of the more distressing autopsies he’d recently reviewed. Methodically, he began to sort them out. Broken tendrils in one pile, root threads in another, shards of the poor burst barrel of the thing in another. The five-floor plunge had had something of the same effect on the liquid-conserving central structure of the skellytum as a sledgehammer applied to a watermelon. Or a needle-grenade exploding inside someone’s chest. He picked out sharp potsherds, and made tentative tries at piecing the bits of plant into place, like a jigsaw puzzle. Was there a botanical equivalent of surgical glue, which could hold it all together again and allow it to heal? Or was it too late? A brownish tinge to the pale interior lumps suggested rot already in progress.

He brushed the damp soil from his fingers, and realized suddenly that he was touching Barrayar. This bit of dirt had come from South Continent, dug up, perhaps, from a tart old Vor lady’s backyard. He dragged over the station chair from the comconsole, climbed precariously up onto it, and retrieved what proved to be an empty pan from an upper shelf. Safely on his feet again, he carefully gathered up as much of the soil as he could, and dumped it in the pan.

He stood back, hands on his hips, and studied his work so far. It made a sad pile. “Compost, my Barrayaran friend, you’re destined to be compost, for all of me. A decent burial may be all I can do for you. Though in your case, that might actually be the answer to your prayers…”

A faint rustle and an indrawn breath made him suddenly aware that he was not alone. He turned his head to find Ekaterin, on her feet again and pausing in the doorway. Her color looked better now than it had immediately after the interrogation, her skin not so puffy and lined, though she still looked very tired. Her brows were drawn down in puzzlement. “What are you doing, Lord Vorkosigan?”

“Um… visiting a sick friend?” Reddening, he gestured to his efforts laid out on her work bench. “Has the medtech released you?”

“Yes, she’s just left. She was very conscientious.”

Miles cleared his throat. “I was wondering if there was any way to put your skellytum back together. Seemed a shame not to try, seventy years old and all that.” He drew back respectfully as she came up to the bench and turned over a fragment. “I know you can’t sew it up like a person, but I can’t help thinking there ought to be something. I’m afraid I’m not much of a gardener. My parents let me try, once, when I was a little kid, back behind Vorkosigan House. I was going to grow flowers for my Betan mother. Sergeant Bothari ended up doing the spade work, as I recall. I dug the seeds up twice a day to see if they’d sprouted yet. My plants did not thrive, for some reason. After that we gave up and turned it into a fort.”

She smiled, a real smile, not a fast-penta grin. We did not break her after all.

“No, you can’t put it back together,” she said. “The only way is to start over. What I could do is take the strongest root fragments-several of them, to make sure,” her long hands sorted through his pile, “and set them to soak in a hormone solution. And then when it starts to put out new growth, repot it.”

“I saved the dirt,” Miles pointed out hopefully. Idiot. Do you know what an idiot you sound like?

But she merely said, “Thank you.” Following up on her words, she rummaged in her shelves and found a shallow basin, and filled it with water from the work bench’s little sink. Another cupboard yielded a box of white powder; she sprinkled a tiny amount into the water and stirred it with her fingers. Taking a knife from her tool drawer, she trimmed the most promising root fragments and pushed them into the solution. “There. Maybe something will come of that.” She stretched to set the basin carefully out of the way on the shelf Miles had had to reach by standing on the chair, and shook the pan of dirt into a plastic bag, which she sealed and put next to the basin. She then rolled up the decaying remains in their tarp again, to take over and shake into another bin; the plastic went back into the trash. “By the time I’d thought of this poor skellytum again, it would have gone out with the organic recycle, and been too late. I’d abandoned hope for it last night, when I thought I had to leave with just what I could carry.”