Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

Vorlynkin nodded, and herded the kids off. Jin looked around as if regretting his lost refuge. Mina reached up and took the consul’s hand, which made him twitch a little, possibly with guilt, but he manfully endured. This was clearly distressing for the children. Hell, it’s distressing for me.

Roic, sleep-rumpled, stuck his head out the door of the improvised bunk room and squinted as the trio vanished around the corner. “I heard voices. What’s going on?”

Miles brought him up to date. His expression, when he learned that they’d just deftly snatched the wrong body, was all that Miles had pictured. Of, course, you had to have been around Roic for a while to read all the nuances of bland his face and posture could convey. Was there some sort of secret school for armsmen to learn this, or was it all apprenticeship? Armsman-commander Pym was a master, but Roic was catching up.

“Y’know,” said Roic, as Pym would not have, because Pym would have had an exact bland to cover it, “if you’d quit while you were winning, right after Wing, we’d be on our way home right now.”

“Well, I can’t quit now,” said Miles tartly.

“I can see that, m’lord.” With a sigh, Roic followed him back into the lab.

Raven had tidied up and was getting ready for his next task. Medtech Tanaka was laying out an array of rather disturbing instruments on a tray next to the cryorevival table. She looked up at their entry and asked, “Will we still get our free cryorevivals, then?”

“Yes, of course,” said Miles automatically. “Rent, after all.” He was surprised she still trusted them for the task, but was vaguely heartened that she evidently agreed with Raven’s analysis. He did not add, And we might be back ; he was growing more cautious. Belatedly.

Raven tapped his fingers on the table and looked over the instruments. “Do you want me to send any samples out to a commercial lab for analysis, or try to set up something here?”

“Which is faster, and which is better?”

“If I wanted to do a good job here in-house, I’d need to bring some of my team from Escobar. This would likely take more time than sending samples out. Either risks drawing attention. Results ought to be the same.”

“Hm. My instinct is to keep this close till we know what we’re dealing with. I’d say, go as far as you can on your own, and then we’ll take stock. My working hypothesis is that this was a deliberate substitution, sometime in the past eighteen months. If we knew who this woman was, where she came from, it might tell us something about who could have put her in Lisa Sato’s place.” Or not . “Makes a difference if she was just swapped out, or if she was actually frozen in place of Sato from the get-go, in which case…”

Raven frowned. “You think Jin and Mina’s mother might still be alive out there? In that case, why didn’t she let her poor kids know?”

“Depends entirely on how dangerous that knowledge might have been.”

Raven’s frown deepened.

“Well, I can tell you one thing straight off,” said Medtech Tanaka, bending to retrieve a scrap of plastic caul from the waste bin and holding it up to the light. “This woman here wasn’t frozen in place of the one you’re looking for, not in the past eighteen months at least. This is an older style of wrapping.”

Three heads turned abruptly toward her. “How old?” said Miles. “And how do you know?”

Her wrinkled eyelids narrowed. “Oh, heavens. I haven’t seen this brand with the hexagonal netting inside since my student days. At least thirty years old, maybe fifty?”

Miles groaned. “So this woman could have come from any time in the last two hundred and fifty years?”

“No, because there were other styles and brands before then. And after. This type was only on the market for about three decades.”

“Thank you, Medtech Tanaka,” said Miles. “That’s a start.”

His mystery, it seemed, had just split into two. Mystery mitosis. It seemed a retrograde sort of progress.

Raven lifted his first instrument and bent to his patient-turned-subject.

It was very quiet in the lift van for the first part of the trip back to the consulate. Jin’s throat was choked with disappointment. Mina, strapped in the middle of the next seat to the rear, was pale and withdrawn. Vorlynkin negotiated traffic by hand till they were well away from Suze-san’s, then linked to the municipal control grid and leaned back with a sigh.

He hitched around sideways to regard Jin and Mina both. “I’m really sorry about all this mix-up.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Jin conceded.

Vorlynkin opened his mouth to say something, evidently thought better of it, and substituted simply, “Thank you.” After a moment he added, “Although if you two had been my daughter, I’d have been furious to have you dragged into something like this.”

Before Jin could say, But I thought we dragged you in, Mina piped up eagerly, “You have a daughter? How old is she? Can she play with us?”

Vorlynkin grimaced. “Annah’s six, so she probably would like to play with you, but I’m afraid not. She’s on Escobar. With her mother.”

“Are they coming back soon?” asked Mina.

“No.” Vorlynkin hesitated. “We’re divorced.”

Both Jin and Mina flinched a little at the scary word.

“Why are you divorced?” asked Mina. If they’d been sitting together, Jin could have kicked her in the ankle to shut her up, but unfortunately she was out of reach.

Vorlynkin shrugged. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. She was an Escobaran. I met her when I was stationed at the embassy there as a junior secretary. When we first married, I thought it was understood that she would follow where my career took me. But by the time I was offered the promotion and the transfer to the Barrayaran embassy on Pol, Annah had come along. And my wife changed her mind. With a baby to look out for, she didn’t want to leave the security of her family and her homeworld. Or she didn’t trust me enough. Or something.”

After a silence, which Jin endured in faint embarrassment and Mina, apparently, in deep fascination, Vorlynkin added, “My ex-wife remarried recently. Another Escobaran. She wrote me that her new husband wants to adopt Annah. I don’t know. It might be better for her than a father she sees for maybe three days every three years. It’s hard to decide. To let go.” He had been talking to his lap but, unexpectedly, he raised his shrewd blue glance to Jin and Mina. “What do you think?”

Mina blinked, and blurted, “I’d want my real daddy.”

Vorlynkin didn’t look terribly cheered by this reply. Jin said more cautiously, “It depends, I guess. If he’s a nice guy or not.”

“I assume so. I haven’t met him yet. I suppose I ought to take some time and go do that, before signing off. Maybe visiting again would just confuse Annah. Surely she can’t remember much about me.”

“Don’t you send her messages and stuff?” asked Mina, frowning.

“Sometimes.”

Jin said slowly, “Couldn’t you have chosen to stay with your wife back then? Instead of going to Pol?” Wherever that was. Pretty far from Escobar, it sounded like. “Being a diplomat isn’t like being a soldier, is it? Aren’t you allowed to quit?”

Vorlynkin gave Jin an ironic salute, just a finger-touch to his forehead, and Jin felt even more uncomfortable. Maybe he shouldn’t have pointed that out?

“Yes, I could have made that choice. Then. I couldn’t go back now, of course. That chance has gone beyond recall.”

Mina’s frown deepened to a scowl. “It sounds like you already picked.”

“My younger self did, yes. I have to wonder about him, some days…” The autopilot beeped as they approached the consulate, and somewhat to Jin’s relief Vorlynkin turned away to re-take the controls.