Lois Bujold - Mirror Dance

“You’re very good at that,” she murmured wheezily, nibbling on his ear.

“Yea …” His grin faded, and he stared at the ceiling, brows drawing down in a combination of gentle, post-coital melancholy, and renewed, if purely mental, frustration. ”… wonder if I was married?” Her head drew back, and he could have bitten his tongue at her stricken look. “Doan’ think so,” he added quickly.

“No … no,” she settled back again. “You’re not married.”

“Which ever one I am?”

“That’s right.”

“Huh.” He hesitated, winding her long hair in his fingers, spreading it idly out in a fan across the burst of red lines on his torso. “So who d’you think you were makin’ love to, jus’ now?”

She touched a long index finger gently to his forehead. “You. Just you.”

This was most pleasing, but … “Wuzzat love, or therapy?”

She smiled quizzically, tracing his face. “A little of both, I think. And curiosity. And opportunity. I’ve been pretty immersed in you, for the past three months.”

It felt like an honest answer. “Seems t’me you made t’ opportunity.”

A small smirk escaped her lips. “Well … maybe.”

Three months. Interesting. So he’d been dead a bit over two months. He must have absorbed a lot of the Durona Group’s resources, in that time. To begin with, three months of this woman’s labor were not cheap.

“Why you doin’ this?” he asked, frowning at the ceiling as she snuggled carefully around his shoulder. “I mean t’whole thing. What d’you expect me to do for you?” Half-crippled, tongue-tied, blank and stupid, not a dollar to his non-existent name. “You’re all hangin’ on m’recovery like I’m your hope ’f heaven.” Even the brutally efficient physical therapist Chrys he’d come to see as pushing him for his good. He almost liked her best, for her merciless drive. He resonated to it. “Who else wants me, tha’ you should hide me? Enemies?” Or friends?

“Enemies for certain,” Rowan sighed.

“Mm.” He lay back in lassitude; she dozed, he didn’t. He touched her net of hair and wondered. What did she see in him? I thought it as the enchanted knight’s crystal coffin … I picked out enough grenade fragments to be certain you weren’t a bystander… . So, there was work to be done. Nor did the Durona Group want any ordinary mercenary. If this was Jackson’s Whole, they could hire ordinary thugs by the boatload.

But then, he’d never thought he was an ordinary man. Not even for a minute.

Oh, milady. Who do you need me to be?

The re-discovery of sex fairly immobilized him for the next three days, but his instinct for escape surfaced one afternoon when Rowan left him sleeping, but he wasn’t. He unlidded his eyes, and traced the pattern of scars on his chest, and thought it over. Out was clearly a wrong direction. In was one he hadn’t tried yet. Everybody here seemed to go to Lilly with their problems. Very well. He would go to Lilly too.

Up, or down? As a Jacksonian leader, she ought traditionally to lodge in either a penthouse or a bunker. Baron Ryoval lived in a bunker, or at least there was a dim image in his head associated with that name, involving shadowy sub-basements. Baron Fell took the penthouse at apogee, looking down on it all from his orbital station. He seemed to have a lot of pictures in his head of Jackson’s Whole. Was it his home? The thought confused him. Up. Up and in.

He dressed in his grey knits, borrowed some of Rowan’s socks, and slipped into the corridor. He found a lift tube and took it to the top floor, just one above Rowan’s. It was another floor of residence suites. At its center he found another lift tube, palm-locked. Any Durona could use it. A spiral staircase wound around it. He climbed the stairs very slowly, and waited, near the top, till he had all his breath back. He knocked on the door.

It slid aside, and a slim Eurasian boy of about ten regarded him gravely. “What do you want?” The boy frowned.

“I want to see your … grandmother.”

“Bring him in, Robin,” a soft voice called.

The boy ducked his head, and motioned him inside. His sock feet trod noiselessly across a deep carpet. The windows were polarized against the dark grey afternoon, and pools of warmer, yellower lamplight fought the gloom. Beyond the window, the force field revealed itself with tiny scintillations, as water droplets or particulars matter were detected and repelled or annihilated.

A shrunken woman sat in a wide chair, and watched him approach her through dark eyes set in a face of old ivory. She wore a high-necked black silk tunic and loose trousers. Her hair was pure white, and very long; a slim girl, most literally twin to the boy, was brushing it over the back of the chair, in long, long strokes. The room was very warm. Regarding her regarding him, he wondered how he could ever have thought that worried old woman with the cane might be Lilly. Hundred-year-old eyes looked at you differently.

“Ma’am,” he said. His mouth felt suddenly dry.

“Sit down,” she nodded to a short sofa set around the corner of the low table in front of her. “Violet, dear,” a thin hand, all white wrinkles and blue ropy veins, touched the girl’s hand which had paused protectively on her black silk shoulder. “Bring tea now. Three cups. Robin, please go downstairs and get Rowan.”

The girl arranged the hair in a falling fan around the woman’s upright torso, and the two children vanished in un-childlike silence. Clearly, the Durona Group did not employ outsiders. No chance of a mole ever penetrating their organization. With equal obedience, he sank into the seat she’d indicated.

Her vowels had a vibrato of age, but her diction, containing them, was perfect. “Have you come to yourself, sir?” she inquired.

“No, ma’am,” he said sadly. “Only to you.” He thought carefully about how to phrase his question. Lilly would not be any less medically careful than Rowan about yielding him clues. “Why can’t you identify me?”

Her white brows rose. “Well put. You are ready for an answer, I think. Ah.”

The lift tube hummed, and Rowan’s alarmed face appeared. She hurried out. “Lilly, I’m sorry. I thought he was asleep—”

“It’s all right, child. Sit down. Pour the tea,” for Violet reappeared around the corner bearing a large tray. Lilly whispered to the girl behind a faintly trembling hand, and she nodded and scampered off. Rowan knelt in what appeared to be a precise old ritual—had she once held Violet’s place? he rather thought so—and poured green tea into thin white cups, and handed it round. She sat at Lilly’s knees, and stole a brief, reassuring touch of the white hair coiled there.

The tea was very hot. Since he’d lately taken a deep dislike to cold, this pleased him, and he sipped carefully. “Answers, ma’am?” he reminded her cautiously.

Rowan’s lips parted in a negative, alarmed breath; Lilly crooked up one finger, and quelled her.

“Background,” said the old woman. “I believe the time has come to tell you a story.”

He nodded, and settled back with his tea.

“Once upon a time,” she smiled briefly, “there were three brothers. A proper fairy tale, ai? The eldest and original, and two young clones. The eldest—as happens in these tales—was born to a magnificent patrimony. Title—wealth—comfort—his father, if not exactly a king, commanded more power than any king in pre-Jump history. And thus he became the target of many enemies. Since he was known to dote upon his son, it occurred to more than one of his enemies to try and strike at him through his only child. Hence this peculiar multiplication.” She nodded at him. It made his belly shiver. He sipped more tea, to cover his confusion.