Lois Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi

“I could,” said Enrique. “What would you do with them?”

“That’s the hard question. Find the parents, plunge them into grief and guilt for a second time, when it all seemed over? To what benefit, for what change?”

Miles opened a gloved hand, full of acknowledgement, empty of solutions. One couldn’t fix the past, only the present.

“What are you going to do about Vadim?” she asked him.

Miles’s grimace this time seemed to go soul-deep. “He has to be fired, for violating any number of ranger regs. Which makes me feel like a faker. So I think we’ll call it terminated for reaching his rad limit, which he can’t prove he hasn’t, and maybe pass him along under the table to Mark. Who could find a dozen different jobs for him to do, yeah.”

“From one Vorkosigan to another?” Ekaterin smirked, secretly pleased. “Is there no escape?”

“Not for the competent. Which he is, but he was placed in a horrible fork.” Miles’s shrug was unrepentant. “I should get one self-indulgence out of all this. Vadim can be it.”

“We did get the milk goats safely to their new paddock at the Ranch,” Enrique offered. “The rangers have been detailed to bring the ponies tomorrow.”

“Oh,” said Ekaterin, “good. That’s one thing at least. Do you suppose you could stop by their room before you leave and tell those kids?”

“Certainly.” He hesitated. “Even I could see their animals meant a lot to them. It gives one hope, rather.”

Ekaterin’s mouth twisted up. “For what, their… rehabilitation, perhaps? No, reintegration is a better term, or would be if they’d ever been integrated in the first place. Really, it’s as if they’d been transported right from the Time of Isolation and plunked down here.” Doubtfully, she considered Jadwiga. There’d been that hint that Boris had once ventured out into the wider district, even if he’d fled back to the zone after. She needed to learn more about that. Ingi seemed both young enough and bright enough for a good social prognosis, but then there was his physical appearance. Or, more accurately, how other district youths would react to it. She glanced under her lashes at Miles.

“I was thinking,” said Enrique, a phrase that made Ekaterin prick her ears, “about that old bunkhouse for hired hands that’s sitting out back at the Ranch. After the docs here are done, it might serve as a sort of halfway house for them, while they acclimatize to modern Barrayar.” He did not add, Such as it is ; good for him. “There are all kinds of tasks at all levels around the labs that need doing. Boris might be trained; Ingi absolutely could be.”

“And Jadwiga? …If she gets out of the hospital?” It would be days, if not weeks, before they could learn her medical fate, and there was nothing more Ekaterin could do to speed it up. For once, she identified with Miles’s deep-rooted impatience. She reminded herself sternly that Hassadar was as good as any hospital on Barrayar for treating radiation-related issues, as the fact that Miles hadn’t whisked her elsewhere proved.

Enrique waved a more optimistic hand. “Of course. If she can milk goats, she can do all sorts of responsible things. Maybe not as quickly as some, but the Ranch runs on its own schedule.”

Ekaterin wondered whether Enrique was craftily adding to his large mammal collection, or if Jadwiga’s joy in his bugs had simply won his heart. Maybe both. Did it matter? “That might work. Or at least might be worth trying.”

“Does Martya have time for home schooling? Or interest?” asked Miles cautiously.

“We’ve dozens of employees. Nothing says it all has to fall on one person,” said Enrique.

It was a encouraging vision, Jadwiga and Boris in a sort of ad hoc sheltered workshop, gainfully employed as much for their own pride as any independence. Ekaterin knew all about that. And the labs were nothing if not flexible. Ingi, she suspected, was capable of much more, and in Enrique’s wake would most certainly find out what. The albino boy’s halfway house could well become not destination but launch pad.

Which left one—victim, perpetrator, it was hard to decide, maybe perpetuator —notably uncompensated. Ekaterin blew out her breath. “Should that invitation extend to Ma Roga? She can’t go back to the zone.”

Enrique’s face scrunched up. “I don’t think she should be left with those kids, do you? After what happened?”

“I’d guess that was temporary insanity brought on by her not being able to think past her current horizons, but… no, something seems broken there. I don’t know if it can be mended.” When rehabilitation was rejected, and punishment was pointless, what was left?

“Incarceration for rad poisoning could segue pretty readily into incarceration for attempted murder,” Miles observed.

“It seems circular. Oh.” That was right, Enrique hadn’t heard Ma’s story about how she’d come to her self-run house arrest in the first place, and therefore he could not have told Miles. Ekaterin pulled back her shoulders and recounted it now to both of them—a synopsis of a synopsis, so leaving out who knew what devilish details? She wasn’t sure it helped.

Miles whistled, behind his mask. “Huh.”

Enrique didn’t look any less doubtful. “So what should I tell those kids?”

Ekaterin massaged her tight temples. “For tonight, just tell them that she’s being treated. I don’t think we’re going to be able to unravel all these years in an hour.”

Or at all, possibly. Ma Roga was a district woman to her hot bones, but of Piotr’s era, not Miles’s; a relict of grim resistance. Ekaterin could better picture her walking back to her beloved hut on her own two feet than adapting to modern Hassadar; slyly returning to being a sinister legend among the local folk, terrorizing the occasional tourist who stumbled across her. Boris might even choose to visit his aging mother on occasion, dutiful if wary. Hadn’t Count Piotr himself given way in the face of that determination? Maybe the old man had called it right the first time.

Enrique smiled acknowledgment, wished Ekaterin a quick recovery, and went out.

She gave Miles’s gloved hand a little shake. “You should go home to our own kids.”

“Yes.” But he didn’t release his grip. They sat that way for a minute.

Ekaterin sighed. “Is this all going to work?” Her harassed gesture around encompassed everything: the zone, the radbug project, the district, far too many decades of inherited history.

Miles vented a mask-muffled noise, not quite a laugh. “It’s not as though we can stop trying.” He let go of her hand to roll his own shoulders, the only knots he could shake out so simply. “‘S funny. Piotr, toward the end of his life, looked at our district and only saw how much better it was. All the backbreaking, heartbreaking work he did cleaning up the messes after the war is taken for granted now, or mostly just forgotten. Instead, we look around and only see how much better it could be. And neither of us is wrong, exactly.”

Ekaterin’s lips bent in a wry smile. “I wonder if all the work we’re doing will suffer the same forgetting?”

“ Vashnoi has always been a garden, right? ” Miles quoted some imagined child of the district’s future. “Is it still a victory if you don’t get the credit?”

“Hah. Welcome to my world,” she teased him.

“And welcome to mine. You’re not running away screaming yet, I see, Lady Vorkosigan. Good sign.”

“I’m in isolation. Running away would be medically disapproved.”

“There’s one upside.”

She shoved at his hip to dislodge him from his perch on her bed. “Go home, Miles. Tell Nikki I’m fine. Don’t stir up the twins just before bed.”