Lois Bujold - The Flowers of Vashnoi

Copyright (c) 2018 by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Cover by Ron Miller

The lift van banked. Vadim Sammi, the district ranger piloting, pointed through the broad canopy. “The boundary of the Vashnoi exclusion zone is in sight, Lady Vorkosigan. Just… there.”

Ekaterin peered. The cleared fields and scattered farmsteads had petered out a few kilometers back. Below the van stretched a rolling, undifferentiated carpet of mixed native Barrayaran red-brown and invasive Earth-green vegetation, scrub and trees, broken by an occasional glint of stream or patch of meadow or swamp. “How can you tell?”

Her husband Miles, who had been uncharacteristically quiet during the half-hour flight from the district capital of Hassadar, leaned over between the front seats. “There are warning signs posted. On stakes or tacked to the trees every ten meters for the whole two-hundred-kilometer perimeter of the zone. One of the ranger cadre’s jobs is to walk the boundary once a year, record the ambient radiation, and replace any signs that have fallen down with their trees or whatever.”

“We move them inward a few meters every year, where we can,” said Vadim. “It’s something.”

“And just the signs are enough to keep people out?” asked Enrique Borgos, from the back seat beside Miles.

Ekaterin turned to smile a bit ruefully at the expatriate Escobaran scientist. “It’s the invisibility problem. When you can’t see the danger anywhere, you tend to see it everywhere. And so the imagination paints poison even where it’s not.”

Enrique considered this, rubbing his nose. “I’d want a rad scanner, myself.”

Miles shrugged. “The signs have worked for decades. With the older generation, at least. The younger folks… we’re debating a fence.” He blinked, reflectively. “Progress of sorts, I suppose.”

“But if Enrique’s project succeeds, maybe we won’t need the fence,” said Ekaterin.

Miles took a breath. “Yeah.” And, after another moment, “Vadim, catch some altitude and take us a turn around the city. I don’t think Ekaterin’s ever seen it this close.”

Quite . Despite Ekaterin’s direct involvement in the project back in the Hassadar lab, this would be her first personal visit to the test plot. Miles had been hypocritically twitchy about letting her near the zone, and she’d humored him up to a point. They’d passed that point a while back. They’d been firmly united in leaving the children back in Hassadar with their perfectly competent nanny, however.

“Certainly, Lord Vorkosigan,” said Vadim. The lift van climbed.

Ekaterin studied Vadim’s profile. He’d been working with Enrique on the outdoor test plot for some weeks, but today was the first she had met him. The rangy ranger was not quite thirty, above middle height, close-shaved and hair shorn short. His face seemed carved from some mineral that cleaved in blocky angles and planes, but his brown eyes were warmer, if a bit uncertain in the alarming presence of Lord and Lady Vorkosigan. He’d been in the ranger cadre for nearly a decade, she understood. She wasn’t sure how to let him know that his dedication to the Vorkosigan’s District had won his liege lord’s regard in advance; he didn’t need to earn it anew. Well, Miles would have him talked down before the day was done, no doubt.

A long ridge running northeast-southwest fell away beneath them, and the site of the lost city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi spread out before her eyes. She was able to mark its boundaries only by the curve of the river that had formerly bisected it, and, in a wide, irregular outer ring a few kilometers off, humps and hillocks in the vegetation that might once have been collapsed buildings.

“I think I was about ten the first time my grandfather, old Count Piotr, flew me over this site,” Miles reminisced, staring out his own window. Twenty-five years ago , Ekaterin’s mind filled in. “There were still these big, glassy patches running here and there, which were said to glow blue in the dark, though that might have been a campfire tale. The scrub and weathering seem to have finally broken them all up.” In the afternoon daylight, nothing glowed now save an occasional reflection off the water.

“How large was the city?” off-worlder Enrique inquired, his palm to the canopy.

“In population, upwards of a quarter of a million,” Vadim supplied, in a tour-guide tone that Ekaterin supposed he was often required to adopt when shepherding visitors. “Which was big, for that soon after the end of the Time of Isolation.”

“And not small by modern standards, either,” Miles added. “Over two hundred thousand people died in the first moments the Cetagandan atomics struck. Another fifty thousand later on, they say, over days and weeks and months, though I’m not sure anyone was organized enough to keep a reliable count by then.” Eighty years ago, that calamity had been, and several wars back, though in the Barrayaran mind the Cetagandan invasion was still the big war, the real war, the crucible of the Imperium. “Most of my grandfather’s immediate family were there that day—both his parents, all of his surviving brothers, a boatload of cousins. Council of war, I believe. Prince Yuri meant to have joined them, but he was delayed in that fighting up north. Though the historians don’t think the Cetagandan ghem-junta was targeting him alone—they wanted to get us all, if they could.” His lips curved grimly. “I can’t say they were wrong in that.”

As the subsequent world-shaking history of General Count Piotr Vorkosigan had amply proved. Ekaterin had never quite known whether to be glad or sorry that she’d not met Miles till long after that formidable old icon had passed away.

“My Da says he never saw my grandfather make a memorial burning for that part of his family,” Miles mused. “And nor did I, come to think. I asked him about it once—just about at age ten, probably, that being when I’d first become curious about it all. He said this”—a wave of his hand took in the scene sweeping silently below—“had been burning enough.”

A grimace of Vadim’s lips signified agreement. Ekaterin wondered if the ranger had district ancestors who’d shared that famous pyre, and what family stories had been passed on to him by age ten. His wasn’t a duty that drew many volunteers.

“Anyway,” Miles went on, as Miles was prone to do, “after we threw the Cetagandans off this planet and the war was over, my grandfather ended up with title deed to the whole contaminated zone. As personal property, not as an entailment of the countship like the public buildings in Hassadar or Vorkosigan House up in Vorbarr Sultana. The Vorkosigans hadn’t owned all of the area even before its destruction, so he couldn’t have inherited the whole thing outright—I believe he actually bought out some of the other survivors who had claims. Which, back then, was a way of slipping some very proud and traumatized people a bit of charity. When the old man died, he left the whole zone to me. I was seventeen, and still a bit touchy about, ah”—a wave down the short length of his body, vaguely hunched, less than five feet tall—“my appearance. I didn’t take it as a compliment, though I realized no one expected the zone to be habitable again in my father’s lifetime. But the older I get, the less sure I am what he was really thinking.”

Ekaterin supposed she was even less in a position to guess. But the old man would have had to be blind indeed not to have seen, even then, his birth-damaged only grandson’s growing powers of mind. And heart. Incandescent , someone had once described Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan. Maybe, love, Piotr chose to pass his wounded lands into hands that he thought could hold them. Maybe he didn’t underestimate you after all. Or maybe she was just too foolishly fond, too much a partisan for level judgment even after four years of marriage. She smiled and stared out, her eye following the route of the river eastward.