Lois Bujold - Memory

"Please do," said Haroche. "Sleep on it. And if you can find anything in it that I haven't, let me know. I'm not happy to find any of my ImpSec people are disloyal, regardless of their planet of origin."

Haroche took his farewells; Miles followed immediately, sending a residence servant to find Martin and have his car brought around. If he went back to the party, he'd be jumped by women demanding explanations and action, neither of which he could offer right now. He did not envy Gregor his task of returning and having to socialize as if nothing had happened.

He was in the Counts groundcar, halfway between the Imperial Residence and ImpSec, when his view through the canopy of some dilapidated buildings, with brightly lit towers behind, suddenly sharpened. They took on an abrupt unreal reality, as if grown denser, overpowering, as if about to be outlined in green fire. He had just time to think, Oh shit oh shit oh shi— before the whole scene dissolved into the familiar colored confetti, then darkness.

He returned to consciousness laid out on the car's backseat, with Martin's panicked form looming over him in the dim yellow light. His tunic was ripped open. The canopy was raised to the night mist, and he shivered in the cold.

"Lord Vorkosigan? My lord, oh hell, are you dying? Stop it, stop it!"

"Unh . . ." he managed. It came out a muffled groan to his ringing ears. His mouth hurt; he touched his wet lips, and his fingers came away smeared, red-brown in this light, with fresh blood.

"'S all right, Martin. Only, uh, seizure."

"Is that what they look like? I couldn't think but what you'd been poisoned or shot or something." Martin looked only slightly relieved.

He tried to sit up; Martin's big hands opened in hovering uncertainty whether to help him up or shove him back down. Both his tongue and his lower lip were bitten, and bleeding freely over his best House uniform.

"Should I take you to a hospital or a doctor, my lord? Which one?"

"No."

"Let me take you back home, at least, then. Maybe . . ." Martin's harried face brightened with hope. "Maybe your lady mother will be there soon."

"And take me off your hands?" Miles grunted a pained laugh. She's not going to kiss it and make it well, Martin. No matter how much she might like to.

He wanted desperately to go on to ImpSec HQ. He'd promised Galeni. . . . But he hadn't properly reviewed the new data, and the team of men he'd want to question about it when he had were undoubtedly gone home to a well-earned night's rest. And he was still shaken, and dizzy with the postseizure lassitude.

The military medical people were all too right. The stress-triggered aspect of the damned seizures virtually guaranteed they would always occur at the most inconvenient possible moment. Unfit for duty indeed, any duty. Unfit.

I hate this.

"Home, Martin," he sighed.

Miles woke the next morning with what he was coming to recognize as a postseizure hangover. A couple of painkiller tablets helped only slightly. If anything, the symptoms were getting worse with time, not better. Or maybe he was simply becoming more accurate in identifying them, now that they were not masked by a stunner-migraine or suicidal depression. I have to see Chenko soon.

He carried a carafe of coffee up to his room, and locked himself in with his comconsole and Haroche's report. He spent, or wasted, the rest of the morning reviewing it, then re-reviewing it.

The very scantiness of the data made it all the more convincing. If this was supposed to be a double-frame, there ought to be more of it. It was strongly suggestive, but not quite proof. But try as he might, he could spot no flaw in its reasoning, no break in the flow of its logic.

With nothing more optimistic to report than this, he dreaded seeing Galeni again. ImpSec had held the Komarran-born officer overnight in the temporary cells at ImpSec HQ, a small section which had replaced the more extensive downstairs dungeons of Ezar's times. There Galeni sat, pending the formal leveling of charges, after which he would presumably be moved to some more official, and dreary, military prison. Held on suspicion. Barrayaran military law was a trifle unclear just how long one could be held on suspicion. Held on bloody paranoia is more like it.

His sour meditations were interrupted by a call from Dr. Weddell, plaintively demanding to know when he could go home. Miles promised to come take his report and let him out; if he couldn't spring one ImpSec prisoner, he at least might spring another. He donned a fresh, if second-best, House uniform and his Auditor's chain, daubed more stim-salve on his lacerated lip, and called Martin to bring his car around.

The medicinal and chemical odors of the ImpSec HQ clinic still gave Miles unpleasant fluttering sensations in his belly. He entered and found the laboratory chamber Weddell had taken over. A rumpled cot in the corner gave evidence that the galactic bioexpert was following orders, and had not left the sample or his data unattended. Weddell himself was still wearing his same clothes from yesterday morning, though he'd obviously managed to shave between times. He was somewhat less bleary than Miles, which wasn't saying much.

"Well, my Lord Auditor. You probably won't be surprised to learn I have positively identified your find as the same prokaryote that was used on Chief Illyan. It's even the same batch." He led Miles to the lab's comconsole, and embarked on a detailed comparison of the two samples, with visual aids and highlights, and mild self-congratulations when the silent Imperial Auditor was not forthcoming with any.

"I spoke with Illyan," said Miles. "He reports no memory of ever having swallowed a small brown capsule in the last four months. Unfortunately, his memory isn't what it used to be."

"Oh, it wasn't swallowed," Weddell stated positively. "It was never designed to be swallowed."

"How do you know?"

"The capsule was neither permeable nor soluble. It was meant to be broken—a pinch of the fingers would do—and the sample mixed with air and breathed. The vector encapsulation design is obviously meant to be airborne. It's quite sporelike."

"The which what?"

"Here." Weddell banished the vid of the molecular chain presently occupying the vid plate, and brought up an image of an object that looked for all the world like a spherical satellite, bristling with antennae. "The actual prokaryotes would have been unmanageably tiny, if someone had simply attempted to load them naked into those large capsules. Instead, they are contained in these hollow sporelike particles"—Weddell pointed to the vid plate—"which float in air until they contact a wet surface, such as mucous membrane or bronchia. At that point, the delivery units dissolve, releasing their load."

"Could you see them in the air, like smoke or dust? Smell them?"

"If the light was strong I suppose one might see a brief puff as they were initially distributed, but then they would appear to vanish. They would be odorless."

"How long . . . would they hang in the air?"

"Several minutes, at least. Depending on the efficiency of the ventilation."

Miles stared in fascination at the malignant-looking sphere. "This is new information." Though he did not, offhand, see how it helped much.

"It was not possible to reconstruct it from the eidetic chip," noted Weddell a bit stiffly, "as no part of the vector encapsulation would ever reach the chip. There were several other potential means of administration."

"I … quite understand. Yes. Thank you." He pictured himself going back to Illyan: Can you remember every breath you took in the last four months? Once, Illyan might have.