Memory (24 page)

And how long had this been going on, before Galeni noticed? It seemed sudden, but perhaps it was only suddenly visible. How many weeks—months—of orders were tainted with this unreliability? Somebody was going to have to go back over every message that had emanated from Illyan's office all the way back to—when?
Someone. But not me.

And was the malfunction sited in the chip, or in Illyan's own neural tissue? Or was it some subtle synergistic dysfunction? That was a medical and bioengineering question, and it would take a technical expert to answer it.
Again, not me.

In the end, he turned to exactly the solution, if you could call it that, which Galeni had fallen back on.
Bounce the information to Someone Else, and hope they'll do something.
So how long was it going to take the committee of concerned Illyan-observers to stop tossing the hot ball back and forth, and unite in effective action?
It's not my decision. I wish to hell it were.

Reluctantly, he punched in a comconsole code. "This is Lord Vorkosigan. Connect me to the Office of Domestic Affairs, please," he told the ImpSec corporal who answered.

General Haroche wasn't in. "Have him call me as soon as you can reach him," Miles told the office clerk. "It's urgent."

He turned back to his piles of clothing while he waited. He scarcely knew which ones to pitch and which ones to put back. Haroche didn't call. Miles tried his office two more times before he finally ran the man down.

Haroche frowned impatiently at him from the comconsole imager. "Yes? What is it, Lord Vorkosigan?"

Miles took a deep breath. "Simon Illyan called me a short time ago. I think you should review the call."

"Excuse me?"

"Go up to Illyan's office, and get his secretary to replay the call for you. In fact, you should both see it. I know it was recorded; it's standard operating procedure."

"Why?"

Indeed. Why should Haroche take the word of a security pariah whom he had witnessed his respected superior Illyan not only discharge, but personally escort from his HQ? "General, it's really important, it's really urgent, and I really would rather you judged it for yourself."

"You're being theatrically mysterious, Lord Vorkosigan." Haroche frowned unamused disapproval.

"I'm sorry." Miles kept his voice flat and level. "You'll understand when you see it."

Haroche raised one eyebrow. "Oh? Maybe I will, then."

"Thank you." Miles cut the com. No use in asking Haroche to call back after viewing the vid; it would be out of Miles's hands for certain, then.

There. He'd done it, done the right thing, as nearly as possible under the circumstances.

He felt quite sick.

Now: should he call Gregor? It was unfair to let the Emperor be blindsided in this, but God . . .

Haroche would do so soon enough, Miles supposed. As soon as he caught up with events and put Illyan under proper medical care, Haroche would by default and the chain of command become acting Chief of ImpSec, and his immediate next duty would be to notify Gregor of this unpleasant turn of events, and determine the Emperor's will in the matter. It would all be over before the day was done.

Maybe the cause of Illyan's confusion was something simple, easily fixed; maybe he'd be back on duty within days. A short circuit in his chip, say.
There's nothing simple about that chip.
But ImpSec would take care of its own.

Miles sighed, and returned to his list of self-imposed little chores, barely attentive. He tried to read, but could not concentrate. It wasn't possible for Illyan to be covering his tracks in this, was it? Suppose Haroche had gone up to view that call, and it wasn't on the log anymore? But if Illyan had that degree of self-awareness, he ought to have turned
himself
in for medical treatment.

The day dragged on interminably. In the evening, when he broke and called both Gregor and Haroche, he could not reach either. Mutually tied up on this crisis, perhaps. He left messages requesting return calls, which did not come. He slept badly.

He
hated
being out of the information circuit. By the following evening Miles was ready to go in person to pound on ImpSec's back door and demand secret reports to which he had no entitlement whatsoever, when Galeni turned up at Vorkosigan House. He'd obviously come straight from work, still in uniform, and looked grim even by his own morose standards.

"Drink?" said Miles after one look at his face, when Martin ushered him into the Yellow Parlor, with a proper announcement this time. "Dinner?"

"Drink." Galeni flung himself into the nearest armchair, and leaned his head back, as if his neck ached right down to the base of his spine. "I'll think about dinner. I'm not hungry yet." He waited until Martin had departed to add, "It's over."

"Talk. What happened?"

"Illyan broke down completely in the middle of the all-departments briefing this afternoon."

"This afternoon? You mean General Haroche didn't turn him over to the ImpSec medical department yesterday?"

"What?"

Miles described his disturbing call from Illyan. "I notified Haroche immediately. Please don't tell me the man didn't do what I told him to."

"I don't know," said Galeni. "I can only report what I saw." As a trained analyst, not to mention historian, Galeni had a keen sense of the difference between eyewitness testimony, hearsay, and speculation. You always knew which category whatever he was recounting fell into.

"Illyan's under medical care
now
, isn't he?" Miles demanded in worry.

"Oh, God, yes," sighed Galeni. "The briefing started out almost normally. The department heads gave their weekly précis reports, and listed all the red flag items they want the other departments to watch out for. Illyan seemed nervous, more restless than usual, fiddling with objects on the table . . . he snapped a data card in half, then muttered some apology. He stood up to give his usual list of chores for everyone, and it came out . . . one line never tracked another. He was all over the map. Not as if he thought it were the wrong day, but as if it were the wrong twenty days. Every sentence was grammatically correct and completely incoherent. And he didn't even seem to be aware of it, till he began looking at all of us staring at him with our jaws hanging open, and ran down.

"Then Haroche stood up—I swear it was the bravest thing I ever saw. And said,
Sir, I believe you should present yourself for medical evaluation immediately.
And Illyan barked back that he wasn't sick, and told Haroche to sit the hell down . . . except the look in his eyes kept flashing back and forth between rage and bewilderment. He was shaking. Where is that hulking teenager of yours with the drinks?"

"Probably took a wrong turn again, and is lost in the other wing. He'll sort himself out eventually. Please go on."

"Ah." Galeni rubbed his neck. "Illyan didn't want to go. Haroche called for a medic. Illyan countermanded him, said he couldn't leave in the middle of a crisis, except the crisis he seemed to think we were in the middle of was the Cetagandan invasion of Vervain, ten years ago. Haroche, who was about the color of milk by then, took him by the arm, and tried to steer him out—that was a mistake, because Illyan started to fight him. Haroche yelled,
Oh, shit, get a medic and hurry!
Which was bright of him. Damn, but Illyan fights dirty when he fights. I'd never seen that."

"Neither have I," said Miles, sickly fascinated.

"Two other men needed medics by the time the medic got there. They sedated Illyan to the eyeballs and tied him down in the ImpSec HQ clinic. And that was the end of
that
committee meeting. And to think I used to complain that they were boring."

"Ah, God." Miles pressed his hands to his eyes, and massaged his face. The scenario could hardly have been worse had it been deliberately engineered for maximum chaos and humiliation. And number of witnesses.

"Haroche is staying late at work tonight, needless to say," Galeni went on. "The whole building's in a suppressed uproar. Haroche gave us all orders not to talk to anyone, of course."

"Except me?"

"He forgot to except you, for some reason," said Galeni dryly. "So you didn't get this from me. You didn't get this, period."

"Quite. I understand. I assume he's reported this to Gregor by now."

"One hopes."

"Dammit, Haroche should have had Illyan under medical care before quitting time last night!"

"He looked pretty scared. We all did. Arresting the Chief of Imperial Security in the middle of ImpSec HQ is . . . not an easy task."

"No. No . . . I shouldn't criticize the man who's in the line of fire, I suppose. He would have had to take enough time to make sure. It's not the sort of thing you dare make a mistake on, if you value your career. Which Haroche does." Taking Illyan down in such a public arena seemed needlessly cruel.
At least Illyan fired me in private.
But on the other hand it was absolutely clear, no ambiguity about it, no room for confusion or rumor or innuendo. Or argument.

"Bad timing for this," Miles went on. "Though I don't suppose there is such a thing as a good time to have a biocybernetic breakdown. I wonder . . . if the strain of all these upcoming, um, Imperial demands was causal? It hardly seems possible. Illyan's weathered much worse crises than a wedding."

"A strain doesn't have to be the worst, to be the last," Galeni pointed out. "This thing could have been hanging by a thread since who knows when." Galeni hesitated. "I don't suppose this could have already been underway when he fired you? I mean . . . might you argue that his judgment was already impaired?"

Miles swallowed, not certain he was grateful to Galeni for saying out loud something he scarcely dared think. "I wish I could say so. But no. There was nothing wrong with his judgment then. It followed quite logically from his principles."

"So when did this start? It's a critical question."

"Yes. I've asked it of myself. Everyone else will be asking too, I'm sure. We'll all have to wait on the ImpSec physicians to tell us, I guess. Speaking of which, was there any word yet as to exactly what did cause this thing?"

"Nothing that trickled down to me. But they can hardly have started to examine the problem yet. I suppose they'll have to fly in obscure experts."

Martin appeared at last with their drinks, and Galeni elected to stay to dinner, a bit of news that made Martin's face fall. Since Ma Kosti served the two men elegantly and abundantly on zero notice, Miles could only assume Martin had been forced to give up his portion to the guest, and been required to subsist on sandwiches. Having seen Ma Kosti's idea of a quick snack, Miles did not feel overly guilty about this, though her art tonight was somewhat wasted on his and Galeni's distraction.

Still . . . the worst was over, with Illyan, and the larger dangers averted. The rest would just be cleanup.

The pressed gargoyles on the lintel over the side door to ImpSec HQ were looking particularly suffused this morning, Miles thought, as if weighed down with sorrow and about to burst from the internal pressure of their sinister secrets. And the expressions on the faces of some of the men he passed bore a subtle resemblance to those of their granite mascots. The clerk at the security desk in the lobby looked up at him with a harried blink. "May I help you, sir?"

"I'm Lord Vorkosigan. I'm here to see Simon Illyan."

The clerk checked his comconsole. "You aren't on my roster, my lord."

"No. I just dropped by to visit him." The clerk, and everyone else, had to at least know that Illyan was off duty, if only because they had to have been informed that Haroche was now their acting chief. "In the clinic. Give me a tag and let me in, please."

"I can't do that, my lord."

"Of course you can. It's your job. Who's duty officer today?"

"Major Jarlais, my lord."

"Good. He knows me. Call him for your authorization, then."

Jarlais's face appeared on the clerk's comconsole within a couple of minutes. "Yes?"

The clerk explained Miles's request.

"I don't think that's possible, my lord," Jarlais said uncertainly to Miles, who was leaning into range of the vid pickup over the clerk's shoulder.

Miles sighed. "Call your boss . . . no, hell, it's going to take thirty minutes to work my way up the entire chain of command. Let's cut out the middlemen, eh? I hate to bother him when he's as busy as he undoubtedly is this morning, but just call General Haroche."

Jarlais, obviously, was equally reluctant to interrupt his superior, but a Vor lord in one's lobby was hard to dismiss, and impossible to ignore. They got through to Haroche's comconsole in a mere ten minutes, good work under the circumstances, Miles thought.

"Good morning, General," Miles said to Haroche's image over the desk clerk's vid plate. "I came in to see Simon."

"Impossible," rumbled Haroche.

Miles's voice grew edged. "It's
impossible
only if he's dead. I think you are trying to say that you don't wish to allow it. Why not?"

Haroche hesitated. "Corporal, set your cone of silence and give up your comconsole seat to Lord Vorkosigan for a moment, please."

The clerk obediently slid aside; a shadow fell around Miles and Haroche's image from the security generator over the station chair.

"Where did you hear about this?" Haroche demanded suspiciously, as soon as their privacy was assured.

Miles raised his brows, and switched gears without a moment's pause. "I was worried. When you didn't call me back after my call to you of day before yesterday, and didn't return any of my other messages, I finally called Gregor."

"Oh," said Haroche. His suspicion faded into mere irritation.

That was a close one
, Miles realized. If Haroche hadn't reported to Gregor yet, it could have been a major stumble, potentially very damaging to Galeni. He'd better be carefully vague about when he'd supposedly talked to the Emperor, until he actually did. "I want to see Illyan."

"Illyan may not even be able to recognize you," said Haroche, after a long pause. "He's babbling classified material at a meter a minute. I had to assign guards of the highest security levels."