Memory (37 page)

Miles and Illyan settled down at dusk to a fish dinner in the lake house's dining room. Ma Kosti had prepared the smallest lake trout, which was enough to feed the whole household, with a sauce that would have made baked cardboard delectable, and rendered the fresh fish a feast for minor gods.

Illyan was clearly amused at this proof of their prowess as primitive providers. "Did you do this often, down here? Feed your whole family?"

"Once in a great while. Then I figured out my Betan mother, who never eats anything but vat-protein if she can help it, was munching it down bravely and lying through her teeth about what a good boy I was, and I stopped, um, challenging her culinary preferences."

"I can just picture her." Illyan grinned.

"D'you want to go out again tomorrow?"

"Let's . . . at least wait until the leftovers are gone."

"The barn cats may help us out there. There are about four of them hanging around the kitchen door right now, trying to soften up my cook. When last seen, they were succeeding."

Miles made his glass of wine last, taking tiny sips. A great deal of water, the nap, and some medication had relieved his incipient beer-and-sun hangover. It was a strange and unfamiliar sensation, to be truly relaxed. Not going anywhere, on overdrive or at any other speed. Enjoying the present, the Now that partakes of eternity.

Martin trundled in, not bearing more food; Miles glanced up.

"My lord? Comconsole for you."

Whoever it is, tell them I'll call back tomorrow. Or next week.
No, it might be the Countess, landing early or calling from orbit. He was ready to face her now, he thought. "Who is it?"

"Says he's Admiral Avakli."

"Oh." Miles put down his fork, and rose at once. "I'll take it, thank you, Martin."

In the private comconsole chamber off the back corridor of the house, Avakli's lean face waited above the vid plate, a disembodied head. Miles slid into his seat and adjusted the vid pickup. "Yes, Admiral?"

"My Lord Auditor." Avakli nodded. "My team is ready to make our report. We can present it simultaneously to you and General Haroche, as you requested."

"Good. When?"

Avakli hesitated. "I would recommend, as soon as possible."

Miles's belly chilled. "Why?"

"Do you wish to discuss this over a comconsole?"

"No." Miles licked lips gone dry. "I . . . understand. It will take me about two hours to get back to Vorbarr Sultana." And for this conference, he'd better allow time to dress. "We could meet, say, at 2600 hours. Unless you would prefer first thing tomorrow morning."

"Your choice, my Lord Auditor."

Avakli wasn't objecting to a midnight meeting. A mild verdict of
natural causes
did not require such haste. Miles would get no sleep anyway, anticipating this. "Tonight, then."

"Very good, my lord." Avakli's parting nod was approving.

Miles shut down the comconsole, and blew out his breath. Life had just speeded up again.

It was late-night-quiet in the ImpSec HQ building; the clinic's conference chamber seemed almost like a tomb. The black vid projection table was ringed by five station chairs. Ah, yet another medical briefing. Miles was learning, these days, altogether more than he'd ever wanted to know about the insides of people's heads, including his own.

"We seem to be a seat short," Miles said to Admiral Avakli, nodding toward the table. "Unless you are proposing to have General Haroche stand?"

"I'll fetch another, my Lord Auditor," Avakli murmured back. "We weren't expecting . . ." His eyes shifted to Illyan, seating himself to the left of the place reserved for Miles, next to Colonel Ruibal and across from Dr. Weddell.

Miles had been uncertain about the wisdom of dragging Illyan along for this, but Avakli's obvious unease filled him with a cheery ruthlessness. "It will save my having to repeat it all to him later," Miles murmured back. "And offhand, I can't think of a man on the planet with a greater right to know."

"I can't argue with that, my lord."

You'd better not.

Avakli went out after the extra chair.

Miles was kitted out in his full brown-and-silver House uniform, though he'd left the military ornaments in his bureau drawer this trip. He didn't want the clutter to distract the eye from his Auditor's chain, formally draped across his chest. Illyan had chosen soft civilian clothing: an open-throated shirt, loose trousers and jacket, giving himself an off-duty and convalescent air. As a courtesy to his struggling replacement Haroche? Except Illyan had worn civvies on-duty so often that the message, if any, was a little ambiguous.

Avakli and Haroche arrived back in the briefing room together. Haroche's lips moved in startlement as he saw Illyan; Illyan turned his head and nodded greetings. "Hello, Lucas."

Haroche's deep voice softened. "Hello, sir. It's good to see you on your feet again." Though he turned aside and whispered to Miles, "Is he going to be all right? Is he up to this?"

"Oh, yes." Miles smiled, concealing his own clueless state on that score. At a brief negating hand-movement from Haroche, the company skipped the exchange of military salutes tonight; with Illyan present, there was perhaps some lingering confusion as to who ought to be saluting whom. There was a rustle and creak, as they seated themselves, serious and attentive. Admiral Avakli remained standing at the vid display podium.

"My Lord Auditor," began Avakli. "General Haroche, gentlemen. Chief Illyan." He gave Illyan a special, if slightly uncertain, nod. "I . . . don't expect it will come as any real surprise to you that we have found the damage to Chief Illyan's eidetic neural implant to have been an artificially created event."

Haroche vented a long sigh, and nodded. "I was afraid of that. I had hoped it would be something simpler."

Miles had hoped such hopes himself, on many occasions; he couldn't help but sympathize. He, too, had usually been disappointed.

"Simple," said Avakli, "is the last word I'd use to describe it."

"We're dealing with a case of deliberate sabotage, then," said Haroche.

Avakli sucked on his lower lip. "That, sir, is your department. I think I prefer to stand by my original wording, for the moment. An artificially created event. To explain this I will now turn you over to Dr. Weddell, who was"—a slight wrinkle passed over Avakli's high brow—"instrumental in assembling the chain of causality. Dr. Weddell, if you please."

By which wrinkle Miles deduced Weddell/Canaba was carrying on as usual, brilliantly and obnoxiously. If his brilliance ever failed, he'd doubtless be quite surprised at what a load of retribution his obnoxiousness had bought him. But Avakli was too honest a scientist to claim another's achievement as his own. Weddell took the podium, his patrician features weary, tense, and a little smug.

"If you would like to look at the culprit—the immediate culprit, that is—here is its portrait." Weddell fiddled with the holovid control; the plate projected a bright green, topologically complex blob, which turned slowly in air. "The color is a computer enhancement, of course—I took a little artistic license there—and the magnification several million times. That, gentlemen, is a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote. Or so I have reconstructed it."

"A what?" said Miles. "Simplify, please."

Weddell flashed a pained smile, doubtless searching his mind for words of one syllable. Miles regretted his last four beers. "A little bug that eats things," Weddell essayed, by way of further translation.

"Not that simplified," said Miles dryly. The Barrayarans around the table, knowing the power of an Imperial Auditor, cringed at his tone; immigrant Weddell did not.
Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant
. Miles let it go. "A prokaryote. So. Reconstructed?"

"I'll get to that in a moment, my Lord Auditor. It barely qualifies as a life-form, being smaller and simpler than the smallest bacterium, but it does perform two life-functions. In a manner of speaking it 'eats.' Specifically, it manufactures a proteolytic enzyme that breaks down the protein matrix found in the eidetic chip and several related galactic neuroenhancement applications. It destroys that and nothing else. And, after absorbing the resulting nutrients, it reproduces, by simple binary fission. A population of these prokaryotes, presented with a field, as it were, of chip proteins upon which to graze, will double and redouble in the usual geometric progression—up to a point. After a number of doublings, the prokaryote is programmed to self-destruct. By the time we obtained the chip for analysis, almost all of them had done so, leaving me a pretty jigsaw puzzle of fragments to play with. Another week, and there would have been nothing left to analyze."

Haroche winced.

"So," said Miles, "was this engineered for Illyan specifically? Or is it a commercial product, or what?"

"Your first question I cannot answer. But I could read much of its product history off its molecular structure. First of all, whoever made this did not begin from scratch. This is a modification of an existing, patented apoptotic organism originally designed to destroy neural plaque. The galactic patent code for that perfectly legitimate medical application was still readable on some of the molecular fragments. The modified prokaryote, however, bore no identifications of laboratories of origin, licensing, or patent markings. The original patent is about ten years old, by the way, which gives you the first point in your time-window problem."

"That was going to be my next question," said Miles. "I hope we can narrow things down more than that."

"Of course. But you see how much we learn already, just from the codes and their absences. The original medical prokaryote was pirated for the new purpose, and the people who modified it were obviously not concerned with legitimizing it for mass trade. It has all the signs of being a one-off job for a one-time customer."

"Illegal Jacksonian work, by chance?" asked Miles.
You would know.

"The kind of shortcuts taken in its design strongly suggest it. I'm not personally familiar with it, unfortunately."

Not something from Bharaputra Labs, Weddell/Canaba's former employer, then.
That
would have been a happy chance. But there were a dozen other Jacksonian houses who might have taken on small work like this. For a fee.

"So how much did this cost to make? Or rather, to have made?"

"Mm . . ." Weddell stared thoughtfully into space. "Actual lab costs, something under fifty thousand Betan dollars. Who knows what the markup might have been. Any special demand for secrecy on the part of its purchasers would have driven the cost up, oh, about five-fold. Or more, depending on what the market would bear."

Not the work of a lone nut, then, unless he were a fabulously rich lone nut. An organization, perhaps. Komarran terrorists sprang to mind—they always did, unfortunately.

"Could this be Cetagandan work?" asked General Haroche.

"Oh, no, I don't think so," said Weddell. "It's not in their style at all. Genetically speaking. Cetagandan work is distinguished by its quality, originality, and, how shall I put it,
elegance
. This is, by comparison, slapdash. Effective, mind you, but slapdash. On a molecular level."

Illyan's lips twisted, but he said nothing.

"The self-destruct sequencing," Weddell went on, "could have been a safety-check, simply left over from the original design. Or . . . it could have been deliberately intended to destroy the evidence."

"Can you tell which?"

"There were some slight modifications in it, compared to the original medical prokaryote . . . it was deliberately left in the design, anyway. I can give you facts, my lord; I cannot give you the intentions of unknown persons."

That's my job, right.
"So . . . when was it administered to Illyan? And how?"

"
Administered
is an assumptive term, though under the circumstances probably allowable. The first gross symptoms of breakdown were when, again?"

"Four weeks ago," said Haroche. "At the all-departments briefing."

"About a week before that, actually," said Miles. "According to my informant."

Haroche gave him a sharp look. "Really."

Illyan stirred, as if about to add something, but then kept his peace.

"Hm. The prokaryote does not reproduce very rapidly. Much depends on how large a dose was initially introduced."

"Yes, and how was it done?" Miles put in. "For that matter, how is this stuff stored and transported? What's its shelf life? Does it require any special conditions?"

"It's stored dry, in an encapsulated form, at room temperature, though it would not be harmed by mild freezing. Shelf life—heavens. Years. Though it's obviously less than a decade old. It is activated by wetting, presumably upon administration, which requires moist contact. Through mucous membranes—it could have been inhaled as a dust—injected as a solution, or introduced as a contaminant into a scratch. Broken skin and moisture would do it. It wouldn't have to be a large scratch."

"Swallowed?"

"Most of the prokaryotes would be destroyed by stomach acids. It could be done, but would require a larger initial dose, to be certain enough entered the bloodstream to be carried to the chip."

"So . . . when? What's the maximum possible time-window for exposure? Can't you use its reproductive rate to calculate when it was administered?"

"Only crudely. That's one of the several variables, I'm afraid, my lord. Administration must have been between ten weeks and one week before the appearance of the first symptoms."

Miles turned to Illyan. "Can you remember anything like that?"

Illyan shook his head helplessly.

Haroche said, "Is there any way . . . could it . . . is it possible the exposure might have been accidental?"

Weddell screwed up his mouth. "Possible? Who can say? Likely? That's the question." And he looked as if he was glad he didn't have to answer it.

"Have there been"—Miles turned to Haroche—"any reports of anyone else on Barrayar who possesses related chip technologies undergoing a mysterious breakdown?" For that matter,
did
anyone else on Barrayar possess a related chip?