Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [116]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He woke in a hospital bed, an unwelcome but familiar environment. In the distance, out his window, the towers of the skyline of Vorbarr Sultana, capital city of Barrayar, glowed strangely green in the darkness. Imp Mil, then, the Imperial Military Hospital. This room was undecorated in the same severe style he had known as a child, when he'd been in and out of its clinical laboratories and surgeries for painful therapies so often Imp Mil had seemed his home away from home.
A doctor entered. He appeared to be about sixty: clipped graying hair, pale lined face, body thickening with age. dr. galen, his name badge read. Hyposprays clanked together in his pockets. Copulating and breeding more, perhaps. Miles had always wondered where hyposprays came from.
"Ah, you're awake," said the doctor gladly. "You're not going to go away on us again this time, now, are you?"
"Go away?" He was tied down with tubes and sensor wires, drips and control leads. It hardly seemed he was going anywhere.
"Catatonia. Cloud-cuckoo-land. Ga-ga. In short, insane. In short is the only way you can go, I suppose, eh? It runs in the family. Blood will tell."
Miles could hear the susurration of his red blood cells in his ears, whispering thousands of military secrets to each other, cavorting drunkenly in a country dance with molecules of fast-penta which were flipping their hydroxyl groups at him like petticoats. He blinked away the image.
Galen's hand rummaged in his pocket; then his face changed. "Ow!" He yanked his hand out, shook off a hypospray, and sucked at his bleeding thumb. "The little bugger bit me." He glanced down, where the young hypospray skittered about uncertainly on its spindly metal legs, and crunched it underfoot. It died with a tiny squeak.
"This sort of mental slippage is not at all unusual in a revived cryo-corpse, of course. You'll get over it," Dr. Galen reassured him.
"Was I dead?"
"Killed outright, on Earth. You spent a year in cryogenic suspension."
Oddly enough, Miles could remember that part. Lying in a glass coffin like a fairy-tale princess under a cruel spell, while figures flitted silent and ghostlike beyond the frosted panels.
"And you revived me?"
"Oh, no. You spoiled. Worst case of freezer-burn you ever saw."
"Oh," Miles paused, nonplused, and added in a small voice, "Am I still dead, then? Can I have horses at my funeral, like Grandfather?"
"No, no, no, of course not." Dr. Galen clucked like a mother hen. "You aren't allowed to die, your parents would never permit it. We transplanted your brain into a replacement body. Fortunately, there was one ready to hand. Pre-owned, but hardly used. Congratulations, you're a virgin again. Was it not clever of me, to get your clone all ready for you?"
"My cl— my brother? Mark?" Miles sat bolt upright, tubes falling away from him. Shivering, he pulled out his tray table and stared into the mirror of its polished metal surface. A dotted line of big black stitches ran across his forehead. He stared at his hands, turning them over in horror. "My God. I'm wearing a corpse."
He looked up at Galen. "If I'm in here, what have you done with Mark? Where did you put the brain that used to be in this head?"
Galen pointed.
On the table at Miles's bedside squatted a large glass jar. In it a whole brain, like a mushroom on a stem, floated rubbery, dead, and malevolent. The pickling liquid was thick and greenish.
"No, no, no!" cried Miles. "No, no, no!" He struggled out of bed and clutched up the jar. The liquid sloshed cold down over his hands. He ran out into the hall, barefoot, his patient gown flapping open behind him. There had to be spare bodies around here; this was Imp Mil. Suddenly, he remembered where he'd left one.
He burst through another door and found himself in the combat-drop shuttle over Dagoola IV. The shuttle hatch was jammed open; black clouds shot with yellow dendrites of