Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [185]
Mark! Miles had shouted, being dragged away, for all he knew, to his own death. Your name is Mark!
I am not Mark. I am NOT your damned brother, you maniac. The denial was hot and huge, but when its echoes died away, in the hollow chamber left inside his skull he seemed not to be anyone at all.
His head was aching, a grinding tightness that crawled up his spine through his shoulders and neck and spread out under his scalp. He rubbed hard at his neck, but the tension just circulated around through his arms and back into his shoulders.
Not his brother. But to be strictly accurate, Naismith could not be blamed for forcing him to life in the same way as the other House Bharaputran clones' progenitors. Oh, they were genetically identical, yes. It was a matter of . . . intent, perhaps. And where the money came from.
Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan had been just six years old when the tissue sample from a biopsy was stolen from some clinical laboratory on Barrayar, during the last gasp of Komarran resistance to Barrayaran imperial conquest. No one, neither Barrayaran nor Komarran, was intrinsically interested in the crippled child Miles. The focus had all been on his father. Admiral Count Aral Vorkosigan, Regent of Barrayar, Conqueror (or Butcher) of Komarr. Aral Vorkosigan had supplied the will and the wit which had made Komarr into Barrayar's first off-planet conquest. And made himself the target of Komarran resistance and revenge. Hope for successful resistance had faded in time. Hope for revenge lived on in exiled bitterness. Stripped of an army, arms, support, one Komarran hate group plotted a slow, mad vengeance. To strike at the father through the son upon whom he was known to dote . . .
Like a sorcerer in an old tale, the Komarrans dealt with a devil to have a simulacrum made. A bastard clone, he thought with a silent, humorless laugh. But things went wrong. The crippled original boy, poisoned before birth by yet another murderous enemy of his father's, grew strangely, unpredictably; his genetic duplicate grew straight . . . that had been his first clue that he was different from the other clones, he reflected. When the other clones went to the doctors for treatment they came back stronger, healthier, growing ever-faster. Every time he went, and he went often, their painful treatments seemed to make him sicklier, more stunted. The braces they put on his bones, neck, back, never seemed to help much. They had made him into this hunchbacked dwarfling as if molding him in a press, die-cut from a cast of his progenitor. I could have been normal, if Miles Vorkosigan had not been crippled.
When he first began to suspect the true purpose of his fellow clones, for rumors passed among the children in wild ways even their careful handlers could not totally control, his growing somatic deformations brought him silent suppressed joy. Surely they could not use this body for a brain transplant. He might be discarded—he might yet escape his pleasant, smiling jailer-servants. . . .
His real escape, when his Komarran owners came to collect him at age fourteen, was like a miracle. And then the training had begun. The endless harsh tutoring, drill, indoctrination. At first a destiny, any destiny at all, seemed glorious compared to his crèche-mates' end. He determinedly took up the training to replace his progenitor, and strike a blow for dear Komarr, a place he had never seen, against evil Barrayar, a place he had never seen either. But learning to be Miles Vorkosigan turned out to be like running the race in Zeno's paradox. No matter how much he learned, how frantically he drilled, how harshly his mistakes were punished, Miles learned more, faster; by the time he arrived, his quarry had always moved on, intellectually or otherwise.
The symbolic race became literal once his Komarran tutors actually moved to effect the substitution. They chased the elusive young Lord