Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [264]
"Is this your office?" asked Mark, cautiously settling himself in the Imperial swivel-chair. The room seemed small and austere for the purpose.
"One of them. This whole complex is crammed with various offices, in some of the oddest niches. Count Vorvolk has one in the old dungeons. No head room. I use this as a private retreat when attending the Council of Counts meetings, or when I have other business here."
"Why do I qualify as business? Besides not being pleasure. Is this personal or official?"
"I can't spit without being official. On Barrayar, the two are not very separable. Miles . . . was . . ." Gregor's tongue tripped over that past tense too, "in no particular order, a peer of my caste; an officer in my service; the son of an extremely, if not supremely, important official; and a personal friend of lifelong standing. And the heir to the Countship of a District. And the Counts are the mechanism whereby one man," he touched his chest, "multiplies to sixty, and then to a multitude. The Counts are the first officers of the Imperium; I am its captain. You do understand, that I am not the Imperium? An empire is mere geography. The Imperium is a society. The multitude, the whole body—ultimately, down to every subject—that is the Imperium. Of which I am only a piece. An interchangeable part, at that—did you notice my great-uncle's scalp, downstairs?"
"Um . . . yes. It was, uh, prominently displayed."
"This is the home of the Council of Counts. The fulcrum of the lever may fancy itself supreme, but it is nothing without the lever. Mad Yuri forgot that. I don't. The Count of the Vorkosigans' District is another such living piece. Also interchangeable." He paused.
"A . . . link in a chain," Mark offered carefully, to prove he was paying attention.
"A link in a chain-mail. In a web. So that one weak link is not fatal. Many must fail at once, to achieve a real disaster. Still . . . one wants as many sound, reliable links as possible, obviously."
"Obviously." Why are you looking at me?
"So. Tell me what happened on Jackson's Whole. As you saw it." Gregor sat up on his perch, hooking one heel and crossing his booted ankles, apparently centered and comfortable, like a raven on a branch.
"I'd have to start the story back on Earth."
"Feel free." His easy brief smile implied Mark had all the time in the world, and one hundred percent of his attention.
Haltingly, Mark began to stammer out his tale. Gregor's questions were few, only interjected when Mark hung up on the difficult bits; few but searching. Gregor was not in pursuit of mere facts, Mark quickly realized. He had obviously already seen Illyan's report. The Emperor was after something else.
"I cannot argue with your good intentions," said Gregor at one point. "The brain transplant business is a loathsome enterprise. But you do realize—your effort, your raid, is hardly going to put a dent in it. House Bharaputra will just clean up the broken glass and go on."
"It will make a permanent difference to the forty-nine clones," Mark asserted doggedly. "Everybody makes that same damned argument. 'I can't do it all, so I'm not going to do any.' And they don't. And it goes on, and on. And anyway, if I had been able to go back via Escobar as I'd planned in the first place—there would have been a big news splash. House Bharaputra might even have tried to reclaim the clones legally, and then there would really have been a public stink. I'd have made sure of it. Even if I'd been in Escobaran detention. Where, by the way, the House Bharaputra enforcers would have had a hard time getting at me. And maybe . . . maybe it would have interested some more people in the problem."
"Ah!" said Gregor. "A publicity stunt."
"It was not a stunt," Mark grated.
"Excuse me. I did not mean to imply your effort was trivial. Quite the reverse. But you did have a coherent long-range strategy after all."
"Yeah, but it went down the waste disintegrator as soon as I lost control of the Dendarii. As soon as