Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [340]
"If you're not getting the right answer," he said slowly, "maybe you're not asking the right question."
"So what is the right question?"
He shook his head, mutely. "Why . . ." His hands spread. "Why not turn my frozen body over to the Dendarii and collect the reward? Why not sell me to Baron Ryoval, if he wants me so much? Why revive me?"
"I wouldn't sell a laboratory rat to Baron Ryoval," Lilly stated flatly. She twitched a brief smile. "Old business, between us."
How old? Older than he, whoever he was.
"As for the Dendarii—we may deal with them yet. Depending on who you are."
They were approaching the heart of the matter; he could sense it. "Yes?"
"Four years ago, Admiral Naismith visited Jackson's Whole, and besides counting a most spectacular coup on Ry Ryoval, left with a certain Dr. Hugh Canaba, one of Bharaputra's top genetics people. Now, I knew Canaba. More to the point, I know what Vasa Luigi and Lotus paid to get him here, and how many House secrets he was privy to. They would never have let him go alive. Yet he's gone, and no one on Jackson's Whole has ever been able to trace him."
She leaned forward intently. "Assuming Canaba was not just disposed of out an airlock—Admiral Naismith has shown he can get people out. In fact, it's a speciality he's famous for. That is our interest in him."
"You want off-planet?" He glanced around at Lilly Durona's comfortable, self-contained little empire. "Why?"
"I have a Deal with Georish Stauber—Baron Fell. It's a very old Deal, as we are very old dealers. My time is surely running out, and Georish is growing," she grimaced, "unreliable. If I die—or if he dies—or if he succeeds in having his brain transplanted to a younger body, as he has attempted at least once to arrange—our old Deal will be broken. The Durona Group might be offered less admirable deals than the one we have enjoyed so long with House Fell. It might be broken up—sold—weakened so as to invite attack from old enemies like Ry, who remembers an insult or an injury forever. It might be forced to work it does not choose. I've been looking for a way out for the last couple of years. Admiral Naismith knows one."
She wanted him to be Admiral Naismith, obviously the most valuable of the two clones. "What if I'm the other one?" He stared at his hands. They were just his hands. No hints there.
"You might be ransomed."
By whom? Was he savior, or commodity? What a choice. Rowan looked uneasy.
"What am I to you if I can't remember who I am?"
"No one at all, little man." Her dark eyes glinted, momentarily, like obsidian chips.
This woman had survived nearly a century on Jackson's Whole. It would not do to underestimate her ruthlessness on the basis of one quirky prejudice about clone-brain transplants.
They finished their tea, and retreated to Rowan's room.
"What in all that seemed familiar to you?" Rowan asked him anxiously when they were alone on her little sofa.
"All of it," he said, in deep perplexity. "And yet—Lilly seems to think I can spirit you all away like some kind of magician. But even if I am Admiral Naismith, I can't remember how I did it!"
"Sh," she tried to calm him. "You're ripe for memory-cascade, I swear. I can almost see it starting. Your speech has improved vastly in just the last few days."
"All that therapuetic kissing." He smiled, a suggestive compliment that won him, as he'd hoped, some more therapy. But when he came up for air he said, "It won't come back to me if I'm the other one. I remember Galen. Earth. A house in London . . . what's the clone's name?"
"We don't know," she said, and at his exasperated grasp of her hands added, "No, we really don't."
"Admiral Naismith . . . shouldn't be Miles Naismith. He should be Mark Pierre Vorkosigan." How the hell did he know that? Mark Pierre. Piotr Pierre. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife