Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [43]
Chapter Six
Miles boiled himself in the shower for a long time, trying to regain control of his shocky body and scattered wits. He'd realized quickly, earlier, that all Madame Vorsoisson's anxious questions about his mother camouflaged oblique concerns about her son Nikolai, and he'd answered her as openly and carefully as he could. He'd been rewarded, through the extremely pleasant morning's expedition, by seeing her gradually relax and grow nearly open herself. When she'd laughed, her light blue eyes had sparkled. The animated intelligence had illuminated her face, and spilled over to loosen and soften her body from its original tight defensive density. Her sense of humor, creeping slowly out from hiding, had even survived his dropping them into that idiot pond.
Her brief appalled look when he'd half-stripped in the bubble-car had almost thrown him back into earlier modes of painful somatic self-consciousness, but not quite. It seemed he had grown comfortable at last in his own ill-used body, and the realization had given him a lunatic courage to try to clear things with her. So when all expression in her face shut down as he'd confessed his snooping . . . that had hurt.
He'd handled a bad situation as well as he could, hadn't he? Yes? No? He wished now he'd kept his mouth shut. No. His false stance with Madame Vorsoisson had been unbearable. Unbearable? Isn't that a little strong? Uncomfortable, he revised this hastily downward. Awkward, anyway.
But confession was supposed to be followed by absolution. If only the damned bubble-car had been delayed again, if only he'd had ten more minutes with her, he might have made it come out right. He shouldn't have tried to pass it off with that stupid joke, I could show you how . . .
Her icy, armored We don't require assistance felt like . . . missing a catch. He would be forced onward, she would spin down into the fog and never be seen again.
You're overdramatizing, boy. Madame Vorsoisson wasn't in a combat zone, was she?
Yes, she is. She was just falling toward death in exquisitely slow motion.
He wanted a drink desperately. Preferably several. Instead he dried himself off, dressed in another of his Auditor-suits, and went to see the Professor.
Miles leaned on the Professor's comconsole in the guest room which doubled as Tien Vorsoisson's home office, and studied the ravaged face of the dead man in the vid. He hoped for some revelation of expression, surprise or rage or fear, that would give a clue as to how the fellow had died. Besides suddenly. But the face was merely dead, its frozen distortions entirely physiological and familiar.
"First of all, are they sure he's really ours?" Miles asked, pulling up a chair for himself and settling in. On the vid, the anonymous medtech's examination recording played on at low volume, her voice-over comments delivered in that flat clinical tone universally used at moments like this. "He didn't drift in from somewhere else, I suppose."
"No, unfortunately," Vorthys said. "His speed and trajectory put him accurately at the site of our accident at the time of the smash-up, and his initial estimated time of death also matches."
Miles had wished for a break in the case, some new lead that would take him in a more speedily fruitful direction. He hadn't realized his desires were so magically powerful. Be careful what you wish for . . .
"Can they tell if he came from the ship, or the station?"
"Not from the trajectory alone."
"Mm, I suppose not. He shouldn't have been aboard either one. Well . . . we wait for the ID, then. News of this find has not yet been publicly released, I trust."
"No, nor leaked yet either, amazingly."
"Unless the explanation for his being there turns out to be rock-solid, I don't think secondhand reports are going to be enough on this one." He had read, God knew, enough reports in the last two weeks to saturate him for a year.
"Bodies are your department." The Professor ceded this one to him with a wave of his hand and