Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (472 page)

No other electricity, of course. Powersat receptors were expensive pieces of precision technology. They would come even here, in time; some communities almost as small, but with strong economic co-ops, already had them. Silvy Vale was obviously still stuck in subsistence-level, and must needs wait till there was enough surplus in the district to gift them, if the surplus was not grabbed off first by some competing want. If only the city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi had not been obliterated by Cetagandan atomics, the whole district could be years ahead, economically.…

Miles walked out on the porch and leaned on the rail. Karal’s son had returned. Down at the end of the cleared yard Fat Ninny was standing tethered, hip-shot, ears aflop, grunting with pleasure as the grinning boy scratched him vigorously under his halter. The boy looked up to catch Miles watching him, and scooted off fearfully to vanish again in the scrub downslope. “Huh,” muttered Miles.

Dr. Dea joined him. “They’ve been gone a long time. About time to break out the fast-penta?”

“No, your autopsy kit, I should say. I fancy that’s what we’ll be doing next.”

Dea glanced at him sharply. “I thought you sent Pym along to enforce the arrest.”

“You can’t arrest a man who’s not there. Are you a wagering man, Doctor? I’ll bet you a mark they don’t come back with Csurik. No, hold it—maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. Here are three coming back.…”

Karal, Pym, and another were marching down the trail. The third was a hulking young man, big-handed, heavy-browed, thick-necked, surly. “Harra,” Miles called, “is this your husband?” He looked the part, by God, just what Miles had pictured. And four brothers just like him—only bigger, no doubt…

Harra appeared by Miles’s shoulder, and let out her breath. “No, m’lord. That’s Alex, the Speaker’s deputy.”

“Oh.” Miles’s lips compressed in silent frustration.
Well, I had to give it a chance to be simple.

Karal stopped beneath him and began a wandering explanation of his empty-handed state. Miles cut him off with a lift of his eyebrows. “Pym?”

“Bolted, m’lord,” said Pym laconically. “Almost certainly warned.”

“I agree.” He frowned down at Karal, who prudently stood silent. Facts first. Decisions, such as how much deadly force to pursue the fugitive with, second. “Harra. How far is it to your burying place?”

“Down by the stream, lord, at the bottom of the valley. About two kilometers.”

“Get your kit, Doctor, we’re taking a walk. Karal, fetch a shovel.”

“M’lord, surely it isn’t needful to disturb the peace of the dead,” began Karal.

“It is entirely needful. There’s a place for the autopsy report right in the Procedural I got from the district magistrate’s office. Where I will file my completed report upon this case when we return to Vorkosigan Surleau. I have permission from the next-of-kin—do I not, Harra?”

She nodded numbly.

“I have the two requisite witnesses, yourself and your,”
gorilla,
“deputy, we have the doctor and the daylight—if you don’t stand there arguing till sundown. All we need is the shovel. Unless you’re volunteering to dig with your hand, Karal.” Miles’s voice was flat and grating and getting dangerous.

Karal’s balding head bobbed in his distress. “The—the father is the legal next-of-kin, while he lives, and you don’t have his—”

“Karal,” said Miles.

“M’lord?”

“Take care the grave you dig is not your own. You’ve got one foot in it already.”

Karal’s hand opened in despair. “I’ll…get the shovel, m’lord.”

* * * *

T
he midafternoon was warm, the air golden and summer-sleepy. The shovel bit with a steady
scrunch-scrunch
through the soil at the hands of Karal’s deputy. Downslope, a bright stream burbled away over clean rounded stones. Harra hunkered watching, silent and grim.

When big Alex levered out the little crate—so little!—Armsman Pym went off for a patrol of the wooded perimeter. Miles didn’t blame him. He hoped the soil at that depth had been cool, these last eight days. Alex pried open the box, and Dr. Dea waved him away and took over. The deputy too went off to find something to examine at the far end of the graveyard.

Dea looked the cloth-wrapped bundle over carefully, lifted it out, and set it on his tarp laid out on the ground in the bright sun. The instruments of his investigation were arrayed upon the plastic in precise order. He unwrapped the brightly patterned cloths in their special folds, and Harra crept up to retrieve them, straighten and fold them ready for reuse, then crept back.

Miles fingered the handkerchief in his pocket, ready to hold over his mouth and nose, and went to watch over Dea’s shoulder. Bad, but not too bad. He’d seen and smelled worse. Dea, filter-masked, spoke procedurals into his recorder, hovering in the air by his shoulder, and made his examination first by eye and gloved touch, then by scanner.

“Here, my lord,” said Dea, and motioned Miles closer. “Almost certainly the cause of death, though I’ll run the toxin tests in a moment. Her neck was broken. See here on the scanner where the spinal cord was severed, then the bones twisted back into alignment.”

“Karal, Alex.” Miles motioned them up to witness; they came reluctantly.

“Could this have been accidental?” said Miles.

“Very remotely possible. The realignment had to be deliberate, though.”

“Would it have taken long?”

“Seconds only. Death was immediate.”

“How much physical strength was required? A big man’s or…”

“Oh, not much at all. Any adult could have done it, easily.”

“Any sufficiently motivated adult.” Miles’s stomach churned at the mental picture Dea’s words conjured up. The little fuzzy head would easily fit under a man’s hand. The twist, the muffled cartilaginous crack—if there was one thing Miles knew by heart, it was the exact tactile sensation of breaking bone, oh yes.

“Motivation,” said Dea, “is not my department.” He paused. “I might note, a careful external examination could have found this. Mine did. An experienced layman”—his gaze fell cool on Karal—“paying attention to what he was doing, should not have missed it.”

Miles too stared at Karal, waiting.

“Overlain,” hissed Harra. Her voice was ragged with scorn.

“M’lord,” said Karal carefully, “it’s true I suspected the possibility—”

Suspected, hell. You knew.

“But I felt—and still feel, strongly”—his eye flashed a wary defiance—“that only more grief would come from a fuss. There was nothing I could do to help the baby at that point. My duties are to the living.”

“So are mine, Speaker Karal. As, for example, my duty to the next small Imperial subject in mortal danger from those who should be his or her protectors, for the grave fault of being”— Miles flashed an edged smile—“physically different. In Count Vorkosigan’s view this is not just a case. This is a test case, fulcrum of a thousand cases. Fuss…” He hissed the sibilant; Harra rocked to the rhythm of his voice, “you haven’t begun to see fuss yet.”

Karal subsided as if folded.

There followed an hour of messiness yielding mainly negative data; no other bones were broken, the infant’s lungs were clear, her gut and bloodstream free of toxins except those of natural decomposition. Her brain held no secret tumors. The defect for which she had died did not extend to spina bifida, Dea reported. Fairly simple plastic surgery would indeed have corrected the cat’s mouth, could she somehow have won access to it. Miles wondered what comfort this confirmation was to Harra; cold, at best.

Dea put his puzzle back together, and Harra rewrapped the tiny body in intricate, meaningful folds. Dea cleaned his tools and placed them in their cases and washed his hands and arms and face thoroughly in the stream, for rather a longer time than needed for just hygiene, Miles thought, while the gorilla reburied the box.

Harra made a little bowl in the dirt atop the grave and piled in some twigs and bark scraps and a sawed-off strand of her lank hair.

Miles, caught short, felt in his pockets. “I have no offering on me that will burn,” he said apologetically.

Harra glanced up, surprised at even the implied offer. “No matter, m’lord.” Her little pile of scraps flared briefly and went out, like her infant Raina’s life.

But it does matter
, thought Miles.

Peace to you, small lady, after our rude invasions. I will give you a better sacrifice, I swear by my word as Vorkosigan. And the smoke of that burning will rise and be seen from one end of these mountains to the other.

* * * *

M
iles charged Karal and Alex straightly with producing Lem Csurik, and gave Harra Csurik a ride home up behind him on Fat Ninny. Pym accompanied them.

They passed a few scattered cabins on the way. At one a couple of grubby children playing in the yard loped alongside the horses, giggling and making hex signs at Miles, egging each other on to bolder displays, until their mother spotted them and ran out and hustled them indoors with a fearful look over her shoulder. In a weird way it was almost relaxing to Miles, the welcome he’d expected, not like Karal’s and Alex’s strained, self-conscious, careful not-noticing. Raina’s life would not have been an easy one.

Harra’s cabin was at the head of a long draw, just before it narrowed into a ravine. It seemed very quiet and isolated, in the dappled shade.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go stay with your mother?” asked Miles dubiously.

Harra shook her head. She slid down off Ninny, and Miles and Pym dismounted to follow her in.

The cabin was of a standard design, a single room with a field-stone fireplace and a wide roofed front porch. Water apparently came from the rivulet in the ravine. Pym held up a hand and entered first behind Harra, his hand on his stunner. If Lem Csurik had run, might he have run home first? Pym had been making scanner checks of perfectly innocent clumps of bushes all the way here.

The cabin was deserted. Although not long deserted; it did not have the lingering, dusty silence one would expect of eight days’ mournful disoccupation. The remains of a few hasty meals sat on the sinkboard. The bed was slept-in, rumpled and unmade. A few man’s garments were scattered about. Automatically Harra began to move about the room, straightening it up, reasserting her presence, her worth. If she could not control the events of her life, at least she might control one small room.

The one untouched item was a cradle that sat beside the bed, little blankets neatly folded. Harra had fled for Vorkosigan Surleau just a few hours after the burial.

Miles wandered about the room, checking the view from the windows. “Will you show me where you went to get your brillberries, Harra?”

She led them up the ravine; Miles timed the hike. Pym divided his attention unhappily between the brush and Miles, alert to catch any bone-breaking stumble. After flinching away from about three aborted protective grabs Miles was ready to tell him to go climb a tree. Still, there was a certain understandable self-interest at work here; if Miles broke a leg, it would be Pym who’d be stuck with carrying him out.

The brillberry patch was nearly a kilometer up the ravine. Miles plucked a few seedy red berries and ate them absently, looking around, while Harra and Pym waited respectfully. Afternoon sun slanted through green and brown leaves, but the bottom of the ravine was already gray and cool with premature twilight. The brillberry vines clung to the rocks and hung down invitingly, luring one to risk one’s neck reaching. Miles resisted their weedy temptations, not being all that fond of brillberries. “If someone called out from your cabin, you couldn’t hear them up here, could you?” remarked Miles.

“No, m’lord.”

“About how long did you spend picking?”

“About”— Harra shrugged—“a basketful.”

The woman didn’t own a chrono. “An hour, say. And a twenty-minute climb each way. About a two hour time window, that morning. Your cabin was not locked?”

“Just a latch, m’lord.”

“Hm.”

Method, motive, and opportunity, the district magistrate’s Procedural had emphasized. Damn. The method was established, and almost anybody could have used it. The opportunity angle, it appeared, was just as bad. Anyone at all could have walked up to that cabin, done the deed, and departed, unseen and unheard. It was much too late for an aura detector to be of use, tracing the shining ghosts of movements in and out of that room, even if Miles had brought one.