Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold Read Free Book Online

not Vorberg.

    "I've sometimes wondered if you're like that Barrayaran fellow you told me about, who went around giving everybody liver patés for Winterfair 'cause he loved them himself. And was always frustrated that no one ever gave him any."

    "I don't need to be rescued. Usually." Last year's sojourn on Jackson's Whole having been a memorable exception. Except that his memory of it had a big three-month blank in it.

    "Mm, not rescue , exactly. Rescue's consequence. Freedom. You give freedom away whenever you can. Is it because it's something you want yourself?"

    And can't have? "Naw. It's the adrenaline high I crave."

    Their dinner arrived, on two carts. Miles sent away the human steward at the door, and he and Taura busied themselves in a brief domestic bustle, getting it all nicely arranged. The cabin was so spacious, the table wasn't even fold-down, but permanently bolted to the deck. Miles nibbled, and watched Taura eat. Feeding Taura always made him feel strangely happy inside. It was an impressive sight in its own right. "Don't overlook those little fried cheese things with the spicy sauce," he pointed out helpfully. "Lots of calories in them, I'm sure."

    "Thanks." A companionable silence fell, broken only by steady munching.

    "Contented?" he inquired.

    She swallowed a bite of something meltingly delicious formed into a dense cake in the shape of a star. "Oh, yes."

    He smiled. She had a talent for happiness, he decided, living in the present as she so carefully did. Did the foreknowledge of her death ever ride upon her shoulder like a carrion crow . . . ? Yes, of course it does. But let us not break the mood.

    "Did you mind, when you found out last year that I was Lord Vorkosigan? That Admiral Naismith wasn't real?"

    She shrugged. "It seemed right to me. I always thought you ought to be some sort of prince in disguise."

    "Hardly that!" he laughed. God save me from the Imperium, amen . Or maybe he was lying now, instead of then. Maybe Admiral Naismith was the real one, Lord Vorkosigan put on like a mask. Naismith's flat Betan accent fell so trippingly from his tongue. Vorkosigan's Barrayaran gutturals seemed to require an increasingly conscious effort, anymore. Naismith was so easy to slip into, Vorkosigan so . . . painful.

    "Actually"—he picked up the thread of their previous conversation, confident that she would follow—"freedom is exactly what I don't want. Not in the sense of being aimless, or, or . . . unemployed." Especially not unemployed. "It's not free time that I want—the present moment excepted," he added hastily. She nodded encouragement. "I want . . . my destiny, I guess. To be, or become, as fully me as I possibly can." Hence the invention of Admiral Naismith, to hold all those parts of himself for which there was no room on Barrayar.

    He'd thought about it, God knew, a hundred times. Thought of abandoning Vorkosigan forever, and becoming just Naismith. Kick free of the financial and patriotic shackles of ImpSec, go renegade, make a galactic living with the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet. But that was a one-way trip. For a Vor lord to possess a private military force was high treason, illegal as hell, a capital crime. He could never go home again, once he went down that road.

    Above all, he could not do that to his father. The-Count-my-Father, a name spoken all in one breath. Not while the old man lived, and hoped all his old-Barrayaran hopes for his son. He wasn't sure how his mother would react, Betan to the bone as she was even after all these years of living on Barrayar. She'd have no objection to the principle of the thing, but she didn't exactly approve of the military. She didn't exactly disapprove, either; she just made it plain that she thought there were better things for intelligent human beings to do with their lives. And once his father died . . . Miles would be Count Vorkosigan, with a District, and an important vote in the Council of Counts, and