Chapter Text
Gregor stared with loathing at the box with its ghastly record of Cetagandan wartime atrocities. The excellent coffee, now neglected, was still giving off a divine odor, but neither man in the room wanted to drink it. Gregor leaned back in his new ergonomic chair, acquired as a gift from Laisa so that she could steal his old one.
“Where did you say you got these photographs?”
Miles was sitting on the edge of the chair, his own coffee cooling, and said, “They were brought to my attention by Cyril Engalychev. He's the speaker for Five Oaks.” He was tapping a finger upon his knees, fidgeting. He was wearing his typical gray-on-gray suit, but this one had a boutonniere rosebud, cut from Ekaterin's garden this morning. She'd told him before that the creamy pink and yellow flower was called “Peace,” and he certainly needed to carry that emblem of serenity with him today. He'd had a week to look at the box's contents, but he was by no means comfortable with them. He'd have given anything to shove them back inside and bury them forever, but he knew Gregor would have to see them. Needed to see them. Gregor was the only one who could decide what to do with these hideous things.
“In the mountains?”
“No, it's actually barely in the foothills. A goat-herder gave them to him. As I understand it, they were at the bottom of a box which was finally being cleared out after all this time. The box was at the back of her loft, and she wanted more space for hay. She found other family relics up there as well, in poor condition. A wedding veil which was torn and had stains on it. One broken child's shoe.” Gregor became even stiller, not that he was ever a restless man, but Miles knew he was thinking about the small shoe that his mother had brought to Kareen, as proof of Gregor's life. It was the last thing she'd seen, just before she'd grabbed a nerve disrupter and tried to kill Vordarian.
The Emperor shook his head a fraction.
“So these photographs—black and white—were there all along. We never knew there was this kind of documentation. This is Vorkosigan Vashnoi?”
“Yes.”
They looked at the damnable photos again. Many of them were pornographic, violations of modest Barrayaran women. Here were two with long skirts, but no blouses, rubbing each other's nipples. In other photos the same pair were wearing blouses but no skirts.They and other women were shown nude in disgusting poses with grinning Cetagandan soldiers. Other solitary women were lying on coaches, arms over their heads, small swirls of cloth not covering anything essential. Their strained smiles came through even in this archaic medium of black and white.
“Why did he take these?” Gregor wondered. “They made him, didn't they?”
“Yes. Apparently for their amusement. But he seems to have saved extra copies for himself.”
“To look at?”
Miles had known Gregor all his life, but he hadn't seen this expression of disgust before. He carried on quickly. “No, from a small diary they found, he was keeping a record of these things to show General Piotr. I have it with me—I had it transcribed for you.”
“Piotr didn't need more evidence of atrocities. This photographer—do we know his name?”
Miles thought back to the almost hysterical speaker who'd called him to take these horrible things off his hands. “They're trying to check with other families in Five Oaks. The goatherd had owned the farm only twenty years or so and didn't have any record of him.”
Gregor spread them out on his desk. Not all the pictures were indecent. Here were two boys, looking like scamps, sharing an apple. They were very thin, in poor clothing, but their natural impishness came through. There was a woman holding the hand of a small child, standing at the edge of an ancient arch which was made beautiful by the spread of ivy. In another a girl was dangling a string for a black and white kitten. Two wrinkled elderly women sat on a stoop, in conversation, one holding a small baby. In these and others the photographer's gift recorded the vanished scenes of ordinary life.
Behind all of them, a mere backdrop here, was the destroyed city, with its ancient architecture revealed. Vorkosigan Vashnoi was almost as old as Vorbarr Sultana, and had never had any urban renewal. Dirt streets, not even cobblestoned in some photos, ran in front of tiny, crowded houses which were set with old wooden doors. The stone of the lintels was worn in the middle, from centuries of use. The boys were sitting beside a hand—operated water pump. Water had spilled onto the streets—the boys might just have had a drink with their apple. The stone wall behind them had been repaired at least once, by darker stone which hadn't had time to fade. The kitten's string dangled in front of a withered and spindly rose bush still staked to its trellis. One small rose drooped from the top branch.
Here, too, though, were other photographs apparently sneaked from within a crowd. A mass grave, with bodies tossed in it. A blurred group of men half a block away were kicking something. A closer shot later showed that a elderly man had been kicked to death. Apparently Cetagandans didn't use energy weapons when brute force was enough. The dead man was sprawled just inside a small park. Old trees drooped over him. Most damning and fascinating of all were the photographer's notations on the back, in a quick firm handwriting, with names and other information.“Sosi and Dosia at the Lyceum. “Sosi, Dosia, and Katya with ghem-soldiers, May 30th.”“Lyev and Dimi eating an apple, September 13th.” “At the Count's Road entrance. Unknown man killed. September 20th. Three ghem soldiers”—the names were given. Miles didn't recognize any of them and was grateful for that.
Gregor grimly poked the pictures back into the envelope. "How did he get these? I thought they needed tripods."
"No, by then they had small box cameras. Easily carried, and some were very small, about two and a half inches by four inches. But there's more."
“Yes?”
Miles pulled out the other envelope he'd been saving, and shook a blue and white neckerchief onto the desk. “When the goat-herder found the box, the neckerchief was wrapped around something hard, covered by a piece of paper, which strictly forbade anyone to open it. 'Nyet. No light. Do not open.' I thought it might be more photographs, but I couldn't think why they'd be rolled up so tight.”
“So you opened them.” Gregor gave Miles—not a smile, but a slight crinkling of his eyes.
“I would never”—hotly denied Miles, while Gregor continued on, with a tiny trickle of amusement. “At least it wasn't a tank.”
“Gregor, that was almost thirty years ago. I don't do things like that now.”
The Emperor and his foster-brother sneered at each other.
“So what's in here? What are you hiding now?”
“I don't know about black and white photography, or any other kind, really,” admitted Miles. He got up and started pacing Gregor's private office, the one hung with modern paintings. Gregor had started his personal art collection before his majority, saying that he wanted to showcase men and women still working.
“So I asked Professor and Professora Vorthys about it. The Professora is really excited about these; she wants to see them mounted in a collection, once you've decided what you want to do with them. I can't see showing most of this stuff, frankly, still too appalling, but if anyone knows how to handle this, she would. She could make a tasteful showing with just some of them." Miles was almost gabbling. "Or she would be able to, if you wanted to do anything except burn them. It's your decision. But I don't think they should be burned, because that would mean there's no respecting of the original wishes, the desire, to keep a record, and we've never had any documentation about Vorkosigan Vashnoi at all, it shouldn't be suppressed--although it will stir up emotions and--"
Gregor. who'd seen all this hyperactivity and rapid speechifying many times before, pulled his foster-brother back to attention.
“What did they say? And stop pacing.”
“Sorry, sire. The Professora knows all about historical photography and almost snatched the bundle out of my hands the second I showed it to her. She demanded to know whether I had unwrapped it, and when I told her I hadn't, she said that by feel these seemed to be exposed film canisters which hadn't been—printed? Printed yet. They would have been destroyed by light.”
Miles was now on another energy-displacing activity, biting his fingernails. “So she had another professor, a lady in Arts, who does know all about this take them into a darkroom, and open them. She could make prints. She did make prints. They're in there.” He pushed another envelope across the desk.
Gregor opened this and pulled out another dozen photographs.
“This one's all white. And this one. There's supposed to be something here?”
“Keep looking,” Miles said hoarsely.
On the third picture was something both men recognized, although neither had ever seen it: a round, billowing cloud which was supported by another, vertical cloud pillar underneath. The mushroom cloud familiar to everyone.
Gregor's mouth dropped open and he gasped, one of the few times since since childhood Miles had seen him lose any control.
“He filmed the bombing? This is Vorkosigan Vashnoi?”
“At the instant it was put to the torch, yes.”
“I thought radiation destroyed film. How did he get these?”
“They seem, by the Professor and Professora's estimations, to have been made at a range of over ten miles. And they said, they SAID,” his voice growing higher and louder, “that the pictures couldn't have been made at all if the Cetagandans hadn't hit us with a baby bomb.”
“A baby bomb?”
“Yes, a tiny one as far as nuclear missiles go, but there was incendiary bombing, high explosives, prior to the nuclear device. The city was set on flame, then destroyed by bombing with conventional weapons. There must have been extremely hot bombs, hundreds of thousands, perhaps, to fuse the city into the glass ruins there today. Then the nuclear bomb, clearly redundant, but made especially dirty with long-acting isotopes, to be the cherry on the top of a very dirty sundae.”
Both men gazed at the rest of the display on the dark,sleek, ultra-modern desk.
Another way, Miles thought, that Gregor distinguished himself from all crusty old Emperors, was to decorate his offices and private residence with the most up to the minute, even radical, designs in furniture. Miles liked all the old furniture in Vorkosigan house better. Most people in the city felt the same, which was why the few modern designers were ecstatic over the Emperor's approval. The Emperor's new metal and black acrylic visitor chairs looked better than they felt. The seat and back were padded, but the arms weren't. The sled type design meant that they bounced a little with each movement of the visitor. It was probably a subtle attempt to make people want to leave without staying too long, a good thing for a man whose appointments were made at ten minute intervals.
The unknown photographer must have been a genius. He had whipped out picture after picture of the fleeing citizens of Vorkosigan Vashnoi: grandfathers pulling carts, women running with children at both hips, wheelbarrows with ancient women piled into them. Young boys the ages of the two with the apple carried bundles as big as themselves. One child—and it was now clear they were the same boys—helped the other reposition his pack. Clothing was spilling out of it. Two young women had turned to face the flame, hands held to their mouths. An archaic truck bounced over ruts, its bed crammed with more children and withered geriatrics. All of these were looking back to the city. A girl was standing up and pointing. She was holding her kitten under the other arm, and struggling to hold her hat in her fist. She was wearing a polka-dotted skirt which was clearly too big for her and a coat which was too small. Light hair streamed in front of her face.
“Wait, I thought this was a surprise attack. How did any anyone at all make it out?”
Miles pulled two final photographs from inside his gray suit.
“I think this may explain it.”
A large Barrayaran countrywoman stood next to a Cetagandan ghem-soldier. He was in full face paint, and his grin matched the woman's. The wedding dress strained across the woman's abdomen, and—there was the wedding veil, set on her head. One last photograph—the same woman, with a child about a year's age, had her head out of the window of the truck, face screwed up, apparently yelling at the person behind the camera.
Gregor touched the pictures, moving them slightly apart with the type of a stylus. He bent over them to peruse some detail, dark hair—now wait, there, just at each temple was a small patch of gray. Miles was admittedly cheered by this. His sire was getting old. Due to his chronic pain and the stress of his osteoarthritis, Miles, five years younger than Gregor, had had graying hair for years. He kept his eyes still and for once stopped eating his fingers. He'd had the better part of a week to review these images, after all.
At last Gregor sat back in his chair, and picked up his coffee. By now it was cold, and he put it down again, grimacing. Miles popped quickly over to the warming pot and poured two more for them.
“The Cetagandan warned his woman?”
“His wife. You can see that they married when she was pregnant. That he cared enough to marry her must have meant he cared about the child. I think that when the Cetas themselves had to evacuate, this one must have come to warn his wife. You can see that many of the people in the truck are those in the other pictures. I'm not sure how many people got out. I think this group is all from the same neighborhood. I even wonder whether the woman remarried the photographer. That last one looks like true love to me.” The one with the agitated woman yelling out the truck window. “That would explain why the photos ended up in the hill village, but no one knew about them. The couple wouldn't have wanted anyone to see this record soon. And then it was lost altogether.”
Miles thought grimly about some of his grandfather's more horrible forms of psychological warfare. Half-Cetagandan infants had been killed and their bodies exposed for the soldiers to see. This woman had a legal husband, which meant a legitimate child. Presumably even the General would have respected such a child. “What are you going to do with them?” This question had been the most stressful for him. You couldn't burn such a remarkable collection, even if you could hardly bear to look at them.
"I know what I'd like to do with them.” Gregor got up, carrying his cup with him, to peer out the long windows at the city below. It was a beautiful morning in early spring. The sky was dark blue. Wind snapped the flags and spurred the river into small waves. Only since visiting Earth had Miles been aware that Barrayar's sun was smaller and weaker than Earth's golden one. He could call back that color now if he wanted to. The Firsters had been extremely lucky to be rewarded a planet as near perfect as this one. Too bad it was also attractive to other races like the Cetagandans.
Gregor continued with his back to Miles.
“I'd like to send them to Komarr, and run them around that news banner they've got in the main square of Solstice. Right across from the memorial. I know the Massacre was horrible; no one married to Laisa could forget that, but the Komarrans have such damned selective memories. They lost two hundred, innocents surely, but there are twenty anonymous men in that one mass grave by itself. At least the Komarrans could put names to their lost, and mourn them. We had the funeral pyre, but don't know who the death offering was burned for.
He returned to Miles.
“I might get a Komarran expert”— “Duv” they both said.
“Yes, I suppose it will have to be Duv. There truly is no one else, and if there were anybody else, it would go to him, anyway, because he would have seniority.”
“Can I come too?” Miles said quickly, aware of how he sounded, a kid pestering two big brothers to let him share their adventure. He pushed on. “I found this, after all. And this is my city. I own it outright. Grandfather gave it to me in his will, along with all the other radioactive acreage. I might as well get something out of it.”
Gregor rubbed his nose, smiling for the first time today. "Yes, and you're my Auditor on the spot, aren't you? How about”—
Miles started to protest, then realized he'd been given exactly what he wanted.
—Gregor said, “you working this up for me?”
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