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The soft hiss of the hypospray, like exhalation.
His son's eyes had closed as soon as he brought out the injector, but now after a moment's stillness they opened. Ser Galen, of course, had conducted any number of interrogations in his long war, and so he was prepared for the near-flaccidity of his son's face, the sweet indifference with which David's gaze landed on him and then-- as lightly-- slid away. Nevertheless he was aware of a thread of memory, long untouched, which led him windingly to images of David's brother as a child, and to the clone.
David himself had not looked like this even in boyhood; Galen thought, in bitter humor, that he had always had a penetrating glance.
He would have preferred a weakness of the eyesight to the kind of blindness which he now understood his adult son to suffer from. That dark stare, so like his mother's: was it turned inward, that the only thing David could see was himself, his petty trials, his perverse hopes? You left little enough to remember you by, were almost his first words, when they met for lunch in the sunlight. As if Galen had not risked everything to ensure that his son would inherit his fire. Why else had he pretended to die, except to secure David's love? There were other means of escape. But he had been so afraid that David would notice the man behind the revolt; that David, nearly grown, would perceive the weakness of the flesh and so reject cause's strength.
Unnatural boy, to find even the dead an inadequate anchor. To have risen so high in an enemy sea, as if he were not tethered to the silt. Yet here he was, looking at his father with neutral pleasure, and Galen was reminded that if David had been less craven he would likewise have been less useful; even betrayal could be a sacrifice of sorts. There was hope for his son's busy brain if not his poisoned heart.
"Describe the security procedures for entry to and exit from the Barrayaran embassy," he said. He put his hands together in his lap, and let his fingers carve a cage from air.
***
"What's he doing?" said the clone. They were watching the feed from David's cell. Quite a show, for a one-man act.
"Monologuing," said Galen. On the screen, David tried to pull one of the benches from its setting. It was hard to see his hands from the lone camera angle they had access to, but Galen's fingers curled anyway, an imitation the more perfect for its uncertainty. Should he have chosen another room? He didn't want David wasting himself on melodramatic struggle-- he wanted David to sit, and think, and see.
"Family trait?" the clone asked, then flinched at Galen's look. "Just a joke," it said, angrily. It glanced away from Galen and the monitor, but its wayward regard no sooner brushed against any part of the room than it fled from the touch, until at last it settled for staring at its own hands, as though they were more likely than the walls to offer it release. Sullen, it looked more like the Butcher than his circus-show spawn. How many vids had they watched together of Miles Vorkosigan, mocking his enemies because he dared not rage?
"…and did you ever think," David was saying, on the screen, his speech punctuated by rattling metal as he strained to shift the bench, "that maybe--" jerk-- "the real reason--" jerk-- "I threw myself at Vorkosigan's feet--" a mighty heave, this-- "was that I felt a certain sympathy?"
Galen... stopped. Breathing, yes, and something else. Constructing counterarguments, call it. Beside him the clone shifted uneasily in its seat.
"Thought that'd get your attention," said Duv Galeni, with a cadaverous smile.
Though there was no way he could know what they were doing, or even who was watching, or whether anyone was watching at all, he climbed onto the abused bench and stared into the light, a man assured of his audience. Almost unconsciously his hands went to smooth his white shirtfront.
"Don't tell me it's never occurred to you," he continued, his fingers stilling on cloth. "To a historian's eye, the parallels are compelling. And we are both historians, father, whatever else we have become. In you it's a flaw. It makes you inclined to think of the future as writ. Me, I prefer to call it writeable."
"How very neat," Galen said aloud, not meaning to but not, once he had said it, unwilling. "To relegate me so deftly to the status of madman and academic in one swoop."
The clone laughed. His son laughed too, in eerie synchrony, with none of the clone's heavy mirth.
"Really I should thank you," he said. "Without you I would never have discovered my gift for oratory. Perhaps if you let me live I'll quit the Service and become a Barrayaran propagandist-- you really can't afford to let me live, sir. Think of the pamphlets."
"Overwritten as hell," the clone murmured.
Galen wanted to break his skull. It was an old, familiar desire, coursing through him simple as lust, less a hunger for substance than a need for release. "Leave me," he said, simply.
The clone glowered. "And if I don't?" it said, its head still turned towards the monitor, where David had gotten back down to sit and was sketching out his proposed career as a writer of textbooks that would glorify every Barrayaran military campaign from the Time of Isolation onward as a prime example of the intrinsic dignity of the human spirit.
"Then you won't get your private interview with the captain," said Galen. Before this would not have been leverage; now, just as obviously, it was. The clone's face darkened like paper staining. "Sir," he said, or possibly Ser; he rose and marched out.
David was running down. It had to be obvious, even to him, that no flimsy could compare, as a weapon, with the mere fact of his service. Galen wondered whether, if he had been left his military jacket, he would have tried to hang himself with it. The final subjugation of his selfhood before Barrayar. That was a bad thought.
"However, I was speaking of myself and the Prime Minister," said his son. He leaned back against the wall, wrapping his arms around himself in a parody of relaxation. "Parallels. He was a second son too, you know. The spare. Until they came for his brother, and he joined the revolution."
A thoughtful expression formed on his face, then settled there. His features were distorted by the fish-eye lens, eyes wide and glossed with light, but even so Galen could see that he was tired.
"Mad Emperor Yuri. There was a fellow you wouldn't like to cross, but Vorkosigan did. Good training, I suppose, for his later endeavors-- and a little inspiration too. I imagine it's hard, with an example like that, to massacre anyone and not wonder if you're up to snuff. Should you have raped the children first? And so on."
It was barely evening out the window. Dusk, like the blue shadow of the sea, had just begun to invade London's sky.
"But Yuri fell. Thanks to Aral Vorkosigan's father, mostly, a tough old son of a bitch if every there was one. He knew a bit about guerilla fighting, and prolonged, underground wars. Though of course he had whole mountaintops to retreat to. No domes. But for his son-- his second son, his newly minted heir-- he got him the first cut, the very first stab at Yuri's corrupt old meat. You have to say this for the Barrayarans: they've never had any illusions about their supreme ruler's person. They've never even pretended to think that anyone couldn't be killed. As they proved, of course, with us, later-- not surrender, nor any other acknowledged weakness, will turn bullets away. But they proved it with their own emperors first."
He was quiet for a while. Galen suspected he had run to the ends of his breath. It was taking a toll on him, visibly: captivity, and interrogation, and the endless light.
"Is that what you wanted for me?" he asked, no longer speaking to the bulb, his head almost resting on his breast. "The first cut?"
It was for the best that he had sent the clone away, Galen knew. Still he regretted it a little, watching his son fall into a heavy doze while upright on the bench. If he had let the clone remain, he might have made some little quip, here, about the first skin patch, and the patent originality of his plan for Vorkosigan's demise.
He let it lie. There was work to be done.
***
And, earliest--
The location they had agreed upon was outdoors, sunny, but not quite public-- blocked off from all main thoroughfares by ancient and largely abandoned buildings, a confusion of glass. A café, he'd called it, and a café it was, though run for years by his branch of the Resistance. His Resistance, call it, since its roots had so long ago gone to rot.
David was waiting for him when he came, pacing between the little wrought-iron tables. He wore his uniform. Galen looked at him intently, torn between avarice and hate, all that evidence of growth clothed in proof of abasement. David was looking back at him with something of the same concentration. "My god," his son said, and just as over the comconsole he sounded not at all like the boy Galen had known. His voice had only just begun breaking when Komarr's last hope of open revolt was crushed. In the years since he had grown dry. "Father. It's really you."
"You wouldn't have come here had it not been," Galen observed, and David's mouth twisted in pale irony.
"No," he agreed, "more fool me. My levers are in entirely the wrong places, it appears."
"Sit," said Galen. There was hesitation, but a minute later they were both seated at the closest table, the heat beating on their bent heads. "They do a very good croissant," Galen offered, tentatively, trying to remember what David liked, what David ate, if any of that could be relevant after all these years. He had tracked the sickening progression of his son's career without thinking to do the same for his tastes.
David gave him a weary smile and picked up the menu. Wrong, then, or unpersuasive. But after another moment those brown eyes flicked up again. In the unceasing sunlight they parsed to a kind of amber.
"This isn't quite how I pictured our reunion unfolding," David admitted. "I had no idea there would be so many types of baguette."
Galen laughed, and thought about the stunner in his pocket, and that sticky amber. In his son's eyes he could see himself reflected fragilely. An insect; even a monster, trapped by freezing out of his proper time. It was disorienting, he found, to be mirrored by someone who bore no resemblance to yourself. No-- worse than disorienting. Did it suspend the heart? He was caught-- unable even to speak-- through silence he fought desperately, and for air.
"Father?" said David. His face was unreadable. "Listen to me," said Galen, "you will listen to me," his own voice tender, his lungs expanding behind the bars of his ribs.