"Want to bet?"

"Not a chance."

Ivan sighs. "I don't suppose there's any way we can get him before he gets us."

"Nothing springs to mind. Keep your eyes open."

"...Now?" he murmurs.

"No. Meet me at the west entrance in thirty minutes."

"I may not be able to achieve precision," he cautions.

"I'm not far enough off the ground to rub shoulders with haut-anyones, Ivan. I just happen to be well-placed to help save their empire..."

"Fast-penta is illegal here for anyone but the police and the imperials, isn't it?" inquires Miles.

Miles counts the passing minutes in his head as he and Ivan move on to admire some less animate floral displays.

Two of Ivan's ghem lady-friends ooze up, flirt with Ivan principally and Miles as an afterthought to resolve the quandary of their limited Ivan supply, and smilingly drag both Barrayarans towards the lady Benello's sister's exhibit.

He finds himself strangely resistant to Lady Benello's charms. Ivan can have all the oozing ghem-women his heart desires; Miles's heart has loftier goals. He doesn't quite go as far as physically stepping away when the lady chooses to walk beside him, but he responds no more than politely to her flirting.

Miles takes a sniff that might be construed as polite investigation of the fabric's scent. In fact he is looking for just about anything his nose can tell him - surely there is no subtle drug concealed in the exhibit, since Yenaro is standing right there inhaling regularly - then again, he drank the zlati ale, too - and there is something familiar in the air, if only Miles could separate it out from the dozens of perfumes wafting from the ghem-gaggle and assorted nearby entries...

The sight of the pitcher closes the circuit of memory. Miles comes on full alert. "Grab that pitcher, Ivan!" he says urgently. "Don't let him spill a drop!"

Ivan obeys, gingerly, self-consciously, and - when he smells what's in the carpet - furiously: "Asterzine!"

Ivan pulls carpet-fibers, takes Yenaro not terribly gently by the arm, and follows Miles to an empty nook a few spaces down, where he takes up a forbidding position between Miles, Yenaro, and the pathway.

Yenaro, making impotent protests and trying without success to get Ivan's hand off his arm, eventually obeys, cut off mid-vague-threat by the bright flash of heat.

"And that was only a gram of the stuff, if that. Multiply this," he gestures at the scorch mark on the quasi-marble tile, "out to the full mass of your little carpet bomb - about five kilos, I'd guess. But you probably have a better idea. I imagine you carried it in here personally. You've obviously never had military training, or you would've recognized it yourself, by the smell—sensitized asterzine. You can dye it to almost any colour, mold it to almost any shape, and until it meets the right catalyst it's totally, harmlessly inert. But as soon as they make contact," scorch mark. "Which is what would have happened to you, me, Ivan, the ladies, the exhibit, and anyone else who happened to be passing by, if you'd dumped that pitcher like you planned."

"This is - some sort of trick," Yenaro insists.

"Of course it is. But this time the joke is on you. Tell me, what effect did your good friend the haut-governor say this was going to have?"

"Allowing me and Ivan to stumble through the rest of the exhibition blind drunk, I suppose. Charming. Did you come pre-antidoted?"

"That first night, at the Marilacan embassy," says Miles. "When I was burned - you weren't entirely faking all that apologetic fluttering, were you? You didn't expect that level of... severity."

Miles leaves the pitcher on the floor next to the scorch mark and stands, gesturing to a little bench tucked against one side of the nook. "I've got something to tell you, Lord Yenaro, and I think you'd better be sitting down."

"This isn't just a few cute tricks played on the unsuspecting envoys of an old enemy," Miles says quietly. "You are a pawn in a treasonous plot against your own Empire. The last such pawn I know about was Ba Lura - I assume you've heard how it ended up. You were all set to play out the same pattern, just now." He gestures at the scorch mark for emphasis.

"That - that can't be," says Yenaro after a silent moment. "It's too crude, it would have started a blood feud between his clan and those of the - bystanders."

"No," Miles corrects. "It would have started a feud between their clans and yours. Because who would be around to say you hadn't set the trap yourself, and then incompetently walked into it with the rest of us? It would be the obvious conclusion, from the evidence available. A very elegant way for your backer to dispose of you at exactly the moment you ceased to be useful."

"The Ba Lura..." says Yenaro slowly. "Committed... suicide."

"No. It was murdered. Your Imperial Security is already headed down that trail. They'll reach the end eventually; I'm just not sure it will be soon enough."

"So I judged," he says, nodding. "For the sake of my curiosity - what were you promised, in return for all this? Or was the scheme its own reward?"

"Yes," says Miles. "I imagine you would have been. Which governor was it, by the way?"

"...Haut Ilsum Kety."

"Thank you." He checks the time. "God, I'm late - you'll have to take it from here, Ivan. Good day, Lord Yenaro, and a much better one than you were meant to have."

Miles nods shortly to both of them and heads off to the appointed meeting place.

"Yes, in fact. Lord Yenaro, the architect of my embarrassing accident, was all set to dump a pitcher of catalyst on a lovely rug made of five kilos of military explosive, cleverly disguised. I took him aside and demonstrated why this would have been a bad idea, using a thread from the rug and a drop from the pitcher, and he was very forthcoming in the ensuing conversation." Miles takes a breath. "It's Kety."

"Okay," breathes the bubble. "Excellent -" She drops her shield, and proffers one of the two flimsies of ship-map in her hand. "There's his ship's model mapped out. I have the ba uniform for you too, and a device that will detect the old-style power supply for the Key, but perhaps that should be transferred when you have a clearer idea of your plan."

"Yes." He accepts the map and starts folding it carefully for concealment in his pocket. "Not until the very moment when I'm about to hare off and board a shuttle - and I can't, right now, I'd be missed too fast. We'll have to arrange something later that'll give me more lead time, if your Handmaiden can manage it. Old-style power supply, eh? Very unique, not likely to be casually duplicated in somebody's antique hair dryer? What kind of range does your detector have, do you know?"

"Short. Twenty feet, if that, less with something in the way. But it won't pick up any hairdryers."

"All right. Convey my thanks and my information to the Handmaiden - and I think I'd better go before someone decides I'm officially missing. My security happens to be particularly on edge today." He hesitates a bare instant, then blurts, "It was nice seeing you again, milady."

"Likewise. - By the way, Lisbet knows about our idea. She guessed, though I'd have had to tell her anyway. She says when she can she'll put in a word with the Emperor."

"Bye," she calls, the bubble-distortion affecting the word halfway through.

He continues to grin foolishly all the way back to the exhibition.

Where Ivan catches him almost immediately. "There you are, where the hell did you go?"

"To report our new information to my haut-contact," he says in an undertone, trying for 'serious' and not really making it more than a third of the way there.

"And get drunk with your the-haut-whoever, what's gotten into y- oh my god, tell me I'm wrong."

"I was not getting drunk, shut up."

"No, that is no longer my guess, tell me you don't fancy yourself in love with a haut-lady, the haut-ladies are off-limits, Miles."

"Haut-ladies as a category, yes. This particular one as much as said outright that if I bring this operation off, she's going to petition to be awarded to me. Which isn't quite how they usually do it, but obviously she has connections, that's how we met in the first place."

"Tell me you don't fancy a haut-lady in love with you."

"Thank you, Ivan," he grits, "I'm perfectly aware of how unlovable I am. She at least definitely seems to like my style better than what she gets at home."

"Oh, God, Miles, I didn't mean about - I'm talking about haut-ladies, not about you, how do you know you're not being - conned, suborned, set up?"

"Because everything I'm doing is exactly the same thing I'd be doing anyway. Except I'd be grinning less."

"You're impossible," says Ivan. "Anyway - Vorreedi got back barely a minute after you scarpered - he talked to Yenaro. The pro who the perimeter fellow saw coming - they caught him and fast-penta'd him but didn't keep him in custody - was there to make sure Yenaro didn't leave alive. Yenaro had a ten-minute head start till the fast-penta wore off and got out. Vorreedi's certainly going to want to talk to you - I told him you had enough sense of proportion not to have tried to put a hit on Yenaro about your legs, anyway."

"Well, thanks."

"You're welcome. I hope you know what you're doing - rather, I wish you knew what you were doing."

"Don't we all," he mutters, in a rare moment of honesty on that subject.

"Anyway. I'm supposed to be looking for you. Let's say I found you. We're going back to the embassy."

"Sounds like a fine plan to me."

For which Miles is deeply grateful.

It makes for a quiet ride - but as promised, once they're there, Ivan scurries up to his room, and Vorreedi wants to see Miles in his office - "after you are recovered from your misadventure, perhaps tomorrow morning".

"What's climbed up your trouser leg, then?" asks Ivan, when he's let Miles into the room.

"Dag Benin. Here. Asking to talk to both of us, with Vorreedi sitting in. Get up, get dressed, come downstairs, let me do the talking, back up whatever I say."

"Oh, God. What now?" asks Ivan in tones of despair.

"Obviously Benin finally traced Ba Lura to our little encounter at the pod dock, and now he wants to ask us pointed questions. I propose to spill very nearly all of the beans - just without mentioning the Great Key or anything that followed from it. No haut shenanigans whatsoever. Bring the nerve disruptor - I might want to let him have it as evidence, in fact I probably will - but don't pull it out until I tell you, in case I change my mind. This is going to be a little delicate. I don't want to obstruct his investigation, it'll suit me just fine if he nails the governor for murder, but I don't want him to stumble on what's really going on. Too high a risk something will leak before we're ready to move."

"And then whatever would happen to your imaginary romance, perish the thought," says Ivan, though he's already fetching out and pocketing the disruptor.

"I'm less concerned with imaginary romance, more concerned with setting off a civil war that ends with the Cetagandan Empire split into multiple scrambling squabbling conquest-happy pieces," says Miles.

"Do you realize how pissed Vorreedi and the ambassador are going to be when they ultimately find out, well, everything?"

"Vorreedi's under control, at least for now; I've got him convinced I'm on a secret mission from Simon Illyan."

"...Which means you aren't. I knew it," groans Ivan.

"Only because he didn't know about any of this in time to give me a secret mission," says Miles. "I'm hoping to produce results he'll find hard to argue with. If I don't, we will all have bigger problems."

"I'm pretty sure no matter what Illyan knew he wouldn't be authorizing you to woo haut-ladies. I'd apologize for being hung up on that part but you think you are wooing a haut-lady."

"Honestly, it's less of a romance and more of an assisted escape. Besides, what's he going to do if I pull it off? Confiscate her? Not bloody likely. Illyan has more sense than that."

Ivan shakes his head, muttering about the time they were eight and Miles had him and Elena dig a tunnel, which collapsed, but he pulls his half-boots on and pats the pocket with the nerve disruptor.

Miles growls at this reminder. Down to the conference room they go.

Ivan produces it, with the ginger motions of someone producing a deadly weapon in the presence of people who might take exception to it. He avoids eye contact with the colonel and Vorreedi both.

"Huh," says Miles. "Garden party - could be an oblique reference to the Celestial Garden. This might be my next contact. This had better be my next contact, because we're going."

"It's not my first choice of how to spend the evening."

"Too bad. I might need you."

"Ugh," says Ivan. "Garden party. Fine. Too bad she can't just get the gene bank off his ship. Then he'd have the key but no lock. That'd fox him good, I bet."

"That... is an interesting idea," says Miles. "Well done, Ivan. I'll suggest it to Lisbet. We still need the Key back, obviously, but that would certainly put a lid on any mischief he might get up to while he has it."

"Mm," says Miles, dropping Ivan's arm once General Chilian and his wife are out of sight. The Barrayarans proceed onward. Miles tries to analyze this new wrinkle. Perhaps the couple's very proximity to Kety suggests that they are not part of some scheme - the governor seems to favour disposable human pawns, used once and then untraceably discarded. But two instances of this pattern hardly make it unshakeable. He wishes he had something, anything, solid to go on in all this.

"Of course," he says, preempting any differing answers that, say, Vorob'yev might have wanted to give. "Where? For how long?"

"Not far - about an hour, all told."

"And if you take longer than an hour?" asks Ivan, drawling only slightly to indicate what he imagines what might take place over more than an hour. Not that he really expects it, but Miles dragged him along to this stupid party and ought to be teased.

Miles shoots Ivan a repressive look. "Wait," he suggests, and turns to follow the haut Linyabel.

"Er... moderately," he says, with a somewhat wary look. "Why?"

"The easiest way to smuggle you out of this party is in my bubble gliding off the edge of the roof - it's safe, but it does involve going off the edge of the roof. It'll be much easier for your people to figure out that you've gone and how far if we have to go by lift-tube, but of course it will be easier still if we go off the edge of the roof and you scream or something."

"I see." He eyes the edge of the roof. "I promise not to scream, then."

"All right then. Sitting on the armrest is probably the most physically comfortable, but if you're going to need to close your eyes - I could probably see over your head to navigate all right even if you were on my lap."

"Er—and you don't mind—? All right," he says, feeling more glad of his small stature than he ever has in his life.

"It's fine," she assures him. "But hurry up before someone walks by."

He nods, and arranges himself in her lap as quickly as possible while still being careful not to introduce any stray knees or elbows into the equation or sit on anything she doesn't want sat.

As soon as he's within the bubble's sphere and no longer standing on the floor, she puts it back up. The view out is clear, if slightly filmy. She bobs out of their little hiding-place. If she is perturbed by having a lap occupant she doesn't show it.

Her lap occupant seeks desperately for some topic of conversation to distract himself from unauthorized sensory enjoyments. He comes up with, "I saw the haut Vio d'Chilian here, staring at the Celestial Garden in... what I would call an unnervingly hateful way. The more I think about it, the more I can't help feeling that might be relevant."

Miles shuts his eyes and hangs onto the armrests and vents a very, very quiet "eeeeeee".

"Oh good. I suppose their scanners either aren't sophisticated enough to pick up on your passenger, or are too polite to look?"

"I don't think they scan me at all. They know I have to be a haut-lady, the chairs are locked to particular users. And I live here."

"That falls under 'too polite to look' as far as I'm concerned. Why am I here, by the way? I assume the Handmaiden hasn't found a way to teleport me into orbit and back..."

"...I think I would rather not be in your lap when you take the bubble down," he agrees, and climbs carefully up to perch on an armrest.

"Lord Vorkosigan," says Lisbet. "Please repeat for the consorts the story of how you acquired the fake Key, subsequent events as they seem relevant to you, and any new information you have gathered or guessed since we last communicated."

"It may very well be," Lisbet agrees.

"I assume her departure was involuntary, but how involuntary?" inquires Linyabel. "Where on the spectrum between - she had plenty of warning and vaguely admired the general before his award was issued, versus she despised him from the start but had already turned down her first two or three possible marriages and was eventually driven out by her constellation closing ranks and had to leave a love-poem behind in so doing...?"

"She volunteered, and certainly wasn't leaving behind friends of any kind; in fact, as far as I know she has never had any. But by the same token she had no particular admiration for the general."

"There's a thin veneer of voluntarism around it," Linyabel explains in an undertone to Miles. "The ones who are going to have to go eventually know it and agree to the next palatable possibility to come up. If she were in denial she wouldn't have gone with the first one offered her."

"'She had no friends' seems like a good reason to have volunteered; 'she has no friends' seems like a good reason to have started regretting it," speculates Miles.

"Indeed," agrees Lisbet.

"What exactly are we suspecting her of here, besides this regret?"

"The original plan called for the consorts to take the usual place of the Empress in overseeing the new copies of the haut genome. If the traitorous governor means to make himself an Emperor, he will require an Empress for that purpose, and the haut Nadina is not available. Who, then, is his candidate? Vio d'Chilian seems like an excellent guess."

"Did she have the opportunity to help him, or is this about what her plans for the future may have been? For that matter, are there any other suspects to be had?"

"Was she one of the six haut-women who passed through the rotunda around the time of Ba Lura's death?"

"As the wife of his ghem-general, she certainly has plenty of opportunity to associate with him," says Lisbet. "Suspects... are difficult to come by. Haut Vio cannot of course have visited the rotunda in her bubble, since she no longer has one... but if she had managed to make or steal one with an electronic signature that the security system would not find remarkable, I would not necessarily know about it. Ghem-Colonel Benin should. He didn't give any hint of interviewing a woman who claimed not to have entered the rotunda at all?"

"Indeed not. He specifically claimed to have talked to all six and found nothing worth mentioning except that none of them saw a body. So... he was lying, or he was somehow deceived, or I was wrong about how the body got into the rotunda. I think I'll go with 'he was somehow deceived'," says Miles. "How easy would it be to steal a haut-bubble, by the way?"

"Difficult. Perhaps not impossible. The float-chairs authenticate their occupants by means of a genetic scan, but not a complete one; it would be possible for haut Vio to happen to duplicate all the relevant gene factors of some other haut-woman, and steal her bubble that way. I could double-check that, if, of course, I had the Great Key. Unfortunately I don't have a record of haut Vio's genome lying around, or I could check against manual scans of at least all the haut-women in this room."

"So maybe she stole someone's bubble, we don't know whose, and snuck in, and got the records of her visit erased somehow, we don't know how, before anyone had occasion to look them up. And the ceremonial guards were sleeping on the job. Right," sighs Miles.

"I don't suppose whoever designed Vio in the first place might know who she's closely related to off the top of her head and be available to interview?"

"At this point I think we need all the information we can get, however faint the hope thereof," says Miles.

"Agreed."

"And, um... I have a suggestion," he says. "If you haven't already considered it - could you recall the gene banks? That would at least prevent Kety from actually getting away with his miniature-empire plan."

Linyabel, meanwhile, is looking up Vio's designer with her pen. "The haut Vio is alas orphaned on that side of the family," she says, spinning the display to show the file she's called up: the lady has been dead for five years.

"Of course," sighs Lisbet.

"Am I still going to be retrieving the Key for you? I'll be honest, I'm not really sure what your other resources are as far as field agents. Or if you even have any. But it seems like you value the Key very highly, and besides my personal sympathy for that, I value not being framed for its theft pretty highly myself."

"Once I've discussed the recall of Kety's gene bank with haut Nadina, I'll send for you again. Your schedule is empty of public events tomorrow, but it should be relatively easy to pull you away from the Ceremony of Singing Open the Great Gates the day after, if I plan carefully and wait until a later stage of the event. I think that, regardless of what Nadina and I do or do not decide in the interim, we'll need to make our move then. The schedule is too tight otherwise."

"I... agree, milady," says Miles. "Is that all for now, then?"

"Yes. The haut Linyabel will return you to your point of origin."

"In my experience, haut Lisbet, we can never get back to exactly where we started, no matter how hard we try."

"A fact of engineering for which I am somewhat grateful," Miles murmurs as he carefully climbs up to perch on the armrest.

She makes straight for the side entrance of the Garden. "There's a car waiting, but I think we're going to be a bit late relative to my first estimate," she notes.

"Damn," sighs Miles. "Well, hopefully not late enough for them to send any form of security after me."

"Hopefully. We'll go up to the party the same way you got in originally and I'll let you out in some unobserved nook, anyway, you could cover for a few minutes by pretending to have been unable to find them within the space of the roof."

"Thanks for the ride, by the way."

He shhs and stays shhd.

Once they're in the lift tube quite alone, she says, "It's convenient that all the bubbles are white this week. Well, conducive to stealth, anyway, I suppose it helps all sides."

"Convenient because...? I know nothing about the social standards of bubble colours," says Miles. "Is it customary to keep to a consistent hue or set of hues? Is it noticeable and obnoxious to match someone else's, or difficult to pick something relatively generic and anonymous?"

"There are conflicting standards and ladies fuss at each other about them when there's nothing else to do. Some people have favorite color patterns - it's usually a shift over some period of time between two or three colors, not a static one. Some coordinate with their clothes, or choose hour to hour at random or based on obscure criteria. People vary in how much they care about being matched. Usually I just slide between robin's egg blue and turquoise every four seconds and people know it's me; someone could copy me, I suppose, but I wouldn't care unless they were going to further lengths to impersonate me."

"I see. And I suppose those electronic signatures everyone keeps talking about would serve to resolve identity disputes, at least once somebody had a scanner pointed at them."

"Yes. The bubbles aren't actually principally intended for identity concealment, but everyone's polite enough about them that they do it anyway."

"What are they principally intended for? Personal defense...? Seems a little extreme. But then, I suppose if I had a sociological excuse to bubble around in a personal force-shield most of the time, I might take advantage."

"Mm," says Miles, having nothing more insightful to offer.

Here is the top of the building. She floats out of the lift tube, to a nook, makes sure no one's looking, and then says, "Till next time," in a low voice and lets the bubble down.

Miles hops off her armrest, scurries out of bubble-range, and bows.

She smiles a little - and rebubbles, and bobs out of the nook.

Ivan looks inquisitively at his cousin.