vor | Second Cream Cake: [Action/Written]

It’s a bad night.

Gregor hasn’t slept. The boredom in this place leaves him too much time to think, and his thoughts revolve around what he learned on Komarr. Alone at night, wondering when his genes will start generating monsters in his head. Prince Serg, the longed-for father, the hero of the last generation, also a sadist who tortured pregnant women. Great Uncle Yuri, Mad Emperor Yuri, slaughterer of almost all his relatives. Ezar, who married his own cousin, Yuri’s sister, and produced Serg. Genes doubled and redoubled, madness folded over itself and compressed into Gregor’s own flesh, sleeping, latent. When will it raise its head?

He wishes and doesn’t wish for Aral Vorkosigan, Prime Minister and Puppet Master, foster-father and cousin, former regent and perpetual mentor. Aral would have answers, but Aral is the last person Gregor wants to hear them from. Aral led the retreat from Escobar after Serg’s death, then taken his place in the Imperium and at home until Gregor reached his majority. The truth about Serg can’t be heard from many others. Why has it never been revealed to him? Why didn’t they warn him of this latent threat? Did they think he would go mad simply from the revelation?

I am glass. Drop me and break me.

He finds himself leaning out the third-story window and wondering if it’s high enough. It’s the thought of Cordelia that makes him back away and close the window after several minutes of leaning. Cordelia, wrapping a protective arm around him after he lit his mother’s funeral offering.

Are they going to kill me, too?

No. I won’t let them.

Cordelia was far more a mother to him than Aral was a father. Still, unlike with Serg, Gregor remembers Kareen. She was murdered when he was five, but he still remembers her, maybe because his subconscious has to hold on to all the memories of his mother that it can. Cordelia had been her friend. Cordelia had tried to save her. Cordelia had taken care of her son. But he still remembers a time when someone else was his mother. He still knows he can’t compete with Cordelia’s actual son.

All the same, she might be the only person who loves him for himself. To her Betan mind, all these formal titles are sort of an optical illusion. And she’d be the first to point out that pitching himself over the side would only make him wake up a week later with his life even more in shambles than before. It doesn’t make him stop wanting to test whether or not he’d really come back, if even that escape is closed to him.

He pries himself away from the window. He should go do something else. Not get drunk, because that would make it worse. But it’s three in the morning and there’s not much else to do except wait till dawn. And that’s what he does, curled on his side on the couch, until the sky begins to lighten and he finally falls asleep.

He dreams about Serg melting the skin off one side of Captain Negri’s body with a plasma arc, mouth open with pleasure.

[He wakes up early in the afternoon and doesn’t feel better until after he’s taken a shower. It takes a lot of motivation to go outside at all. He spends a little time in the stables just to remember the smell of horses even if there aren’t any that belong to him. Riding. That’s the only thing he can think of that’s worth going outside for, and he can’t do it.

He tries the library. Barrayaran history won’t hold any answers about Serg, so maybe Escobaran. He doesn’t find Escobaran history. He does, however, find some psychology books that he winds up taking with him to the tea shop on a whim. There, he sits and sips his cuppa while devouring one book about mental illness by a supposedly distinguished author. There’s comfort in looking at it from a curable, clinical perspective. Most of the actual content matter he’s already learned at Cordelia’s knee.

Feeling like he’s doing something helps. He starts to look up more information about missions. He wants at least one horse, dammit, and the currency here seems to be these points earned by doing favors for the Malnosso. Maybe during a research mission, he could even learn something about what happened at Escobar.

He has a plan. Horse, psychology, and Escobar. And after the first horse? Maybe another. Maybe he’ll fill the stables so people can travel more easily within the enclosure. It would be good to have horses around. Maybe he could take up a career as a groom. Ma and Da (Illyan and Aral) would have conniptions. Cordelia would say it’s good for him.

He writes:]

Would anyone ride horses if we had them?

Also: I would like to speak with anyone who has died here and come back, if anyone would be willing to speak of it.

-GVB

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

And many elsewhere. [Something about a written conversation is less exhausting than the usual chit-chat, but this has been going on for a while. He's going to use the old trick of saying just enough to keep the other person going.]

[It really is, which is why Leonhardt doesn't understand why more don't do written entries. It also has an advantage of being able to hide identity if one wishes.]

I gather then you have had to listen to many lectures as well?

I have been spared that here.

[Back home, on the other hand...]

Which tells me that you are new here then. I'd say welcome to Luceti, but it really isn't a place very many would wish to be.

It's not as bad as I was expecting.

Only because there has not yet been an experiment. The last one ended right before new arrivals started showing up.

What happened during that one?

To put it in simple terms, it was one that changes people's professions and then they would have urges to do things like they would do in that profession. An honest person could become a thief and start stealing from everyone to give an example that did happen.

But it didn't last?

They never do.

That's worrying.

It is a good thing. Would you want to be stuck as a princess for more than a week?

[Not impressed. Been stuck as an emperor since the age of five.]

It's worrying that things snap back and forth like that. No residual effects to speak of. I keep thinking it all has to have a cumulative effect.

[It's more the princess part, as in, wearing a dress and being a stereotypical damsel in distress when one is used to doing things for themselves. It would be like suddenly becoming an empress rather than an emperor.]

How much did you understand of the Guide's explanation of Shifts?

[He got lots of feeling like a damsel in distress when his foster-brother arranged games of pretend when they were kids. Miles was always the loyal vassal commanding his troops (Elena and Ivan) and saving the life of his liege, who solemnly bestowed honors upon him at the end. Heck, on the run from his own security? Yeah, he can hardly feel lower. Empress might be a refreshing change. Disappoints fewer people.]

I understood all of it.

[Well, definitely not refreshing to Leonhardt who is far more like a knight or bodyguard, so going to defenseless is a major blow to him.]

Good, then I don't have to explain that much. The Malnosso are desperate. They are trying to figure out what brings us here and what returns us. The experiments allow them to gain a greater understanding of Shifting in hopes that they will be able to return home within this lifetime when many of them have been here for multiple lifetimes.

I understand. It's the psychological impact I wonder about. Repeated brainwashing has to have consequences.

As far as we can tell, that is why they don't do it for very long. But it does have impacts, even if it is just annoying us to no end.

It's not a matter of the length of the experiments at all. It's the thoroughness. Back and forth like that, even once would be enough to scramble someone's brains.

I've been affected by them five times now. There are others who have been around far longer and have been affected by far more. It is no different than using some magic to increase strength or speed or add protection for a short time.

[Gregor blinks very slowly at the journal, making the camera capture a somewhat odd expression.]

What do you mean by magic?

[Leonhardt had a feeling he was going to get a reaction like that. It seemed worlds with technology didn't have any sort of magic and his own world was unique in that it did have both and that technology brought about magic.]

It's another thing that is common in this place. It is used to describe the phenomenon of making something appear from nothing. Like someone making a fireball appear to attack an enemy without a need for any matches or fuel to start the fire. Many of the worlds that have this also have monsters that they need to defend themselves from.

[Just like with his presence here, Gregor is pretty sure there's a scientific explanation for it. Magic. He's too much Cordelia's son not to be, even if he's not Cordelia's son.

Except Cordelia hardly ever rules anything out. Cordelia is, after all, a theist as well as a scientist, and science is not using what you know to prove what you've already made up your mind about despite what you see. He wishes she was here.

Monsters, though. An animal by any other name would be just as dangerous? There are monsters on Sergyar people call animals.

It takes a while to write back.]

Making something of nothing?

[There is definitely some logic behind magic, it's just that every world has a different one and he was going more for a general one since it's a common term.]

That is what it would appear like to an observer. How it works for each world is different, in mine we use a device that has stones that serve as a power source for the magic.