"Not tonight. Go to bed, Miles. I'm certainly going to." Yawning, Illyan headed up the stairs to his suite.

"So how do you like concerts?" Miles called after him.

Illyan's voice floated back: "Very well!"

Dammit, the rest of us are going crazy over this chip thing. Why aren't you? No, unfair to blame Illyan for declining to, well, to go into a decline. Perhaps the ImpSec chief had concluded the failure was natural, and was dealing with it. Or perhaps he was just more patient and subtle than Miles about stalking his stalker. That would not be news.

Anyway, why shouldn't Illyan have a normal night out? He didn't fall over and have convulsions in public. Miles growled, and went to bed, but not to sleep; it was going to be a wearing wait for Chenko's call from ImpMil.

Dr. Chenko leaned intently into his comconsole pickup, and spoke.

"This is what we've managed to come up with so far, Lord Vorkosigan. We've ruled out the possibility of a purely medical approach, say, the administration of drugs to slow your production of neurotransmitters. If only one or a few related chemicals were involved, it might be possible, but you are apparently overproducing dozens or even hundreds—maybe even all of them. We can't suppress them all, and in any case, even if we could it would only reduce the frequency of the seizures, not eliminate them. And in fact, upon closer examination of the data, I don't think the malfunction is nearly so much on the production side, as it is on the reservoirs' molecular-release-mechanism side.

"A second approach looks more promising. We think we can microminiaturize a version of the neural stimulators we used in the lab to trigger your seizure the other day. This array could be permanently installed under your skull, along with feedback sensors that would report when your neurotransmitter reservoirs were becoming dangerously overloaded. You could use the stimulator to voluntarily trigger a seizure in a controlled time and place, and thus, so to speak, defuse yourself safely. Done on a schedule, the attacks ought to be milder and shorter in duration, too."

"Would I be able to drive? Fly?" Command?

"Mm . . . if the levels were properly monitored and maintained, I don't see why not. If it works."

After a short internal struggle—against whom?—Miles blurted, "I was medically discharged over these seizures. Would I be—could I be reinstated? Returned to duty?"

"Yes, I don't quite understand . . . you should have been sent to ImpMil before your discharge was finalized. Hm. Well. If you were a lieutenant still serving, you might be able to petition—or pull whatever strings you own—and arrange to be assigned to desk work. Since you are already discharged, you would . . . certainly need more strings." Chenko smiled in prudent unwillingness to underestimate Lord Vorkosigan's inventory of strings.

"Desk work. Not ship duty, not field command?"

"Field command? I thought you were an ImpSec galactic affairs operative."