He pressed the palm-lock pad to the right of the front door; its two halves swung out with stately grace to admit him, and closed again behind him as he stepped across the threshold. It felt quite odd, to open the door himself; there had always been a Vorkosigan Armsman in the House uniform of brown and silver on duty to admit him. When did they automate that door?

The great entry hall with its black-and-white paved floor was chill and shadowy, as the rain and gloom of early evening leached away the light. Miles almost spoke, Lights!, to bring up the illumination, but paused, and set down his valise. In his whole life, he'd never had Vorkosigan House entirely to himself.

"Someday, my son, all this will be yours," he whispered experimentally into the shadows. The hard-edged echo of his words seemed to rasp back up from the tessellated pavement. He suppressed a slight shudder. He turned to the right, and began a slow tour of the premises.

The carpet in the next room muffled the lonely clump of his boots. All the remaining furniture—about half seemed to be missing—was covered with ghostly white sheeting. He circled the entire first floor. The place seemed both larger and smaller than he'd remembered, a puzzling paradox.

He checked out the garage occupying the whole eastern wing's sub-basement level. His own lightflyer was tucked neatly into a corner. A barge of an armored groundcar, polished and luxurious but elderly, occupied another. He thought of his combat armor. I probably ought not to attempt to drive or fly, either, till this damned glitch in my head gets straightened out. In the lightflyer, he risked killing himself in a seizure; in the land-barge, anyone else on the road. Last winter, before he'd convinced himself that he was healing as promised, he'd gotten really good at apparently casually cadging rides.

He ascended one of the back stairways to the huge kitchen on the lower level. It had always been a lucrative locale for treats and company when he was a child, full of interesting, busy people like cooks and Armsmen and servants, and even an occasional hungry Imperial Regent, wandering through looking for a snack. Some utensils remained, but the place had been stripped of food, nothing left in the pantries or the walk-in freezer or refrigerators, which were tepid and disconnected.