"Yes, m'lord." The flyer banked to the right. After a few more minutes, the automated beacon on the ground detected them, and issued the standard bleat over the lightflyer's com, a recorded voice intoning, "Warning. You are entering a high radiation area. . . ."

Martin paled. "M'lord? Should I continue on this heading?"

"Yes. We're all right at this altitude. But it's been years since I flew over the center of the wastelands. It's always interesting to check and see how things are progressing down there."

The farmland had given way to woodland many kilometers back. Now the woodland grew more sparse, the colors odder and grayer, scraggly and blighted in some areas, strangely dense in others. "I own almost all of that, y'know," Miles went on, gazing down at it. "I mean, personally. Not a figure of speech because my father's the District Count. My grandfather left it to me. Not to my father like most of the rest of our property. I've always wondered what sort of a message to me that was supposed to be." Blighted land for a blighted scion, a comment on his early disabilities? Or resigned realization that Count Aral's life would run its course long before the blasted land recovered? "I've never set foot on it. I plan to put on radiation gear and visit it, sometime after I have children. They say there are some very strange plants and animals down there."

"There's no people, are there?" said Martin, staring downward in palpable unease. Without being told, he added a few hundred more meters of altitude.

"A few squatters and bandits, who don't expect to live long enough to have cancer or children. The District rangers round them up and run them out, from time to time. It looks deceptively recovered, in spots. In fact, the radioactivity levels in some areas have dropped by half in my lifetime. When I'm old, this will just begin to be usable again."

"Ten more years, m'lord?" said Martin.

Miles's lips twitched. "I was thinking, like, fifty more years, Martin," he said gently.

"Oh."

After a few more minutes, he craned his neck and stared out the canopy past Martin. "There on your left. That blotch is the site of Vorkosigan Vashnoi, the old District capital. Huh. It's going gray-green now. It used to be all black, still, when I was a kid. I wonder if it still glows in the dark?"

"We can come back after dark and look," Martin offered, after a slight pause.

"No . . . no." Miles settled back in his seat, and stared ahead at the mountains rising to the south. "That's enough."

"I could power up some more," said Martin presently, as the moldy colors on the landscape below fell behind to be replaced by healthier greens and browns and golds. "See what this flyer can do." His tone was decidedly longing.

"I know what it can do," said Miles. "And I have no reason to hurry, today. Another time, perhaps."