The door clicked. Galeni snapped from his apparent doze into a sitting position, feet under his center of gravity, face utterly closed. But this time it was dinner. Or breakfast, judging from the ingredients: lukewarm scrambled eggs, sweet raisin bread, blessed coffee in a flimsy cup, one spoon each. It was delivered by one of the poker-faced young men Miles had seen the night before. Another hovered in the doorway, stunner at ready. Eyeing Galeni, the man set the food down on the end of one bench and backed quickly out.

Miles regarded the food warily. But Galeni collected his and ate without hesitation. Did he know it wasn't drugged or poisoned, or did he just not give a damn anymore? Miles shrugged and ate too.

Miles swallowed his last precious drops of coffee and asked, "Have you picked up any hint of what the purpose of this whole masquerade is? They must have gone to incredible lengths to produce this . . . duplicate me. It can't be a minor plot."

Galeni, looking a bit less pale by virtue of the decent food, rolled his cup carefully between his hands. "I know what they've told me. I don't know if what they've told me is the truth."

"Right, go on."

"You've got to understand, my father's group is a radical splinter of the main Komarran underground. The groups haven't spoken to each other in years, which is one of the reasons we—Barrayaran Security," a faint ironic smile played around his lips, "—missed them. The main body has been losing momentum over the last decade. The expatriates' children, with no memory of Komarr, have been growing up as citizens of other planets. And the older ones have been—well, growing old. Dying off. And with things becoming not so bad at home, they're not making new converts. It's a shrinking power base, critically shrinking."

"I can see that would make the radicals itchy to make some move. While they still had a chance," Miles remarked.

"Yes. They're in a squeeze." Galeni crushed his cup slowly in his fist. "Reduced to wild gambles."

"This one seems pretty damned exotic, to bet—sixteen, eighteen years on? How the devil did they assemble the medical resources? Was your father a doctor?"

Galeni snorted. "Hardly. The medical half was the easy part, apparently, once they'd got hold of the stolen tissue sample from Barrayar. Though how they did that—"

"I spent the first six years of my life getting prodded, probed, biopsied, scanned, sampled, sliced and diced by doctors. There must have been kilograms of me floating around in various medical labs to choose from, a regular tissue smorgasbord. That was the easy part. But the actual cloning—"

"Was hired out. To some shady medical laboratory on the planet of Jackson's Whole, as I understand it, that would do anything for a price."

Miles's mouth, opening, gaped for a moment. "Oh. Them."

"Do you know about Jackson's Whole?"