"I have a Deal with Georish Stauber—Baron Fell. It's a very old Deal, as we are very old dealers. My time is surely running out, and Georish is growing"—she grimaced— "unreliable. If I die—or if he dies—or if he succeeds in having his brain transplanted to a younger body, as he has attempted at least once to arrange—our old Deal will be broken. The Durona Group might be offered less admirable deals than the one we have enjoyed so long with House Fell. It might be broken up—sold—weakened so as to invite attack from old enemies like Ry, who remembers an insult or an injury forever. It might be forced to work it does not choose. I've been looking for a way out for the last couple of years. Admiral Naismith knows one."

She wanted him to be Admiral Naismith, obviously the most valuable of the two clones. "What if I'm the other one?" He stared at his hands. They were just his hands. No hints there.

"You might be ransomed."

By whom? Was he savior, or commodity? What a choice. Rowan looked uneasy.

"What am I to you if I can't remember who I am?"

"No one at all, little man." Her dark eyes glinted, momentarily, like obsidian chips.

This woman had survived nearly a century on Jackson's Whole. It would not do to underestimate her ruthlessness on the basis of one quirky prejudice about clone-brain transplants.

They finished their tea, and retreated to Rowan's room.

*    *    *

"What in all that seemed familiar to you?" Rowan asked him anxiously when they were alone on her little sofa.

"All of it," he said, in deep perplexity. "And yet—Lilly seems to think I can spirit you all away like some kind of magician. But even if I am Admiral Naismith, I can't remember how I did it!"

"Sh," she tried to calm him. "You're ripe for memory-cascade, I swear. I can almost see it starting. Your speech has improved vastly in just the last few days."

"All that therapuetic kissing." He smiled, a suggestive compliment that won him, as he'd hoped, some more therapy. But when he came up for air he said, "It won't come back to me if I'm the other one. I remember Galen. Earth. A house in London . . . what's the clone's name?"

"We don't know," she said, and at his exasperated grasp of her hands added, "No, we really don't."

"Admiral Naismith . . . shouldn't be Miles Naismith. He should be Mark Pierre Vorkosigan." How the hell did he know that? Mark Pierre. Piotr Pierre. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her, a taunt from out of a crowd that had put an old man into a terrifying murderous rage, he'd had to be restrained by—the image escaped him. Gran'da? "If the Bharaputra-made clone is the third son, he could be named anything." Something wasn't right.