galactic traders hit us, thought he was going to make a killing in
jewels—you know, diamonds, rubies, emeralds—the galactics seemed
to be selling them so cheaply. He put all his liquid assets and about half his chattels into them. Well, of course they were synthetics,
better than the naturals and cheap as dirt—uh, sand—and the bottom
promptly dropped out of the market, taking him with it. I'm told my great-grandmother never forgave him." He waved vaguely at Mayhew who, becoming conditioned, passed over his bottle. Miles offered it to the senior pilot officer, who rejected it with a look of disgust. Miles shrugged, and took a long pull. Amazingly pleasant stuff. His
circulatory system, as well as his digestive, now seemed to be glowing with rainbow hues. He felt he could go days without sleep.
"Unfortunately, most of the land he sold was around Vorkosigan Surleau, which is pretty dry—not by your standards, of course—and
the land he kept was around Vorkosigan Vashnoi, which was the
better."
"What's unfortunate about that?" asked Mayhew.
"Well, because it was the principal seat of government for the Vorkosigans, and because we owned about every stick and stone in
it—it was a pretty important industrial and trade center—and because the Vorkosigans were, uh, prominent in the Resistance, the
Cetagandans took the city hostage. It's a long story, but—eventually, they destroyed the place. It's now a big glass hole in the ground. You can still see a faint glow in the sky, on a dark night, twenty kilometers off."
The senior pilot officer brought the little shuttle smoothly into its dock.
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"Hey," said Mayhew suddenly. "That land you had around Vorkosigan whatever-you-said—"
"Vashnoi. Have. Hundreds of square kilometers of it, and mostly downwind, yes?"
"Is that the same—" his face was lighting, like the sun coming up after a long, dark night, "is that the same land you mortgaged to—" He began to laugh, delightedly, under his breath; they disembarked. "Is
that what you pledged to that sand-crawler Calhoun in return for my ship?"
"Caveat emptor," bowed Miles. "He checked the climate plat; he never thought to check the radioactivity plat. He probably doesn't
study anybody else's history either."
Mayhew sat down on the docking bay, laughing so hard that he
bent his forehead nearly to the floor. His laughter had more than an edge of hysteria—several days without sleep, after all . . . "Kid," he cried, "have a drink on me!"
"I mean to pay him, you understand," explained Miles. "The hectares he chose would make an unaesthetic hole in the map for
some descendant of mine, in a few hundred years, when it cools off.
But if he gets greedy, or pushy about collecting—well, he'll get what he deserves."
Three groups of people were bearing down upon them. Bothari had