In Another’s Wake

An adventure of Imperial pilot Nikolai Vorsoisson

I. The Pilot of the Echo

Imperial jump pilot first class Nikolai Vorsoisson had flown the Echo for five years — since her commissioning day, when the assignments board reviewed the files of forty-one candidates for the fastest hull in the Imperium and settled on the thirty-year-old Komarran with a spotless log and the dullest reputation in the entire pilot corps.

“Dull,” in the mouths of jump pilots, was a complicated word. Vorsoisson did not fly spectacularly. Vorsoisson flew clean: entry into the throat on the axis line to the centimeter, neurotransmitter expenditure below norm, zero deviations from flight plan in fifteen years of service — and logs kept with an honesty the young pilots found old-fashioned and the old ones found inconvenient. Once, in his third year, he had reported his own violation — a three-second delay on a maneuver, noticed by no one, with consequences for no one — and to his commander’s question “why, devil take it, man, who would ever have known?” he had answered with a sentence that followed him through the corps ever after:

“I would have known, sir. And I fly with that man in every cockpit.”

No one in the corps knew the whole story behind the sentence. They knew the outline: his father, a Komarran administrator, killed in an accident when the boy was nine; his mother remarried — remarkably well, to Lord Auditor Vorkosigan himself; the boy raised in Vorkosigan House, but keeping his father’s name, which on Barrayar read as a gesture. Few knew more, because the full file on the death of Tien Vorsoisson lay under Auditorial seal: the embezzlement, the concealed Vorzohn’s Dystrophy, the complicity in a theft that led to the worst catastrophe in the history of Komarran terraforming, and the end — chained to a railing in the middle of the wasteland, breath mask empty, by his own co-conspirators.

Nikki knew all of it. He had demanded it — at eleven, with a child’s insistence that reached the Emperor himself; and Gregor, then, had told him the truth to his face, all of it, uncut, because in the house that was raising the boy they believed that stories with the cuts left in are more dangerous than enemies. Since then Nikolai Vorsoisson had lived with a two-line inheritance: one dream — the jumps, his own since age nine — and one family name his father had left with a stain on it.

The dream he had fulfilled. And for the name, he flew clean. Every day. Fifteen years.

The Echo waited for him in Barrayar orbit that morning, as always — one hundred and sixty meters of Illyrican poetry with a double phase fan, the fastest thing under the Imperial flag — and Nikki walked the docking tube with that quiet, complete, everyday happiness that had not worn off once in five years. Today was a simple day: the annual recertification, then a courier run to Komarr. Routine.

The routine ended at ten past eleven, in the neurology suite of Imperial flight medicine.

II. The Certificate

“Here.” The doctor rotated the hologram of the implant and pointed his stylus at a grayish shadow in the tissue by the third contact node. “A microstructural anomaly. It’s small — at the edge of resolution. It might be a scanner artifact. It might be scar tissue. It might be the beginning of something. The protocol in such cases offers two paths, pilot. The first: I enter ‘finding within norms, follow-up in one year’ — I have grounds; the finding really is borderline. You fly tomorrow. The second: full workup, three weeks, a board. If it’s a scar — you fly in a month. If it’s something else…” The doctor did not finish. He did not need to; every pilot knew the end of that sentence: the ground. Forever. “The choice, frankly, is yours. Nobody but the two of us has seen this scan.”

The room went quiet. Nikki looked at the grayish shadow — three millimeters of unknown in his own head, between him and the throats of the wormholes — and in the quiet, very clearly, he heard the echo of another story: a man who hides a diagnosis because admission costs a career; a man who lies on declarations year after year; a man whose small hidden things grow in the dark until they become a railing in the middle of a wasteland.

“Pilot?” the doctor prompted.

“The second path,” said Nikolai Vorsoisson. “The full workup. And, Doctor — enter in the record that the finding was reported by me, at my own request, with full understanding of the consequences.” He stood and took his jacket, and only at the door added, more quietly, mostly to himself: “In my family the other way has already been tried. It doesn’t work.”

The self-grounding of the best pilot in the corps thundered through the service by evening. His commander called him in and spent half an hour trying to talk him out of “rushing the formalities”; Nikki heard everything out politely and yielded nothing. That evening his mother called by holo from Vorbarr Sultana and talked him out of nothing — only looked at him for a long time, with those eyes, and said at last: “Your father would—” she rarely began sentences that way, and Nikki went still, “—your father would not have understood it. But I understand it, Nikki. And if it means anything: I am proud of you exactly as much as I am afraid for you. The two grow from one root.”

And his stepfather, the Lord Auditor, did not call at all. He sent only a note, on paper, by courier, by his old habit for the important things — one line:

The right decisions rarely look like flying. Usually they look like a waiting room. Hold on. — M.

Nikki taped it to the inside of his locker and waited. The waiting lasted nine days.

On the tenth came the alarm.

III. The Call

Wormhole XT-4 was young, weakly, and until that week — harmless: a side entrance to the Odera system, where around a pale sun there orbited three habitats and one ore station — eleven thousand six hundred souls, a thirty-year-old colony, connected to the Nexus through a single throat. On the night of the tenth day, the monitoring station at XT-4 registered the thing the whole galaxy had learned to read with a chill since the quaddie crisis: terminal arrhythmia. The young wormhole was dying — fast, in days — and behind it eleven thousand six hundred people would be sealed in. Not dead: abandoned. Forever, with no road out and no road in, until the oxygen of their civilization ran out.

The medicine existed and was called O-2: Professor Riva’s second machine, lighter, smarter, and — in Riva’s own words — “better brought up,” built from zero after the death of the first, with the single purpose of singing to sick bells. O-2 stood in Riva’s laboratory on Komarr, ready and untested. From Komarr to XT-4 were eleven jumps by the standard corridors — nine days’ travel. The forecast gave the wormhole six.

There existed another route: five jumps, of which two ran through throats with a variance forbidden to everything except one class of ship. Four days. For the Echo — three and a half.

And the pilot of the Echo was sitting in a waiting room.

The board convened extraordinarily, at two in the morning, under pressure descending from so high that no one dared name it. The results of the full workup — completed the previous day, its report stuck in someone’s inbox — were retrieved, read, and announced in the presence of the pilot himself, to whom nobody had said anything for nine days:

“The finding is scar tissue,” the chairman read. “Old. Stable. Non-progressing. Origin…” he looked up from the page, “…a trace of gene therapy in childhood. Retrogene correction of Vorzohn’s Dystrophy, performed at age eight. The treatment was successful and complete; the scar is cosmetic, flight-irrelevant. Conclusion: fit without restriction.” A pause. “Pilot Vorsoisson. The board notes in the record, by exception, the following: you reported a borderline finding voluntarily, in full awareness of the risk. The board has seen all kinds of pilots. This kind it sees rarely. You are dismissed — that is, on the contrary: your flight orders are waiting at the door.”

Nikki took the orders with a hand steadier than it had any right to be, and only in the corridor, alone, stopped for a moment by the window. A scar from childhood. A trace of the treatment paid for, back then, with all of his mother’s terror and all of his father’s lies — Tien’s disease, the hidden one, the shameful one, written into his own head as three millimeters of quiet tissue that interfered with nothing and would never go away.

You carry a scar from your father, he thought, without bitterness, for the first time in his life without any bitterness at all. It does not interfere with the flying.

“Well then,” said Nikolai Vorsoisson to the window, to the orders, and to three millimeters of family history. “Let’s fly.”

IV. The Cargo

O-2 was loaded on Komarr in six hours — four sections in shock cradles, eleven technicians from the arsenal team — and together with the machine there came aboard, waving off three offered arms with her cane, Professor Emerita Judith Riva herself, ninety-one, with the expression of a person being talked out of something already decided.

“Don’t argue,” she informed the Echo’s captain before he could open his mouth. “The machine is mine, the patient is urgent, and I am at an age when any journey may be my last, so I choose to make them interesting. My cabin is to be near the cargo bay. And introduce me to the pilot — I want to see the man to whom I’m entrusting my old age across two bad throats.”

The introduction took place in the navigation room, over the unrolled route, and lasted three minutes on the substance and one pause off it — when Riva read the name on the pilot’s tablet and raised to Nikki a gaze suddenly very old and very attentive.

“Vorsoisson. Komarran.” It was not a question. “How old were you in the year of the soletta, pilot?”

“Nine, Professor.” Nikki held her gaze. “My father was Tien Vorsoisson. The administrator from the terraforming project. I see you remember the case.”

“I remember the case,” said Riva slowly, “because I was one of the consultants on it. I did the five-space mathematics of the thing that was stolen, and that killed an engineer of your acquaintance.” She was silent a moment. “So you know what that is in my hold. You know whose mathematics lies at the bottom of it.”

“I know, Professor. Soudha’s mathematics, through Soven’s machine, through O-1, to your O-2.” Nikki squared the route charts, with even hands. “An equation that began as theft and murder, and today flies to hold a door open for eleven thousand people. If you’re asking whether I can carry it…” he raised his eyes, “…Professor, I have been waiting for this cargo for twenty-six years. I just didn’t know until now what it looked like.”

Riva studied him a while longer. Then she nodded — once, like a seal.

“Fly, pilot,” she said. “You and I, it appears, are hauling the same baggage. Mine is heavier, but yours is from further back. At XT-4 we unload both.”

The run became a legend in the corps before it was over. Five jumps in eighty-one hours: two standard throats taken on the axis to the centimeter; one overloaded trade throat at Tau node, where the Echo — with a clearance extracted by Riva on the emergency band with the words “young lady, get me the dispatcher, and tell the dispatcher he is wanted by an old woman with eleven gigawatts” — went through out of turn, in the wake of an outbound liner, inside its ninety seconds, by the maneuver the whole corps studied from Kera Volan’s telemetry and which Nikki executed so smoothly that Riva, watching from navigation, said only: “Well, well. So it’s taught now.”

“It isn’t taught, Professor,” said Nikki, without taking his hands from the board. “It’s studied. You fly in another’s wake only until you learn to leave your own.”

V. The Patient

XT-4 met them in terminal phase: a throat contracted to two-thirds of its catalog diameter, a pulse ragged to ugliness, and a monitoring station whose duty crew had not slept in five days. On the far side, over the last living relay link, the Odera system kept a disciplined silence — eleven thousand six hundred people who knew the numbers and had chosen, with a dignity that put half the Echo’s crew in tears, not to clog the channel with pleas.

Riva deployed O-2 on the installation barge in thirty hours, directing from a chair, cane for a pointer, and at hour thirty-one gathered the staff with a face Nikki had already learned to read.

“Bad news and worse. The bad: the arrhythmia is outrunning my model — we have forty hours, not eighty. The worse is structural.” She rotated the hologram of the throat. “A young wormhole in terminal phase cannot be damped from one side. O-2 will hold this shore of the bell. But the far mouth is disintegrating in anti-phase — and unless someone carries a mirror resonator to it, into the mouth itself, precisely during the tuning, the damping will crack the passage instead of healing it. The resonator is ready — there it is, two hundred kilos, in that crate. The question is who carries it. A transit through this throat, now, is a task for one class of ship and very few hands. And holding position in the far mouth, inside the ringing bell, for forty minutes while I sing from here…” Riva let the sentence drop. “And to be honest to the end: if the tuning does not take, the passage closes with the resonator and its carrier on the far side. Forever. Among eleven thousand six hundred hosts.”

The staff room went silent. And in the silence Nikolai Vorsoisson heard — as he always heard in such moments — the echo: a man chained to a railing, who had chosen none of what brought him there; a man who all his life had chosen the small hidden exits, until they ran out. And he heard the other thing, the stronger one: his own voice at nine years old, over a table on Komarr, before a small Imperial Auditor: I’m going to be a jump pilot.

“The Echo carries the resonator,” he said. “I fly.”

“Pilot—” the captain began.

“Sir, with all respect: the arithmetic is simple and I have been doing it all my life.” Nikki turned to the staff, calm in that way which, in his family, was passed down not by blood but by dinner table. “Beyond the throat are eleven thousand people who chose nothing. On this side is one pilot who chooses with open eyes, with the best ship in the Imperium, and with forty minutes of work he has trained fifteen years to do. If the tuning doesn’t take — I remain with people who will need a pilot, a mechanic, and a geometry teacher, and I qualify for two of the three. If it takes…” he looked at Riva, “…Professor, if it takes, I’ll ask you for a copy of the score. As a keepsake.”

Before the jump he wrote two letters — on paper, by the custom of the house that had raised him. One to his mother, short, because between them words had long been unnecessary. The other to his second father — shorter still:

Dad. (I’ve been calling you that in my head for years; it’s proper at least once on paper.) If you are reading this, the door closed with me on the right side of it. Regret nothing: you gave me the route, Mother gave me the compass, and the heading was always mine. Tell Gregor the debt from my eleventh year is repaid with interest. — N.

He sealed them, handed them to the captain with the word “in case,” and went to put on his ship.

VI. The Mouth

The transit through the dying throat of XT-4 lasted eight minutes, and Nikolai Vorsoisson did not remember it as fear. He remembered it as hearing: the bell was striking all around him, ragged, vicious, and he walked between the strokes — by Riva’s score, then by her corrections, then, in the last thirty seconds, by a third thing that was neither computation nor instinct, but fifteen years of clean logs gathered into two hands.

Beyond waited strange stars, three habitats glowing like cities at night — and a silence on the air that broke the instant his transponder identified itself: eleven thousand six hundred people who had kept disciplined silence for five days stopped keeping it, all at once. Nikki let them shout for forty-five seconds — he judged that much humanly necessary — then asked for a clean channel and an anchoring position.

The station-keeping in the far mouth entered the piloting textbooks under the dry name “the Odera stationary regime,” with the note that it has been performed once. For forty minutes the Echo hung in the very jaws of the ringing bell, the mirror resonator unfolded from her hull like a silver flower, and Nikki held position against the pulse of the dying five-space — not with thrust but with phase, the left and right fans separately, compensating every stroke with a counterstroke, forty minutes of continuous asynchronous maneuvering, about which Kera Volan, having reviewed the telemetry, later said in public one sentence worth more than a medal: “I invented it out of desperation. He played it from the sheet music.”

At the thirty-eighth minute the bell began to quiet. O-2 sang from the other shore — patient, coaxing, in anti-phase — the resonator returned the song in mirror, and between the two the throat of XT-4, a young wormhole sick with its own youth, shivered, evened its pulse… and breathed.

Riva’s voice came over the restored relay link, ninety-one years old and shamelessly triumphant:

“The pulse is sinus, the variance is falling, the patient will live. Pilot Vorsoisson — come home through the door. It is now merely a door.”

Nikki came home through a mere door — smooth, placid, boring, the most beautiful throat he had ever transited — and only at the exit, with Odera falling astern, did he grasp what exactly he had left there: the first colony in history saved by a machine with a criminal pedigree, delivered by a pilot with a family name of shame.

The circle, he thought, had not closed. Circles do not close. But the wake — the wake was different now.

VII. The Wake

The colonists of Odera requested permission to name the wormhole, and it went through the channels in record time, because nobody dared stand in the way of eleven thousand six hundred grateful signatures. The proposal read: “the Nikolai Vorsoisson Passage.” The pilot asked for one amendment, a single one, and formulated it in writing, with his customary precision:

Without the first name. Only the family name. My father bore that name too — a Komarran administrator, a man of complicated fate, who did not live to see what could come of it. Let the name work a while longer. Names, like wormholes, are healed by passage.

The Vorsoisson Passage entered the registries the following spring. Ekaterin Vorkosigan, reading the official notice in the garden at Vorbarr Sultana, wept — once, briefly, facing the beds — and then planted by the south wall a new tree, of which, to her husband’s question, she said only: “Komarran. Endures everything. You’ll see when it grows.”

And the letters marked “in case” came back to their sender unopened and were burned in the fireplace of Vorkosigan House by the old family custom, in a small circle, glass in hand. Miles watched the fire a long time, then said — to Nikki, and not only to him:

“Do you know the strangest thing about the fatherhood trade? You spend years preparing to pass something on — experience, a name, a route. And then one day you discover that the most important thing your son took himself, from a place you never showed him: from the worst room of his own history. You made a cockpit out of that room, Nikki. I know no higher piloting.”

“I had a good wake to study,” said Nikolai Vorsoisson. “Several wakes. And then I just… started leaving my own.”

The Echo lifted on a scheduled run three days later — routine, boring, perfect — and somewhere across the Nexus, in the simulator halls of the pilot corps, the new intake was already studying telemetry stamped “Odera, stationary regime,” frame by frame, stroke by stroke, the way one studies another’s wake: carefully, with gratitude, and with the secret intention of one day outflying it.

The pilot of the Echo had no objection. That is what wakes are left for.