The Shift

An adventure of Emperor Gregor Vorbarra — incognito

I. The Heir

Prince Xav Vorbarra, heir to the thrones of Barrayar, Komarr, and Sergyar, twenty-two years old, vanished from the Solstice residence on the night before Thursday, in the middle of the Imperial family’s state visit to Komarr.

The disappearance was discovered at six in the morning, established beyond doubt at eleven minutes past, and classified to seven levels of access at twelve past. By seven o’clock the residence was sealed, the dome under silent surveillance, and in the third-floor conference room the chief of ImpSec, General Duv Galeni, was unrolling before the Emperor a search plan with a code name, three phases, and one essential property: within twelve hours, half of Komarr would guess at the disappearance, and within twenty-four, half the galaxy.

Emperor Gregor Vorbarra heard the plan out to the end, silently, standing at the window overlooking the dome as it woke for its working day. Then he said:

“No.”

“Sire—”

“No phases, Duv. No nets.” Gregor did not turn from the window. “Do you know what happened at the palace five weeks ago? Xav turned twenty-two, and per the heir’s protocol he received the full briefing: the archives without abridgment. The ceremony of majority access.” A pause. “His grandfather’s file. All of it. Crown Prince Serg, unedited — as he was, not as the textbooks write him. The boy read for four hours, thanked the archivist — politely; he is always polite — and for five weeks since, I have watched my son grow quieter and quieter. I know that silence, Duv. I have worn it. At his age, give or take four years, after learning the same thing, in the same way.” Gregor turned at last. “And I know what I did then.”

Galeni, who knew the story — it was taught at the ImpSec academy as “the Hegen incident,” the greatest failure of the protection service in a century — went silent in the way that, with him, substituted for turning pale.

“Check the balcony of the east wing,” said Gregor. “Third floor, where the service gantry passes two meters below the rail. Then check whether a supply platform left the residence’s cargo approach last night. Then — the labor exchange on level four, the morning hiring. And send no one to fetch him.”

“Sire, with all respect — how—”

“Because, Duv, the route is mine.” The Emperor’s voice was perfectly level, and that was the worst of it. “The balcony, the platform, the exchange. I told him the story when he was fourteen — how his grandfather by fosterage tracked me down at the far end of the Nexus, how I nearly cost the Imperium a civil war by wanting one week of not being myself. I told it to him as a warning.” Gregor took his jacket from the chair back. “Warnings, General, are maps. Merely with the sign reversed. Now find me work clothes, a Komarran identity of middle age, and forty-eight hours of silence. I am going to collect my son. Personally.”

“Out of the question,” said Galeni.

“Duv,” said the emperor of three worlds, putting on the jacket, “in thirty years you have refused me everything you were required to refuse me, and I am grateful for every time. This is not one of them. The boy has run from the crown. If I send the crown after him — agents, drones, a net — I confirm everything he is running from. His father goes, or no one goes.”

There was a long silence. Then General Duv Galeni, chief of the Imperial Security Service, Komarran by birth and realist by profession, said the only thing he could say:

“Then the father takes along one old Komarran acquaintance. I grew up four levels below this residence, Sire. If we are going down into the domes — we go down by my streets.”

II. The Balcony

The Empress saw them off from the residence’s inner door, without retinue, in a dressing gown, with a face on which thirty years of public life had built serenity and this night had knocked it down.

“Do you know what is most Komarran about our son?” said Laisa. “Not my blood. The bookkeeping. For five weeks he has been working an equation in his head — what he owes, to whom, and whether anyone ever asked him if he wanted the loan. Don’t bring him back before he has closed the account, Gregor. Bring me back both of you — and don’t hurry.”

The east wing balcony told the story of the escape in a language Gregor read fluently: one folding service ladder, not quite stowed; the print of a boot sole on the gantry rail; and — this made him smile for the first time in six hours — a neatly tied rope with a double seaman’s knot, left “so nobody wonders how.” The boy was polite even in flight.

“Cargo platform eleven, night delivery of kitchen consumables, departed at two forty,” Galeni reported from his tablet. “One extra trainee loader aboard, per the driver: ‘young fellow, said he was from the agency, worked well and kept quiet.’ Got off at the distribution hub on level four. And at five thirty in the morning, at the level-four labor exchange, a new worker registered.” Galeni looked up. “Name: Sav Kerin. Twenty-two. The documents are amateur, but they pass — the boy listened carefully in his intelligence classes. Hired at ten to six. A crew maintaining exterior seals, Solstice dome, south sector. Foreman — one Kos. A two-week contract.”

“Seals.” Gregor nodded slowly. “Work at the rim of the dome, between the city and the poison. The lowest, most honest, best-paid rough labor on Komarr.” He looked at Galeni. “He is not hiding, Duv. He is testing himself.”

They went down into the domes after midday, transformed by ImpSec’s wardrobe department: two secondhand coveralls, two middle-aged biographies — a Komarran accountant laid off in a merger, and his brother-in-law, seeking two weeks’ work “wherever they’re hiring” — and no weapon but experience. At the threshold Galeni handed the Emperor the identification card and stared at the name Gregor had requested personally.

“‘Greg Bleakman.’” Galeni closed his eyes for a second. “Sire. That alias is in the textbooks. In my textbooks. An entire chapter.”

“Precisely,” said Gregor Vorbarra, pocketing the card of the man he had been for nine days, thirty-six years earlier, at the other end of the Nexus, in the freest and most dangerous week of his life. “No one in the universe would believe anyone would dare use it again. Hiding in plain sight, Duv, is a Barrayaran art. We are a people who hid a whole emperor in plain sight for three centuries. Lead me to your streets.”

III. The Domes

Level four of Solstice smelled of machine oil, frying, and ozone — the smell Galeni inhaled with the expression of a man entering his childhood room after fifty years — and lived in a rhythm no residence knew: shifts, sirens, queues, haggling, children with school satchels weaving between workers’ legs.

Greg Bleakman walked through it with wide-open eyes under his cap brim, and absorbed. For thirty years he had looked at Komarr through reports, delegations, and armored glass; now Komarr jostled his shoulders, swore in front of him in the queue for air-share adjusters, sold him from a stall a warm flatbread of profoundly uncertain provenance and superb flavor — and did not know him. Nobody knew him. The sensation was physical, like removing a pressure suit: thirty-odd years of weight, hung on his face, left upstairs at the residence with the parade tunics.

“You are breathing loudly, Sire,” Galeni observed in an undertone.

“I am breathing unsymbolically, Duv. Try it yourself.” Gregor finished the flatbread. “Listen to them.”

They listened. In the queues, in the lifts, at the exchange itself, people talked about everything — tariffs, dome taxes, last night’s match — and, inevitably, about the state visit whose banners hung two kilometers overhead. The Imperium, in the mouths of level four, was distant meteorology: sometimes it rains, sometimes it shines, nobody consults it. Of the Emperor they spoke with a tired, impersonal correctness. But of the prince…

“Half ours, that one,” said the woman at the work-gloves counter, unprompted, nodding at the news screen where footage ran from the official ceremony two days before: Xav, upright, impeccable, absent. “His mother’s a Toscane, of the old ones. And look how he stands — like he swallowed a meter rule, poor boy. Two worlds on his back and not even twenty-five.” She thumped her stamp. “Hope they feed him properly, at least. Next!”

Gregor took his gloves and said nothing, but Galeni, who had known him thirty years, noted silently that the Emperor stowed that remark somewhere very deep, with the few things he kept.

Kos’s crew took them on the following morning — their luck came through at the exchange, as the broker put it, “on account of Kos had two men go on medical, and the seals don’t wait.” Foreman Sander Kos proved to be a fifty-year-old Komarran with hands like seal flanges and a pedagogy of two sentences: “The rules are simple. The dome breathes — you don’t sleep.” He accepted the “accountant” Bleakman with half a glance (“inventory’s yours, granddad, and see the numbers come out, because my last inventory clerk is presently counting his own teeth”) and pointed the newcomers to the tool corner.

And by the tools, in an orange coverall, sealant gun in hand, with two weeks of blond stubble that suited him outrageously, stood — instructing two even newer newcomers in how one tests a seam: patiently, clearly, with hands already scuffed the proper way — the worker Sav Kerin, twenty-two years old, of whom the crew had already concluded that he was “a decent kid, only eats like he’s escaped from a siege.”

His father watched him for forty seconds from behind the inventory rack. Then he bent over the manifest and began counting flanges, because the boy’s account, Laisa had said, was not yet closed — and in their family, Gregor decided, at least one person ought finally to learn to wait.

IV. The Crew

For three days Emperor Gregor Vorbarra counted flanges, sealant cartridges, and meters of seam tape in the south sector of Solstice dome, slept in a workers’ hostel on a bunk whose springs remembered three generations of backs, ate from the crew pot, and learned more about his Imperium than from the last ten annual reports taken together.

He learned that the air-share adjusters were running eleven days behind on processing, and nobody upstairs knew, because the statistics were kept from filing, not from payment. He learned that Foreman Kos kept in his locker a picture of his daughter in Imperial fleet uniform and showed it with a pride he himself called “stupid, but mine.” He learned that on level four the emperor was called “him,” the Imperium “them,” and Komarr “us” — but when the news screen showed the soletta, the whole canteen fell silent and watched to the end of the clip, because the soletta was “ours” in an older and deeper sense, beyond all pronouns. And he learned — from the best possible position, behind the manifest, invisible — what his son was like among strangers.

His son was good. Not by lineage — by substance: he worked without grumbling, taught the slower men, ate last from the pot without anyone having taught him (or, Gregor thought with sudden warmth, without remembering who had), and on the third day, when two seasoned local specimens waylaid the shift’s newcomers outside the hostel for an “initiation fee” — an old ritual of all workers’ levels on all worlds — Sav Kerin reached neither for his fist nor for the rank hidden in his boot. He stepped in front of the two smaller newcomers, surveyed the collectors, and began to talk: quietly, reasonably, in that precise, patient intonation that looks for the person in the man opposite rather than the opponent — and found him, because four minutes later the “initiation fee” had been renegotiated to “a round of beer for everyone on Friday, and no nonsense, because the foreman knows your mothers.” The collectors left almost content.

“Kid talks like a tax lawyer,” the worker beside Gregor observed with respect.

“Like his father,” said Greg Bleakman, before he could stop himself.

“You know his father?”

“Slightly,” said Gregor. “They say he’s a heavy sort. Keeps quiet all the time.”

V. The Two Teas

He found him on the evening of the fourth day, in the canteen after second shift, when the crew had cleared out and the boy sat alone in the corner over a cold tea, with that gaze through the wall that Gregor knew from mirrors thirty-six years old.

He drew two teas from the dispenser, crossed the canteen, and sat down opposite him.

“Your mother sends her regards,” said Emperor Gregor Vorbarra.

His son raised his eyes. It must be granted him — and Gregor granted it to him, later, officially — that he did not start, did not pale, and did not glance around for the security detail. Xav Vorbarra looked at his father for five long seconds: the work coverall, the three-day stubble, the card reading “G. Bleakman” on the pocket — and on the fifth second there kindled in his eyes an understanding that passed through horror, through admiration, and settled on something between the two.

“Bleakman,” he said. “You did not dare.”

“I dared. Galeni is at the hostel; he is too old for second shift and is counting my protocol violations instead of flanges.” Gregor pushed the tea toward him. “Drink. And before you start apologizing — don’t. I have come to finish a story I told you at fourteen with roughly one-third of the truth, because at fourteen no more is owed. Now you are owed all of it. Afterward you will decide for yourself what comes next — that is your mother’s condition, and with your mother, you will learn, one does not negotiate.”

And in the workers’ canteen of level four, over two dispenser teas, the emperor of three worlds told his heir the whole story: of the boy who at twenty-two read his father’s file — Crown Prince Serg, the sadist, the monster, the pus at the heart of the dynasty — and for three months studied the mirror, searching for the features; of the balcony on Komarr, of the cargo ship, of the nine days as Greg Bleakman — hunger, freedom, one beating, one foreign porridge tastier than every palace menu; of the station in the Hegen Hub, of the small mad lieutenant who found him at the bottom of the Nexus and handed him back the crown with both hands, because he lacked the strength for anything else; and of the conversation afterward, with Cordelia Vorkosigan, who told him the single sentence that did the work:

“She said: ‘Gregor, blood is not a prophecy. Blood is a lexicon — from it you write whatever you choose. Serg is one of the words in yours. So is Ezar. So is my father, and your mother, and Aral. The sentence is your own.’” Gregor turned his cup. “For thirty-six years I have been writing the sentence, Xav. There are days when the word ‘Serg’ presses forward — I feel it, in anger, in exhaustion, in one cold place I know the address of. On those days I write more slowly. That is the entire secret of the trade: there are no clean lexicons. There are careful authors.”

Xav was silent a long time. When he spoke, his voice was a grown man’s — perhaps for the first time all the way through:

“I didn’t run only from the file. I ran from the arithmetic. On Barrayar I am ‘the Komarran kid.’ Here I am ‘the boot.’ I am a living bridge, Father — and a bridge is not a place to live; it is only a thing to be crossed. I wanted… I wanted one week of being a shore. Any shore. My own.” He looked at his scuffed hands. “And do you know what I found? The crew doesn’t know who I am — and it accepts me. Not by halves. Whole. For the first time in my life somebody counts me as one person.”

“I know,” said Gregor. “Which is why I did not come to fetch you.” He drank off his tea and rose, and in the level-four canteen there stood for a moment not the worker Bleakman but the other man — but only a moment, and only for his son. “Your contract runs to the end of the week. So does mine. Kos says Thursday we change the seals on lock twelve — two men on the lines, one on the manifest. I shall want a rest afterward, incidentally: I am taking annual leave for the first time in eleven years, if Galeni survives that long.” He turned for the door, then added, over his shoulder, in the most ordinary voice: “You are your own, Xav. Nobody’s bridge. Your own door — and doors, a mutual relation of ours will tell you, are kept open by walking through them. Good night. Shift’s at six.”

VI. The Lock

The failure at lock twelve came on Thursday, at ten past eleven, and had nothing to do with politics, plots, or fate: a forty-year-old seal, three days past its replacement date, blew out under a cargo lock in the middle of a scheduled changeover — eight meters from where Kos’s crew was working on the lines.

The whistle of escaping air is a sound every Komarran knows from the cradle and the drill, and for the next eleven minutes the south sector worked as dome people have worked for five generations: without panic, without heroes, by procedure. Kos commanded from the platform in a voice like a flange. The emergency membrane settled over the breach in ninety seconds. And behind it, for the permanent seam — a job for two men on lines in the narrow service cut, fast, precise, awkward — the first down was the newcomer Kerin, who was nearest, and after him, before the foreman could assign anyone, the accountant Bleakman, who had no business whatsoever on the lines and who, to Kos’s “where d’you think you’re going, granddad?!” replied with a sentence that afterward gave the foreman much to think about:

“I’m holding his safety line. I have always held it.”

They worked below for fourteen minutes — the boy on the seam, the father on the lines and the feed — and in the narrow gap between the dome and Komarr’s poison sky, the emperor of three worlds executed his son’s short, precise commands (“tape,” “cutter,” “tension,” “hold there”) with an exactness no protocol had ever trained in him, and which gave him — he admitted it to himself right there — the purest professional pleasure he had known in years. The seam laid clean. The sensors went green. Above, the crew hauled them up and thumped their backs with heavy gauntlets, and Kos declared a sector lunch break with the addendum that “the new fellows count as people,” which on level four was a decoration.

On Friday the contracts ran out. On Saturday morning Foreman Sander Kos walked the two temporary men to the cargo approach, shook their hands, and presented each with a sheet of paper — real paper, run off the crew printer, with the subcontractor’s stamp:

“References. I write them for every man who earns one, and you two earned them.” He surveyed the pair, the old one and the young one, with suddenly narrowed eyes. “Father and son, aren’t you? Shows in the line work. Hear it from a foreman: wherever you go — hold on to each other. The market’s bad, the times are crooked, but two men who hold each other’s safety lines get by anywhere. Off you go. And if you’re ever out of work again — Kos takes good workers back any time.”

VII. The Reference

They returned to the residence on Saturday evening, through the cargo approach, exactly as they had left, and the Imperium never learned a thing: the official bulletin noted that “the Emperor and the Heir conducted a one-week working program in closed format,” which was, Galeni observed with exhausted satisfaction, the truest communiqué of his career.

Laisa met them at the inner door, surveyed the two of them — stubbled, scuffed, with a smell of machine oil that no hostel shower removes on the first pass — and said only:

“Did the account come out?”

“It came out,” said her son. “With a remainder in my favor.”

The rest settled itself quietly, in the Vorbarra way. Prince Xav returned to the heir’s program with one added clause, negotiated personally and entered — Gregor insisted — into his official status: two weeks annually of “service in closed format,” without retinue, without cameras, under a name ImpSec would know and keep. The Komarran air-share adjusters received a sudden Imperial audit that cut the eleven-day backlog to zero, on a memorandum signed by an Auditor who never did learn how the Emperor knew about the problem down to the counter number. And Foreman Kos’s daughter, an ensign in her second year with the Imperial fleet, was transferred — through routine channels, with a perfectly clean file, with no visible hand anywhere — to the crew of the fleet’s best training ship, where the able rose fast.

And in the private study of Emperor Gregor Vorbarra — the room almost no one entered, and in which the personal effects amounted to a holo of Laisa with the children, an old portrait of Prince Xav the First, and one faded photograph of a man and a woman in Viceroy’s uniforms — there appeared on the wall, in a plain frame, a new exhibit. A sheet of paper with a Komarran subcontractor’s stamp and a text set on a crew printer:

REFERENCE. The undersigned foreman S. Kos certifies that G. Bleakman (inventory, safety lines) and S. Kerin (seals, exterior work), father and son, worked in the crew entrusted to me for one week: conscientiously, without injuries, and without being asked twice. Good workers. I take them back any time.

Galeni, the only outsider ever to see the frame, once asked — with the caution of a man putting a personal question to an emperor — why this, of all things, among all the decorations, treaties, and capitulations signed in that same study.

“Because everything else in this room was given to me, Duv,” said Gregor Vorbarra. “By inheritance, by protocol, by blood, out of pity, or out of fear. But this—” he nodded at the frame, “—this is the only document of my life that I earned. With two hands, in one week, on general terms.” He smiled, rarely and truly. “And the only one bearing the highest title I have managed to attain in fifty-eight years: ‘father and son, good workers.’ They take us back any time, Duv. Do you know how many emperors can say the same?”