Falling Free (Vorkosigan Saga) Read online

  FALLING FREE

  a science fiction novel

  by

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  www.dendarii.com

  www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/bujold.htm

  Falling Free - Baen 1988

  Dreamweaver’s Dilemma - NESFA Press 1996

  © by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Books by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The Vorkosigan Series

  Falling Free

  Shards of Honor

  Barrayar

  The Warrior’s Apprentice

  The Vor Game

  Cetaganda

  Ethan of Athos

  Borders of Infinity

  Brothers in Arms

  Mirror Dance

  Memory

  Komarr

  A Civil Campaign

  Diplomatic Immunity

  Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance

  CryoBurn

  The Chalion Series

  The Curse of Chalion

  Paladin of Souls

  The Hallowed Hunt

  The Sharing Knife Tetralogy

  Volume One: Beguilement

  Volume Two: Legacy

  Volume Three: Passage

  Volume Four: Horizon

  Other Fantasy

  The Spirit Ring

  Short Stories

  Proto Zoa

  Table of Contents

  DREAMWEAVER’S DILEMMA

  FALLING FREE

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Dreamweaver’s Dilemma

  “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma”, at about 16,300 words technically a novelette, also is the foreshadowing or first draft of what has come to be dubbed ‘the Vorkosiverse’ or ‘the Vorkosigan saga’, my long-running (and still running) science fiction series. Having invented Beta Colony and the future history of the wormhole nexus as backstory for co-protagonist Chalmys DuBauer, I promptly recycled it as the place Cordelia Naismith was from when I plunged, a few weeks later in December of 1982, into the start of my first novel. Yes, the ill-fated Ensign Dubauer from Shards is a later descendant of Chalmys, both genetically and literarily.

  The story takes place approximately six hundred years before the events in Cordelia’s Honor.

  -o-o-O-o-o—

  Anias Ruey, the feelie-dream composer, floundered up out of sleep feeling like a sea creature being hauled out of deep water by a harpoon. She had the blurry thought that if the waking had been a transition in one of her own works, she would edit it out in the very next take. Her consciousness coming into sharper focus, she correctly identified the harpoon sensation as the musical chime of the vone. She rolled over in a tangle of covers and regarded its small blinking light malignantly. She knew only one man with the moral strength to ignore the vone; at the moment it seemed his most admirable trait. As it continued to ding inanely, she regretfully gave up the desire to emulate him and, in spite of the certainty in her heart that curiosity was more likely to be punished than rewarded, croaked “Answer,” and pulled the screen to face her. The machine, finicky, refused to obey until she cleared her throat and repeated it in a more normal tone.

  The unwelcome features of Helmut Gonzales, Rio de Janeiro’s most successful feelie-dream distributor, snapped into focus on the screen. He was a large, booming man whom Anias generally did not care to face before her first cup of coffee.

  “Yeah, what is it?” Anias said, with all the ungraciousness she could muster.

  “It’s the first of the month, Anias,” replied Gonzales, frowning right back. “Where is it?”

  “Are you going into one of your impresario phases again?” she inquired, attacking the flank.

  “It’s not finished yet, is it?” he asked rhetorically, interpreting her reply with depressing correctness. “Does signing a contract mean anything to you, or is it just a social pastime, like sex?”

  “Ooh, nasty,” said Anias appreciatively. She sighed. “How I long for the olden days, when people could say, ‘It’s in the mail! It’s in the mail!’ We live in an uncivilized age, Helmut.”

  He almost smiled, but remembered his purpose and controlled himself. “Is it even started yet?”

  She shrugged. “Well, yes. But I erased it. It just wasn’t working.”

  The look on his face suggested a mind at work on baroque ways of squeezing blood from stones. “If I could have it this week, we could still make maximum capital out of the success of Triad. If I’d had it last month like I was supposed to, I could have done even better. This delay is costing you as well as me, you know.”

  “I hate sequels. I’m tired of the subject,” Anias evaded.

  “Garbage. How can you get tired of romance?” he objected forthrightly. “Besides, you’re the one who makes so much noise about being a professional. So go to work like one. You don’t find me in the sack at ten in the morning when there’s work to be done. My creditors don’t put up with excuses instead of payments.”

  “Well, you have got Triad,” she pointed out.

  “And you have the advance on its sequel,” he said, with a firm grasp on the main point. “The work is now two months overdue, and you are in violation of contract. Starting today, I am diverting all royalties from Triad to the repayment of that advance, and unless and until you come through, that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

  “Capitalist swine.”

  “You’ll thank me for it someday, when you’re rich. Some people,” he sniffed, “simply need more discipline than others.” Sensing himself to be at least temporarily in possession of the last word, he prudently rang off.

  Anias twitched the covers back up to her chin with a glum frown. In her heart she felt Gonzales to be justified, especially in light of the promises she had made about the new dream. His business was marketing, and she herself profited from the fact that he did his job well. Soulless, inartistic Philistines could be very useful people to have around. Also, the reproduction his company did was unquestionably of outstanding quality. Nevertheless, she indulged herself for a few minutes in a slanderous reverie upon his manners, morals, and genes.

  Giving up on sleep, she swung out of bed and padded off to wash. Her bathroom mirror, which she ignored as usual, revealed her as a young woman of slight build, with a strong-boned facial structure of the sort called ‘interesting’ by the kindly. Her complexion was as soft and pale and innocent of the touch of sunlight as a new mushroom. Lank black hair made an unflattering frame for it, but intensely alive dark eyes did much to cancel the unfortunate effect.

  She dressed carelessly, dialed herself a large mug of coffee, and seated herself at her worktable. Beyond, through the window, she could rest her eyes in distance among the jumbled geometries of the cityscape, backed by a glittering glimpse of the sea. The view reminded her that the position of her apartment was something for which she paid a premium, so she took a moment to call up a statement of her current financial status on the vone screen. She moved some of the figures around a bit, but it didn’t help the depressing summations. Solvency was definitely dead and gone.

  “Bah,” she murmured, by way of incantation, and exorcised the ghost with a wave of her hand. “Time to go t
o work.”

  She settled more comfortably in her chair, and unwound the pair of leads to her very expensive dream synthesizer, a neat black box about the size of an antique paperback book. After five years of slowly growing success in the creation of feelie-dreams, she had just finished paying for it, entirely with the proceeds from her works. This was a point of pride bordering on passion for her, which she looked forward to bringing up in her next one-upsmanship contest with her ex-fiancé, her ex-guardian aunt, or any other unbeliever from her past. She put a fresh master cartridge in it, and attached the leads to the small silvery metal circles set flush with her skin on each temple. Closing her eyes, she prepared to concentrate.

  Her breathing gradually slowed and became very even. She might have appeared to be asleep in her chair but for the very intensity of her stillness, which breathed an air of trances, spells, or ecstatic visions.

  Interiorly, she began to construct a scene, viewed from within the body of her female protagonist. She carefully marshaled her emotions; devotion, delight, and fear at the sight of her hero. Her male protagonist entered the room of the dream. In riding dress, he was tall and bronzed, muscular and handsome, with even white teeth and an irresistible masculine aroma of sweat, scented soap, leather, and horses. His presence held an overpowering sexual aura, like an electric charge, boosted by the fact that he was obviously in a towering rage.

  “So,” he ground out, in a vibrant, penetrating bass voice. “This is how you repay my trust!”

  “I … I don’t know what you mean,” she faltered, her heart clamoring with guilt and confusion. She could hear the blood beating in her ears, and was intensely aware of waves, as of heat, radiating outward from the center of her body. The stays of her heavy brocade dress constricted her breathing.

  “You’re a half-ass and he’s a half-ass,” the voice of Anias’s mind broke the scene to fragments, like the last judgment come upon mankind. “Give up. You were obviously made for each other.” The hero, startled, was swept away in a flood of smelly ordure.

  Anias sighed, sat up, and rubbed her eyes. “Tiresome prig,” she murmured. “I don’t know why I ever invented you.” She erased the master cartridge and reset it to the beginning. “Take two. Let’s try a different dialogue.” She settled herself again with a firmer determination.

  The vone chimed. Reprieved, she answered it. A man she did not know, with oily black hair and an inadequate chin, appeared on the screen.

  “Miss Ruey?” he began politely. “My name is Rudolph Kinsey. I wonder if I may make an appointment to speak with you, on a matter of business.”

  “You’re speaking now,” Anias pointed out. She added suspiciously, “You’re not selling insurance, are you?”

  “Oh, no, no.” He waved the suggestion away with a smile that reminded her of a shark. Perhaps it was because it did not reach his eyes. Perhaps it was merely the effect of the chin. “I mean, an appointment to speak with you in person. Um … it’s a delicate matter.”

  Anias meditated upon him for a moment. He did not have the look of a fan or journalist. There was something sly about him, as though he ought to be a professional blackmailer, or an upper-class pimp. A quick review of her conscience turned up no unpublishable sins; the most lurid thing in her life was her imagination, something she not only did not hide, but actually displayed for sale in the dilute and disciplined forms of her creations. She put down this rather romantic turn of speculation with a pang (she would have liked to meet a real blackmailer, by way of research) and decided, reasonably, that he probably wished to commission a private feelie-dream, most likely of the rank variety.

  “Well, all right,” she allowed. “Do you know where I live?”

  He nodded.

  “Come up, oh…” conscience calculated a time for her neglected work, “four this afternoon?”

  “Very good.” He faded, as a spirit in a magic mirror.

  Work did not go well that afternoon. Her characters, each commissioned to carry its own little burden of ego and feeling, persisted in sliding off into inappropriate speech and behavior. Her own irritation and boredom with her assignment kept erupting into puckish outbreaks of character torture, necessitating several erasures. And whenever action did begin to flow, the vone was sure to chime.

  Thus by four she had forgotten her appointment, and the buzz from the door came as yet another interruption. She was yanked from the dream to a disorientated awareness of her true surroundings, thoroughly scrambling an intricately choreographed sequence of action that she had been weaving for the last several minutes. She shut down her machine with a snarl.

  Recalling that her visitor might be bringing offers of money, and some work other than her current nemesis, she took off her leads and composed herself. “Enter,” she called.

  Rudolph Kinsey was even less attractive in person than on the vone. He shook hands with a clammy softness, like a slug with bones. In her current mood, however, she took him as a preferable alternative to her intractable dream hero.

  After being seated he came directly to the point. She mentally blessed him for it. Embarrassed clients with bizarre requests could be tediously roundabout, and worse, vague.

  “I am given to understand that you occasionally do custom free-lance dreams, for a fee, in addition to the work you do under contract to the Sweet Dreams Distributing Company,” he began precisely. Anias nodded. “I am also given to understand that you maintain a degree of, as it were, professional discretion with respect to private commissions?”

  Anias cleared her throat. “Well, naturally, when one is asked to handle someone’s inmost, um, thoughts, to make them come alive, as it were, any public broadcast of the private feelings confided in one would be the greatest discourtesy,” she said encouragingly, echoing his style. She wondered if Mr. Kinsey’s requests would be of the sort too obscene to be admitted to, or too silly to be admitted to. She rather enjoyed doing the second sort, entering into the spirit of the thing, but by the look of him she bet it would be the first. Oh, well, it was bound to be educational.

  “I have here,” he said, surprising her by taking a sheaf of papers from a carrying case, “a precise scenario for the dream I wish to commission. I would wish it to be followed exactly. Please look it over. If you feel you would be able to do it, I have two requirements. First, that this commission not be discussed with anyone under any circumstances whatsoever. Second, that the sole copy and all rights to its use be delivered over to me absolutely. For a first-class interpretation, with those criteria met, I am prepared to pay twenty thousand S.A.H. pesodoros.”

  Anias’s eyes widened, but she carefully repressed other reactions, such as jumping up and down and shrieking with joyous greed. “A handsome sum,” she managed in a neutral tone. This guy must be a real sewer, she thought; a moment’s internal editing, and she spoke it as, “Is the subject quite difficult?”

  “As you see,” he said, handing her the sheaf of paper.

  “Why on paper?” she asked, taking it curiously.

  “No questions asked, please.” He tapped his lips playfully, and smiled. Anias wished he wouldn’t.

  She began to read, turning the pages carefully. “It’s certainly quite explicit. That’s a help.” A moment’s silence. “It’s structured very oddly. More like a night dream than a day dream.” Another page. “More like a nightmare.” She read on. “You really want to experience this?” She remembered the fee mentioned, and added prudently, “Well, there’s no accounting for taste.” Upon reflection, that didn’t seem quite tactful either, but Kinsey seemed to let it pass. “There are some technical problems. This scene where the children playing turn into a school of sharks and the dreamer slides down one’s throat, that twists into the fellatio scene, that dissolves into a gun going off and blowing out the back of her head … Do you want zoom transitions or melts? How much pain? What odors?” She fell silent, already revolving possible solutions in her mind.

  “That would be up to your, er, artistic discretion.�
�

  She finished the last page. “It doesn’t exactly resolve too well, does it? Very … existential.”

  “If it is too difficult for you I can of course find another—” began Kinsey.

  “No, no,” Anias temporized. “It’s quite a challenge, I admit. I’ve never done much horror before.”

  The strange unpleasant dream sequence was beginning to stir her artist’s imagination. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t trivial. The muse might smell of brimstone, but in the end it was the muse and not the money that tripped her decision.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll give it a try. Do I keep these to work from?” She rattled the papers.

  “Ah, very good,” said Kinsey, smiling again. “Yes. I hardly need mention, I hope, that they are not to be copied or, er, lost? When do you think you might have it ready?”

  “Well”—she rubbed her nose—“it’s complex, but not really very long. Two weeks, maybe, if I drop everything else to work on it. Maybe a bit more,” she added, to be safe. “Should I call you?”

  “Oh, no. Perhaps I can drop by, say, this time two weeks from today?” He rose.

  “Sure.”

  He shook her hand formally and departed. She saw him out the door, and rubbed her hand absently on her pants leg, frowning at the peculiar scenario.

  The vone chimed. Anias sighed. “If I’m going to do the job on you,” she said to the papers, “I’m going to have to tear that damned thing out of the wall.” She started toward it, thinking of her friend and sometimes lover who almost never answered his. “Now there’s a thought,” she murmured, stopping abruptly. “I’ll go plant myself on Chalmys for a couple of weeks. Practically nobody will guess I’m up there, and if anyone does, they’ll get his blasted answering program. Great food, no harassment—perfect!” Immensely cheered by her brilliant plan, she stepped smartly to the vone and said, “Answer!”