After Martin jockeyed the lightflyer up out of the trees, Miles located the clearing he sought about a kilometer away. He had Martin put them down in the yard in front of a cabin built of weathered silvery wood. The cabin, with its familiar full-length porch giving a fine view over the valley and the new lake, appeared unchanged, though there were a couple of new outbuildings downslope.

A man came out onto the porch to see what was landing in his yard. It was not the balding, one-armed Speaker Karal. This was a total stranger, a tall fellow with a neatly trimmed black beard. But he leaned, interested, on the porch railing of bark-peeled sapling as if he owned the place. Miles climbed out of the lightflyer, and stood by it for an uncertain moment, staring up at the man, rehearsing explanations for himself and secretly glad of Martins bulk. Perhaps he should have brought a trained bodyguard.

But the stranger's face lit with recognition and excitement. "Lord Vorkosigan!" he cried. He ran down off the porch two steps at a time, and strode toward Miles, his hands out in greeting, smiling broadly. "Great to see you again!" His smile faded. "Nothing wrong, I hope?"

Well, this one remembered Miles, all right, from that judgment of nearly a decade ago. "No, this is purely a social visit," Miles offered, as the man came up and shook his hand—both his hands—with enthusiastic cordiality. "Nothing official."

The man stepped back, looking down at his face, and his smile turned into a sly grin. "Don't you know who I am?"

"Urn . . ."

"I'm Zed Karal."

"Zed?" Zed Karal, Speaker Karal's middle son, had been twelve years old. . . . Miles did a little quick math. Twenty-two, or thereabouts. Yeah. "The last time I saw you, you were shorter than me."

"Well, my ma was a good cook."

"Indeed. I remember." Miles hesitated. "Was? Are your parents, um . . ."

"Oh, they're fine. Just not here. My older brother married this lowlander girl from Seligrad, and went there to work and live. Ma and Da go down to live with them for the winter, 'cause the winters are getting hard for them up here. Ma helps with their kids."

"Is . . . Karal not the Speaker of Silvy Vale anymore, then?"

"No, we have a new Speaker, as of about two years ago. A young hotshot full of Progressive ideas he picked up living in Hassadar, just your type. I think you'll remember him all right. Name's Lem Csurik." Zed's smile broadened.

"Oh!" said Miles. For the first time today a smile tugged at his own lips. "Really. I'd … like to see him."

"I'll take you to him right now, if you'll give me a lift. He's probably working on the clinic today. You won't know where that is, it's bright-new. Just a second." Zed dashed back into his cabin to put something in order, a hint of that former twelve-year-old in his run. Miles felt like banging his head on the lightflyer's canopy, to try to force his spinning brain back into gear.

Zed returned, to hop into the lightflyer's backseat, and give Martin a string of directions interspersed with running commentary as they rose into the air and passed over the next ridge. He brought them down about two kilometers away in front of the rising frame of a six-room building, the biggest structure Miles had ever seen in Silvy Vale. Power lines were already strung to it, feeding a rack of pack-rechargers for power tools. Half a dozen men paused in their labors to watch them land.

Zed clambered out and waved. "Lem, hey Lem! You'll never guess who's here!" Miles followed him toward the building site; Martin sat at the controls and watched in bemusement.

"My lord!" Lem Csurik's recognition was instantaneous too; but then, Miles's appearance was, ah, distinctive. Miles could probably have picked Lem out of the crowd in turn with a moment's study. He was still the wiry hillman of about Miles's age that Miles remembered, though obviously much happier than the day a decade back when he'd been falsely accused of murder, and even more confident-looking than the time Miles had briefly seen him in Hassadar six years ago. Lem too went for an engulfing two-handed greeting.

"Speaker Csurik. Congratulations," Miles said in return. "I see you've been busy."

"Oh, you don't know the half of it, my lord! Come see. We're getting our own clinic—it's going to serve the whole area. I'm pushing to have it undercover before the first snow flies, and all ready by Winterfair. That's when we're getting our doctor, a real one, not just the medtech who flies the circuit once a week. The doc's one of your lady mother's scholarship students from the new school in Hassadar; he's going to serve us here four years in exchange for his schooling. Winterfair's when he's supposed to graduate. We're fixing him up a cabin, too, upslope; it's got a real nice view—"

Lem introduced his crew all around, and took Miles on a tour of, if not the clinic yet, the dream of the clinic that burned in his imagination so hotly, Miles could see its ghostly outlines all complete.

"I saw the electric dam in the valley, coming in," Miles said, when Lem at last paused for breath. "Where did that come from?"

"We built it," said Lem proudly. "You can bet that was a job and a half, with so few power tools. Had to make the power to have the power, of course. We'd been waiting and waiting for the powersat receptor the District promised us, but we were so far down the list, we'd still be waiting. Then I got to figuring. I went over to Dos'tovar and looked at their hydro plant, which they'd had for years. It was low-tech, but it worked. I got a couple of the fellows from there to come help us with the dam, picking the best site and all, and got an engineer from Hassadar whose house I'd helped build to come help us with the electrical system guts. He gets the use of a cabin up from the new lake for a vacation place in the summer in return. We still owe for the generators, but that's all."

"That was the best site, was it?"

"Oh, yes. The shortest span and the biggest drop available, and the most water-flow. We'll outgrow it in time, but that's the whole point. Without basic power, this place was in stasis. Now we can grow. Couldn't have won the lottery from the District for the doctor without power for the clinic, for one thing."

"You didn't let anything stop you, did you?"

"Well, m'lord, you know who I learned that from."

Harra, his wife, of course. Raina's mother. Miles nodded. "Speaking of Harra, where is she today?" He had come up here wanting only to stand silent before the dead, but he was now beginning to want very much to talk to Harra.

"Teaching at the school. I built on another room—we have two teachers now, you know. There's a girl Harra trained who does the little ones, and Harra teaches the older ones."

"Can I, ah, see it?"

"Harra'd skin me alive if I let you get away without seeing her! Come on, I'll take you over there now."

Zed, having turned Miles over to the responsible authority, waved good-bye and headed back home, disappearing among the trees. Lem spoke briefly to his crew, and took over Zed's place as native guide in the back seat of the lightflyer.

Another short hop brought them to an older and more traditional structure: a long cabin with two doors and fieldstone fireplaces on both ends. A large hand-carved sign with scrolling letters above the porch labeled it The Raina Csurik School. Lem led Miles through the door on the left, Martin trailing to linger uncertainly just outside. About twenty teenagers of various sizes sat at handmade wooden desks with comconsole lap-links atop them, listening to the vigorously gesturing woman at the head of the room.

Harra Csurik was still tall and lean, as Miles remembered her. Her straight straw-blond hair was tied back neatly at the nape of her neck, hill-woman fashion, and she wore a hill woman's simple dress, though clean and well made. Like the majority of her students, her feet were bare in this mild weather. But her protuberant gray eyes were lively and warm. She broke off her lecture abruptly as she saw Miles and Lem.