That looked much better. Now a little short, though. A slow smile turned his lips. He bent and added: P.S.—Byerly Vorrutyer has the whole story, if you can catch up with him.
Actually, he didn’t expect By to be back in Vorbarr Sultana till some days after he and Tej and Rish arrived, at the earliest. But what was that tale from Old Earth, about throwing one’s fellow traveler out of the troika to distract the pursuing wolves? Yeah, like that, only more virtual, since Mamere wouldn’t be able to lay her hands on By, either. But it sounded good.
He sent the message on its way, racing ahead of them at the speed of light.
Chapter Nine
For a capital that had hosted so many wars, both civil and interplanetary, Vorbarr Sultana seemed in remarkably good shape to Tej’s eye. From her readings of Barrayaran history aboard the JP-9, she’d half expected to see gutted buildings with blackened timbers still smoking, bomb craters in the streets, and haunted, emaciated people scurrying like rats among the barricades. Instead, it was fully modernized, if not always fully modern, chock-a-block with galactic-standard transportation and architecture, with citizens—no, subjects, she corrected the term—out everywhere, looking busy and well-fed and alarmingly assertive. Terms like lively or even vibrant rose to Tej’s mind. It was extremely disorienting.
All right, the traffic congestion was appalling. The auto-cab that they’d taken from the military shuttleport took twenty minutes to crawl across what Ivan Xav assured her was a very famous bridge, but it did give her and Rish time to stare up and down the river valley, from the high bluffs crowned with strange archaic castles lit, their guide promised, with pretty colored floodlights at night, to the hillsides crowded with fine houses hogging the views, to the level areas sprouting high-rises, universities, and medical complexes. They pulled up in front of a tall residential building quite close to the center of things, or at least to the military headquarters. The government complexes were closer to the Old Town, nearly lost in the center of the sprawl, but Ivan Xav explained that the historical area was all cleaned up these days, with some quite fine restaurants to be found if one knew how to avoid the backcountry tourists.
The building harboring Ivan Xav’s flat reminded Tej very much of his place in Solstice, but the security was rather better; a human guard manned a reception desk, and Ivan Xav paused to have them scanned and entered as bona fide residents in the electronic database. The vidcams were unobtrusive but maintained a redundant overlap. He then whisked them up a lift tube and down a hallway, pulling out a remote to unlock a sliding, but not airsealed, door. “Home at last,” he announced cheerfully, “and boy, am I glad of it.”
His flat, too, reminded her of the place on Komarr—it lacked the separate entry hall, and the kitchen was bigger, but it boasted a balcony overlooking the street and a bit of the city. Not as high up. The rooms were larger, but they were much more cluttered, seeming closer and warmer somehow despite the stuffy smell of a place not occupied for the better part of a month.
“Ah, good,” Ivan Xav went on, striding to the bedroom and tossing his duffle down on a broad bed. “The cleaning service has been in. We’re all set.”
Having worked for nearly three weeks straight, Ivan Xav was due several days of leave, Admiral Desplains had told Tej upon parting for his own leave and Madame Desplains, who’d been waiting at the shuttleport to pick him up. He trusted Captain Vorpatril would use the time well to organize his affairs, right, Ivan? Ivan Xav had nodded earnestly. Just what that meant, Tej had no idea.
They were here. Now what? In her exhaustion and stress on Komarr, she’d scarcely thought past escape from. Escape to hadn’t even been on her mental horizon.
“Where do I sleep?” Rish inquired, wandering around and looking things over, her expression dubious.
“The sofa folds flat. It’s not too bad.” Ivan Xav stretched mightily and came back into his living room. “There are three people I’d most like to avoid in Vorbarr Sultana—m’mother, Miles, and Gregor, in that order. Well, and Falco, but he’s not so hard to dodge. He may well be up in the District. Though I suppose we’ll have to chase him down in due course. But other than that, what would you two like to do here in the great metropolis?”
Tej looked down at her travel-rumpled garments. Do? That implied Go out, surely. “We only have these Komarran clothes. Are they all right to wear on Barrayar, or should we find something to help us blend in better?”
Rish extended a slim blue hand and snorted. She then raised her arms and did a slow backbend, kicking over to a handstand and then up to her feet again.
“You know what I mean,” said Tej.
“Yeah, sure,” said Ivan Xav. “M’mother gets her clothes custom designed, but my other gir—I’ve been dragged around to enough other places, I’ll bet I could find you something nice. But Komarran styles are trendy, too—Empress Laisa, you know. Maybe you want to look around and see what you like, first, and then go picking.”
A pleasant chime sounded.
“T’ hell?” said Ivan Xav. “Nobody knows I’m back yet. Not expecting company . . .” He wandered to his door and carefully checked his security vid. It was far too early, Tej reminded herself, for her pursuers to have regrouped and caught up with her.
“Ah,” muttered Ivan Xav. “Christos. Maybe . . . maybe we’re not home just yet. Still caught in traffic, yeah.”
“Come on, Lord Ivan, open up,” came a man’s voice, balanced on some cusp between amused and irritated. “I know you’re in there. Or at least check the messages on your wristcom.”
“M’mother’s driver and errand boy,” Ivan Xav told Tej and Rish over his shoulder. “And bodyguard—the man’s a retired commando sergeant. Like my cousin’s armsmen in all but title and oath. I swear he aspires to the role. Came in about four years ago—he didn’t actually dandle me on his knee as a small boy, he just acts like it.” He added reluctantly after a moment, “Good at his job, though.”
Which one? Tej wondered.
Ivan Xav hit the pad to open the door.
The man looked big, gray-haired, and affable; for a change, his clothing did not resemble a uniform, just a neat shirt with wide sleeves, trousers with baggy cuffs tucked into short boots, and a sleeveless jacket with strange but attractive embroidery. But mostly, he looked big.
He eased around Ivan Xav, spotted Tej and Rish, and said, “Ah,” in a satisfied tone. He came to a species of attention before her. “Good afternoon, Lady Vorpatril, Mademoiselle Lapis Lazuli. I’m Christos, Dowager Lady Vorpatril’s driver. M’lady has charged me to convey you to a private dinner at her flat. And also to convey her earnest invitation for said dinner, should it unaccountably”—he cast a knife-flick of a glance at Ivan Xav—“have become lost somewhere on Lord Ivan’s wristcom.”
“Oh,” said Tej, glaring a plea at Ivan Xav. What was she supposed to do?
“We just got off the shuttle,” Ivan Xav began.
“Yeah, I know.” Christos held up a viewer. “I brought a book for while you clean up. I’m to wait while you get ready. Because she didn’t want me to miss you, if you took yourselves out or whatever.” He smiled thinly, trod into the living room, and helped himself to a chair, settling back for a comfortable read. He added as he keyed it on and found his place, “Dress is casual, she said. Which only means, not formal.”
“Trapped,” Ivan Xav muttered. “Like rats . . .”
“What now?” Tej whispered to him.
He scratched his head and sighed, as if in defeat. “Well, we’ve all got to eat sometime. And at least the food’ll be first-rate.”
“If we get this over with now,” murmured Rish, “we won’t have to sit around anticipating it, you know. It does seem an inevitable meeting.”
Ivan Xav grimaced, but Tej nodded. Even if Ivan Xav’s mother was a horrible harridan in hysterics, as his actions seemed to imply, the news of the impending divorce ought to calm her down. It seemed unlikely that she would pull out a weapon and shoot her son’s new bride over dinner, and besides, t
hat would be redundant. She had only to stake Tej and Rish out where the enemy syndicate could find them, and the problem would be carried out of her ken without her having to lift, or tighten, a finger. Still . . . poisons? Rish could detect an astonishing number of these, if presented in food or drink. But—redundancy, again. Tej decided she was letting travel weariness and her nerves turn her thoughts just too strange. It would all be made plain soon enough.
A flurry of turns in the bath and dithering over their tiny selection of garb resulted in Rish in black Komarran trousers and top, with a long-sleeved jacket and her head-shawl, Tej similarly attired in shades of cream, a little shabby but easy on her acute color sensitivity, and Ivan Xav in civilian clothes similar to what he’d been wearing the first time they’d met, but pulled clean from his capacious closet and not crumpled and smelly from his duffle. The driver shepherded them out with bland courtesy.
A large groundcar with a separate driver’s compartment awaited them in the basement garage. As Christos handed them into the spacious back passenger compartment and started to close the silvered canopy, Ivan Xav held up a hand and said, “Uh, Christos—will Simon be there, do you know?”
“Of course, Lord Ivan.” The canopy snapped closed, sealing them in.
Ivan Xav sat back with a wince, but for a few minutes Tej and Rish were too busy craning their necks and trying to see the city for Tej to pursue this new mystery. Nearing sunset of what seemed to be a late fall or early winter day, traffic was heavy, but the car was bearing generally upriver and uphill.
Ivan Xav cleared his throat. “I should probably explain Simon,” he began, then stalled out, muttering, “No, there’s no explaining Simon . . .”
“All right, who is Simon?” said Tej. If they were being flung into this headfirst . . . “Aren’t you the one who was complaining to Byerly Vorrutyer about inadequate briefings?”
“How do I put this?” Ivan Xav rubbed his forehead. “Simon Illyan was Chief of Imperial Security for upwards of thirty years, from the War of Vordarian’s Pretendership till about four or so years back, when he suffered, um, a sort of stroke. Neurological damage to his memory functions. Retired out on a medical, y’know.”
Wait, that Simon Illyan? The same ImpSec boss whom Morozov, without a trace of irony, had dubbed the legendary?
“—and took up with m’mother. Why then, and not any time in the preceding three decades that they worked together, I have no idea, but there you are. So he’s like there, all the time now. With her. Unless she’s at the Residence working. They stick to each other like glue. It’s pretty damned unnerving, I can tell you.”
“Oh,” said Rish, finally unraveling this. “They’re lovers. Why didn’t you say so?”
Ivan Xav tilted his head back and forth and made little flailing motions with his hands. “Haven’t got used to it yet, I guess.”
“After four years?” Tej blinked in new dismay. In other words, the Simon Illyan was almost-sort-of Ivan’s stepfather and he hadn’t mentioned it till now? “Does he really have a cyborg brain?”
“What?”
“That was the rumor in the Whole. Illyan, the Barrayaran Imperial Security chief with the cyborg brain.” The whispers had suggested a sinister super-humanity. Or super-inhumanity.
“I wouldn’t call it that. When he was a young ImpSec lieutenant—twenty-seven, I think he said, good grief, that’s almost eight years younger than I am now . . .” Ivan Xav trailed off, then took up his thread again. “Anyway, then-Emperor Ezar sent him all the way to Illyrica, a trip that took months, to be fitted with an experimental eidetic-memory chip. Which was kind of a bust—nine out of ten of the subjects came down with some sort of chip-induced schizophrenia, and the project was canned. Illyan was a tenth man. So ever after that he had to cope with two memories, the perfect one off his chip, and his original organic one. Ezar, of course, died, and Illyan had to find his own way—he became one of the Regent’s key men around the time of the Pretendership.”
“So, so he had a stroke, and . . .” Tej puzzled through all this spate of belated information. “It did something to this chip?”
Ivan Xav cleared his throat. “Actually, it was the other way around. The chip broke down. Had to be surgically removed. But Illyan’s brain had sort of, it’s hard to describe—even harder to live through, I guess—rerouted itself around the chip in the, what, almost thirty-five years that he had it. When it was so abruptly yanked out, it was really hard for him to readjust.
“So the thing about Simon is,” Ivan Xav forged on, “the thing about Simon is, he used to have this terrifying total recall, but now he sometimes doesn’t track. He’s pretty quiet, so you’re not always sure what’s going on in his head, not that you ever were. So, um . . . make allowances, huh?”
He was—Tej tried to sort it out—he was anxious for his mother’s lover’s dignity, then? And not just for how it reflected on his mother, it seemed. He seemed anxious for Simon Illyan in his own right. That was . . . unexpected.
And Illyan was now her . . . stepfather-in-law? Or would he see her that way? It was unclear whether he and Ivan Xav were close. But it seemed that the legend was in some sort of medical eclipse. Well, old people. It was said Barrayarans aged faster than galactics.
It was all very curious. If the looming Christos were to offer them escape from their date with fate right now, she wasn’t sure that she would take him up on it.
They arrived at length at another tallish residential tower, this one high on the river ridge and so commanding an even better view. “Is this where you grew up?” Tej inquired, as they entered yet another underground garage.
“No, m’mother moved here recently. She has the top two floors. She used to live in an older building much closer to the Imperial Residence. That was where I grew up as much as anywhere, I guess.”
“Nice digs,” murmured Rish as they rose in a transparent lift tube through level after level of elegantly appointed foyers. “Are higher floors more expensive?”
“Dunno. She owns the building, so it’s not like she pays the rent.” He added after a moment, “She still owns t’old one, too.” And, after another, “And mine. Has a business manager to look after ’em all.”
Tej was beginning to wonder if Lady Alys Vorpatril qualified as a House Minor in her own right. And then they were crossing out of the tube into another foyer, and escorted by Christos through a pair of sleek doors clad in fine wood marquetry to a hushed hallway graced with mirrors and fresh flowers. And then into a broad living room backed by wide glass walls taking in a sweeping panorama of the capital, with the sun going down and the dusk rising to turn the city lights to jewels on velvet for as far as the eye could see, under a cloud-banded sky.
In two comfortable-looking armchairs angled close together at the room’s far corner sat a man and a woman; both rose and advanced as Christos announced, “Milady, sir; Lord Ivan Vorpatril, Lady Tej Vorpatril, Mademoiselle Lapis Lazuli,” and bowed himself out, delivering his captives and escaping in the same smooth movement.
Tej scrambled to recognize the couple from assorted vid scans she’d recently seen, although, as always, people in person were subtly different from their graphic representations—in scent, in sound, in sheer palpability. And these people were palpable.
Lady Alys was a woman past youth and into an indeterminate age one might dub dignified, but certainly not old; she moved with ease, and the streak of silver in her bound-back hair seemed to rest there as mere tasteful decoration. Dark brown eyes like Ivan Xav’s, large in her pale, oval face; fine skin well-cared-for. A long-sleeved, dark red dress with a hem at her mid-calf was topped by a darker loose sleeveless vest of equal length, the colors appropriate to her skin tones, her surroundings, and the season.
Simon Illyan was dressed not unlike the driver, except in shades of sober cream and charcoal. He was barely taller than Lady Alys, who was surely of no more than average height for a Barrayaran woman. Thinning brown hair was succumbing to a tide of gray rising arou
nd the sides. Scans she’d seen of him from earlier in his career, always in the background of some Imperial event—and if she’d known, she’d have paid him more attention—had seemed to convey a sharp tension in his posture and grim expression. He smiled at her now with an amiable vagueness that went well with the slight pudge around his middle, but sat oddly with his reputation.
Lady Alys cast a look at her son that seemed to say, I’ll deal with you later, and turned to take the startled Tej’s hands in cool, slim fingers.
“Lady Tej,” she said, looking her guest in the eye as if . . . searching? “Welcome to my home. Congratulations on your marriage. And, I am so very sorry for your late losses.”
The last words floored Tej. No one had offered her condolences for the slaughter of her family, not one person in all the long months of their erratic flight from the Whole to here. Granted, the only people who’d known who she was were the ones trying to add her to the tally. But still, but still, but still. She gulped, breathless and trembling. Managed a constricted, “Thank you,” blinking back the blur in her eyes. Ivan Xav looked at her in concern.
With a peculiar little nod, Lady Alys squeezed her hands and released them. Ivan Xav moved in to slip an arm around her shoulders and give her an uncertain hug.
“And you too, Lapis Lazuli,” Lady Alys continued, turning to Rish, but offering more of a handshake. “Or do you prefer Rish?”
“I prefer Rish,” said Rish. “Lapis Lazuli has always been more of a stage name.”
“May I make you both known to my long-time friend, Simon Illyan.”
Illyan, too, shook their hands in turn, his clasp firm and dry. He lingered to look Tej up and down; his smile broadened slightly. But he made no remark.
“Please, won’t you come sit down.” Lady Alys made a graceful wave toward the seats in a close conversational grouping at the room’s far end. Ivan Xav grabbed Tej’s hand and kept her by him, aiming them onto the two-person sofa; Lady Alys and Illyan took their former chairs, and Rish perched on a rather antique-looking carved chair with new silk upholstery. The whole room, Tej noted, was put together with a quiet, firm taste, a mixture of the old and new that complemented rather than clashed, and, oh blessings, with an impeccable eye for color. Well, Rish stood out a little.