Miles in Love

"Betan training?" Enrique perked up. "Someone with Betan training, in this benighted place?"

  "Only a couple of undergraduate courses," Kareen explained hastily. "And there are lots of folks on Barrayar with galactic training of all sorts." What does he think this is, the Time of Isolation?

  "It's a start," said Enrique, in a tone of judicious approval. "But I was going to ask, Mark, do we have enough money to hire anyone yet?"

  "Mm," said Mark.

  "You, out of money?" said Kareen to Mark, startled. "What did you do on Escobar?"

  "I'm not out. It's just tied up in a lot of nonliquid ways right now, and I spent quite a bit more than I'd budgeted—it's only a temporary cash-flow problem. I'll get it sorted out at the end of the next period. But I have to confess, I was really glad I could put Enrique and his project up here free for a little while."

  "We could sell shares again," Enrique suggested. "That's what I did before," he added in an aside to Kareen.

  Mark winced. "I think not. I know I explained to you about closely-held."

  "People do raise venture capital that way," Kareen observed.

  Mark informed her under his breath, "But they don't normally sell shares to five hundred and eighty percent of their company."

  "Oh."

  "I was going to pay them all back," Enrique protested indignantly. "I was so close to breakthrough, I couldn't stop then!"

  "Um . . . excuse us a moment, Enrique." Mark took Kareen by her free hand, led her into the corridor outside the laundry room, and shut the door firmly. He turned to her. "He doesn't need an assistant. He needs a mother. Oh, God, Kareen, you have no idea what a boon it would be if you could help me ride herd on the man. I could give you the credit chits with a quiet mind, and you could keep the records and dole out his pocket-money, and keep him out of dark alleys and not let him pick the Emperor's flowers or talk back to ImpSec guards or whatever suicidal thing he comes up with next. The thing is, um . . ." He hesitated. "Would you be willing to take shares as collateral against your salary, at least till the end of the period? Doesn't give you much spending money, I know, but you said you meant to save . . ."

  She stared dubiously at the butter bug, still tickling her palm as it finished off the last of its rose petal. "Can you really give me shares? Shares of what? But . . . if this doesn't work out as you hope, I wouldn't have anything else to fall back on."

  "It will work," he promised urgently. "I'll make it work. I own fifty-one percent of the enterprise. I'm having Tsipis help me officially register us as a research and development company, out of Hassadar."

  She would be betting their future together on Mark's odd foray into bioentrepreneurship, and she wasn't even sure he was in his right mind. "What, ah, does your Black Gang think of all this?"

  "It's not their department in any way."

  Well, that was reassuring. This was apparently the work of his dominant personality, Lord Mark, serving the whole man, and not a ploy of one of his sub-personas for its own narrow ends. "Do you really think Enrique is that much of a genius? Mark, I thought that smell back in the lab was the bugs at first, but it was him. When was his last bath?"

  "He probably forgot to take one. Feel free to remind him. He won't be offended. In fact, think of it as part of your job. Make him wash and eat, take charge of his credit chit, organize the lab, make him look both ways before crossing the street. And it would give you an excuse to hang out here at Vorkosigan House."

  Put like that . . . besides, Mark was giving her that pleading-puppy-eyes look. In his own strange way Mark was almost as good as Miles at drawing one into doing things one suspected one would later regret deeply. Infectious obsession, a Vorkosigan family trait.

  "Well . . ." A little chittering burp made her look down. "Oh, no, Mark! Your bug is sick." Several milliliters of thick white liquid dripped from the bug's mandibles onto her palm.

  "What?" Mark surged forward in alarm. "How can you tell?"

  "It's throwing up. Ick! Could it be jump-lag? That makes some people nauseous for days." She looked around frantically for a place to deposit the creature before it exploded or something. Would bug diarrhea be next?

  "Oh. No, that's all right. They're supposed to do that. It's just producing its bug butter. Good girl," he crooned to the bug. At least, Kareen trusted he was addressing the bug.

  Firmly, Kareen took his hand, turned it palm-up, and dumped the now-slimy bug into it. She wiped her hand on his shirt. "Your bug. You hold it."

  "Our bugs . . . ?" he suggested, though he accepted it without demur. "Please . . . ?"

  The goop didn't smell bad, actually. In fact, it had a scent rather like roses, roses and ice cream. She nevertheless found the impulse to lick the stickiness off her hand to be quite resistible. Mark . . . was less so. "Oh, very well." I don't know how he talks me into things like this. "It's a deal."

  Chapter Five

  Armsman Pym admitted Ekaterin to the grand front hall of Vorkosigan House. Belatedly, she wondered if she ought to be using the utility entrance, but in his tour of a couple of weeks ago Vorkosigan hadn't shown her where it was. Pym was smiling at her in his usual very friendly way, so perhaps it was all right for the moment.

  "Madame Vorsoisson. Welcome, welcome. How may I serve you?"

  "I had a question for Lord Vorkosigan. It's rather trivial, but I thought, if he was right here, and not busy . . ." She trailed off.

  "I believe he's still upstairs, madame. If you would be pleased to wait in the library, I'll fetch him at once."

  "I can find my way, thank you," she fended off his proffered escort. "Oh, wait—if he's still asleep, please don't—" But Pym was already ascending the stairs.

  She shook her head, and wandered through the antechamber to the left toward the library. Vorkosigan's Armsmen seemed impressively enthusiastic, energetic, and attached to their lord, she had to concede. And astonishingly cordial to visitors.

  She wondered if the library harbored any of those wonderful old hand-painted herbals from the Time of Isolation, and whether she might borrow—she came to a halt. The chamber had an occupant: a short, fat, dark-haired young man who crouched at a comconsole that sat so incongruously among the fabulous antiques. It was displaying a collection of colored graphs of some kind. He glanced up at the sound of her step on the parquet.

  Ekaterin's eyes widened. At my height, Lord Vorkosigan had complained, the effect is damned startling. But it wasn't the soft obesity that startled nearly so much as the resemblance to, what did they call it for a clone, to his progenitor, which was half-buried beneath the . . . why did she instantly think of it as a barrier of flesh? His eyes were the same intense gray as Miles's—as Lord Vorkosigan's, but their expression was closed and wary. He wore black trousers and a black shirt; his belly burgeoned from an open backcountry-style vest which conceded the spring weather outside only by being a green so dark as to be almost black.

  "Oh. You must be Lord Mark. I'm sorry," she spoke to that wariness.

  He sat back, his finger touching his lips in a gesture very like one of Lord Vorkosigan's, but then going on to trace his doubled chin, pinching it between thumb and finger in an emphatic variation clearly all his own. "I, on the other hand, am tolerably pleased."

  Ekaterin flushed in confusion. "I didn't mean—I didn't mean to intrude."

  His eyebrows flicked up. "You have the advantage of me, milady." The timbre of his voice was very like his brother's, perhaps a trifle deeper; his accent was an odd amalgam, neither wholly Barrayaran nor wholly galactic.

  "Not milady, merely Madame. Ekaterin Vorsoisson. Excuse me. I'm, um, your brother's landscape consultant. I just came in to check what he wants done with the maple tree we're taking down. Compost, firewood—" She gestured at the cold carved white marble fireplace. "Or if he just wants me to sell the chippings to the arbor service."

  "Maple tree, ah. That would be Earth-descended botanical matter, wouldn't it?"

  "Why, yes."

  "I'll take any chopped-up bits
he doesn't want."

  "Where . . . would you want it put?"

  "In the garage, I suppose. That would be handy."

  She pictured the heap dumped in the middle of Pym's immaculate garage. "It's a rather large tree."

  "Good."

  "Do you garden . . . Lord Mark?"

  "Not at all."

  The decidedly disjointed conversation was interrupted by a booted tread, and Armsman Pym leaning around the doorframe to announce, "M'lord will be down in a few minutes, Madame Vorsoisson. He says, please don't go away." He added in a more confiding tone, "He had one of his seizures last night, so he's a little slow this morning."

  "Oh, dear. And they give him such a headache. I shouldn't trouble him till he's had his painkillers and black coffee." She turned for the door.

  "No, no! Sit down, madame, sit, please. M'lord would be right upset with me if I botched his orders." Pym, smiling anxiously, motioned her urgently toward a chair; reluctantly, she sat. "There now. Good. Don't move." He watched her a moment as if to make sure she wasn't going to bolt, then hurried off again. Lord Mark stared after him.

  She hadn't thought Lord Vorkosigan was the sort of Old Vor who threw his boots at his servants' heads when he was displeased, but Pym did seem edgy, so who knew? She looked around again to find Lord Mark leaning back in his chair, steepling his fingers and watching her curiously.

  "Seizures . . . ?" he said invitingly.

  She stared back at him, not at all sure what he was asking. "They leave him with the most dreadful hangover the next day, you see."

  "I'd understood they were practically cured. Is this not, in fact, the case?"

  "Cured? Not if the one I witnessed was a sample. Controlled, he says."

  His eyes narrowed. "So, ah . . . where did you see this show?"

  "The seizure? It was on my living room floor, actually. In my old apartment on Komarr," she felt compelled to explain at his look. "I met him during his recent Auditorial case there."

  "Oh." His gaze flicked up and down, taking in her widow's garb. Construing . . . what?

  "He has this little headset device his doctors made for him, which is supposed to trigger them when he chooses, instead of randomly." She wondered if the one he'd had last night was medically induced, or if he'd left it for too long again and suffered the more severe, spontaneous version. He'd claimed to have learned his lesson, but—

  "He neglected to supply me with all those complicating details, for some reason," Lord Mark murmured. An oddly unhumorous grin flashed over his face and was gone. "Did he explain to you how he came by them in the first place?"

  His attention upon her had grown intent. She groped for the right balance between truth and discretion. "Cryo-revival damage, he told me. I once saw the scars on his chest from the needle grenade. He's lucky he's alive."

  "Huh. Did he also mention that at the time he encountered the grenade, he was trying to save my sorry ass?"

  "No . . ." She hesitated, taking in his defiantly lifted chin. "I don't think he's supposed to talk much about his, his former career."

  He smiled thinly, and drummed his fingers on the comconsole. "My brother has this bad little habit of editing his version of reality to fit his audience, y'see."

  She could understand why Lord Vorkosigan was loath to display any weakness. But was Lord Mark angry about something? Why? She sought to find some more neutral topic. "Do you call him your brother, then, and not your progenitor?"

  "Depends on my mood."

  The subject of their discussion arrived then, curtailing the conversation. Lord Vorkosigan wore one of his fine gray suits and polished half-boots, his hair was neatly combed but still damp, and the faint scent of his cologne carried from his shower-warmed skin. This dapper impression of greet-the-morning energy was unfortunately belied by his gray-toned face and puffy eyes; the general effect was of a corpse reanimated and dressed for a party. He managed a macabre smile in Ekaterin's direction, and a suspicious squint at his clone-brother, and lowered himself stiffly into an armchair between them. "Uh," he observed.

  He looked appallingly just like that morning-after on Komarr, minus the bloodstains and scabs. "Lord Vorkosigan, you should not have gotten up!"

  He gave her a little wave of his fingers which might have been either agreement or denial, then Pym arrived in his wake bearing a tray with coffeepot, cups, and a basket covered with a bright cloth from which wafted an enticing aroma of warm spiced bread. Ekaterin watched with fascination as Pym poured out the first cup and folded his lord's hand around it; Lord Vorkosigan sipped, inhaled—it looked like his first breath of the day—sipped again, and looked up and blinked. "Good morning, Madame Vorsoisson." His voice only sounded a little underwater.

  "Good morning—oh—" Pym poured her a cup too before she could forestall him. Lord Mark shut off his comconsole graphs and added sugar and cream to his, and studied his progenitor-brother with obvious interest. "Thank you," Ekaterin said to Pym. She hoped Vorkosigan had ingested his painkillers upstairs, first thing; by his rapidly-improving color and easing movement, she was fairly sure he had.

  "You're up early," Vorkosigan said to her.

  She almost pointed out the time, in denial of this, then decided that might be impolitic. "I was excited to be starting my first professional garden. The sod crew are out rolling up the grass in the park this morning, and collecting the terraformed topsoil. The tree crew will be along shortly to transplant the oak. It occurred to me to ask if you wanted the maple for firewood, or compost."

  "Firewood. Sure. We burn wood now and then, when we're being deliberately archaic for show—it impresses the hell out of my mother's Betan visitors—and there're always the Winterfair bonfires. There's a pile out back behind some bushes. Pym can show you."

  Pym nodded genial confirmation.

  "I've laid claim to the leaves and chippings," Lord Mark put in, "for Enrique."

  Lord Vorkosigan shrugged, and held a hand palm-out in a warding gesture. "That's between you and your eight thousand little friends."

  Lord Mark appeared to find no mystery in this obscure remark; he nodded thanks. Having, apparently, accidentally routed her employer out of bed, Ekaterin wondered if it would be too rude to dash out again immediately. She ought probably to stay long enough to drink at least one cup of Pym's coffee. "If all goes well, the excavation can start tomorrow," she added.

  "Ah, good. Did Tsipis put you in the way of collecting all your water and power connection permits?"

  "Yes, that's all under control. And I've learned more than I expected about Vorbarr Sultana's infrastructure."

  "It's a lot older and stranger than you'd think. You should hear Drou Koudelka's war stories some time, about how they escaped through the sewers after collecting the Pretender's head. I'll see if I can get her going at the dinner party."

  Lord Mark leaned his elbow on the comconsole, nibbled gently on his knuckle, and idly rubbed his throat.

  "A week from tomorrow night seems to be the date I can round up everyone," Lord Vorkosigan added. "Will that work for you?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Good." He shifted around, and Pym hastened to pour him more coffee. "I'm sorry I missed the garden groundbreaking. I really meant to come out and watch that with you. Gregor sent me out-country a couple of days ago on what turned out to be a fairly bizarre errand, and I didn't get back till late last night."

  "Yes, what was that all about?" Lord Mark put in. "Or is it an Imperial secret?"

  "No, unfortunately. In fact, it's already gossip all over town. Maybe it will divert attention from the Vorbretten case. Though I'm not sure if you can call it a sex scandal, exactly." A tilted grimace. "Gregor told me, `You're half-Betan, Miles, you're just the Auditor to handle this one.' I said, `Thanks, Sire.'"

  He paused for his first bite of sweet spiced bread, washed down with another swallow of coffee, and warmed to his theme. "Count Vormuir came up with this wonderful idea how to solve his District's underpopulation problem. Or so he
imagined. Are you up on the latest hot demographic squabbles among the Districts, Mark?"

  Lord Mark waved a negating hand, and reached for the bread basket. "I haven't been following Barrayaran politics for the past year."

  "This one goes back further than that. Among our father's early reforms, when he was Regent, was that he managed to impose uniform simplified rules for ordinary subjects who wanted to change Districts, and switch their oaths to their new District Count. Since every one of the sixty Counts was trying to attract population to his District at the expense of his brother Counts, Da somehow greased this through the Council, even though everyone was also trying to prevent their own liege people from leaving them. Now, each Count has a lot of discretion about how he runs his District, how he structures his District government, how he imposes his taxes, supports his economy, what services he provides his people, whether Progressive or Conservative or a party of his own invention like that loon Vorfolse down on the south coast, and on and on. Mother describes the Districts as sixty sociopolitical culture dishes. I'd add, economic, too."