Ekaterin glanced up at the sound of their footsteps, and a ghost of a smile lightened her pale face. She jammed her trowel into the dirt, and rose to her feet. "Oh, hello."
"Hi, Ekaterin." Not wishing to plunge too baldly into the purpose of her visit, Kareen added, with a wave of her arm, "This is pretty." Trees, and walls draped with vines, made the little garden into a private bower in the midst of the city.
Ekaterin followed her glance. "It was a hobby-project of mine, when I lived here as a student, years ago. Aunt Vorthys has kept it up, more or less. There are a few things I'd do differently now . . . Anyway," she gestured at the graceful wrought-iron table and chairs, "won't you sit down?"
Martya took prompt advantage of the invitation, seating herself and resting her chin on her hands with a put-upon sigh.
"Would you like anything to drink? Tea?"
"Thanks," said Kareen, also sitting. "Nothing to drink, thanks." This household lacked servants to dispatch on such errands; Ekaterin would have to go off and rummage in the kitchen with her own hands to supply her guests. And the sisters would be put to it to guess whether to follow prole rules, and all troop out to help, or impoverished-high-Vor rules, and sit and wait and pretend they didn't notice there weren't any servants. Besides, they'd just eaten, and her dinner still sat like a lump in Kareen's stomach even though she'd barely picked at it.
Kareen waited until Ekaterin was seated to venture cautiously, "I just stopped by to find out—that is, I'd wondered if, if you'd heard anything from . . . from Vorkosigan House?"
Ekaterin stiffened. "No. Should I have?"
"Oh." What, Miles the monomaniacal hadn't made it all up to her by now? Kareen had pictured him at Ekaterin's door the following morning, spinning damage-control propaganda like mad. It wasn't that Miles was so irresistible—she, for one, had always found him quite resistible, at least in the romantic sense, not that he'd ever exactly turned his attention on her—but he was certainly the most relentless human being she'd ever met. What was the man doing all this time? Her anxiety grew. "I'd thought—I was hoping—I'm awfully worried about Mark, you see. It's been almost two days. I was hoping you might have . . . heard something."
Ekaterin's face softened. "Oh, Mark. Of course. No. I'm sorry."
Nobody cared enough about Mark. The fragilities and fault lines of his hard-won personality were invisible to them all. They'd load him down with impossible pressures and demands as though he were, well, Miles, and assume he'd never break. . . . "My parents have forbidden me to call anyone at Vorkosigan House, or go over there or anything," Kareen explained, tight-voiced. "They insisted I give them my word before they'd even let me out of the house. And then they stuck me with a snitch." She tossed her head in the direction of Martya, now slumping with almost equal surliness.
"It wasn't my idea to be your bodyguard," protested Martya. "Did I get a vote? No."
"Da and Mama—especially Da—have gone all Time-of-Isolation over this. It's just crazy. They're all the time telling you to grow up, and then when you do, they try to make you stop. And shrink. It's like they want to cryofreeze me at twelve forever. Or stick me back in the replicator and lock down the lid." Kareen bit her lip. "And I don't fit in there anymore, thank you."
"Well," said Ekaterin, a shade of sympathetic amusement in her voice, "at least you'd be safe there. I can understand the parental temptation of that."
"You're making it worse for yourself, you know," said Martya to Kareen, with an air of sisterly critique. "If you hadn't carried on like a madwoman being locked in an attic, I bet they wouldn't have gone nearly so rigid."
Kareen bared her teeth at Martya.
"There's something to that in both directions," said Ekaterin mildly. "Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It's so infuriating. It took me the longest time to figure out how to stop falling into that trap."
"Yes, exactly," said Kareen eagerly. "You understand! So—how did you make them stop?"
"You can't make them—whoever your particular them is—do anything, really," said Ekaterin slowly. "Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that's hard." Ekaterin looked up from her lap where her hands had been absently rubbing at the yard dirt smeared on them, and remembered to smile. Kareen felt an odd chill. It wasn't just her reserve that made Ekaterin daunting, sometimes. The woman went down and down, like a well to the middle of the world. Kareen bet even Miles couldn't shift her around at his will and whim.
How hard is it to walk away? "It's like they're that close," she held up her thumb and finger a few millimeters apart, "to telling me I have to choose between my family and my lover. And it makes me scared, and it makes me furious. Why shouldn't I have both? Would it be considered too much of a good thing, or what? Leaving aside that it'd be a horrid guilt to lay on poor Mark—he knows how much my family means to me. A family is something he didn't have, growing up, and he romanticizes it, but still."
Her flattened hands beat a frustrated tattoo on the garden tabletop. "It all comes back to the damned money. If I were a real adult, I'd have my own income. And I could walk away, and they'd know I could, and they'd have to back off. They think they have me trapped."
"Ah," said Ekaterin faintly. "That one. Yes. That one is very real."
"Mama accused me of only doing short-term thinking, but I'm not! The butter bug project—it's like school all over again, short-term deprivation for a really major pay-off down the line. I've studied the analyses Mark did with Tsipis. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's a get-rich-big scheme. Da and Mama don't have a clue how big. They imagine I've spent my time with Mark playing around, but I've been working my tail off, and I know exactly why. Meanwhile I have over a month's salary tied up in shares in the basement of Vorkosigan House, and I don't know what's happening over there!" Her fingers were white where they gripped the table edge, and she had to stop for breath.
"I take it you haven't heard from Dr. Borgos, either?" said Martya cautiously to Ekaterin.
"Why . . . no."
"I felt almost sorry for him. He was trying so hard to please. I hope Miles hasn't really had all his bugs killed."
"Miles never threatened all his bugs," Kareen pointed out. "Just the escapees. As for me, I wish Miles had strangled him. I'm sorry you made him stop, Ekaterin."
"Me!" Ekaterin's lips twisted with bemusement.
"What, Kareen," scoffed Martya, "just because the man revealed to everybody that you were a practicing heterosexual? You know, you really didn't play that one right, considering all the Betan possibilities. If only you'd spent the last few weeks dropping the right kind of hints, you could have had Mama and Da falling to their knees in thanks that you were only messing around with Mark. Though I do wonder about your taste in men."
What Martya doesn't know about my sampling of Betan possibilities, Kareen decided firmly, won't hurt me. "Or else they really would have locked me in the attic."
Martya waved this away. "Dr. Borgos was terrorized enough. It's really unfair to drop a normal person down in Vorkosigan House with the Chance Brothers and expect him to just cope."
"Chance Brothers?" Ekaterin inquired.
Kareen, who had heard the jibe before, gave it the bare grimace it deserved.
"Um," Martya had the good grace to look embarrassed. "It was a joke that was going around. Ivan passed it on to me." When Ekaterin continued to look blankly at her, she added reluctantly. "You know—Slim and Fat."
"Oh." Ekaterin didn't laugh, though she smiled briefly; she looked as though she was digesting this tidbit, and wasn't sure if she liked the aftertaste.
"You think Enrique is normal?" said Kareen to her sister, wrinkling her nose
.
"Well . . . at least he's a change from the sort of Lieutenant Lord Vor-I'm-God's-Gift-to-Women we usually meet in Vorbarr Sultana. He doesn't back you into a corner and gab on endlessly about military history and ordnance. He backs you into a corner and gabs on endlessly about biology, instead. Who knows? He might be good husband material."
"Yeah, if his wife didn't mind dressing up as a butter bug to lure him to bed," said Kareen tartly. She made antennae of her fingers, and wriggled them at Martya.
Martya snickered, but said, "I think he's the sort who needs a managing wife, so he can work fourteen hours a day in his lab."
Kareen snorted. "She'd better seize control immediately. Yeah, Enrique has biotech ideas the way Zap the Cat has kittens, but it's a near-certainty that whatever profit he gets from them, he'll lose."
"Too trusting, do you think? Would people take advantage of him?"
"No, just too absorbed. It would come to the same thing in the end, though."
Ekaterin sighed, a distant look in her eyes. "I wish I could work four hours at a stretch without chaos erupting."
"Oh," said Martya, "but you're another. One of those people who pulls amazing things out of their ears, that is." She glanced around the tiny, serene garden. "You're wasted in domestic management. You're definitely R and D."
Ekaterin smiled crookedly. "Are you saying I don't need a husband, I need a wife? Well, at least that's a slight change from my sister-in-law's urgings."
"Try Beta Colony," Kareen advised, with a melancholy sigh.
The conversation grounded for a stretch upon this beguiling thought. The muted city street noises echoed over the walls and around the houses, and the slanting sunlight crept off the grass, putting the table into cool pre-evening shade.
"They really are utterly revolting bugs," Martya said after a time. "No one in their right mind will ever buy them."
Kareen hunched at this discouraging non-news. The bugs did too work. Bug butter was science's almost-perfect food. There ought to be a market for it. People were so prejudiced. . . .
A slight smile turned Martya's lip, and she added, "Though the brown and silver was just perfect. I thought Pym was going to pop."
"If only I'd known what Enrique was up to," mourned Kareen, "I could have stopped him. He'd been babbling on about his surprise, but I didn't pay enough attention—I didn't know he could do that to the bugs."
Ekaterin said, "I could have realized it, if I'd given it any thought. I scanned his thesis. The real secret is in the suite of microbes." At Martya's raised eyebrows, she explained, "It's the array of bioengineered microorganisms in the bugs' guts that do the real work of breaking down what the bugs eat and converting it into, well, whatever the designer chooses. Enrique has dozens of ideas for future products beyond food, including a wild application for environmental radiation cleanup that might excite . . . well. Anyway, keeping the microbe ecology balanced—tuned, Enrique calls it—is the most delicate part. The bugs are just self-assembling and self-propelled packaging around the microbe suite. Their shape is semi-arbitrary. Enrique just grabbed the most efficient functional elements from a dozen insect species, with no attention at all to the aesthetics."
"Most likely." Slowly, Kareen sat up. "Ekaterin . . . you do aesthetics."
Ekaterin made a throwaway gesture. "In a sense, I guess."
"Yes, you do. Your hair is always right. Your clothes always look better than anyone else's, and I don't think it's that you're spending more money on them."
Ekaterin shook her head in rueful agreement.
"You have what Lady Alys calls unerring taste, I think," Kareen continued, with rising energy. "I mean, look at this garden. Mark, Mark does money, and deals. Miles does strategy and tactics, and inveigling people into doing what he wants." Well, maybe not always; Ekaterin's lips tightened at the mention of his name. Kareen hurried on. "I still haven't figured out what I do. You—you do beauty. I really envy that."
Ekaterin looked touched. "Thank you, Kareen. But it really isn't anything that—"
Kareen waved away the self-deprecation. "No, listen, this is important. Do you think you could make a pretty butter bug? Or rather, make butter bugs pretty?"
"I'm no geneticist—"
"I don't mean that part. I mean, could you design alterations to the bugs so's they don't make people want to lose their lunch when they see one. For Enrique to apply."
Ekaterin sat back. Her brows sank down again, and an absorbed look grew in her eyes. "Well . . . it's obviously possible to change the bugs' colors and add surface designs. That has to be fairly trivial, judging from the speed with which Enrique produced the . . . um . . . Vorkosigan bugs. You'd have to stay away from fundamental structural modifications in the gut and mandibles and so on, but the wings and wing carapaces are already nonfunctional. Presumably they could be altered at will."
"Yes? Go on."
"Colors—you'd want to look for colors found in nature, for biological appeal. Birds, beasts, flowers . . . fire . . ."
"Can you think of something?"
"I can think of a dozen ideas, offhand." Her mouth curved up. "It seems too easy. Almost any change would be an improvement."
"Not just any change. Something glorious."
"A glorious butter bug." Her lips parted in faint delight, and her eyes glinted with genuine cheer for the first time this visit. "Now, that's a challenge."
"Oh, would you, could you? Will you? Please? I'm a shareholder, I have as much authority to hire you as Mark or Enrique. Qualitatively, anyway."
"Heavens, Kareen, you don't have to pay me—"
"Never," said Kareen with passion, "ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear." She hesitated, then added anxiously, "You will take shares, though, won't you? Ma Kosti did, for the product development consultation she did for us."
"I must say, Ma Kosti made the bug butter ice cream work," Martya admitted. "And that bread spread wasn't bad either. It was all the garlic, I think. As long as you didn't think about where the stuff came from."
"So what, have you ever thought about where regular butter and ice cream come from? And meat, and liver sausage, and—"
"I can about guarantee you the beef filet the other night came from a nice, clean vat. Tante Cordelia wouldn't have it any other way at Vorkosigan House."
Kareen gestured this aside, irritably. "How long do you think it would take you, Ekaterin?" she asked.
"I don't know—a day or two, I suppose, for preliminary designs. But surely we'd have to meet with Enrique and Mark."
"I can't go to Vorkosigan House." Kareen slumped. She straightened again. "Could we meet here?"
Ekaterin glanced at Martya, and back to Kareen. "I can't be a party to undercutting your parents, or going behind their backs. But this is certainly legitimate business. We could all meet here if you'll get their permission."
"Maybe," said Kareen. "Maybe. If they have another day or so to calm down . . . As a last resort, you could meet with Mark and Enrique alone. But I want to be here, if I can. I know I can sell the idea to them, if only I have a chance." She stuck out her hand to Ekaterin. "Deal?"
Ekaterin, looking amused, rubbed the soil from her hand against the side of her skirt, leaned across the table, and shook on the compact. "Very well."
Martya objected, "You know Da and Mama will stick me with having to tag along, if they think Mark will be here."
"So, you can persuade them you're not needed. You're kind of an insult anyway, you know."
Martya stuck out a sisterly tongue at this, but shrugged a certain grudging agreement.
The sound of voices and footsteps wafted from the open kitchen window; Kareen looked up, wondering if Ekaterin's aunt and uncle had returned. And if maybe one of them had heard anything from Miles or Tante Cordelia or . . . But to her surprise, ducking out the door after Nikki came Armsman Pym,
in full Vorkosigan House uniform, as neat and glittery as though ready for the Count's inspection. Pym was saying, "—I don't know about that, Nikki. But you know you're welcome to come play with my son Arthur at our flat, any time. He was asking after you just last night, in fact."
"Mama, Mama!" Nikki bounced to the garden table. "Look, Pym's here!"
Ekaterin's expression closed as though shutters had fallen across her face. She regarded Pym with extreme wariness. "Hello, Armsman," she said, in a tone of utter neutrality. She glanced across at her son. "Thank you, Nikki. Please go in now."