"I have no influence," said Ivan, edging By towards the door. "If Lord Dono is Count Dono by then, maybe you can get him to take you along."
By acknowledged this with a wave, and strolled off down the corridor, yawning. Ivan stood for a moment after the door hissed shut, rubbing his forehead. He pictured himself presenting By's news to Miles, assuming his distraught cousin had sobered up by now. He pictured himself ducking for cover. Better yet, he pictured himself deserting it all, possibly for the life of a licensed male prostitute at Beta's Orb. Betan male prostitutes did have female customers, yes? Miles had been there, and told him not-quite-all about it. Fat Mark and Kareen had even been there. But he'd never even once made it to the Orb, dammit. Life was unfair, that was what.
He slouched to his comconsole, and punched in Miles's private code. But all he stirred up was the answering program, a new one, all very official announcing that the supplicant had reached Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, whoop-te-do. Except he hadn't. Ivan left a message for his cousin to call him on urgent private business, and cut the com.
Miles probably wasn't even awake yet. Ivan dutifully promised his conscience he'd try again later today, and if that still didn't draw a response, drag himself over to Vorkosigan House to see Miles tonight. Maybe. He sighed, and shoved off to don the tunic of his undress greens, and head out for the Imperial Residence and the day's tasks.
* * *
Mark rang the chime on the Vorthys's door, shifted from foot to foot, and gritted his teeth in anxiety. Enrique, let out of Vorkosigan House for the occasion, stared around in fascination. Tall, thin, and twitchy, the ectomorphic Escobaran made Mark feel more like a squat toad than ever. He should have given more thought to the ludicrous picture they presented when together . . . ah. Ekaterin opened the door to them, and smiled welcome.
"Lord Mark, Enrique. Do come in." She gestured them out of the afternoon glare into a cool tiled entry hall.
"Thank you," said Mark fervently. "Thank you so much for this, Madame Vorsoisson—Ekaterin—for setting this up. Thank you. Thank you. You don't know how much this means to me."
"Goodness, don't thank me. It was Kareen's idea."
"Is she here?" Mark swiveled his head in search of her.
"Yes, she and Martya were just a few minutes ahead of you both. This way . . ." Ekaterin led them to the right, into a book-crammed study.
Kareen and her sister sat in spindly chairs ranged around a comconsole. Kareen was beautiful and tight-lipped, her fists clenched in her lap. She looked up as he entered, and her smile twisted bleakly upward. Mark surged forward, stopped, stammered her name inaudibly, and seized her rising hands. They exchanged a hard grip.
"I'm allowed to talk to you now," Kareen told him, with an irritated toss of her head, "but only about business. I don't know what they're so paranoid about. If I wanted to elope, all I'd have to do is step out the door and walk six blocks."
"I, I . . . I'd better not say anything, then." Reluctantly, Mark released her hands, and backed off a step. His eyes drank her in like water. She looked tired and tense, but otherwise all right.
"Are you all right?" Her gaze searched him in turn.
"Yeah, sure. For now." He returned her a wan smile, and looked vaguely at Martya. "Hi, Martya. What are you doing here?"
"I'm the duenna," she told him, with a grimace quite as annoyed as her sister's. "It's the same principle as putting a guard on the picket line after the horses are stolen. Now, if they'd sent me along to Beta Colony, that might have been of some use. To me, at least."
Enrique folded himself into the chair next to Martya, and said in an aggrieved tone, "Did you know Lord Mark's mother was a Betan Survey captain?"
"Tante Cordelia?" Martya shrugged. "Sure."
"A Betan Astronomical Survey captain. And nobody even thought to mention it! A Survey captain. And nobody even told me."
Martya stared at him. "Is it important?"
"Is it important. Is it important! Holy saints, you people!"
"It was thirty years ago, Enrique," Mark put in wearily. He'd been listening to variations on this rant for two days. The Countess had acquired another worshipper in Enrique. His conversion had doubtless helped save his life from all his coreligionists in the household, after the incident with the drains in the nighttime.
Enrique clasped his hands together between his knees, and gazed up soulfully into the air. "I gave her my dissertation to read."
Kareen, her eyes widening, asked, "Did she understand it?"
"Of course she did. She was a Betan Survey commander, for God's sake! Do you have any idea how those people are chosen, what they do? If I'd completed my postgraduate work with honors, instead of all that stupid misunderstanding with the arrest, I could have hoped, only hoped, to put in an application, and even then I wouldn't have had a prayer of beating out all the Betan candidates, if it weren't for their off-worlder quotas holding open some places specifically for non-Betans." Enrique was breathless with the passion of this speech. "She said she would recommend my work to the attention of the Viceroy. And she said my sonnet was very ingenious. I composed a sestina in her honor in my head while I was catching bugs, but I haven't had time to get it down yet. Survey captain!"
"It's . . . not what Tante Cordelia is most famous for, on Barrayar," Martya offered after a moment.
"The woman is wasted here. All the women are wasted here." Enrique subsided grumpily. Martya turned half-around, and gave him an odd raised-brows look.
"How's the bug roundup going?" Kareen asked him anxiously.
"One hundred twelve accounted for. The queen is still missing." Enrique rubbed the side of his nose in reminded worry.
Ekaterin put in, "Thank you, Enrique, for sending me the butter bug vid model so promptly yesterday. It speeded up my design experiments vastly."
Enrique smiled at her. "My pleasure."
"Well. Perhaps I ought to move along to my presentations," said Ekaterin. "It won't take long, and then we can discuss them."
Mark lowered his short bulk into the last spindly chair, and stared mournfully across the gap at Kareen. Ekaterin sat in the comconsole chair, and keyed up the first vid. It was a full-color three-dimensional representation of a butter bug, blown up to a quarter of a meter long. Everyone but Enrique and Ekaterin recoiled.
"Here, of course, is our basic utility butter bug," Ekaterin began. "Now, I've only run up four modifications so far, because Lord Mark indicated time was of the essence, but I can certainly make more. Here's the first and easiest."
The shit-brown-and-pus-white bug vanished, to be replaced with a much classier model. This bug's legs and body were patent-leather black, as shiny as a palace guardsman's boots. A thin white racing stripe ran along the edges of the now-elongated black wing carapaces, which hid the pale pulsing abdomen from view. "Ooh," said Mark, surprised and impressed. How could such small changes have made such a large difference? "Yeah!"
"Now here's something a little brighter."
The second bug also had patent-black legs and body parts, but now the carapaces were more rounded, like fans. A rainbow progression of colors succeeded each other in curved stripes, from purple in the center through blue-and-green-and-yellow-and-orange to red on the edge.
Martya sat up. "Oh, now that's better. That's actually pretty."
"I don't think this next one will quite be practical," Ekaterin went on, "but I wanted to play with the range of possibilities."
At first glance, Mark took it for a rose bud bursting into bloom. Now the bug's body parts were a matte leaf-green faintly edged with a subtle red. The carapaces looked like flower petals, in a delicate pale yellow blushing with pink in multiple layers; the abdomen too was a matching yellow, blending with the flower atop and receding from the eye's notice. The spurs and angles of the bug's legs were exaggerated into little blunt thorns.
"Oh, oh," said Kareen, her eyes widening. "I want that one! I vote for that one!"
Enrique looked quite stunned, his mouth slightly o
pen. "Goodness. Yes, that could be done . . ."
"This design might possibly work for—I suppose you'd call them—the farmed or captive bugs," said Ekaterin. "I think the carapace petals might be a little too delicate and awkward for the free-range bugs that were expected to forage for their own food. They might get torn up and damaged. But I was thinking, as I was working with these, that you might have more than one design, later. Different packages, perhaps, for different microbial synthesis suites."
"Certainly," said Enrique. "Certainly."
"Last one," said Ekaterin, and keyed the vid.
This bug's legs and body parts were a deep, glimmering blue. The carapace halves flared and then swept back in a teardrop shape. Their center was a brilliant yellow, shading immediately to a deep red-orange, then to light flame blue, then dark flame blue edged with flickering iridescence. The abdomen, barely visible, was a rich dark red. The creature looked like a flame, like a torch in the dusk, like a jewel cast from a crown. Four people leaned forward so far they nearly fell off their chairs. Martya's hand reached out. Ekaterin smiled demurely.
"Wow, wow, wow," husked Kareen. "Now that is a glorious bug!"
"I believe that was what you ordered, yes," murmured Ekaterin.
She touched a vid control, and the static bug came to life momentarily. It flicked its carapace, and a luminous lace of wing flashed out, like a spray of red sparks from a fire. "If Enrique can figure out how to make the wings bio-fluoresce at the right wavelength, they could twinkle in the dark. A group of them might be quite spectacular."
Enrique leaned forward, staring avidly. "Now there's an idea. They'd be a lot easier to catch in dim locations that way . . . There would be a measurable bio-energy cost, though, which would come out of butter production."
Mark tried to imagine an array of these glorious bugs, gleaming and flashing and twinkling in the twilight. It made his mind melt. "Think of it as their advertising budget."
"Which one should we use?" asked Kareen. "I really liked the one that looked like a flower . . ."
"Take a vote, I guess," said Mark. He wondered if he could persuade anyone else to go for the slick black model. A veritable assassin-bug, that one had looked. "A shareholder's vote," he added prudently.
"We've hired a consultant for aesthetics," Enrique pointed out. "Perhaps we should take her advice." He looked over to Ekaterin.
Ekaterin opened her hands back to him. "The aesthetics were all I could supply. I could only guess at how technically feasible they were, on the bio-genetic level. There may be a trade-off between visual impact, and the time needed to develop it."
"You made some good guesses." Enrique hitched his chair over to the comconsole, and ran through the series of bug vids again, his expression going absent.
"Time is important," Kareen said. "Time is money, time is . . . time is everything. Our first goal has to be to get some saleable product launched, to start cycling in capital to get the basic business up, running, and growing. Then play with the refinements."
"And get it out of Vorkosigan House's basement," muttered Mark. "Maybe . . . maybe the black one would be quickest?"
Kareen shook her head, and Martya said, "No, Mark." Ekaterin sat back in a posture of studied neutrality.
Enrique stopped at the glorious bug, and sighed dreamily. "This one," he stated. One corner of Ekaterin's mouth twitched up, and back down. Her order of presentation hadn't been random, Mark decided.
Kareen glanced up. "Faster than the flower-bug, d'you think?"
"Yes," said Enrique.
"Second the motion."
"Are you sure you don't like that black one?" said Mark plaintively.
"You're outvoted, Mark," Kareen told him.
"Can't be, I own fifty-one percent . . . oh." With the distribution of shares to Kareen and to Miles's cook, he'd actually slipped below his automatic majority. He intended to buy them back out, later . . .
"The glorious bug it is," said Kareen. She added, "Ekaterin said she'd be willing to be paid in shares, same as Ma Kosti."
"It wasn't that hard," Ekaterin began.
"Hush," Kareen told her firmly. "We're not paying you for hard. We're paying you for good. Standard creative consultant fee. Pony up, Mark."
With some reluctance—not that the workwoman was unworthy of her hire, but merely covert regret for the additional smidge of control slipping through his fingers—Mark went to the comconsole and made out a receipt of shares paid for services rendered. He had Enrique and Kareen countersign it, sent off a copy to Tsipis's office in Hassadar, and formally presented it to Ekaterin.
She smiled a little bemusedly, thanked him, and set the flimsy aside. Well, if she took it for play-money, at least she hadn't supplied play-work. Like Miles, maybe she was one of those people who was incapable of any speeds but off and flat-out. All things done well for the glory of God, as the Countess put it. Mark glanced again at the glorious bug, which Enrique was now making cycle through its wing-flash some more. Yeah.
"I suppose," said Mark with a last longing look at Kareen, "we'd better be going." Time-the-essence and all that. "The bug hunt has stopped everything in its tracks. R and D is at a standstill . . . we're barely maintaining the bugs we have."
"Think of it as cleaning up your industrial spill," Martya advised unsympathetically. "Before it crawls away."
"Your parents let Kareen come here today. Do you think they'd at least let her come back to work?"
Kareen grimaced hopelessly.
Martya screwed up her mouth, and shook her head. "They're coming down some, but not that fast. Mama doesn't say much, but Da . . . Da has always taken a lot of pride in being a good Da, you see. The Betan Orb and, well, you, Mark, just weren't in his Barrayaran Da's instruction manual. Maybe he's been in the military too long. Although truth to tell, he's barely handling Delia's engagement without going all twitchy, and she is playing by all the old rules. As far as he knows."
Kareen raised an inquiring eyebrow at this, but Martya did not elaborate.
Martya glanced aside to the comconsole, where the glorious bug sparked and gleamed under Enrique's enraptured gaze. "On the other hand—the guard-parents haven't forbidden me to go over to Vorkosigan House."
"Martya . . ." Kareen breathed. "Oh, could you? Would you?"
"Eh, maybe." She glanced under her lashes at Mark. "I was thinking maybe I could stand to get into some of this share-action myself."
Mark's brows rose. Martya? Practical Martya? To take over the bug hunt and send Enrique back to his genetic codes, without sestinas? Martya to maintain the lab, to deal with supplies and suppliers, to not flush bug butter down the sink? So what if she looked on him as a sort of oversized repulsive fat butter bug that her sister had inexplicably taken for a pet. He had not the least doubt Martya could make the brains run on time. . . . "Enrique?"
"Hm?" Enrique murmured, not looking up.
Mark got his attention by reaching over and switching off the vid, and explained Martya's offer.
"Oh, yes, that would be lovely," the Escobaran agreed sunnily. He smiled hopefully at Martya.
The deal was struck, though Kareen looked as if she might be having second thoughts about sharing shares with her sister. Martya electing to return to Vorkosigan House with them on the spot, Mark and Enrique rose to make their farewells.
"Are you going to be all right?" Mark asked Kareen quietly, while Ekaterin was busy getting her bug designs downloaded for Enrique to carry off.
She nodded. "Yeah. You?"
"I'm hanging on. How long will it take, d'you suppose? Till this mess gets resolved?"
"It's resolved already." Her expression was disturbingly fey. "I'm done arguing, though I'm not sure they realize it yet. I've had it. While I'm still living in my parents' house, I'll continue to hold myself honor-bound to obey their rules, however ludicrous. The moment I've figured out how to be somewhere else without compromising my long-range goals, I'll walk away. Forever, if need be." Her mouth was grim and determ
ined. "I don't expect to be there much longer."
"Oh," said Mark. He wasn't exactly sure what she meant, or meant to do, but it sounded . . . ominous. It terrified him to think that he might be the cause of her losing her family. It had taken him a lifetime, and dire effort, to win such a place of his own. The Commodore's clan had looked to be such a golden refuge, to him . . . "It's . . . a lonely place to be. On the outside like that."
She shrugged. "So be it."
The business meeting broke up. Last chance . . . They were in the tiled hallway, with Ekaterin ushering them out, before Mark worked up the courage to blurt to her, "Are there any messages I can take for you? To Vorkosigan House, I mean?" He was absolutely certain he would be ambushed by his brother on his return, given the way Miles had briefed him on his departure.