"Are you really a
clone
?"
Anything but that. "Yes."
"Oh. My."
More silence.
"A lot of people are," he observed.
"Not here."
"True."
"Uh . . . oh!" Her face melted with relief. "Excuse me, Lord Mark. I see my mother is calling me—" She handed off a spasmodic smile like a ransom, and turned to hurry toward a Vorish dowager on the other side of the room. Mark had not seen her beckon.
Mark sighed. So much for the hopeful theory of the overpowering attraction of rank. Lady Cassia was clearly not anxious to kiss a toad.
If I were Ivan I'd do handstands for a girl who looked at me like that.
"You look thoughtful," observed Countess Vorkosigan at his elbow. He jumped slightly.
"Ah, hello again. Yes. Ivan just introduced me to that girl. Not a girlfriend, I gather."
"Yes, I was watching the little playlet past Alys Vorpatril's shoulder. I stood so as to keep her back to it, for charity's sake."
"I . . . don't understand Ivan. She seemed like a nice enough girl to me."
Countess Vorkosigan smiled. "They're all nice girls. That's not the point."
"What is the point?"
"You don't see it? Well, maybe when you've had more time to observe. Alys Vorpatril is a truly doting mother, but she just can't overcome the temptation to try to micro-manage Ivan's future. Ivan is too agreeable, or too lazy, to resist openly. So he does whatever she begs of him—except the one thing she wants above all others, which is to settle into a marriage and give her grandchildren. Personally, I think his strategy is wrong. If he really wants to take the heat off himself, grandchildren would absolutely divert poor Alys's attention. Meanwhile her heart is in her mouth every time he takes a drive."
"I can see that," allowed Mark.
"I could slap him sometimes for his little game, except I'm not sure he's conscious of it, and anyway it's three-quarters Alys's fault."
Mark watched Lady Vorpatril catch up with Ivan, down the room. Checking his evening's progress down the short list already, Mark feared. "You seem able to maintain a reasonably hands-off maternal attitude yourself," he observed idly.
"That . . . may have been a mistake," she murmured.
He glanced up and quailed inwardly at the deathly desolation he surprised, momentarily, in the Countess's eyes.
My mouth. Shit.
The look twitched away so instantly, he didn't even dare apologize.
"Not altogether hands-off," she said lightly, attaching herself to his elbow again. "Come on, and I'll show you how they cross-net, Barrayaran style."
She steered him down the long room. "There are, as you have just seen, two agendas being pursued here tonight," the Countess lectured amiably. "The political one of the old men—an annual renewal of the forms of the Vor—and the genetic agenda of the old women. The men imagine theirs is the only one, but that's just an ego-serving self-delusion. The whole Vor system is founded on the women's game, underneath. The old men in government councils spend their lives arguing against or scheming to fund this or that bit of off-planet military hardware. Meanwhile, the uterine replicator is creeping in past their guard, and they aren't even conscious that the debate that will fundamentally alter Barrayar's future is being carried on right now among their wives and daughters. To use it, or not to use it? Too late to keep it out, it's already here. The middle classes are picking it up in droves. Every mother who loves her daughter is pressing for it, to spare her the physical dangers of biological childbearing. They're fighting not the old men, who haven't got a clue, but an old guard of their sisters who say to their daughters, in effect,
We
had to suffer, so must you! Look around tonight, Mark. You're witnessing the last generation of men and women on Barrayar who will dance this dance in the old way. The Vor system is about to change on its blindest side, the side that looks to—or fails to look to—its foundation. Another half generation from now, it's not going to know what hit it."
Mark almost swore her calm, academic voice concealed a savagely vengeful satisfaction. But her expression was as detached as ever.
A young man in a captain's uniform approached them, and split a nod of greeting between the Countess and Mark. "The Major of Protocol requests your presence, my lord," he murmured. The statement too seemed to hang indeterminately in the air between them. "This way, please."
They followed him out of the long reception room and up an ornately carved white marble staircase, down a corridor, and into an antechamber where half a dozen Counts or their official representatives were marshaled. Beyond a wide archway in the main chamber, Gregor was surrounded by a small constellation of men, mostly in red-and-blues, but three in dark Minister's robes.
The Emperor was seated on a plain folding stool, even less than a chair. "I was expecting a throne, somehow," Mark whispered to the Countess.
"It's a symbol," she whispered back. "And like most symbols, inherited. It's a standard-issue military officer's camp stool."
"Huh." Then he had to part from her, as the Major of Protocol herded him into his appointed place in line. The Vorkosigan's place.
This is it.
He had a moment of utter panic, thinking he'd somehow mislaid or dropped the bag of gold along the way, but it was still looped safely to his tunic. He undid the silken cords with sweaty fingers.
This is a stupid little ceremony. Why should I be nervous now?
Turn, walk forward—his concentration was nearly shattered by an anonymous whisper from somewhere in the antechamber behind him, "My God, the Vorkosigans are really going to do it . . . !"—step up, salute, kneel on his left knee; he proffered the bag right-handed, palm correctly up, and stuttered out the formal words, feeling as if plasma arc beams were boring into his back from the gazes of the waiting witnesses behind him. Only then did he look up to meet the Emperor's eyes.
Gregor smiled, took the bag, and spoke the equally formal words of acceptance. He handed the bag aside to the Minister of Finance in his black velvet robe, but then waved the man away.
"So here you are after all—Lord Vorkosigan," murmured Gregor.
"Just Lord Mark," Mark pleaded hastily. "I'm not Lord Vorkosigan till Miles is, is . . ." the Countess's searing phrase came back to him, "dead and
rotted
. This doesn't mean anything. The Count and Countess wanted it. It didn't seem like the time to give them static."
"That's so." Gregor smiled sadly. "Thank you for that. How are you doing yourself?"
Gregor was the first person ever to ask after him instead of the Count. Mark blinked. But then, Gregor could get the real medical bulletins on his Prime Minister's condition hourly, if he wanted them. "All right, I guess." He shrugged. "Compared to everybody else, anyway."
"Mm," said Gregor. "You haven't used your comm card." At Mark's bewildered look he added gently, "I didn't give it to you for a souvenir."
"I . . . I haven't done you any favors that would allow me to presume upon you, sir."
"Your family has established a credit account with the Imperium of nearly infinite depth. You can draw on it, you know."
"I haven't asked for anything."
"I know. Honorable, but stupid. You may fit right in here yet."
"I don't want any favors."
"Many new businesses start with borrowed capital. They pay it back later, with interest."
"I tried that once," said Mark bitterly. "I borrowed the Dendarii Mercenaries, and bankrupted myself."
"Hm." Gregor's smile twisted. He glanced up, beyond Mark, at the throng no-doubt backing up in the antechamber. "We'll talk again. Enjoy your dinner." His nod became the Emperor's formal dismissal.
Mark creaked to his feet, saluted properly, and withdrew back to where the Countess waited for him.
At the conclusion of the lengthy and tedious taxation ceremony, the Residence's staff served a banquet to a thousand people, spread through several chambers according to rank. Mark found himself dining just downstream from Gregor's own table. The wine and elaborate food gave him an excuse not to chat much with his neighbors. He chewed and sipped as slowly as possible. He still managed to end up uncomfortably overfed and dizzy from alcohol poisoning, till he noticed the Countess was making it through all the toasts by merely wetting her lips. He copied her strategy. He wished he'd noticed sooner, but at least he was able to walk and not crawl from the table afterwards, and the room only spun a little.
It could have been worse. I could have had to make it through all this while simultaneously pretending to be Miles Vorkosigan.
The Countess led him to a ballroom with a polished marquetry floor, which had been cleared for dancing, though no one was dancing yet. A live human orchestra, all men in Imperial Service uniforms, was arrayed in one corner. At the moment only a half dozen of its musicians were playing, a sort of preliminary chamber music. Long doors on one side of the room opened to the cool night air of a promenade. Mark noted them for future escape purposes. It would be an unutterable relief to be alone in the dark right now. He was even beginning to miss his cabin back aboard the
Peregrine.
"Do you dance?" he asked the Countess.
"Only once tonight."
The explanation unfolded shortly when Emperor Gregor appeared, and with his usual serious smile led Countess Vorkosigan out onto the floor to officially open the dance. On the music's first repeat other couples began to join them. The Vor dances seemed to tend to the formal and slow, with couples arranged in complex groups rather than couples alone, and with far too many precise moves to memorize. Mark found it vaguely allegorical of how things were done here.
Thus stripped of his escort and protectress, Mark fled to a side chamber where the volume of the music was filtered to background level. Buffet tables with yet more food and drink lined one wall. For a moment, he longingly considered the attraction of anesthetic drinking. Blurred oblivion . . .
Right, sure. Get publicly drunk, and then, no doubt, get publicly sick.
Just what the Countess needed. He was halfway there already.
Instead he retreated to a window embrasure. His surly presence seemed enough to claim it against all comers. He leaned against the wall in the shadows, folded his arms, and set himself grimly to endure. Maybe he could persuade the Countess to take him home early, after her one dance. But she seemed to be working the crowd. For all that she appeared relaxed, social, cheerful, he hadn't heard a single word out of her mouth tonight that didn't serve her goals. So much self-control in one so secretly strained was almost disturbing.
His grim mood darkened further, as he brooded on the meaning of that empty cryo-chamber.
ImpSec can't be everywhere,
the Countess had once said. Dammit . . . ImpSec was supposed to be all-seeing. That was the intended implication of the sinister silver Horus-eye insignia on Illyan's collar. Was ImpSec's reputation just propaganda?
One thing was certain. Miles hadn't removed
himself
from that cryo-chamber. Whether or not Miles was rotted, disintegrated, or still frozen, a witness or witnesses must exist, somewhere. A thread, a string, a hook, a connection, a trail of bloody breadcrumbs,
something. I believe it's going to kill me if there isn't.
There had to be something.
"Lord Mark?" said a light voice.
He raised his eyes from blind contemplation of his boots to find himself facing a lovely cleavage, framed in raspberry pink gauze with white lace trim. Delicate line of collarbone, smooth swelling curves, and ivory skin made an almost abstract sculpture, a tilted topological landscape. He imagined himself shrunk to insect size, marching across those soft hills and valleys, barefoot—
"Lord Mark?" she repeated, less certainly.
He tilted his head back, hoping the shadows concealed the embarrassed flush in his cheeks, and managed at least the courtesy of eye contact.
I can't help it, it's my height. Sorry.
Her face was equally rewarding to the eye: electric blue eyes, curving lips. Short loose ash-blonde curls wreathed her head. As seemed the custom for young women, tiny pink flowers were braided into it, sacrificing their little vegetable lives for her evening's brief glory. However, her hair was too short to hold them successfully, and several were on the verge of falling out.
"Yes?" It came out sounding too abrupt. Surly. He tried again with a more encouraging, "Lady—?"
"Oh." She smiled. "I'm not Lady anything. I'm Kareen Koudelka."
His brow wrinkled. "Are you any relation to Commodore Clement Koudelka?" A name high on the list of Aral Vorkosigan's senior staff officers. Galen's list, of further assassinations if opportunity had presented.
"He's my father," she said proudly.
"Uh . . . is he here?" Mark asked nervously.
The smile disappeared in a momentary sigh. "No. He had to go to HQ tonight, at the last minute."
"Ah." To be sure. It would be a revealing study, to count the men who should have been here tonight but weren't because of the Prime Minister's condition. If Mark were actually the enemy agent he'd trained to be, in that other lifetime, it would be a fast way for him to discover who were the real key men in Aral Vorkosigan's support constellation, regardless of what the rosters said.
"You really don't look quite like Miles," she said, studying him with a critical eye—he stiffened, but decided sucking in his gut would only draw more attention to it—"your bones are heavier. It would be a treat to see you two together. Will he be back soon?"
She does not know,
he realized with a kind of horror.
Doesn't know Miles is dead, doesn't know I killed him.
"No," he muttered. And then, masochistically, asked, "Were you in love with him too?"
"Me?" She laughed. "I haven't a chance. I have three older sisters, and they're
all
taller than I am. They call me the dwarf."
The top of his head was not quite level with the top of her shoulder, which meant that she was about average height for a Barrayaran woman. Her sisters must be valkyries. Just Miles's style. The perfume of her flowers, or her skin, rocked him in faint, delicate waves.