Memory (54 page)

The Admonishments, though traditional in form and content, had been subtly edited too, Miles noted. The comments on the Duty to Bear an Heir had been reworded so as not to imply any particular obligation to do so in one's own body using one's real womb, with all the inherent dangers that entailed. No question whose hand was at work there. As for the rest of them . . . Miles's imagined Quinn's suggestions of how to roll the parchment and in what part of the Admonisher's anatomy he might lodge it for storage thereafter, and how hard. Dr. Toscane, less vigorous in her vocabulary, only cast one or two beseeching looks at Countess Vorkosigan, to be reassured with a few covert palm-down don't-take-it-too-seriously-dear gestures. The rest of the time, fortunately, she was so occupied with smiling at Gregor smiling at her, the Admonishments slithered past without objection.

Miles stepped back, and the fiancées had their hands joined in the last gesture of the ceremony, or rather, each was permitted to grasp one of Lady Alys's hands, and at this well-chaperoned remove exchange their promissory pledges.
And if you think this was a circus, just wait till the wedding at Midsummer.
Then the ceremony was over, and the party started. Since everyone was feeling more or less snowed-in, the party went on, and on. . . .

Gregor had first claim on Miles's father, so Miles took himself off to one of the buffets. There he encountered Ivan, tall and splendid in his parade red-and-blues, filling a single plate.

"Hello, Lord Auditor Coz," said Ivan. "Where's your gold leash?"

"I get it back next week. I take my oath before the last joint session of the Counts and Ministers, before they break for Winterfair."

"The word is out, you know. All sorts of people have been asking me about your appointment."

"If it gets too thick, direct 'em to Vorhovis or Vorkalloner. Though not, I think, to Vorparadijs. Did you bring a dance partner I might borrow?"

Ivan grimaced, and looked around, and lowered his voice. "I tried to do one better. I asked Delia Koudelka to marry me."

Miles thought he already knew the lay of things, but this was, after all, Ivan. "I figured this stuff would be contagious. Congratulations!" he said with synthetic heartiness. "Your mother will be ecstatic."

"No."

"No? But she likes the Koudelka girls."

"Not that. Delia turned me down. The first time I ever proposed to a girl, and—
squelch
!" Ivan looked quite indignant.

"She didn't take you, Ivan! What a surprise."

Ivan, awakening to his tone of voice, eyed him suspiciously. "And all my mother said was,
That's too bad, dear. I told you not to wait so long.
And wandered away to see Illyan. I saw them a couple of minutes ago, hiding out in an alcove. Illyan was rubbing her neck. The woman's besotted."

"Well, so she did tell you. Hundreds of times. She knew the demographic odds."

"I figured there would always be room at the top. Delia says she's marrying Duv Galeni! The damned Komarran . . . um . . ."

"Competition?" suggested Miles, as Ivan groped for a noun.

"You knew!"

"I had a few clues. You'll enjoy your untroubled single existence, I'm sure. Your next decade will be just like your last, eh? And the next, and the next, and the next . . . happy and carefree."

"
You're
not doing any better," Ivan snapped.

"I . . . didn't expect to." Miles smiled grimly. That was perhaps enough Ivan-twitting, on this topic. "You'll just have to try again. Martya, maybe?"

Ivan growled.

"What, two rejections in—you didn't ask both sisters on the same day, did you, Ivan?"

"I panicked."

"So . . . who's Martya marrying?"

"Anyone but me, apparently."

"Really. So, um . . . did you see where the Koudelkas went?"

"The Commodore was here a bit ago. He's probably gone off with your da by now. I expect the girls will be up in the ballroom as soon as the music starts."

"Ah." Miles started to turn away, but then added absently, "Do you want a kitten?"

Ivan stared at him. "Why in God's name would I want a kitten?"

"It would brighten your bachelor digs, you know. A bit of life and movement, to keep you company on your long, lonely nights."

"Get stuffed, Lord Auditor Coz."

Miles grinned, popped an hors d'oeuvre in his mouth, and departed, munching thoughtfully.

He spotted the Koudelka clan in the ballroom, in a cluster on the far side. The three sisters were minus their fourth, Kareen, who was still on Beta Colony but who would, he'd been informed, be returning for the Imperial wedding at Midsummer. So would Lord Mark, presumably. Captain Galeni stood engaged in serious conversation with his prospective father-in-law the Commodore, Delia by his side in her favorite blue. Upon reflection, and some quiet campaigning from his fiancée, Galeni had decided not to resign his commission, to Miles's immense relief. Miles was staying out of ImpSec's internal business this week, but he'd had a whiff through Gregor of just how seriously Galeni was being considered for head of Komarran Affairs, and hoped to congratulate him soon.

Madame Koudelka looked on benignly. It made a nice tableau, and would do much toward repairing whatever damages still lingered to Galeni's reputation from Haroche's calculatedly clumsy arrest of him here a few weeks ago. With four sisters in all, Galeni was on his way to gaining an array of major Barrayaran clan connections by marriage. . . . Miles wondered if anyone had apprised Galeni yet that he stood in some danger of acquiring Miles's clone-brother Mark as his next brother-in-law. If not, Miles wanted to be there when somebody told him, just to savor the look on his face. Also, he wondered if kittens would make good wedding presents. . . .

A rich, raspy baritone voice over his shoulder said, "Congratulations on your promotion, sir."

Miles grinned dryly, and turned around to greet his father. "Which one, sir?"

"I admit," said Viceroy Count Aral Vorkosigan, "I was thinking of your Imperial Auditorship, but I understand from Gregor you slipped a captaincy in there somehow as well. You hadn't mentioned it. Congratulations on that, too, though . . . that has to be the most roundabout method of acquiring a set of blue tabs I've ever heard of."

"If you can't do what you want, do what you can. Or how you can. The captaincy . . . completed something, for me."

"I'm glad you survived long enough to finally grow into yourself. So, you're not losing your forward momentum with age, are you, boy?" The Count refrained from following this up with one of those we're-getting-so-old complaints mainly designed to invite the listener to offer a contradiction.

"I don't think so." Miles's eyes narrowed in a brief moment of introspection. His new calmness was still there, inside, but it did not feel at all weary. Quite the opposite. "It's just taking another direction. Vorhovis tells me I'm the youngest Imperial Auditor since the Time of Isolation. It's not a post you ever held, I understand."

"No. I missed that one, somehow. Your grandfather never held it, either. Nor your great-grandfather. In fact . . . I'll have to look it up, but I don't think any Count or Lord Vorkosigan has ever been an Auditor."

"I did. None has. I'm the first in the family," Miles informed him smugly. "I am unprecedented."

The Count smiled. "This is not news, Miles."

Miles stood in the concourse just outside Customs Processing on one of Komarr's larger orbital transfer stations.
Smells like a space station, oh, yeah.
It was not a sweet perfume, that odd acridity compounded of machinery, electronics, humanity and all its effluvia, and chill air run through filters which never quite succeeded in reducing its complexity. But it was familiar, universal, and an enormously nostalgic odor for him: Admiral Naismith's atmosphere, subliminally electrifying even now.

The station was one of a dozen orbiting the system's only semihabitable planet. Three more deep-space stations circled Komarr's feeble star, and each of the six wormhole exits they all served boasted both a military station and a commercial one. In this far-flung network cargo and passengers loaded, unloaded, and shuffled, bound not only for Barrayar but for Pol, the Hegen Hub, Sergyar, Escobar beyond it, and a dozen other connecting routes. The reopened trade route to Rho Ceta and the rest of the Cetagandan Empire, uneasy neighbors though they were, also supported a growing stream of traffic. The fees and taxes generated here were a vast source of income for the Barrayaran Imperium, far beyond anything squeezed out of poor backcountry groat farmers on the homeworld. This too was part of Barrayar, he must remember to point out to space-bred Elli Quinn.

Quinn might be almost happy on Komarr. Its domed cities were reminiscent of the space station upon which she had been born. True, most of Lord Vorkosigan's duties would keep him in a tight little circuit around Vorbarr Sultana. The capital drew all ambitious men like a gravity well. But one might maintain a second domicile on one of the stations here, a cozy little deep-space dacha. . . .
It is far from the mountains.

He'd seen the Count and Countess off from this station yesterday, on their way back to Sergyar, having hitched a ride with them as far as Komarr in their government courier ship. Five days in the relatively uninterrupted confines of a jump-ship had actually given them time enough to talk, for a change. He had also seized the opportunity to beg an Armsman for himself from his father, the comfortable Pym by choice. The Countess grumbled they should have held out for Ma Kosti in exchange, but gave up her favorite Armsman to him nonetheless; the Count promised to send him a couple more in due time, chosen from those whose wives and families had been the most bitterly unhappy at having been forcibly transplanted from their familiar city to the wilds of Chaos Colony.

The crowd around the exit door from Customs Processing thickened, as inbound passengers began to spill through and hurry to their further destinations, or greet waiting parties with businesslike decorum or familial enthusiasm. Miles rose on his toes, futilely. Nine-tenths of this outrush dissipated before Quinn came striding through the doors, conservatively incognito in Komarran civilian fashion, a white padded silk jacket and trousers. The outfit set off her dark curls and brilliant brown eyes; but then, Quinn made anything she wore look great, including ripped fatigues and mud.

She too craned to look for him, murmured a "Heh," of satisfaction upon spotting him waving a hand behind a few other shoulders, and wove through the crowd. Her stride stretched as she neared; she dropped the gray duffel she swung and they embraced with an impact that nearly knocked Miles off his feet. The scent of her made up for any number of defective space station atmospheric filters.
Quinn, my Quinn.
After a dozen or so kisses, they parted just far enough to permit speech.

"So why did you ask me to bring
all
your stuff?" she demanded suspiciously. "I didn't like the sound of that."

"Did you?"

"Yes. It's stuck back in Customs. They choked on the contents, particularly all the weapons. I gave up arguing with them after a while—you're a Barrayaran,
you
sort them out."

"Ah, Pym." Miles gestured to his Armsman, like Miles dressed in discreet streetwear. "Take Commodore Quinn's receipts, and rescue my property from our bureaucracy, please. Readdress it to Vorkosigan House, and send it by commercial shipper. Then go on back to the hostel."

"Yes, my lord." Pym collected the data codes, and plunged back through the doors into Customs.

"Is that all your personal luggage?" Miles asked Quinn.

"As ever."

"Off to the hostel, then. It's a nice one." The best on the station, in fact, luxury class. "I, ah, got us a suite for tonight."

"You'd better have."

"Have you had dinner?"

"Not yet."

"Good. Neither have I."

A short walk brought them to the nearest bubble-car terminal, and a short ride to the hostel. Its appointments were elegant, its corridors wide and thickly carpeted, and its staff solicitous. The suite was large, for a space station, which meant nicely cozy for Miles's present purposes.

"Your General Allegre is generous," remarked Quinn, unloading her duffel after a quick reconnoiter of the sybaritic bathroom. "I may like working for him after all."

"I think you will, but this is on my bill tonight, not ImpSec's. I wanted someplace quiet where we could talk, before your official meeting with Allegre and the Galactic Affairs chief tomorrow."

"So . . . I don't quite understand this setup. I get one lousy message from you with you looking like a damned zombie, telling me Illyan caught up with you about poor Vorberg, and didn't I tell you so. Then a resounding silence, for weeks, and no answers to my messages to you, you rat. Then I get another one with you all chipper again, saying it's all right now, and I sure don't see the connection. Then I get this order to report to ImpSec on Komarr without delay, no explanations, no hint of what the new assignment is, except with this postscript from you to bring your whole kit with me when I come and put the freight charges on ImpSec's tab. Are you back in ImpSec, or not?"

"Not. I'm here as a consultant, to get you up and running with your new bosses, and vice versa. I, ah . . . have another job, now."

"I
really
don't understand. I mean, your messages are usually cryptic—"

"It's hard to send proper love letters, when you know everything you say is going to be monitored by ImpSec censors."

"But this time, it was frigging incomprehensible. What is going on with you?" Her voice was edged with the same suppressed fear Miles was feeling,
Am I losing you?
No, not fear. Knowledge.

"I tried to compose a message a couple of times, but it was . . . too complicated, and all the most important parts were things I didn't want to send tight-beam. The edited version came out sounding like gibberish. I had to see you face-to-face anyway, for, for a lot of reasons. It's a long story, and most of it is classified, a fact that I am going to completely ignore. I can, you know. Do you want to go down to the restaurant to eat, or order room service?"