Yawning, he dragged on trousers and went in search of caffeine. Tej was in the comconsole niche, talking to someone-a Barrayaran, a commercial clerk of some sort, apparently. She switched to Barrayaran Russian in mid-sentence; the man brightened and became more voluble. And cooperative? In any case, her business was concluded by the time Ivan came back with a steaming mug in his hand.
Ivan nodded at the comconsole. “How did you know that fellow’s mother tongue? He had a pretty urban accent.”
Tej gestured to the now-blank vid-plate. “I can hear it in their voices. Can’t you?”
“Accents, sure. But he sounded pure Vorbarr Sultana to me.”
“Not really. I haven’t got all the District dialect variations sorted out yet, though. Sixty-times-four plus South Continent. I have to pick up more local geography.”
“Do you expect to? Sort them all out?”
She shrugged. “If I’m here long enough, they’ll sort themselves.”
“Tej…” He wanted to follow up that ambiguous-sounding if I’m here long enough, but stuck to his first thought. “How many languages do you speak?”
“I dunno.” Her nose wrinkled. “Since I came here-nine?”
“That’s a lot.”
“Not really. Good translator earbugs will handle hundreds. Why bother making work out of it, when the ones you need likely won’t be the ones you learned anyway? I never even heard of Barrayaran Russian before I came here. Or your local Greek dialect, which is pretty corrupt-well, altered-see, I didn’t say mutated. I mean, learning them yourself isn’t a practical hobby. The earbugs do it better.” A crooked smile. “Kind of fun, though. I like fun.”
“Fun,” said Ivan, bemusedly reflecting on all the lack of fun he’d had in his school language drills.
Rish emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed. “Tej, did you get the ground-van and the big speakers? Are we ready to go now?”
“Yes and yes.” Tej popped up and offered Ivan a placatory kiss on the cheek. “Gotta run.”
“Where are you going?”
“The Jewels wanted a place for some dance practice, since this is the first they’ve been together for ages, and Simon found us this nice park. There wasn’t any place big enough in the hotel. I’m doing tech on the music.”
“Outdoors? In this weather?” Ivan wandered to a window and peered blearily out. All right, the angled winter sun was shining brightly, and it was windless and well above freezing, but still.
“It’s really pretty nice out today. Supposed to change tomorrow, though, so I really have to go now…”
She and Rish blew out.
Ivan munched groats, a little later, with his uneasiness growing. He shaved, dressed, and, with extreme reluctance, called his mother.
“Mamere,” he said, when her impeccably groomed features appeared over the vid plate, wearing an expression of surprised inquiry. “Do you know anything about some dance practice place Simon recommended to the Jewels? A park or commons, outdoors.” Vorbarra Sultana had dozens of such nooks.
“Oh, yes, he mentioned that. He’s gone off to watch. I thought it was good for him to get out. I’d have loved to go with him, but I’m running a diplomatic luncheon at the Residence today for Laisa, as she had to go down to that Vorbarra District economics conference in Nizhne-Whitekirk.”
“Where? The dance practice, I mean.”
“He suggested the little park across the street from ImpSec headquarters. Hardly anyone ever uses it, you know. Except those poor fellows with that seasonal affective problem, who come out to eat their lunches sometimes. Simon did make full-spectrum lighting an allowable requisition, years back.”
“Um, yeah. Thanks.” About to sign off, he hesitated. “Mamere-has Simon told you anything about what Shiv had to say to him? Or vice versa?”
Her smile never shifted. So why did he get the impression of her putting on her most diplomatic poker-face? “He said they had a very enjoyable exchange. I was pleased. I quite liked Udine and Moira, you know. Such adventurous lives! Earth! I’ve never been further than Komarr.” She sighed.
“You should get Simon to take you,” Ivan suggested. “Or take him. Lever him out of his comfy rut. Four, pushing five years since his retirement, all the really hot stuff in his head-whatever’s left of it-has to have cooled off some by now. Doesn’t he think it’s safe to travel out of the Empire yet?”
Her brows rose in a thoughtful way. “He’s never suggested travel farther than the south coast. He was really…extremely exhausted, immediately after all that-” a flick of her hand summed the nightmare weeks of Simon’s chip breakdown. And nightmare decades of its full function, before that, Ivan supposed. “More so than I think he let on.”
“He always was pretty closed,” said Ivan, in what had to be the understatement of the century. “It’s not like you could tell the difference from the outside.”
“No, I suppose you couldn’t.”
Ivan heard the faint emphasis on that you. Which presumably did not include her. Her thirty years of working with Simon hadn’t exactly been like one of those long marriages where people started finishing each other’s sentences, but it did perhaps partake of some of the elements. Ivan tried to remember what had been the longest time he’d ever stuck with one girlfriend. Or vice versa. Surely at least one of them had been more than a year? Almost a year? More than a half-year…?
“Delightful for you to call, but I must go,” his mother said firmly. “Tomorrow, we really must come up with something else to do with your visitors. Properly, it would be their turn to invite us to dinner, but they may not like to do so in that hotel.”
“Um, right,” said Ivan, and let her cut the com.
It being the last weekend before the start of Winterfair proper, parking around ImpSec HQ was not as impossible as usual. Ivan only had to walk about a block before the bare little park, and the great gloomy building across from it, came into view.
The security headquarters had an imposing facade, utterly windowless, with the wide stairs leading up to the front doors deliberately designed to be higher than most people could comfortably step. The great bronze doors were, as far as Ivan knew, rarely opened-everyone with business here went around to the human-scale entrances on the sides or the back. The stone face of the building was severely plain, except for a stylized bas-relief frieze of pained-looking creatures that Miles had once dubbed pressed gargoyles which entirely circled the edifice.
At the time of the reign of Mad Yuri, the gargoyles had possessed some political/artistic/propagandistic metaphorical meaning, which had once been explained to Ivan, but that he had promptly forgotten. Ivan thought the poor things just looked constipated. The people of Vorbarr Sultana, over time, had named them all, and endowed them with varied personalities; there were running jokes about the conversations they had up there, frozen in their frieze, and some of them regularly appeared as editorial cartoon characters. And a short-lived children’s animated show, Ivan dimly remembered from his youth.
The whole was surrounded in turn by a cobblestone courtyard and high stone walls topped with iron spikes not unlike the ones around Vorkosigan House, though already archaically outdated for actual defense even at the time they’d been built. All the real defenses were electronic and invisible. The wall was pierced fore and aft by two gates, the gate guards armed with energy weapons. Muskets would have seemed more in-period.
The park was indeed sunny, if only because ImpSec had never permitted trees, kiosks, bathrooms, or bushes installed to impede the line of sight, or fire. Grass, a little brown after the first frosts but neatly groomed, held up well due to the small number of pedestrians who ventured to cut across it.
Five brightly-dressed people were milling about on the turf-Rish, Jet, Em, Pearl, and Star-while Tej knelt at the side messing with a portable comconsole and some wireless speakers. Under Star’s direction, Tej stood up and shifted one of the speakers a few meters. Tej saw Ivan and waved, but didn’t come over to greet him. Star, with Jet consulting, also shifted around a couple of brightly-colored sticks topped with sparkly pom-poms; counting off strides, taking a line of sight, and sticking them back in the ground.