He addressed her, "May I use one of these?"
She shrugged. "Go ahead. Wash it after, though." She tapped her spoon on the pot rim and laid it aside. "You new here?"
"Very new."
"Rules are, cook what you want, clean up after yourself, replace what you use, contribute money to the pantry when you can. Sign up on the cleaning duty roster on the front of the fridge."
"Thanks. Just tea for now…" Miles took a sip. It was stewed, cheap, bitter, and served his purposes as a prop in both senses. "You been here long yourself?"
"I came with my grandmother. It won't be much longer."
As he was figuring out how to lead her on to parse that, a familiar, querulous voice sounded from beyond the counter: "That soup ready yet?" A tall, bent old man stooped to peer through the serving hatch. Impressive white mustachios drooped down, framing his frown, and wriggled as he spoke. Like an insect's palps, ah.
"Another half hour," the woman called back. "Just go sit."
"I believe I've met him," Miles murmured to her. "Name of Yani?"
"Yah, that's him."
Yani shuffled in to collect a mug of tea from the dispenser. He scowled at Miles.
Miles returned a cheery smile. "Good morning, Yani."
"So, you've sobered up. Good. Go home." Yani clutched his mug in two hands, to average out the shakes perhaps, and shuffled back to one of the tables. Miles, undaunted, followed and slid in across from him.
"Why haven't you gone away?" asked Yani.
"Still waiting for my ride. So to speak."
"Aren't we all."
"Jin says you're a revive. Did you really have yourself frozen a century ago?" That would have been just about at the end of Barrayar's Time of Isolation, on the verge of a torrent of new history all of which Yani had more-or-less slept through. "I would think the oral chroniclers around here would be all over you."
Yani vented a bitter laugh. "Not likely. The people here are glutted with revive interviews. I thought the journals might pay me, but there are too many of us up walking around. Nobody wants us here. Everything costs too much. The city's too big. Settlement was supposed to be more spread out. Hell, I thought the terraforming would be halfway to the poles by now. The politics have gone all wrong, and nobody has any manners…"
Miles made encouraging noises. If there was one skill Miles had honed in his youth, it was how to please an old man by listening to his complaints. Yani needed no more than a nod to launch into a comprehensive denunciation of modern Kibou, a world with no need nor place for him. Some of his phrases were so practiced they came out in paragraphs, as if he'd told them over to anyone who would stop to listen. Which, by this point, was no one-the few other residents who drifted in gave Yani's table a wide berth. His rheumy eye brightened at this new audience who didn't show visible signs of wanting to chew through his own leg to get away, and Miles's suspect druggie status was temporarily forgotten.
As Yani maundered on, Miles was thrown back in memory to his own grandfather. General Count Piotr Vorkosigan, planetary liberator, un-maker and re-maker of emperors, and cause of a lot of that history that Yani had missed, had sired his heir late in life, as had Miles's father, so that it was more nearly three generations between grandfather and grandson than two. Still, they had loved each other after their own peculiar fashion. How would Miles's life have altered if Piotr had been frozen when Miles was seventeen, instead of buried for real in the ground? His impending return always a promise, or a threat?
Like a great tree the old general had been, but a tree did not only give shelter from the storm. How would Barrayar be different if that towering figure had not fallen, permitting sunlight to penetrate to the forest floor and new growth to flourish? What if the only way to effect change on Barrayar had been to violently destroy what had gone before, instead of waiting for the cycle of generations to gracefully remove it?
For the first time, the notion occurred to Miles that it might not be vote-grubbing alone, nor even the lack of medical progress in reversing geriatric decay, that caused the cryocorps to freeze more patrons than they revived.
Yani had now segued into a long screed about how his cryocorp had cheated him, evidently by not delivering him into this new world physically youthful, rich, and famous, which was roughly where Miles had come in on this rant. Yani seemed a time-traveler who had found out the hard way that he did not like his destination any better than his point of departure, failed to notice the one common factor was himself, and now could not go back. So just how many like him were haunting the streets of Kibou? Miles made the emptiness of their mugs an excuse to grab both and take them for refills.
As he was washing his mug and topping up Yani's, Miles murmured to the cook, "Is it true Yani was rejected for being a revive?"
She snorted. "I daresay nobody wanted him around a hundred years ago, either. I don't know why he thought that would have changed."
Miles muffled a smile. "I daresay."
The half-smile caught her eye, and she looked at him more closely. "You're not very old. Are you sick?"
Miles blinked. "Do I look that hung-over?"
"I thought that might be why you were here."
"Well, I have a chronic medical condition, but I don't much care to discuss it." How had she guessed? A seizure disorder hardly showed on the outside like, say, skin lesions. Miles suspected a conversation at cross-purposes, again, and that he'd just been handed a clue. So what was it?
But before he could follow this up, she turned away and said, "Oh! Tenbury-san!"
A lot of heads swiveled at the entry of a man in threadbare coveralls, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and an enormous quantity of hair, but the looks were mostly followed up with brief nods or friendly waves. The greetings were returned as silently. The man trod into the kitchen area. He shoved his hand into his thatch of brown-gray beard to scratch his chin, greeted the cook with another nod, and held out a familiar carafe, which she took to rinse and refill with coffee. "Your lunch is all ready, Tenbury-san," she called over her shoulder. "Sack's in the fridge."
The man grunted thanks and went to poke inside the industrial refrigerator. He was not, Miles, realized, actually of a bearlike build under all the mad hair, but lanky and pale. He pulled out a cloth sack, turned, and eyed Miles. "You're new."
"I'm a friend of Jin's," Miles answered, not quite directly. Or at least, he collected me.
"Really? Where is the boy?"
"I sent him to run an errand for me."
"Eh. Good. Time he did some work."
"There's a faucet leaking in two-ten," the cook informed him.
"Right, right. I'll bring my tools after dinner," said the man. He took the carafe and trod out.
"Who was that?" Miles asked, as the cook picked up her spoon again.
"Tenbury. He's the custodian here."
Miles dimly remembered that term going by a few times earlier, and wondered if its meaning was as far outside the usual as Suze the Secretary's. But if he really wanted to know where the power came from and the sewage went to, now was his chance. Should he wait for Jin to broker an introduction? Miles didn't have infinite time to explore, here…?his feet were already in motion, deciding for him.
He waved his own thanks to the cook, dropped the refilled mug by Yani, rapped a friendly farewell on the tabletop, and made it to the door just in time to tail Tenbury's receding footsteps. The worn rubber soles on Miles's scavenged shoes were as silent as he'd hoped. Hinges squeaked; Miles nipped around the corner to discover a door closing again on another stairwell. He drew a breath and followed.