The mob was waiting, headed by a tall woman with roan-red hair and a delighted smile. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan actually hugged her daughter-in-law first. A white-haired, stocky man advanced from the antechamber to the left, face luminous with pleasure, and stood in line for his chance with Ekaterin before turning to his son. Nikki clattered down the sweeping stairway and into his mother's arms, and returned her tight hug with only a tinge of embarrassment. The boy had grown at least three centimeters in the past two months. When he turned to Miles, and copied the Count's handshake with dauntingly grown-up resolve, Miles found himself looking up into his stepson's face.
A dozen armsmen and servants stood around grinning; Ma Kosti, the peerless cook, pressed a splendid bunch of flowers on Ekaterin. The Countess handed off an awkwardly worded but sincere message of felicitation for their impending parenthood from Miles's brother Mark, at graduate school on Beta Colony, and a rather more fluent one from his Grandmother Naismith there. Ekaterin's older brother, Will Vorvayne, unexpectedly present, took vids of it all.
“Congratulations,” Viceroy Count Aral Vorkosigan was saying to Ekaterin, “on a job well done. Would you like another? I'm sure Gregor can find you a place in the diplomatic corps after this, if you want it.”
She laughed. “I think I have at least three or four jobs already. Ask me again in, oh, say about twenty years.” Her glance went to the staircase leading to the upper floors, and the nursery.
Countess Vorkosigan, who caught the look, said, “Everything is waiting and ready as soon as you are.”
After the briefest of washups in their second-floor suite, Miles and Ekaterin made their way down a servitor-crowded hallway to rendezvous with the core family again in the nursery. With the addition of the birth team—an obstetrician, two medtechs, and a bio-mechanic—the small chamber overlooking the back garden was as full as it could hold. It seemed as public a birth as those poor monarchs' wives in the old histories had ever endured, except that Ekaterin had the advantage of being upright, dressed, and dignified. All of the cheerful excitement, none of the blood or pain or fear. Miles decided that he approved.
The two replicators, released from their racks, stood side by side on a table, full of promise. A medtech was just finishing fiddling with a cannula on one. “Shall we proceed?” inquired the obstetrician.
Miles glanced at his parents. “How did you all do this, back then?”
“Aral lifted one latch,” said his mother, “and I lifted the other. Your grandfather, General Piotr, lurked menacingly, but he came around to a wider way of thinking later.” His mother and his father exchanged a private smile, and Aral Vorkosigan shook his head wryly.
Miles looked to Ekaterin.
“It sounds good to me,” she said. Her eyes were brilliant with joy. It lifted Miles's heart to think that he had given her that happiness.
They advanced to the table. Ekaterin went around, and the techs scrambled out of her way; Miles hooked his cane over the edge, supported himself with one hand, and raised the other to match Ekaterin's. A double snap sounded from the latches. They moved down and repeated the gesture with the second replicator.
“Good,” Ekaterin whispered.
Then they had to stand out of the way, watching with irrational anxiety as the obstetrician popped the first lid, swept the exchange tube matting aside, slit the caul, and lifted the pink squirming infant out into the light. A few heart-stopping moments clearing air passages, draining and cutting the cord; Miles breathed again when little Aral Alexander did, and blinked his blurring lashes. He felt less self-conscious when he noticed his father wipe his eyes. Countess Vorkosigan gripped her skirts at her sides, forcibly making hungry grandmotherly hands wait their turn. The Count's hand on Nikki's shoulder tightened, and Nikki in his front-and-center viewpoint lifted his chin and grinned. Will Vorvayne bobbed around trying to get better vid angles, until his little sister put on her firmest Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan voice and quashed his attempts at stage directing. He looked startled, but backed off.
By some tacit assumption, Ekaterin got first dibs. She held her new son and watched as the second replicator yielded up her very first daughter. Miles leaned on his cane at her elbow, his eyes devouring the astonishing sight. A baby. A real baby. His . He'd thought his children had seemed real enough, when he'd touched the replicators in which they grew. That was nothing like this. Little Aral Alexander was so small. He blinked and stretched. He breathed, actually breathed, and placidly smacked his tiny lips. He had a notable amount of black hair. It was wonderful. It was . . . terrifying.
“Your turn,” said Ekaterin, smiling at Miles.
“I . . . I think I'd better sit down, first.” He half-fell into an armchair brought hastily forward for him. Ekaterin tucked the blanket-wrapped bundle into his panicked arms. The Countess hovered over the back of the chair like some maternal vulture.
“He seems so small.”
“What, four point one kilos!” chortled Miles's mother. “He's a little bruiser, he is. You were half that size when you were taken out of the replicator.” She continued with an unflattering description of Miles at that moment that Ekaterin not only ate up, but encouraged .
A lusty yowl from the replicator table made Miles start; he looked up eagerly. Helen Natalia announced her arrival in no uncertain terms, waving freed fists and howling. The obstetrician completed his examination and pressed her rather hastily into her mother's reaching arms. Miles stretched his neck. Helen Natalia's dark, wet wisps of hair were going to be as auburn as promised, he fancied, when they dried.
With two babies to go around, all the people lined up to hold them would have their chances soon enough, Miles decided, accepting Helen Natalia, still making noise, from her grinning mother. They could wait a few more moments. He stared at the two bundles more than filling his lap in a kind of cosmic amazement.
“We did it,” he muttered to Ekaterin, now perching on the chair arm. “Why didn't anybody stop us? Why aren't there more regulations about this sort of thing? What fool in their right mind would put me in charge of a baby? Two babies?”
Her brows drew together in quizzical sympathy. “Don't feel bad. I'm sitting here thinking that eleven years suddenly seems longer that I realized. I don't remember anything about babies.”
“I'm sure it'll all come back to you. Like, um, like flying a lightflyer.”
He had been the end point of human evolution. At this moment he abruptly felt more like a missing link. I thought I knew everything. Surely I knew nothing. How had his own life become such a surprise to him, so utterly rearranged? His brain had whirled with a thousand plans for these tiny lives, visions of the future both hopeful and dire, funny and fearful. For a moment, it seemed to come to a full stop. I have no idea who these two people are going to be .
Then it was everyone else's turn, Nikki, the Countess, the Count. Miles watched enviously his father's sure grip of the infant on his shoulder. Helen Natalia actually stopped screaming there, reducing the noise level to one of more generalized, desultory complaint.
Ekaterin slipped her hand into his and gripped tightly. It felt like free falling into the future. He squeezed back, and soared.