The medtech who came, after a few minutes, to the front door buzzer did indeed recognize her at once, and let them in without demur. He cross-checked the records and led them back through several doors to a freshly arrayed bank of replicators, and sorted through to the right monitor. The light level was muted, the picture indeed tiny and blobby, like some low form of sea life.
Oliver peered dubiously over her shoulder. “So strange. And yet amazing.” He glanced around as if wondering in what freezer his own future hopes were being stored. But he didn’t quite muster the boldness to ask.
“Yes,” she had to agree.
“You’re smiling.”
“Yes,” she had to admit. Her smile crept wider, igniting a reflecting glint in Oliver’s eyes. Even the medtech, when he let them out and locked the doors again, smiled back, as if infected by her compressed joy. Her weary stride widened to almost an Oliver-stretch as they turned up the main street once more.
At the Palace gate, Cordelia apologized for keeping him up past his bedtime and hers. “I didn’t anticipate all the complications on that outing. I suppose one never does.”
“If you anticipated them, they wouldn’t be complications, eh?”
She laughed and bade him goodnight.
Cordelia woke in the small hours, as she so often did these days, with an old memory floating up out of her dream fragments. An unvoiced huh of bemusement shook her.
She’d been in her twenties, eager to advance into her adult life. Tops in her Survey classes, clumsy in her social interactions, she’d been thrilled to at last acquire her first real sexual partner. Their affair had been sporadically renewed as their duties in the Betan Astronomical Survey permitted, culminating in a several-month voyage as declared affiliates, sharing a cabin and junior-officer duties. They’d made plans for the future. Equals in love and life, she’d thought, till it came time to put in for the same promotion.
He would go first, they decided; she would take downside duties to raise their allotted two kids, and then it would be her turn. She applied for and took the desk job as planned, but somehow the declaration of co-parent status and the fertilizations were not forthcoming, though she’d had her egg extraction and signed up for her mandatory parenting course. But he’d had no time to attend to those details before he shipped out in his first captaincy; too many new duties to get atop of right now. It had seemed reasonable.
All ran to plan till he’d returned from that first voyage with a different woman in tow, a junior ensign and xeno-chemist uninterested in having children. We just made a mistake, Cordelia, he told her, as if correcting an error in her navigational math. It’s nobody’s fault, really.
Even if she’d been the scene-making type, she wouldn’t have made protest in the public place he’d prudently chosen for this revelation, and she’d let him slither away, imagining his lie undetected. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted him back. He’d gone on to a steady career in the B.A.S.—even, eventually, the two kids, with a partner a few down the line from either Cordelia or her replacement. And the next year, the captaincy of the René Magritte had opened up for her, a better ship than his if the truth be told, so, no harm done, right?
And two voyages after that she’d discovered this planet and Aral, and the rest was, very literally, history.
The tale of that duplicity was the first intimate secret about herself she’d shared with Aral, during their fraught trek here, in fair trade for one of his own, considerably more blood-soaked and lurid. Aral had come by his gift for the dramatic honestly, she had to concede, and she smiled to recollect how even at age eighty he could still electrify a room just by walking into it.
Which made, in retrospect, her Betan clot’s betrayal the best thing he’d ever done for her. Was it too late to send him a thank-you note? She wondered if her face was as much of a blur in his mind by now as his was in hers. All that lingered of him was the picture of the pain, not even the pain itself, of that stab through the center of her soul. An image still strangely clear.
Catastrophic events had conspired against Aral’s hopes to repair that old wound of hers, yet decades later he’d made sure to leave in her hands the means to do so herself, if she chose. Trust Aral to honor even a tacit promise grandly.
These weren’t tales she could share with Oliver, she realized, at the moment or perhaps ever. He might take them the wrong way. In fact, they were of no use to anyone at all, not even to her, now were they? Sighing, she folded the memories back into herself, and turned over in the dark.
Jole arrived at his downside base office the next morning to find his aide neither late, nor hung-over.
“How was the party at the Cetagandan consulate last night, Lieutenant?” he asked her, as she presented him with a sacrificial offering of coffee. “Did you learn anything interesting?”
“Very odd.” Vorinnis wrinkled her nose in distaste. “The food was…tricky. And then they passed around these things that you were supposed to sniff, but I only pretended to inhale.” Jole gathered that this was less for the sake of virtue than of paranoia. “And then my so-called date went off and left me halfway through. I had to sit through about an hour and a half of this weird poetry recital all by myself. By the time Lord ghem Soren got back, he’d lost his turn at reciting, which made him all miffed and not much company.”
Jole suppressed a smile. “Ah. I’m afraid that was not exactly his fault. Lon ghem Navitt was picked up with a group of his classmates by the Kayburg guard after an, er, self-inflicted accident out in the backcountry last night, and the guard wouldn’t let the kids go till they had inconvenienced all the parents sufficiently to make their point. Ghem Soren was apparently told off by his boss to go collect the lad. For what it’s worth, he didn’t seem too happy with being assigned the detail.”
“Oh.” Vorinnis blinked, taking this in. She did not then inquire, How do you know all this, sir? Was he simply presumed to be omniscient? But she grew a shade less peeved. “Other than that, he mainly seemed to want to tell me all about his family tree. Did you know he had a Barrayaran ancestor? Ancestoress, I guess.”
Jole raised his eyebrows. That tidbit had not been in the cursory ImpSec dossier he’d read on the fellow, though it had named a couple of unexceptionably Cetagandan-sounding parents from ghem Soren’s planet of origin, a lesser satrap world which lay beyond the higher-status capital of Eta Ceta from Barrayar. “No, I didn’t. Do tell.”
“It seems his great-grandmother on his father’s side was a Barrayaran collaborator during the Occupation, and got taken along with the family when the Cetagandans pulled out. I can’t quite figure out if she was Vor or prole, or a servant or mistress or what, though he called her a third wife. Sounded like some kind of concubine to me.”
“Mm, more than a servant, anyway. That’s a status with official standing and rights, but her children would certainly be lower in rank than their senior half-siblings.” Jole sipped coffee and considered his next leading question in this engaging debriefing. “And what sorts of things did he ask you about?”
“He wanted to know if I rode horses, back on Barrayar. He seemed to think all Vor did. I mean, all the time, to get around. And carriages.”
“And, ah, did you ride? As a sport, of course.” Aral had instructed him in horseback riding on those long-ago country weekends down at Vorkosigan Surleau, though they had both preferred the sailing. He’d apologized that he was not so expert a cavalryman as his late father General Count Piotr Vorkosigan had been, and sounded almost sorry that he could not gift Jole with this superior mentor; Simon Illyan had just muttered, Count your blessings.