“From a distance?” said Ekaterin dryly. “Forever?”
Enrique shrugged. “It’s far from the only unpeopled and un-people-able wasteland on the planet. Agriculture? Seems archaic. Industrial food- and fiber-making are more efficient. And your cities are growing.”
“Not everyone wants to live in a plascrete box.” Ekaterin certainly didn’t. “And even the industrial bio-processes need organic feedstocks.”
“Yes, but you’ll have a hard sell from here. There’s likely still going to be a rad residue, even after cleanup. Food seems, so to speak, off the table. Fiber… eh…” He frowned in doubt.
Ekaterin said, a little shyly, “This used to be one of the most fruitful agricultural areas on the continent. I thought the first recovery application might be commercial flower farming.” She could see it in her mind’s eye even now, acres of glorious blooms, rivers of color. And more district employment, too.
“Oh.” Enrique blinked. “Yes, that might do very well.”
“Even if it only becomes a park, it might be a park people could walk in without protection, maybe camp in without dosimeters. We need our open spaces. Our green-and-red-brown spaces.”
“A garden, then,” said Enrique. “Two hundred kilometers around?”
Ekaterin smiled. “Maybe.”
“Ambitious.”
“Miles,” she said primly, “has strong views on not limiting one’s scope.”
“I’ve heard some of his, er…”
“Rants?” Ekaterin supplied.
He gave her a grateful You said it, I didn’t nod. “I suppose that’s why we’re all here.”
“Oh, you have no idea.”
Enrique’s call came earlier than Ekaterin expected, the next morning as she was struggling to get breakfast into two toddlers. Miles was helping, sort of—both twins seemed more interested in using their food to bomb the Hassadar Count’s Residence cats, swirling under their high chairs, a more entertaining and quasi-military exercise to which Miles had allowed himself to be diverted.
“Bracket him, bracket him, that’s right, Helen—!”
Giggles and shrieks, not much chewing and swallowing. Except by the three overweight cats, who greeted this manna with ecstatic growls. A one-to-one ratio of parents to children ought to be an even match, but Ekaterin was sometimes not sure whose side Lord Vorkosigan was on. Grimacing in mixed amusement and exasperation. Ekaterin stepped away from the war zone and raised her wristcom to her lips. “Yes, Enrique?”
“Ekaterin, you’ve got to come out to the lab right away!”
“Is it an emergency?”
“Yes!”
Martya’s voice interrupted: “Not by now, surely. This was last night. Even if you flew out there right away, you’d be too late to do anything about it.”
“Martya”—Ekaterin, experienced, addressed the practical partner—“what’s going on?”
“Our vidcams picked up our bug thief last night.”
“Aha! Was it chickens?”
“No…”
“Well, what was it?”
“It’s a little hard to say. You should see this.”
Miles, ears pricking, looked up and waved her on. “If Martya sounds that taken aback, it probably is urgent. You’d better go. I have things under control here. I’m not due in that damned committee for another hour, and it’s only a five-minute walk across Hassadar Square.”
Aurie Pym, their summer nanny while she was on college break, strolled in just then, sipping coffee. “Need some help, Lady Ekaterin?”
“Yes,” said Ekaterin gratefully. “For the love of heaven, get some protein into those two.” She jerked her head toward the playtime in progress. “Or he won’t be the one who’s sorry later.”
Aurie grinned. “Understood.”
The chortles of laughter, punctuated by an occasional lying meow protesting imminent starvation, and fatherly praise of “Good shot, Sasha!” that followed Ekaterin out relieved her maternal guilt, somewhat.
It was a short hop by lightflyer from downtown Hassadar out to the lab, installed on an old hardscrabble farmstead abandoned when its prior occupant had emigrated to what Ekaterin hoped were more fertile fields on Sergyar. In any case, the farmstead seemed more lucratively suited to its new purpose. MPVK Enterprises, Laboratory One, read the formal public sign by the gate, though Martya’s sister Kareen had dubbed it The Butterbug Ranch, a name which had stuck in private.
Ekaterin bypassed the new pole barn housing the experimental bug hutches and headed for the current main building, the converted farmhouse. Some more impressive HQ was planned for Someday, when we’re not so busy. She found Enrique and Martya back in the old parlor that served as auxiliary office and communications center.
She waved at Martya Koudelka-Borgos, a tall, blond, efficient woman in her late twenties. “Hi, Martya. So, what’s the big mystery?”
“More mystery, it seems. Come look.”
Enrique was seated at the comconsole, scowling at an array of vid images that Ekaterin recognized as the cross-angles of their plot. “Here, I’ll back it up to the beginning. Just after dusk, last night.” He enhanced the images to defeat the low light level, at some cost in true color and resolution.
She leaned over his shoulder and stared.
A strange, slight figure stepped carefully over the force barrier and wandered into focus. It was dressed in trousers a couple of sizes too large for it, cinched up around the narrow waist by a rope belt, and an old black T-shirt. Skinny arms shone a luminous white by contrast—skin not just pale ivory, or lacking a tan, but near-paper-white. When the figure glanced upward, the vid caught a clear view of a bony face, equally white, and wispy white hair that looked as though someone had trimmed around the head using a bowl for a guideline.
“Freeze that shot!” said Ekaterin. “Go in close.”
The eyes were a pale ice blue. The ears looked decidedly pointed.
“My word, it’s Miles’s wood-elf!”
“Miles’s what?” said Martya, raising her brows.
“An albino person, surely,” put in Enrique, in a tone of helpful scientific correction.
“Yes, yes, I see that. But Miles, night before last, saw someone moving in the dusk, someone Vadim couldn’t find—he said it looked like a wood-elf. And, oh dear, it really does!” Miles would be—well, among other things, relieved that his vision hadn’t been the harbinger of some mental breakup. But otherwise, Ekaterin was fairly sure, as disconcerted as herself.
In the stilled vid-shot, it became clear that the elf was a boy. Ekaterin’s experienced eye pegged the age as somewhere between a well-grown eleven and an undersized fourteen, beardless, into his growth spurt but not yet into full puberty. Just about the age of her eldest son Nikolai, child of her first marriage.
Enrique, with a glance at her for permission, put the figure into motion once more. The boy set down a saggy cloth bag he’d carried slung over one shoulder and drew from it a liter-sized glass jar, with holes punched in its metal lid, which he unscrewed. He then dodged around the plot picking up the brightest radbugs and popping them into the jar.
“He’s not wearing gloves!” Martya wailed.
“He’s not even wearing shoes!” Ekaterin echoed her horrified tone.
Enrique sat up straighter. “Hadn’t noticed that, the first time through. But he’s stealing our bugs, the little—juvenile delinquent!”