"Oh, come on," Miles was stirred to object. "Mother's as apolitical as you can get and still be conscious and walking around."
"Thank God, or she'd be running Barrayar today. I've never seen your father cross her yet. Well, well, it could have been worse …" The old man shifted again, twisting in his pain of spirit as Miles had in his pain of body.
Miles lay in his chair, making no effort to defend the issue or himself. The Count could be trusted to argue himself down, taking both parts, in a little time.
"We must bend with the times, I suppose. We must all bend with the times. Shopkeepers' sons are great soldiers, now. God knows, I commanded a few in my day. Did I ever tell you about the fellow, when we were fighting the Cetagandans up in the Dendarii Mountains back behind Vorkosigan Surleau—best guerilla lieutenant I ever had. I wasn't much older than you, then. He killed more Cetagandans that year . .. His father had been a tailor. A tailor, back when it was all cut and stitched by hand, hunched over all the little detailing …" He sighed for the irretrievable past. "What was the fellow's name …"
"Tesslev," supplied Miles. He raised his eyebrows quizzically at his feet. Perhaps I shall be a tailor, then. I'm built for it. But they're as obsolete as Counts, now.
"Tesslev, yes, that was it. He died horribly when they caught his patrol. Brave man, brave man …" Silence fell between them for a time.
The old Count spotted a straw, and clutched at it. "Was the test fairly administered? You never know, these days—some plebian with a personal ax to grind…"
Miles shook his head, and moved quickly to cut this fantasy down before it had a chance to grow and flower. "Quite fair. It was me. I let myself get rattled, didn't pay attention to what I was doing. I failed because I wasn't good enough. Period."
The old man twisted his lips in sour negation. His hand closed angrily, and opened hopelessly. "In the old days no one would have dared question your right .. ."
"In the old days the cost of my incompetence would have been paid in other men's lives. This is more efficient, I believe." Miles's voice was flat.
"Well …" the old man stared unseeingly out the window. "Well—times change. Barrayar has changed. It underwent a world of change between the time I was ten and the time I was twenty. And another between the time I was twenty and forty. Nothing was the same . .. And another between the time I was forty and eighty. This weak, degenerate generation—even their sins are watered down. The old pirates of my father's day could have eaten them all for breakfast and digested their bones before lunch … Do you know, I shall be the first Count Vorkosigan to die in bed in nine generations?" He paused, gaze still fixed, and whispered half to himself, "God, I've grown weary of change. The very thought of enduring another new world dismays me. Dismays me."
"Sir," said Miles gently.
The old man looked up quickly. "Not your fault, boy, not your fault. You were caught in the wheels of change and chance just like the rest of us. It was pure chance, that the assassin chose that particular poison to try and kill your father. He wasn't even aiming for your mother. You've done well despite it. We—we just expected too much of you, that's all. Let no one say you have not done well."
"Thank you, sir."
The silence lengthened unbearably. The room was growing warm. Miles's head ached from lack of sleep, and he felt nauseous from the combination of hunger and medications. He clambered awkwardly to his feet. "If you'll excuse me, sir . .."
The old man waved a hand in dismissal. "Yes, you must have things to do …" He paused again, and looked at Miles quizzically. "What are you going to do now? It seems very strange to me. We have always been Vor, the warriors, even when war changed with the rest of it…"
He looked so shrunken, down in his chair. Miles pulled himself together into a semblance of cheerfulness. "Well, you know, there's always the other aristocratic line to fall back on. If I can't be a Service grunt, I'll be a town clown. I plan to be a famous epicure and lover of women. More fun than soldiering any day."
His grandfather fell in with his humor. "Yes, I always envied the breed—go to, boy …" He smiled, but Miles felt it was as forced as his own. It was a lie anyway—"drone" was a swear word in the old man's vocabulary. Miles collected Bothari and made his own escape.
Miles sat hunched in a battered armchair in a small private parlor overlooking the street side of the great old mansion, feet up, eyes closed. It was a seldom used room; there was a good chance of being left alone to brood in peace. He had never come to a more complete halt, a drained blankness numb even to pain. So much passion expended for nothing—a lifetime of nothing stretching endlessly into the future—because of a split second's stupid, angry self-consciousness . ..
There was a throat-clearing noise behind him, and a diffident voice; "Hi, Miles."
His eyes flicked open, and he felt suddenly a little less like a wounded animal hiding in its hole. "Elena! I gather you came up from Vorkosigan Surleau with Mother last night. Come on in."
She perched near him on the arm of another chair. "Yes, she knows what a treat it is for me to come to the capital. I almost feel like she's my mother, sometimes."
"Tell her that. It would please her."
"Do you really think so?" she asked shyly.
"Absolutely." He shook himself into alertness. Perhaps not a totally empty future …
She chewed gently on her lower lip, large eyes drinking in his face. "You look absolutely smashed."
He would not bleed on Elena. He banished his blackness in self-mockery, leaning back expansively and grinning. "Literally. Too true. I'll get over it. You, ah—heard all about it, I suppose."
"Yes. Did, um, it go all right with my lord Count?"
"Oh, sure. I'm the only grandson he's got, after all. Puts me in an excellent position—I can get away with anything."
"Did he ask you about changing your name?"
He stared. "What?"
"To the usual patronymic. He'd been talking about, when you—oh." She cut herself off, but Miles caught the full import of her half revelation.
"Oh, ho—when I became an officer, was he finally planning to break down and allow me my heir's names? Sweet of him—seventeen years after the fact." He stifled a sick anger beneath an ironic grin.
"I never understood what that was all about."
"What, my name—Miles Naismith, after my mother's father, instead of Piotr Miles, after both? It all goes back to that uproar when I was born. Apparently, after my parents had recovered from the soltoxin gas and they found out what the fetal damage was going to be—I'm not supposed to know this, by the way—Grandfather was all for an abortion. Got in a big fight with my parents—well, with Mother, I suppose, and Father caught in the middle—and when my father backed her up and faced him down, he got huffy and asked his name not be given me. He calmed down later, when he found I wasn't a total disaster." He smirked, and drummed his fingers on the chair arm. "So he was thinking of swallowing his words, was he? Perhaps it's just as well I washed out. He might have choked." He closed his teeth on further bitterness, and wished he could call back his last speech. No point in being more ugly in front of Elena than he already was.
"I know how hard you studied for it. I—I'm sorry."
He feigned a surface humor. "Not half as sorry as I am. I wish you could have taken my physicals. Between us we'd make a hell of an officer."
Something of the old frankness they had shared as children escaped her lips suddenly. "Yes, but by Barrayaran standards I'm more handicapped than you—I'm female. I wouldn't even be permitted to petition to take the tests."