his youth. And the first day was pretty rocky, but once she persuaded Simon to stop treating the mandatory psychological interest survey as a hostile interrogation, things smoothed out…and…Thank God, now Aunt Cordelia switches to telling me all about Commodore Jole’s new sailboat-the Sergyaran seas don’t dissolve human skin the way Ylla’s do, happily. He took them all out for a sail, good. And no one drowned. Much better.”
“Better than what?” Tej was still laughing at him, he feared.
“Just-better.” Ivan took refuge in what dignity a man wearing nothing but shorts and sipping fruity girly drinks could muster. And also in the drink.
“We should go to the Orb, on the way back,” mused Tej. “I mean, it’s famous for its erotic arts instruction, which I’ve already had, but I’ve always wanted to see it.”
Ivan was torn. “Yeah, so have I, but…what the hell is the mandatory psychological interest survey? Nobody ever mentioned that before.” Not even Miles.
Tej brightened. “My Betan tutors told me all about that. It’s not like a multiple-choice test-it’s more like a brain scan, while they run all kinds of images and stimuli past you, and then put the response-data through their analysis program. They pitch it to the customers as a way of helping people with limited time sort through the menu of offerings to find what will please them most-and it does do that. But it also screens for problem customers.”
“Are they turned away?”
“No, no. They just get a different level of supervision. They mean a lot of varied things by problem, you see. Some people are very distressed by insights that the survey reveals about them, things that they didn’t want to know, and then they have to be sort of gently talked down.”
Ivan considered this, warily. “I think Simon already knows everything about himself that he doesn’t want to know. He never seemed much given to self-deception. All those years of non-adjustable memory.”
“I can believe that.”
But a new reason for some people not to talk much about their visits to the famous Orb glimmered in Ivan’s mind. The next time he caught up with Miles…
Speaking of that devil. “Ah, here’s one from my cousin, Lord-Auditor-and-don’t-you-forget-it.”
“Oh, those are always very interesting.” Tej perked up.
Ivan read for a minute or so, his lips parting. “Oh, my God. The investing angel who bought the old ImpSec site from the Imperial government? Turns out to have been my clone-cousin Mark Vorkosigan.”
“For a Betan dollar?”
“No, not that much nepotism. But he bargained them way down by accepting all legal liabilities. Apparently, his engineers found a way to raise the building back to ground level again! And stabilize the subsoil. It took several months, but they got it up pretty much whole.”
“That must have been almost as bizarre a sight as sinking it was. But…” Her brows drew down. “What in the world is the man going to do with an ugly old government building? It was pretty much gutted, wasn’t it?”
“Stripped more than gutted, I gather. Surprisingly intact. Mark Vorkosigan Enterprises’ new headquarters? He needs one. No…” Ivan scrolled on. His lips drew back in an uncontrollable grin. “Ooh, snarky, Miles! I just bet you’re upset…”
“Come on,” urged Tej, grinning as if he were the best show in town.
“Mark’s turning it into a theme hotel, restaurant, and nightclub. With an espionage museum, very educational. He plans to sell ‘the whole ImpSec experience’ to the tourists, both backcountry and galactic, apparently.”
“Will people pay to sleep in old ImpSec cells and offices and things? I mean-it seems more like a place people would have paid to get out of.”
“That was then, this is now…oh, my. Oh, you’ll have to read this. Miles is so pissed, but he can’t say so directly, because, Mark. The grand opening is in a couple of weeks. And it’s already booked solid for the first two months.” Ivan couldn’t help adding, after a moment of somewhat skewed beatific vision, “I wonder if there’ll be an Adults Only section…? Because, Mark…”
He wanted to go back and start over right then, just to savor the letter on all its levels, but there was more, taking another direction. “Oh, no, Miles and Ekaterin have decanted another one. Going into production, coz? I suppose you are. Still trying to outrun…everything. And pictures. Why? Babies all look alike, I swear…”
“Ooh. Send over.” Tej held out a demanding hand; he extended her his reader, now displaying flat scans of what, he was assured, was a baby girl, one Lady Elizabeth Vorkosigan. His newest niece. Uncle Ivan, good God, the urchins would probably be up to calling him that by the time they got home to Vorbarr Sultana. And Aunt Tej, as well, now. How is it I can have my identity changed by something I didn’t even do…?
He cautiously considered the sobriquet Da. That one, at least, might be his own doing…
Tej was not, thankfully, goopy the way some women got when presented with baby pictures. But the look in her eye was curious, and, when she raised her face to his again, speculative.
“One wouldn’t,” she said neutrally, “want to start an infant in a replicator here, and then have to drag it, decanted or otherwise, back through all those stressful wormhole jumps to Barrayar. More sensible to wait a bit.”
“A bit,” Ivan agreed. The memory of so comfortably ignoring his thirty-sixth birthday drifted across his mind. But some deadlines demanded attention. “You know…I’m going to be a twenty-years man in just four more years. That used to seem forever away, and now it’s…not.”
“What does that mean? In Barrayaran. Or Vor, as the case may be.”
“MilSpeak. Yet another dialect for you. It’s the time a mid-grade officer like me either takes early retirement-not all that early, really-or retakes his oaths and gets serious about tracking for high command. They used to encourage men to stay in, but they don’t so much, these days. They’d rather have new young fellows with new young training.”
“So…what do you want to do? Or do instead?”
“Opting out would be a sure-fire way to avoid unwanted promotion.” He tried to remember his early military idealism, before the glitter had worn off. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure it had been idealism so much as a burning hunger for a status to overawe his fellow obnoxious eighteen-year-olds. Which…seemed much less important, now.
“Is that your answer, then?”
“Might be. It also depends on the alternatives on offer. The consul thinks I should consider the diplomatic corps. That’s-really not an unusual second-career path, for a twenty-years man like me.”
Tej’s lips curved up. “There’s no one like you, Ivan Xav.”
Ivan decided not to argue with this flattering viewpoint.
Tej tried it out in her mouth. “Ambassador Vorpatril?”
“Ambassador and Lady Vorpatril-they like you to come as a set. And they’d fall all over themselves for your language kink. But there’s an apprenticeship first, even if I were fast-tracked. Unless we were sent to the backside of nowhere.” He looked around, and added conscientiously, “Again.”
Tej let her gaze pass over the golden Yllan landscape, the odd but lovely deep blue-green for-want-of-a- better-term vegetation-much the color of a very chilled Rish-the wide, shining, corrosive sea. “Well, someone has to be,” she allowed, judiciously.
“It could involve a lot of wormhole jumps.”
“Mm, but only once every few years. I could…steel myself. And it would keep us far away from both our families.”
“I can see the appeal…”
In all, in truth, it was a problem for another day, Ivan decided. When life and chance handed you an afternoon as idyllic as this one promised to be, it seemed profoundly ungrateful not to pay attention.
Ivan ran a toe up Tej’s shin, and began attending.
