“We just got off the shuttle,” Ivan Xav began.
“Yeah, I know.” Christos held up a viewer. “I brought a book for while you clean up. I’m to wait while you get ready. Because she didn’t want me to miss you, if you took yourselves out or whatever.” He smiled thinly, trod into the living room, and helped himself to a chair, settling back for a comfortable read. He added as he keyed it on and found his place, “Dress is casual, she said. Which only means, not formal.”
“Trapped,” Ivan Xav muttered. “Like rats…”
“What now?” Tej whispered to him.
He scratched his head and sighed, as if in defeat. “Well, we’ve all got to eat sometime. And at least the food’ll be first-rate.”
“If we get this over with now,” murmured Rish, “we won’t have to sit around anticipating it, you know. It does seem an inevitable meeting.”
Ivan Xav grimaced, but Tej nodded. Even if Ivan Xav’s mother was a horrible harridan in hysterics, as his actions seemed to imply, the news of the impending divorce ought to calm her down. It seemed unlikely that she would pull out a weapon and shoot her son’s new bride over dinner, and besides, that would be redundant. She had only to stake Tej and Rish out where the enemy syndicate could find them, and the problem would be carried out of her ken without her having to lift, or tighten, a finger. Still…poisons? Rish could detect an astonishing number of these, if presented in food or drink. But-redundancy, again. Tej decided she was letting travel weariness and her nerves turn her thoughts just too strange. It would all be made plain soon enough.
A flurry of turns in the bath and dithering over their tiny selection of garb resulted in Rish in black Komarran trousers and top, with a long-sleeved jacket and her head-shawl, Tej similarly attired in shades of cream, a little shabby but easy on her acute color sensitivity, and Ivan Xav in civilian clothes similar to what he’d been wearing the first time they’d met, but pulled clean from his capacious closet and not crumpled and smelly from his duffle. The driver shepherded them out with bland courtesy.
A large groundcar with a separate driver’s compartment awaited them in the basement garage. As Christos handed them into the spacious back passenger compartment and started to close the silvered canopy, Ivan Xav held up a hand and said, “Uh, Christos-will Simon be there, do you know?”
“Of course, Lord Ivan.” The canopy snapped closed, sealing them in.
Ivan Xav sat back with a wince, but for a few minutes Tej and Rish were too busy craning their necks and trying to see the city for Tej to pursue this new mystery. Nearing sunset of what seemed to be a late fall or early winter day, traffic was heavy, but the car was bearing generally upriver and uphill.
Ivan Xav cleared his throat. “I should probably explain Simon,” he began, then stalled out, muttering, “No, there’s no explaining Simon…”
“All right, who is Simon?” said Tej. If they were being flung into this headfirst…“Aren’t you the one who was complaining to Byerly Vorrutyer about inadequate briefings?”
“How do I put this?” Ivan Xav rubbed his forehead. “Simon Illyan was Chief of Imperial Security for upwards of thirty years, from the War of Vordarian’s Pretendership till about four or so years back, when he suffered, um, a sort of stroke. Neurological damage to his memory functions. Retired out on a medical, y’know.”
Wait, that Simon Illyan? The same ImpSec boss whom Morozov, without a trace of irony, had dubbed the legendary?
“-and took up with m’mother. Why then, and not any time in the preceding three decades that they worked together, I have no idea, but there you are. So he’s like there, all the time now. With her. Unless she’s at the Residence working. They stick to each other like glue. It’s pretty damned unnerving, I can tell you.”
“Oh,” said Rish, finally unraveling this. “They’re lovers. Why didn’t you say so?”
Ivan Xav tilted his head back and forth and made little flailing motions with his hands. “Haven’t got used to it yet, I guess.”
“After four years?” Tej blinked in new dismay. In other words, the Simon Illyan was almost-sort-of Ivan’s stepfather and he hadn’t mentioned it till now? “Does he really have a cyborg brain?”
“What?”
“That was the rumor in the Whole. Illyan, the Barrayaran Imperial Security chief with the cyborg brain.” The whispers had suggested a sinister super-humanity. Or super-inhumanity.
“I wouldn’t call it that. When he was a young ImpSec lieutenant-twenty-seven, I think he said, good grief, that’s almost eight years younger than I am now…” Ivan Xav trailed off, then took up his thread again. “Anyway, then-Emperor Ezar sent him all the way to Illyrica, a trip that took months, to be fitted with an experimental eidetic-memory chip. Which was kind of a bust-nine out of ten of the subjects came down with some sort of chip- induced schizophrenia, and the project was canned. Illyan was a tenth man. So ever after that he had to cope with two memories, the perfect one off his chip, and his original organic one. Ezar, of course, died, and Illyan had to find his own way-he became one of the Regent’s key men around the time of the Pretendership.”
“So, so he had a stroke, and…” Tej puzzled through all this spate of belated information. “It did something to this chip?”
Ivan Xav cleared his throat. “Actually, it was the other way around. The chip broke down. Had to be surgically removed. But Illyan’s brain had sort of, it’s hard to describe-even harder to live through, I guess-rerouted itself around the chip in the, what, almost thirty-five years that he had it. When it was so abruptly yanked out, it was really hard for him to readjust.
“So the thing about Simon is,” Ivan Xav forged on, “the thing about Simon is, he used to have this terrifying total recall, but now he sometimes doesn’t track. He’s pretty quiet, so you’re not always sure what’s going on in his head, not that you ever were. So, um…make allowances, huh?”
He was-Tej tried to sort it out-he was anxious for his mother’s lover’s dignity, then? And not just for how it reflected on his mother, it seemed. He seemed anxious for Simon Illyan in his own right. That was… unexpected.
And Illyan was now her…stepfather-in-law? Or would he see her that way? It was unclear whether he and Ivan Xav were close. But it seemed that the legend was in some sort of medical eclipse. Well, old people. It was said Barrayarans aged faster than galactics.
It was all very curious. If the looming Christos were to offer them escape from their date with fate right now, she wasn’t sure that she would take him up on it.
They arrived at length at another tallish residential tower, this one high on the river ridge and so commanding an even better view. “Is this where you grew up?” Tej inquired, as they entered yet another underground garage.
“No, m’mother moved here recently. She has the top two floors. She used to live in an older building much closer to the Imperial Residence. That was where I grew up as much as anywhere, I guess.”
“Nice digs,” murmured Rish as they rose in a transparent lift tube through level after level of elegantly appointed foyers. “Are higher floors more expensive?”
“Dunno. She owns the building, so it’s not like she pays the rent.” He added after a moment, “She still owns t’old one, too.” And, after another, “And mine. Has a business manager to look after ’em all.”
Tej was beginning to wonder if Lady Alys Vorpatril qualified as a House Minor in her own right. And then they were crossing out of the tube into another foyer, and escorted by Christos through a pair of sleek doors clad in fine wood marquetry to a hushed hallway graced with mirrors and fresh flowers. And then into a broad living room backed by wide glass walls taking in a sweeping panorama of the capital, with the sun going down and the dusk rising to turn the city lights to jewels on velvet for as far as the eye could see, under a cloud-banded sky.
In two comfortable-looking armchairs angled close together at the room’s far corner sat a man and a woman; both rose and advanced as Christos announced, “Milady, sir; Lord Ivan Vorpatril, Lady Tej Vorpatril, Mademoiselle Lapis Lazuli,” and bowed himself out, delivering his captives and escaping in the same smooth movement.
Tej scrambled to recognize the couple from assorted vid scans she’d recently seen, although, as always, a person in person was subtly different from their graphic representations-in scent, in sound, in sheer palpability. And these people were palpable.
Lady Alys was a woman past youth and into an indeterminate age one might dub dignified, but certainly not old; she moved with ease, and the streak of silver in her bound-back hair seemed to rest there as mere tasteful decoration. Dark brown eyes like Ivan Xav’s, large in her pale, oval face; fine skin well-cared-for. A long-sleeved, dark red dress with a hem at her mid-calf was topped by a darker loose sleeveless vest of equal length, the colors appropriate to her skin tones, her surroundings, and the season.
