“Mamere,” he said, when her impeccably groomed features appeared over the vid plate, wearing an expression of surprised inquiry. “Do you know anything about some dance practice place Simon recommended to the Jewels? A park or commons, outdoors.” Vorbarra Sultana had dozens of such nooks.
“Oh, yes, he mentioned that. He’s gone off to watch. I thought it was good for him to get out. I’d have loved to go with him, but I’m running a diplomatic luncheon at the Residence today for Laisa, as she had to go down to that Vorbarra District economics conference in Nizhne-Whitekirk.”
“Where? The dance practice, I mean.”
“He suggested the little park across the street from ImpSec headquarters. Hardly anyone ever uses it, you know. Except those poor fellows with that seasonal affective problem, who come out to eat their lunches sometimes. Simon did make full-spectrum lighting an allowable requisition, years back.”
“Um, yeah. Thanks.” About to sign off, he hesitated. “Mamere-has Simon told you anything about what Shiv had to say to him? Or vice versa?”
Her smile never shifted. So why did he get the impression of her putting on her most diplomatic poker-face? “He said they had a very enjoyable exchange. I was pleased. I quite liked Udine and Moira, you know. Such adventurous lives! Earth! I’ve never been further than Komarr.” She sighed.
“You should get Simon to take you,” Ivan suggested. “Or take him. Lever him out of his comfy rut. Four, pushing five years since his retirement, all the really hot stuff in his head-whatever’s left of it-has to have cooled off some by now. Doesn’t he think it’s safe to travel out of the Empire yet?”
Her brows rose in a thoughtful way. “He’s never suggested travel farther than the south coast. He was really…extremely exhausted, immediately after all that-” a flick of her hand summed the nightmare weeks of Simon’s chip breakdown. And nightmare decades of its full function, before that, Ivan supposed. “More so than I think he let on.”
“He always was pretty closed,” said Ivan, in what had to be the understatement of the century. “It’s not like you could tell the difference from the outside.”
“No, I suppose you couldn’t.”
Ivan heard the faint emphasis on that you. Which presumably did not include her. Her thirty years of working with Simon hadn’t exactly been like one of those long marriages where people started finishing each other’s sentences, but it did perhaps partake of some of the elements. Ivan tried to remember what had been the longest time he’d ever stuck with one girlfriend. Or vice versa. Surely at least one of them had been more than a year? Almost a year? More than a half-year…?
“Delightful for you to call, but I must go,” his mother said firmly. “Tomorrow, we really must come up with something else to do with your visitors. Properly, it would be their turn to invite us to dinner, but they may not like to do so in that hotel.”
“Um, right,” said Ivan, and let her cut the com.
It being the last weekend before the start of Winterfair proper, parking around ImpSec HQ was not as impossible as usual. Ivan only had to walk about a block before the bare little park, and the great gloomy building across from it, came into view.
The security headquarters had an imposing facade, utterly windowless, with the wide stairs leading up to the front doors deliberately designed to be higher than most people could comfortably step. The great bronze doors were, as far as Ivan knew, rarely opened-everyone with business here went around to the human-scale entrances on the sides or the back. The stone face of the building was severely plain, except for a stylized bas-relief frieze of pained-looking creatures that Miles had once dubbed pressed gargoyles which entirely circled the edifice.
At the time of the reign of Mad Yuri, the gargoyles had possessed some political/artistic/propagandistic metaphorical meaning, which had once been explained to Ivan, but that he had promptly forgotten. Ivan thought the poor things just looked constipated. The people of Vorbarr Sultana, over time, had named them all, and endowed them with varied personalities; there were running jokes about the conversations they had up there, frozen in their frieze, and some of them regularly appeared as editorial cartoon characters. And a short-lived children’s animated show, Ivan dimly remembered from his youth.
The whole was surrounded in turn by a cobblestone courtyard and high stone walls topped with iron spikes not unlike the ones around Vorkosigan House, though already archaically outdated for actual defense even at the time they’d been built. All the real defenses were electronic and invisible. The wall was pierced fore and aft by two gates, the gate guards armed with energy weapons. Muskets would have seemed more in-period.
The park was indeed sunny, if only because ImpSec had never permitted trees, kiosks, bathrooms, or bushes installed to impede the line of sight, or fire. Grass, a little brown after the first frosts but neatly groomed, held up well due to the small number of pedestrians who ventured to cut across it.
Five brightly-dressed people were milling about on the turf-Rish, Jet, Em, Pearl, and Star-while Tej knelt at the side messing with a portable comconsole and some wireless speakers. Under Star’s direction, Tej stood up and shifted one of the speakers a few meters. Tej saw Ivan and waved, but didn’t come over to greet him. Star, with Jet consulting, also shifted around a couple of brightly-colored sticks topped with sparkly pom-poms; counting off strides, taking a line of sight, and sticking them back in the ground.
Simon, wrapped in an aged military greatcoat, was sitting on a bench at the grass’s verge benignly overlooking the show. Hatless-Mamere would have had words-with his thinning, graying hair making him look very much like some retired old man watching youngsters at play. Which Ivan supposed he was. Sort of. In some pig’s eye somewhere.
A uniformed ImpSec officer without a coat-a major, Ivan saw as he approached-was standing talking to Simon, looking back and forth from his former chief to the dance practice which was just getting rolling again. Bright music blared. Jewels were suddenly in motion, swaying, stomping, gesturing, rising and dipping. Jet, in a bravura moment, suddenly began a series of back-flips that ran in a straight diagonal all across the park, and ended with him balanced first on one hand, and then on one foot.
“That’s impressive,” the major said to Simon, as Ivan came up. The fellow’s eyes shifted from Jet to check out Ivan, in civvies because this was his day off dammit; his face cleared. “Captain Vorpatril, is it? Ops?”
Ivan granted him a nod, in lieu of a salute. “Yes, sir.”
“So you would know what all this is in aid of…?”
“A rather high-energy galactic dance troupe who have been cooped up on jumpships for too long, celebrating their reunion, is the tale I was told,” said Ivan easily. Did Simon smile, there, into his lack of a beard?
“I had never seriously watched dance,” Simon remarked to the major, “before my retirement. Lady Vorpatril has her own box at the Vorbarr Sultana Hall, you know. She has been kind enough to invite me to escort her there, many times since. It’s been a real artistic education. Of a style I’d never had time for, earlier in my life. Old dogs, new tricks, who knows where it could all end?”
“Hm. Well. If they’re with you, sir…” The major, with a restraint that practically seemed to break something- perhaps his heart-visibly kept himself from saluting his former chief, managing a mere curt farewell nod before turning away to dodge traffic across the street and slip back through the front gate.
Ivan slung himself down on the bench beside Simon, who had twisted a bit to watch the fellow retreat.
“That’s the fifth man who has come out so far to check this out,” Simon observed, turning back. “The ranks keep getting higher.”
“Have they,” said Ivan, neutrally.
Star, all slicked-back hair, green eyes, and long leggings, bopped out and moved the sparkly pom-poms again. The music started up once more, a slower beat this time. Jewels glittered, in an eye-grabbing and athletic whirl. Jet repeated the astonishing back-flip routine, on the park’s other diagonal.
“I had always considered,” Simon mused after a bit, “that for a building housing a cadre of men whose insignia”-he touched his civilian shirt collar, where no Eye-of-Horus pins now hung-“proclaimed to the Imperium, sees all, knows all, to have no damned windows allowing them to see out, to be some sort of cosmic irony.”
Ivan leaned forward slightly to glance around Simon at the looming facade. “I expect they were more worried at the time about windows being blown in.” The techno-eyes were mostly non-obvious, but for some antennae and reception dishes peeking over the crenellated roof edge. “They have electronic surveillance, surely.”
“Of a redundant redundancy. It was like working in a granite spaceship. Hermetically sealed.”
“So, um…” Ivan considered how to phrase this. “How far up does the rank have to go before someone in your parade of concerned officers comes out and says, What the hell, Simon? ”
