A Civil Campaign

CHAPTER TWO

Kareen Koudelka slid eagerly into the window seat of the orbital shuttle, and pressed her nose to the port. All she could see so far was the transfer station and its starry background. After endless minutes, the usual clanks and yanks signaled undocking, and the shuttle spun away from the station. The thrilling colored arc of Barrayar's terminator slid past her view as the shuttle began its descent. The western three-quarters of North Continent still glowed in its afternoon. She could see the seas . Home again, after nearly a year. Kareen settled back in her seat, and considered her mixed feelings.

She wished Mark were with her, to compare notes. And how did people like Miles, who had been off-world maybe fifty times, handle the cognitive dissonance? He'd had a student year on Beta Colony too, when even younger than she. She realized she had a lot more questions to ask him about it now, if she could work up the nerve.

So Miles Vorkosigan really was an Imperial Auditor now. It was hard to imagine him as one of those stiff old sticks. Mark had expended considerable nervous wit at the news, before sending off a congratulatory message by tight-beam, but then, Mark had a Thing about Miles. Thing was not accepted psychoscientific terminology, she'd been informed by his twinkling therapist, but there was scarcely another term with the scope and flexibility to take in the whole complexity of the . . . Thing.

Her hand drifted down in an inventory, tugging her shirt and smoothing her trousers. The eclectic mix of garb—Komarran-style pants, Barrayaran bolero, a syntha-silk shirt from Escobar —wasn't going to shock her family. She pulled an ash-blond curl out straight and looked up at it cross-eyed. Her hair was almost grown out again to the length and style she'd had when she'd left. Yes, all the important changes were on the inside, privately; she might reveal them or not, in her own time, as seemed right or safe. Safe? she queried herself in bemusement. She was letting Mark's paranoias rub off on her. Still . . .

With a reluctant frown, she drew her Betan earrings from her ears, and tucked them into her bolero pocket. Mama had hung around with Countess Cordelia enough; she might well be able to decode their Betan meaning. This was the style that said: Yes, I'm a consenting and contraceptive-protected adult, but I am presently in an exclusive relationship, so please do not embarrass us both by asking. Which was rather a lot to encrypt in a few twists of metal, and the Betans had a dozen more styles for other nuances; she'd graduated through a couple of them. The contraceptive implant the earrings advertised could now just ride along in secret, no one's business but her own.

Kareen considered briefly the comparison of Betan earrings with related social signals in other cultures: the wedding ring, certain styles of clothing or hats or veils or facial hair or tattoos. All such signals could be subverted, as with unfaithful spouses whose behavior belied their outward statement of monogamy, but really the Betans seemed very good about keeping congruent to theirs. Of course, they had so many choices. Wearing a false signal was highly disapproved, socially. It screws it up for the rest of us, a Betan had once explained to her. The whole idea is to eliminate the weird guessing-games . You had to admire their honesty. No wonder they did so well at the sciences. In all, Kareen decided, there was a lot about the sometimes appallingly sensible Betan-born Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan that she thought she might understand much better now. But Tante Cordelia wouldn't be back home to talk with till nearly the Emperor's wedding at Midsummer, sigh.

She set the ambiguities of the flesh abruptly aside as Vorbarr Sultana drew into view below. It was evening, and a glorious sunset painted the clouds as the shuttle made its final descent. City lights in the dusk made the groundscape magical. She could pick out dear, familiar landmarks, the winding river, a real river after a year of those measly fountains the Betans put in their underground world, the famous bridges—the folk song in four languages about them rippled through her mind—the main monorail lines . . . then the rush of landing, and the final whine to a true stop at the shuttleport. Home, home, I'm home! It was all she could do to keep from stampeding over the bodies of all the slow old people ahead of her. But at last she was through the flex-tube ramp and the last maze of tube and corridor. Will they be waiting? Will they all be there?

They did not disappoint her. They were all there, every one, standing in their own little squad, staking out the best space by the pillars closest to the exit doors: Mama clutching a huge bouquet of flowers, and Olivia, holding up a big decorated sign with rainbow ribbons streaming that said WELCOME HOME KAREEN!, and Martya, jumping up and down as she saw her, and Delia looking very cool and grownup, and Da himself, still wearing his Imperial undress greens from the day's work at HQ, leaning on his stick and grinning. The group-hug was all that Kareen's homesick heart had ever imagined, bending the sign and squashing the flowers. Olivia giggled and Martya shrieked and even Da rubbed water from his eyes. Passers-by stared; male passers-by stared longingly, and tended to blunder into walls. Commodore Koudelka's all-blond commando team, the junior officers from HQ joked. Kareen wondered if Martya and Olivia still tormented them on purpose. The poor boys kept trying to surrender, but so far, none of the sisters had taken prisoners except Delia, who'd apparently conquered that Komarran friend of Miles's at Winterfair—an ImpSec commodore, no less. Kareen could hardly wait to get home and hear all the details of the engagement.

All talking at once, except for Da, who'd given up years ago and now just listened benignly, they herded off to collect Kareen's luggage and meet the groundcar. Da and Mama had evidently borrowed the big one from Lord Vorkosigan for the occasion, along with Armsman Pym to drive it, so that they all might fit in the rear compartment. Pym greeted her with a hearty welcome-home from his liege-lord and himself, piled her modest valises in beside him, and they were off.

'I thought you would come home wearing one of those topless Betan sarongs,' Martya teased her, as the groundcar pulled away from the shuttleport and headed toward town.

'I thought about it.' Kareen buried her grin in her armload of flowers. 'It's just not warm enough here.'

'You didn't actually wear one there , did you?'

Fortunately, before Kareen was forced to either answer or evade this, Olivia piped up, 'When I saw Lord Vorkosigan's car I thought Lord Mark might have come home with you after all, but Mama said not. Won't he be coming back to Barrayar for the wedding?'

'Oh, yes. He actually left Beta Colony before I did, but he stopped on the way at Escobar to . . .' she hesitated, 'to attend to some business of his.' Actually, Mark had gone to cadge weight-loss drugs, more powerful than those his Betan therapist would prescribe for him, from a clinic of refugee Jacksonian doctors in which he had a financial interest. He would doubtless check out the business health of the clinic at the same time, so it wasn't an outright lie.

Kareen and Mark had come close to having their first real argument over this dubious choice of his, but it was, Kareen recognized, indeed his choice. Body-control issues lay near the core of his deepest troubles; she was developing an instinct—if she didn't flatter herself, close to a real understanding—of when she could push for his good. And when she just had to wait, and let Mark wrestle with Mark. It had been a somewhat terrifying privilege to watch and listen, this past year, as his therapist coached him; and an exhilarating experience to participate, under the therapist's supervision, in the partial healing he was achieving. And to learn there were more important aspects to love than a mad rush for connection: confidentiality, for one. Patience for another. And, paradoxically and most urgently in Mark's case, a certain cool and distant autonomy. It had taken her months to figure that one out. She wasn't about to try to explain it to her noisy, teasing, loving family in the back of a groundcar.

'You've become good friends . . .' her mother trailed off invitingly.

'He needed one.' Desperately .

'Yes, but is he your boy friend?' Martya had no patience with subtlety, preferring clarity.

'He seemed sweet on you when he was here last year,' Delia