A Civil Campaign

challenge in its own right. Kareen began to think she might like this Duv Galeni fellow. A brother-in-law, hm. It was a concept to get used to.

And then the groundcar rounded the last corner, and home loomed up. The Koudelkas' residence was the end house in a block-row, a capacious three stories high and with a greedy share of windows overlooking a crescent-shaped park, smack in the middle of the capital and not half a dozen blocks from Vorkosigan House itself. The young couple had purchased it twenty-five years ago, when Da had been personal military aide to the Regent, and Mama had quit her ImpSec post as bodyguard to Gregor and his foster-mother Lady Cordelia in order to have Delia. Kareen couldn't begin to calculate how much its value must have appreciated since then, though she bet Mark could. An academic exercise—who could bear to sell the dear old place, creaky as it was? She bounded out of the car, wild with joy.

It was late in the evening before Kareen had a chance to talk privately with her parents. First there had to be the unpacking, and the distribution of presents, and the reclaiming of her room from the stowage her sisters had ruthlessly dumped there during her absence. Then there was the big family dinner, with all three of her best old girlfriends invited. Everybody talked and talked, except Da of course, who sipped wine and looked smug to be sitting down to dinner with eight women. In all the camouflaging chatter Kareen only gradually became aware that she was wrapping away in private silence the things that mattered most intensely to her. That felt very strange.

Now she perched on the bed in her parents' room as they readied for sleep. Mama was running through her set series of isometric exercises, as she'd done every night for as long as Kareen could remember. Even after two body-births and all those years, she still maintained an athlete's muscle tone. Da limped across the room and set his swordstick up by his side of the bed, sat awkwardly, and watched Mama with a little smile. His hair was all gray now, Kareen noticed; Mama's braided mane still maintained her tawny blond without cosmetic assistance, though it was getting a silvery sheen to it. Da's clumsy hands began the task of removing his half-boots. Kareen's eye was having trouble readjusting. Barrayarans in their mid-fifties looked like Betans in their mid-seventies, or even mid-eighties; and her parents had lived hard in their youth, through war and service. Kareen cleared her throat.

'About next year's,' she began with a bright smile, 'school.'

'You are planning on the District University, aren't you?' said Mama, chinning herself gently on the bar hung from the ceiling joists, swinging her legs out horizontally, and holding them there for a silent count of twenty. 'We didn't pinch marks to provide you with a galactic education to have you quit halfway. That would be heartbreaking.'

'Oh, yes, I want to keep going. I want to go back to Beta Colony.' There.

A brief silence. Then Da, plaintively: 'But you just got home , lovie.'

'And I wanted to come home,' she assured him. 'I wanted to see you all. I just thought . . . it wasn't too soon to begin planning. Knowing it's a big thing.'

'Campaigning?' Da raised an eyebrow.

She controlled irritation. It wasn't as though she were a little girl begging for a pony. This was her whole life on the line, here. 'Planning. Seriously.'

Mama said slowly, perhaps because she was thinking or perhaps because she was folding herself upside-down, 'Do you know what you would study this time? The work you selected last year seemed a trifle . . . eclectic.'

'I did well in all my classes,' Kareen defended herself.

'All fourteen completely unrelated courses,' murmured Da. 'This is true.'

'There was so much to choose from.'

'There is much to choose from at Vorbarr Sultana District,' Mama pointed out. 'More than you could learn in a couple of lifetimes, even Betan lifetimes. And the commute is much less costly.'

But Mark won't be at Vorbarr Sultana. He'll be back on Beta. 'Mark's therapist was telling me about some scholarships in her field.'

'Is that your latest interest?' asked Da. 'Psycho-engineering?'

'I'm not sure,' she said honestly. 'Itis interesting, the way they do it on Beta.' But was it psychology in general that entranced her, or just Mark's psychology? She couldn't really say. Well . . . maybe she could. She just didn't entirely like how the answer sounded.

'No doubt,' said Mama, 'any practical galactic medical or technical training would be welcome back here. If you could focus on one long enough to . . . The problem is money, love. Without Lady Cordelia's scholarship, we couldn't have dreamed of sending you off world. And as far as I know, her next year's grant has already been awarded to another girl.'

'I didn't expect to ask her for anything more. She's done so much for me already. But there is the possibility of a Betan scholarship. And I could work this summer. That, plus what you would have spent anyway on the District University . . . you wouldn't expect a little thing like money to stop, say, Lord Miles?'

'I wouldn't expect plasma arc fire to stop Miles.' Da grinned. 'But he is, shall we say, a special case.'

Kareen wondered momentarily what fueled Miles's famous drive. Was it frustrated anger, like the kind now heating her determination? How much anger? Did Mark, in his exaggerated wariness of his progenitor and twin, realize something about Miles that had eluded her? 'Surely we can come up with some solution. If we all try.'

Mama and Da exchanged a look. Da said, 'I'm afraid things are a bit in the hole to start with. Between schooling for all of you, and your late grandmother Koudelka's illness . . . we mortgaged the house by the sea two years ago.'

Mama chimed in, 'We'll be renting it out this summer, all but a week. We figure with all the events at Midsummer we'll hardly have time to get out of the capital anyway.'

'And your mama is now teaching self-defense and security classes for Ministerial employees,' Da added. 'So she's doing all she can. I'm afraid there aren't too many sources of cash left that haven't already been pressed into service.'

'I enjoy the teaching,' Mama said. Reassuring him? She added to Kareen, 'And it's better than selling the summer place to clear the debt, which for a time we were afraid we'd have to do.'

Lose the house by the sea, focus of her childhood? Kareen was horrified. Lady Alys Vorpatril herself had given the house on the eastern shore to the Koudelkas for a wedding present, all those years ago; something about saving her and baby Lord Ivan's lives in the War of Vordarian's Pretendership. Kareen hadn't known finances were so tight. Until she counted up the number of sisters ahead of her, and multiplied their needs . . . um.

'It could be worse,' Da said cheerfully. 'Think of what floating this harem would have been like back in the days of dowries!'

Kareen smiled dutifully—he'd been making that joke for at least fifteen years—and fled. She was going to have to come up with another solution. By herself.

* * *

The decor of the Green Room in the Imperial Residence was superior to that of any other conference chamber in which Miles had ever been trapped. Antique silk wall coverings, heavy drapes and thick carpeting gave it a hushed, serious, and somewhat submarine air, and the elegant tea laid out in elaborate service on the inlaid sideboard beat the extruded-food-in-plastic of the average military meeting all hollow. Spring sunshine streamed through the windows to make warm golden bars across the floor. Miles had been