A Civil Campaign

'Spy on her?' Kareen frowned disapproval. 'Did Miles set you on me for this?'

'Actually, no. It was Tsipis. He's a bit worried for Miles. And—I am too.'

'I would like to be friends with her . . .'

Naturally.

'She doesn't seem to have very many. She's had to move a lot. And I think whatever happened to her husband on Komarr was more ghastly than she lets on. The woman is so full of silences, they spill over.'

'But will she do for Miles? Will she be good for him?'

Kareen cocked an eyebrow down at him. 'Is anyone bothering to ask if Miles will be good for her?'

'Um . . . um . . . why not? Count's heir. Well-to-do. An Imperial Auditor, for God's sake. What more could a Vor desire?'

'I don't know, Mark. It likely depends on the Vor. I do know I'd take you and every one of the Black Gang at their most obstreperous for a hundred years before I'd let myself get locked up for a week with Miles. He . . . takes you over .'

'Only if you let him.' But he warmed inside with the thought that she could really, truly prefer him to the glorious Miles, and suddenly felt less hungry.

'Do you have any idea what it takes to stop him? I still remember being kids, me and my sisters, visiting Lady Cordelia with Mama, and Miles told off to keep us occupied. Which was a really cruel thing to do to a fourteen-year-old boy, but what did I know? He decided the four of us should be an all-girl precision drill team, and made us march around in the back garden of Vorkosigan House, or in the ballroom when it was raining. I think I was four.' She frowned into the past. 'What Miles needs is a woman who will tell him to go soak his head, or it'll be a disaster. For her, not him.' After a moment, she added sapiently, 'Though if for her, for him too, sooner or later.'

'Ow.'

The amiable young men came panting back up out of the ravine then, and took the lift van back down into it. With clanks and thumps, they finished loading, and their van lumbered into the air and headed north. Some time later, Enrique and Madame Vorsoisson appeared, breathless. Enrique, who clutched a huge bundle of native Barrayaran plants, looked quite cheerful. In fact, he actually looked as if he had blood circulation. The scientist probably hadn't been outdoors for years; it was doubtless good for him, despite the fact that he was dripping wet from having fallen in the creek.

They managed to get the plants stuffed in the back, and Enrique half-dried, and everyone loaded up again as the sun slanted west. Mark took pleasure in trying the lightflyer's speed, as they circled the vale one last time and banked northward, back toward the capital. The machine hummed like an arrow, sweet beneath his feet and fingertips, and they reached the outskirts of Vorbarr Sultana again before dusk.

They dropped off Madame Vorsoisson first, at her aunt and uncle's home near the University, with many promises that she would stop in at Vorkosigan House on the morrow and help Enrique look up the scientific names of all his new botanical samples. Kareen hopped out at the corner in front of her family's townhouse, and gave Mark a little farewell kiss on the cheek. Down, Grunt. That wasn't to your address .

Mark slipped the lightflyer back into its corner in the subbasement garage of Vorkosigan House, and followed Enrique into the lab to help him give the butter bugs their evening feed and checkup. Enrique did stop short of singing lullabies to the little creepy-crawlies, though he was in the habit of talking, half to them and half to himself, under his breath as he puttered around the lab. The man had worked all alone for too damned long, in Mark's view. Tonight, though, Enrique hummed as he separated his new supply of plants according to a hierarchy known only to himself and Madame Vorsoisson, some into beakers of water and some spread to dry on paper on the lab bench.

Mark turned from weighing, recording, and scattering a few generous scoops of tree bits into the butter bug hutches to find Enrique settling at his comconsole and firing it up. Ah, good. Perhaps the Escobaran was about to commit some more futurely-profitable science. Mark wandered over, preparing to kibitz approvingly. Enrique was busying himself not with a vertigo-inducing molecular display, but with an array of closely-written text.

'What's that?' Mark asked.

'I promised to send Ekaterin a copy of my doctoral thesis. She asked ,' Enrique explained proudly, and in a tone of some wonder. 'Toward Bacterial and Fungal Suite-Synthesis of Extra-cellular Energy Storage Compounds . It was the basis of all my later work with the butter bugs, when I finally hit upon them as the perfect vehicle for the microbial suite.'

'Ah.' Mark hesitated. It's Ekaterin for you too, now? Well, if Kareen had got on a first-name basis with the widow, Enrique, also present, couldn't very well have been excluded, could he? 'Will she be able to read it?' Enrique wrote just the same way he talked, as far as Mark had seen.

'Oh, I don't expect her to follow the molecular energy-flow mathematics—my faculty advisors had a struggle with those—but she'll get the gist of it, I'm sure, from the animations. Still . . . perhaps I could do something about this abstract, to make it more attractive at first glance. I have to admit, it's a trifle dry.' He bit his lip, and bent over his comconsole. After a minute he asked, 'Can you think of a word to rhyme with glyoxylate ?'

'Not . . . off-hand. Try orange . Orsilver .'

'Those don't rhyme with anything. If you can't be helpful, Mark, go away.'

'What are you doing ?'

'Isocitrate , of course, but that doesn't quite scan . . . I'm trying to see if I can produce a more striking effect by casting the abstract in sonnet form.'

'That sounds downright . . . stunning.'

'Do you think?' Enrique brightened, and started humming again. 'Threonine, serine, polar, molar . . .'

'Dolor,' Mark supplied at random. 'Bowler.' Enrique waved him off irritably. Dammit, Enrique wasn't supposed to be wasting his valuable brain-time writing poetry; he was supposed to be designing long-chain molecule interactions with favorable energy-flows or something. Mark stared at the Escobaran, bent like a pretzel in his comconsole station chair in his concentration, and his brows drew down in sudden worry.

Even Enrique couldn't imagine he might attract a woman with his dissertation, could he? Or was that, only Enrique could imagine . . . ? It was, after all, his sole signal success in his short life. Mark had to grant, any woman he could attract that way was the right sort for him, but . . . but not this one. Not the one Miles had fallen in love with. Madame Vorsoisson was excessively polite, though. She would doubtless say something kind no matter how appalled she was by the offering. And Enrique, who was as starved for kindness as . . . as someone else Mark knew all too well, would build upon it . . .

Expediting the removal of the Bugworks to its new permanent site in the District seemed suddenly a much more urgent task. Lips pursed, Mark tiptoed quietly out of the lab.

Padding up the hall, he could still hear Enrique's happy murmur, 'Mucopolysaccharide, hm, there's a good one, like the rhythm, mu –co- pol –ee-sacc –a-ride . . .'