A Civil Campaign

Abject.

He went back inside Vorkosigan House to his study, where he sat himself down to attempt, through a dozen drafts, the best damned abject anybody'd ever seen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kareen leaned over the porch rail of Lord Auditor Vorthys's house and stared worriedly at the close-curtained windows in the bright tile front. 'Maybe there's no one home.'

'I said we should have called before we came here,' said Martya, unhelpfully. But then came a rapid thump of steps from within—surely not the Professora's—and the door burst open.

'Oh, hi, Kareen,' said Nikki. 'Hi, Martya.'

'Hello, Nikki,' said Martya. 'Is your mama home?'

'Yeah, she's out back. You want to see her?'

'Yes, please. If she's not too busy.'

'Naw, she's only messing with the garden. Go on through.' He gestured them hospitably in the general direction of the back of the house, and thumped back up the stairs.

Trying not to feel like a trespasser, Kareen led her sister through the hall and kitchen and out the back door. Ekaterin was on her knees on a pad by a raised flower bed, grubbing out weeds. The discarded plants were laid out beside her on the walk, roots and all, in rows like executed prisoners. They shriveled in the westering sun. Her bare hand slapped another green corpse down at the end of the row. It looked therapeutic. Kareen wished she had something to kill right now. Besides Martya.

Ekaterin glanced up at the sound of their footsteps, and a ghost of a smile lightened her pale face. She jammed her trowel into the dirt, and rose to her feet. 'Oh, hello.'

'Hi, Ekaterin.' Not wishing to plunge too baldly into the purpose of her visit, Kareen added, with a wave of her arm, 'This is pretty.' Trees, and walls draped with vines, made the little garden into a private bower in the midst of the city.

Ekaterin followed her glance. 'It was a hobby-project of mine, when I lived here as a student, years ago. Aunt Vorthys has kept it up, more or less. There are a few things I'd do differently now . . . Anyway,' she gestured at the graceful wrought-iron table and chairs, 'won't you sit down?'

Martya took prompt advantage of the invitation, seating herself and resting her chin on her hands with a put-upon sigh.

'Would you like anything to drink? Tea?'

'Thanks,' said Kareen, also sitting. 'Nothing to drink, thanks.' This household lacked servants to dispatch on such errands; Ekaterin would have to go off and rummage in the kitchen with her own hands to supply her guests. And the sisters would be put to it to guess whether to follow prole rules, and all troop out to help, or impoverished-high-Vor rules, and sit and wait and pretend they didn't notice there weren't any servants. Besides, they'd just eaten, and her dinner still sat like a lump in Kareen's stomach even though she'd barely picked at it.

Kareen waited until Ekaterin was seated to venture cautiously, 'I just stopped by to find out—that is, I'd wondered if, if you'd heard anything from . . . from Vorkosigan House?'

Ekaterin stiffened. 'No. Should I have?'

'Oh.' What, Miles the monomaniacal hadn't made it all up to her by now? Kareen had pictured him at Ekaterin's door the following morning, spinning damage-control propaganda like mad. It wasn't that Miles was so irresistible—she, for one, had always found him quite resistible, at least in the romantic sense, not that he'd ever exactly turned his attention on her—but he was certainly the most relentless human being she'd ever met. What was the man doing all this time? Her anxiety grew. 'I'd thought—I was hoping—I'm awfully worried about Mark, you see. It's been almost two days. I was hoping you might have . . . heard something.'

Ekaterin's face softened. 'Oh, Mark. Of course. No. I'm sorry.'

Nobody cared enough about Mark. The fragilities and fault lines of his hard-won personality were invisible to them all. They'd load him down with impossible pressures and demands as though he were, well, Miles, and assume he'd never break. . . . 'My parents have forbidden me to call anyone at Vorkosigan House, or go over there or anything,' Kareen explained, tight-voiced. 'They insisted I give them my word before they'd even let me out of the house. And then they stuck me with a snitch.' She tossed her head in the direction of Martya, now slumping with almost equal surliness.

'It wasn't my idea to be your bodyguard,' protested Martya. 'Did I get a vote? No.'

'Da and Mama—especially Da—have gone all Time-of-Isolation over this. It's just crazy. They're all the time telling you to grow up, and then when you do, they try to make you stop. And shrink. It's like they want to cryofreeze me at twelve forever. Or stick me back in the replicator and lock down the lid.' Kareen bit her lip. 'And I don't fit in there anymore, thank you.'

'Well,' said Ekaterin, a shade of sympathetic amusement in her voice, 'at least you'd be safe there. I can understand the parental temptation of that.'

'You're making it worse for yourself, you know,' said Martya to Kareen, with an air of sisterly critique. 'If you hadn't carried on like a madwoman being locked in an attic, I bet they wouldn't have gone nearly so rigid.'

Kareen bared her teeth at Martya.

'There's something to that in both directions,' said Ekaterin mildly. 'Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It's so infuriating. It took me the longest time to figure out how to stop falling into that trap.'

'Yes, exactly,' said Kareen eagerly. 'You understand! So—how did you make them stop?'

'You can't make them—whoever your particular them is—do anything, really,' said Ekaterin slowly. 'Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough . No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that , and walk away. But that's hard.' Ekaterin looked up from her lap where her hands had been absently rubbing at the yard dirt smeared on them, and remembered to smile. Kareen felt an odd chill. It wasn't just her reserve that made Ekaterin daunting, sometimes. The woman went down and down, like a well to the middle of the world. Kareen bet even Miles couldn't shift her around at his will and whim.

How hard is it to walk away? 'It's like they're that close,' she held up her thumb and finger a few millimeters apart, 'to telling me I have to choose between my family and my lover. And it makes me scared, and it makes me furious. Why shouldn't I have both? Would it be considered too much of a good thing, or what? Leaving aside that it'd be a horrid guilt to lay on poor Mark—he knows how much my family means to me. A family is something he didn't have, growing up, and he romanticizes it, but still.'

Her flattened hands beat a frustrated tattoo on the garden tabletop. 'It all comes back to the damned money. If I were a real adult, I'd have my own income. And I could walk away, and they'd know I could, and they'd have to back off. They think they have me trapped.'