his face fell. He carefully resheathed it, and handed it back sadly. “I guess you didn’t realize. I’m not Vor. It’s not legal for me to own a private sword.”
“Oh.” Cordelia was crestfallen.
Vorkosigan raised an eyebrow. “May I see that, Cordelia?” He looked it over, unsheathing it more cautiously. “Hm. Am I right in guessing I paid for this?”
“Well, you will, I suppose, when the bill arrives. Although I don’t think you should pay for the one I broke. I might as well take it back, though.”
“I see.” He smiled a little. “Lieutenant Koudelka, as your commanding officer and a vassal secundus to Ezar Vorbarra, I am officially issuing you this weapon of mine, to carry in the service of the Emperor, long may he rule.” The unavoidable irony of the formal phrase tightened his mouth, but he shook off the blackness, and handed the stick back to Koudelka, who bloomed again. “Thank you, sir!”
Cordelia just shook her head. “I don’t believe I’ll ever understand this place.”
“I’ll have Kou find you some legal histories. Not tonight, though. He has barely time to put his notes from today in order before Vortala’s due here with a couple more of his strays. You can take over part of the Count my father’s library, Kou; we’ll meet in there.”
Dinner broke up. Koudelka retreated to the library to work, while Vorkosigan and Cordelia retired to the drawing room next to it to read, before Vorkosigan’s evening meeting. He had yet more reports, which he ran rapidly through a hand viewer. Cordelia divided her time between a Barrayaran Russian phrase earbug, and an even more intimidating disk on child care. The silence was broken by an occasional mutter from Vorkosigan, more to himself than her, of phrases like, “Ah ha! So that’s what the bastard was really up to,” or “Damn, those figures are strange. Got to check it out… .” Or from Cordelia, “Oh, my, I wonder if all babies do that,” and a periodic thwack! penetrating the wall from the library, which caused them to look up at each other and burst out laughing.
“Oh, dear,” said Cordelia, after the third or fourth of these. “I hope I haven’t distracted him unduly from his duties.”
“He’ll do all right, when he settles down. Vorbarra’s personal secretary has taken him in hand, and is showing him how to organize himself. After Kou follows him through the funeral protocol, he should be able to tackle anything. That swordstick was a stroke of genius, by the way; thank you.”
“Yes, I noticed he was pretty touchy about his handicaps. I thought it might unruffle his feathers a little.”
“It’s our society. It tends to be … rather hard on anyone who can’t keep up.”
“I see. Strange … now that you mention it, I don’t recall seeing any but healthy-looking people, on the streets and so on, except at the hospital. No float chairs, none of those vacuous faces in the tow of their parents …”
“Nor will you.” Vorkosigan looked grim. “Any problems that are detectable are eliminated before birth.”
“Well, we do that, too. Though usually before conception.”
“Also at birth. And after, in the backcountry.”
“Oh.”
“As for the maimed adults …”
“Good heavens, you don’t practice euthanasia on them, do you?”
“Your Ensign Dubauer would not have lived, here.”
Dubauer had taken disruptor fire to the head, and survived. Sort of.
“As for injuries like Koudelka’s, or worse … the social stigma is very great. Watch him in a larger group sometime, not his close friends. It’s no accident that the suicide rate among medically discharged soldiers is high.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I took it for granted, once. Now … not anymore. But many people still do.”
“What about problems like Bothari’s?”
“It depends. He was a usable madman. For the unusable …” he trailed off, staring at his boots.
Cordelia felt cold. “I keep thinking I’m beginning to adjust to this place. Then I go around another corner and run headlong into something like that.”
“It’s only been eighty years since Barrayar made contact with the wider galactic civilization again. It wasn’t just technology we lost, in the Time of Isolation. That we put back on again quickly, like a borrowed coat. But underneath it … we’re still pretty damned naked in places. In forty-four years, I’ve only begun to see how naked.”
Count Vortala and his “strays” came in soon after, and Vorkosigan vanished into the library. The old Count Piotr Vorkosigan, Aral’s father, arrived from his District later that evening, come up to attend the full Council vote. “Well, that’s one vote he’s assured of tomorrow,” Cordelia joked to her father-in-law, helping him get stiffly out of his jacket in the stone-paved foyer.
“Ha. He’s lucky to get it. He’s picked up some damned peculiar radical notions in the last few years. If he wasn’t my son, he could whistle for it.” But Piotr’s seamed face looked proud.
Cordelia blinked at this description of Aral Vorkosigan’s political views. “I confess, I’ve never thought of him as a revolutionary. Radical must be a more elastic term than I thought.”
“Oh, he doesn’t see himself that way. He thinks he can go halfway, and then stop. I think he’ll find himself riding a tiger, a few years down the road.” The count shook his head grimly. “But come, my girl, and sit down and tell me that you’re well. You look well—is everything all right?”
The old count was passionately interested in the development of his grandson-to-be. Cordelia sensed her pregnancy had raised her status with him enormously, from a tolerated caprice of Aral’s to something bordering perilously on the semi-divine. He fairly blasted her with approval. It was nearly irresistible, and she never laughed at him, although she had no illusions about it. Cordelia had found Aral’s earlier sketch of his father’s reaction to her pregnancy, the day she’d brought home the confirming news, to be right on target. She’d returned to the estate at Vorkosigan Surleau that summer day to search Aral out down by the boat dock. He was puttering around with his sailboat, and had the sails laid out, drying in the sun, as he squished around them in wet shoes.
He looked up to meet her smile, unsuccessful at concealing the eagerness in his eyes. “Well?” He bounced a little, on his heels.
“Well.” She attempted a sad and disappointed look, to tease him, but the grin escaped and took over her whole face. “Your doctor says it’s a boy.”
“Ah.” A long and eloquent sigh escaped him, and he scooped her up and twirled her around.
“Aral! Awk! Don’t drop me.” He was no taller than herself, if, um, thicker.
“Never.” He let her slide down against him, and they shared a long kiss, ending in laughter.
“My father will be ecstatic.”
“You look pretty ecstatic yourself.”
“Yes, but you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen an old-fashioned Barrayaran paterfamilias in a trance over the growth of his family tree. I’ve had the poor old man convinced for years that his line was ending with me.”
“Will he forgive me for being an offworlder plebe?”
“No insult intended, but by this time I don’t think he’d have cared what species of wife I dragged home, as long as she was fertile. You think I’m exaggerating?” he added at her trill of laughter. “You’ll see.”
“Is it too early to think of names?” she asked, slightly wistful.
“No thinking to it. Firstborn son. It’s a strict custom here. He gets named after his two grandfathers. Paternal for the first, maternal for the second.”
“Ah, that’s why your history is so confusing to read. I was always having to put dates next to those duplicate names, to try and keep track. Piotr Miles. Hm. Well, I guess I can get used to it. I’d been thinking of… something else.”
“Another time, perhaps.”
“Ooh, ambitious.”
A short wrestling match ensued, Cordelia having previously made the useful discovery that in certain moods he was more ticklish than she. She extracted a reasonable amount of revenge, and they ended laughing on the grass in the sun.
