with mud. Also thud, blood, crud, dud, and cud.”
“You’ll always be Drou to me,” Kou had promised.)
As senior witness Aral then broke the circle of groats with a sweep of one booted foot and let them out, and the music, dancing, eating and drinking began.
The buffet was incredible, the music live, and the drinking … traditional. After the first formal glass of the good wine Piotr’d sent on, Cordelia drifted up to Kou and murmured a few words about Betan research on the detrimental effects of ethanol on sexual function, after which he switched to water.
“Cruel woman,” Aral whispered in her ear, laughing.
“Not to Drou, I’m not,” she murmured back.
She was formally introduced to the brothers, now brothers-in-law, who regarded her with that awed respect that made her teeth grind. Though her jaw eased a bit when a rhyming brother was waved to silence by Dad to make room for some comment by the bride on the topic of hand-weapons. “Quiet, Jos,” Sergeant Droushnakovi told his son. “You’ve never handled a nerve disruptor in combat.” Drou blinked, then smiled, a gleam in her eye.
Cordelia seized a moment with Bothari, whom she saw all too seldom now that Aral had split his household from Piotr’s.
“How is Elena doing, now she’s back home? Has Mistress Hysopi recovered from it all yet?”
“They’re well, Milady,” Bothari ducked his head, and almost-smiled. “I visited about five days ago, when Count Piotr went down to check on his horses. Elena, um, creeps. Put her down and look away a minute, you look back and she’s moved… .” He frowned. “I hope Carla Hysopi stays alert.”
“She saw Elena safely through Vordarian’s war, I suspect she’ll handle crawling with equal ease. Courageous woman. She should be in line for some of those medals they’re handing out.”
Bothari’s brow wrinkled. “Don’t know they’d mean much to her.”
“Mm. She does understand she can call on me for anything she needs, I trust. Any time.”
“Yes, Milady. But we’re doing all right for the moment.” A flash of pride, there, in that statement of sufficiency. “It’s very quiet down at Vorkosigan Surleau, in the winter. Clean. A right and proper place for a baby.” Not like the place I grew up in, Cordelia could almost hear him add. “I mean her to have everything right and proper. Even her da.”
“How are you doing, yourself?”
“The new med is better. Anyway, my head doesn’t feel like it’s stuffed with fog anymore. And I sleep at night. Besides that I can’t tell what it’s doing.”
Its job, apparently; he seemed relaxed and calm, almost free of that sinister edginess. Though he was still the first person in the room to look over to the buffet and ask, “Is he supposed to be up?”
Gregor, in pajamas, was creeping along the edge of the culinary array, trying to look invisible and nail down a few goodies before he was spotted and taken away again. Cordelia got to him first, before he was either stepped on by an unwary guest, or recaptured by Security forces in the persons of the breathless maidservant and terrified bodyguard who were supposed to be filling in for Drou. They were followed up by a paper-white Simon Illyan. Fortunately for Illyan’s heart, Gregor had apparently only been formally missing for about sixty seconds. Gregor shrank into her skirts as the hyperventilating adults loomed over him.
Drou, who had noticed Illyan touch his comm, turn pale, and start to move, checked in by sheer force of habit. “What’s the matter?”
“How’d he get away?” snarled Illyan to Gregor’s keepers, who stammered out something inaudible about thought he was asleep and never took my eyes off.
“He’s not away,” Cordelia put in tartly. “This is his home. He ought to be at least able to walk about inside, or why do you keep all those bloody useless guards on the walls out there?”
“Droushie, can’t I come to your party?” Gregor asked plaintively, casting around desperately for an authority to outrank Illyan.
Drou looked at Illyan, who looked disapproving. Cordelia broke the deadlock without hesitation. “Yes, you can.”
So, under Cordelia’s supervision, the Emperor danced with the bride, ate three cream cakes, and was carried away to bed satisfied. Fifteen minutes was all he’d wanted, poor kid.
The party rolled on, elated. “Dance, Milady?” Aral inquired hopefully at her elbow.
Dare she try it? They were playing the restrained rhythms of the mirror-dance—surely she couldn’t go too wrong. She nodded, and Aral drained his glass and led her onto the polished marquetry. Step, slide, gesture: concentrating, she made an interesting and unexpected discovery. Either partner could lead, and if the dancers were alert and sharp, the watchers couldn’t tell the difference. She tried some dips and slides of her own, and Aral followed smoothly. Back and forth the lead passed like a ball between them, the game growing ever more absorbing, until they ran out of music and breath.
The last snows of winter were melting from the streets of Vorbarr Sultana when Captain Vaagen called from ImpMil for Cordelia.
“It’s time, Milady. I’ve done all I can do in vitro. The placenta is ten months old and clearly senescing. The machine can’t be boosted any more to compensate.”
“When, then?”
“Tomorrow would be good.”
She barely slept that night. They all trooped down to the Imperial Military Hospital the next morning, Aral, Cordelia, Count Piotr flanked by Bothari. Cordelia was not at all sure she wanted Piotr present, but until the old man did them all the convenience of dropping dead, she was stuck with him. Maybe one more appeal to reason, one more presentation of the facts, one more try, would do the trick. Their unresolved antagonism grieved Aral; at least he let the onus for fueling it fall on Piotr, not herself. Do your worst, old man. You have no future except through me. My son will light your offering pyre. She was glad to see Bothari again, though.
Vaagen’s new laboratory was an entire floor in the most up-to-date building in the complex. Cordelia’d had him moved from his old lab on account of ghosts, having come in for one of her frequent visits soon after their return to Vorbarr Sultana to find him in a state of near-paralysis, unable to work. Every time he entered the room, he’d said, Dr. Henri’s violent and senseless death replayed in his memory. He could not step on the floor near the place where Henri’s body had fallen, but had to walk wide around; little noises made him jump and twitch. “I am a man of reason,” he’d said hoarsely. “This superstitious nonsense means nothing to me.” So Cordelia had helped him burn a private offering to Henri in a brazier on the lab floor, and disguised the move as a promotion.
The new lab was bright and spacious and free of revenant spirits. Cordelia found a mob of men waiting when Vaagen ushered her in: researchers assigned to Vaagen to explore replicator technology, interested civilian obstetricians including Dr. Ritter, Miles’s own pediatrician-to-be, and his consulting surgeon. The changing of the guard. Mere parents needed determination to elbow their way in.
Vaagen bustled about, happily important. He still wore his eyepatch, but promised Cordelia he would take the time for the last round of surgery to restore his vision very soon now. A tech trundled out the uterine replicator and Vaagen paused, as if trying to figure out how to put the proper drama and ceremony into what Cordelia knew for a very simple event. He settled on turning it into a technical lecture for his colleagues, detailing the composition of the hormone solutions as he injected them into the appropriate feed-lines, interpreting readouts, describing the placental separation going on within the replicator, the similarities and differences between replicator and body births. There were several differences Vaagen didn’t mention. Alys Vorpatril should see this, Cordelia thought.
Vaagen looked up to see her watching him, paused selfconsciously, and smiled. “Lady Vorkosigan.” He gestured to the replicator’s latch-seals. “Would you care to do the honors?”
She reached, hesitated, and looked around for Aral. There he was, solemn and attentive at the edge of the crowd. “Aral?”
He strode forward. “Are you sure?”
“If you can open a picnic cooler, you can do this.” They each took a latch and raised them in unison, breaking the sterile seal, and lifted the top off. Dr. Ritter moved in with a vibra-scalpel, cutting through the thick felt mat of nutrient tubing with a touch so delicate the silvery amniotic sac beneath was unscored, then cut Miles free of his last bit of biological packaging, clearing his mouth and nose of fluids before his first surprised inhalation. Aral’s arm, around her, tightened so hard it hurt. A muffled laugh, no more than a breath, broke from his lips; he swallowed and blinked to bring his features, suffused with elation and pain, back under strict control.
