not slept well last night. The satrap governors were all doing good imitations of men stuffed and mounted, except for the ancient governor of Mu Ceta, who slumped in open boredom, and watched through sardonic slitted eyes as his juniors, i.e., everyone else there, performed with various degrees of flop-sweat. The older and more experienced men, as they came on, at least had better deliveries, if not necessarily better poems.
Miles meditated on the character of Lord X, trying to match it with one of the eight faces ranged before him. The murderer/traitor was something of a tactical genius. He had been presented with an unanticipated opportunity to gain power, had committed rapidly to an all-out effort, evolved a plan, and struck. How fast? The first satrap governor had arrived in person only ten days before Miles and Ivan had, the last only four days before. Yenaro, the embassy's ImpSec office had finally reported, had put his sculpture together in just two days from designs delivered from an unknown source, working his minions around the clock. Ba Lura could only have been suborned since its mistress's death, not quite three weeks ago.
The aged haut thought nothing of taking on plans that took decades to mature, with can't-lose security.
Witness the old empress herself. They experienced time differently than Miles did, he was fairly sure. This whole chain of events smelled . . . young. Or young at heart.
Miles's opponent must be in an interesting frame of mind just now. He was a man of action and decision. But now he had to lie quiet and do nothing to draw attention to himself, even as it began to look more and more like Ba Lura's death was not going to pass as planned as a suicide. He had to sit tight on his bank and the Great Key till the funeral was over, and glide softly back to his planetary base—because he couldn't start the revolt from here; he'd prepared nothing in advance before he'd left home.
So would he send the Great Key on, or keep it with him? If he'd sent it back to his satrapy already, Miles was in deep trouble. Well, deeper trouble. Would the governor take the risk of losing the powerful tokens in transit? Surely not.
The droning amateur poets were getting to Miles. He found his subconscious mind not working along with the rest of it as it should, but going off on its own tangent. A poem of his own in honor of the late empress formed, unbidden, in his brain.
A Degtiar empress named Lisbet
Trapped a satrap lord neatly in his net.
Enticed into treason
For all the wrong reasons,
He'll soon have a crash with his kismet.
He choked down a genuinely horrible impulse to bounce down to the center of the dell and declaim his poetic offering to the assembled haut multitude, just to see what would happen.
Mia Maz glanced aside in concern at his muffled snort. 'Are you all right?'
'Yes. Sorry,' he whispered. 'I'm just having an attack of limericks.'
Her eyes widened, and she bit her lip; only her deepening dimple betrayed her.
The ceremony went on uninterrupted. Alas, there was all too much time to evolve more verse, of equal artistic merit. He gazed out at the banks of white bubbles.
A beautiful lady named Rian
Hypnotized a Vor scion.
The little defective
Thinks he's a detective,
but instead will be fed to the lion. . . .
How did the haut live through these things? Had they bioengineered their bladders to some inhuman capacity, along with all the other rumored changes?
Fortunately, before Miles could think of two rhymes for
The satrap governors' poems were all excellent, all in the most difficult forms—and, Maz informed Miles in a whisper, mostly ghost-written by the best haut-women poets in the Celestial Garden. Rank hath its privileges. But try as he might, Miles could not read any useful sinister double meanings into them—his suspect was not using this moment to publicly confess his crimes, put the wind up his enemies, or any of the other really interesting possibilities. Miles was almost surprised. The placement of Ba Lura's body suggested Lord X had a weakness for the baroque in his plotting, when the simple would have done better. Making an Art of it?
The emperor sat through it with unruffled solemn calm. The satrap governors all received polite nods of thanks from the chief mourner for their elegant praises. Miles wondered if Benin had taken his advice, and spoken with his master yet. He hoped so.
And then, abruptly, the literary ordeal was over. Miles suppressed an impulse to applaud; that was apparently Not Done. The majordomo came out and made another cryptic gesture, at which everyone went to their knees again; the emperor and his guards decamped, followed by the consort bubbles, the satrap governors, and their ghem-officers. Then everyone else was freed—to find a bathroom, Miles trusted.
The haut race might have divested itself of the traditional meanings and functions of sexuality, but they were still human enough to make the sharing of food part of life's basic ceremonies. In their own way. Trays of meat were sculpted into flowers. Vegetables masqueraded as crustaceans, and fruit as tiny animals. Miles stared thoughtfully at the plate of simple boiled rice on the buffet table. Every grain had been individually hand-arranged in an elaborate spiral pattern. He almost tripped over his own boots, boggling at it. He controlled his bemusement and tried to refocus on the business at hand.
The informal—by Celestial Garden standards—refreshments were served in a long pavilion open as usual to the garden, presently lit in a warm afternoon glow that invited relaxation. The haut-ladies in their bubbles had evidently gone elsewhere—someplace where they could drop their bubbles to eat, presumably. This was the most exclusive of several post-poetry buffet sites scattered around the Celestial Garden. The emperor himself was somewhere at the other end of the graceful building. Miles wasn't quite sure how Vorob'yev had got them in, but the man deserved a commendation for extraordinary service. Maz, eyes alight, hand on Vorob'yev's arm, was clearly in some sort of sociologist's heaven.
'Here we go,' murmured Vorob'yev, and Miles went heads-up. The haut Este Rond's party was entering the crowded pavilion. The other haut, not knowing what to do about these out-of-place outlanders, had been trying to pretend the Barrayarans were invisible ever since they'd arrived. Este Rond did not have that option. The beefy, white-robed satrap governor, his painted and uniformed ghem-general by his side, paused to greet his Barrayaran neighbors.
A white-robed woman, unusual in this heavily male gathering, trailed the Rond's ghem-general. Her silver- blond hair was gathered in a looping queue down her back to her ankles, and she stood with downcast eyes, not speaking. She was much older than Rian, but certainly a haut-woman—
Maz was giving Miles some inexplicable but urgent signal—a tiny head shake, and a
Governor Rond and Vorob'yev exchanged elaborate courtesies, by which Miles gathered that the Rond had been their ticket in. Vorob'yev culminated his diplomatic coup by introducing Miles. 'The lieutenant takes a very gratifying interest in the finer points of Cetagandan culture,' Vorob'yev recommended him to the governor's attention.
The haut Rond nodded cordially; when Vorob'yev recommended someone it seemed even Cetagandan haut-lords attended.
'I was sent to learn, as well as serve, sir. It is my duty and my pleasure.' Miles favored the haut-governor with a precisely calculated bow. 'And I must say, I have certainly been having learning experiences.' Miles tried by his edged smile to put as much double-spin on his words as possible.
The Rond smiled back, cool-eyed. But then, if Este Rond was Lord X, he ought to be cool. They exchanged a few empty pleasantries about the diplomatic life, then Miles ventured boldly, 'Would you be so kind, haut Rond, as
