Cetaganda

sighed, and pushed himself up on his elbow. 'Enter, Ivan.'

Ivan had skinned out of his dress uniform and into fatigues as fast as possible also. And friction-slippers, hah. He had a sheaf of colored papers in his hand.

'Just thought I'd share these with you,' Ivan said. 'Vorreedi's clerk handed 'em to me just as we were leaving the embassy. Everything we're going to be missing tonight, and for the next week.' He switched on Miles's disposal chute, in the wall. A yellow paper. 'Lady Benello.' He popped it in; it whooshed into oblivion. A green one. 'Lady Arvin.' Whoosh. An enticing turquoise one; Miles could smell the perfume from his bunk. 'The inestimable Veda.' Whoosh—

'I get the point, Ivan,' Miles growled.

'And the food,' Ivan sighed. '—why are you eating that disgusting rat bar? Even courier ship stores can do better than that!'

'I wanted something plain.'

'Indigestion, eh? Your stomach acting up again? No blood leakage, I hope.'

'Only in my brain. Look, why are you here?'

'I just wanted to share my virtuous divesting of my life of decadent Cetagandan luxury,' Ivan said primly. 'Sort of like shaving my head and becoming a monk. For the next two weeks, anyway.' His eye fell on the Order of Merit, turning slowly on its ribbon. 'Want me to put that down the disposer too? Here, I'll get rid of it for you—' He made to grab it.

Miles came up out of his bunk in a posture of defense like a wolverine out of its burrow. 'Will you get out of here!'

'Ha! I thought that little bauble meant more to you than you were letting on to Vorreedi and Vorob'yev,' Ivan crowed.

Miles stuffed the medal down out of sight, and out of reach, under his bedding. 'I frigging earned it. Speaking of blood.' Ivan grinned, and stopped circling for a swoop on Miles's possessions, and settled down into the tiny cabin's station chair.

'I've thought about it, you know,' Miles went on. 'What it's going to be like, ten or fifteen years from now, if I ever get out of covert ops and into a real line command. I'll have had more practical experience than any other Barrayaran soldier of my generation, and it's all going to be totally invisible to my brother officers. Classified. They'll all think I spent the last decade riding in jumpships and eating candy. How am I going to maintain authority over a bunch of overgrown backcountry goons—like you? They'll eat me alive.'

'Well,' Ivan's eye glinted, 'they'll try, to be sure. I hope I'm around to watch.'

Secretly, Miles hoped so too, but he would rather have had his fingernails removed with pliers, in the old- fashioned ImpSec interrogation style of a couple of generations ago, than say so out loud.

Ivan heaved a large sigh. 'But I'm still going to miss the ghem-ladies. And the food.'

'There's ladies and food at home, Ivan.'

'True.' Ivan brightened slightly.

'S'funny.' Miles lay back on his bunk, shoving his pillow behind his shoulders to prop himself half-up. 'If Fletchir Giaja's late Celestial Father had sent the haut-women to conquer Barrayar, instead of the ghem-lords, I think Cetaganda would own the planet right now.'

'The ghem-lords were nothing if not crude,' Ivan allowed. 'But we were cruder.' He stared at the ceiling. 'How many more generations, d'you think, before we can no longer consider the haut-lords human?'

'I think the operative question is, how many generations till the haut-lords no longer regard us as human.' Well, I'm used to that even at home. Sort of a preview of things to come. 'I think . . . Cetaganda will remain potentially dangerous to its neighbors as long as the haut are in transition to … wherever they're going. Empress Lisbet and her predecessors,' and her heiresses, 'are running this two-track evolutionary race—the haut fully controlled, the ghem used as a source of genetic wild cards and pool of variations. Like a seed company keeping strains of wild plants even when they only sell a monoculture, to permit development in the face of the unexpected. The greatest danger to everybody else would be for the haut to lose control of the ghem. When the ghem are allowed to run the show— well, Barrayar knows what it's like when half a million practicing social Darwinists with guns are let loose on one's home planet.'

Ivan grimaced. 'Really. As your esteemed late grandfather used to tell us, in gory detail.'

'But if … the ghem fail to be consistently militarily successful in the next generation or so—our generation—if their little expansionist adventures continue to be embarrassing and costly, like the Vervain invasion debacle, maybe the haut will turn to other areas of development than the military in their quest for superiority. Maybe even peaceful ones. Perhaps ones we can scarcely imagine.'

'Good luck,' snorted Ivan.

'Luck is something you make for yourself, if you want it.' And I want it more, oh yes. Keeping one eye out for sudden moves from his cousin, Miles re-hung his medallion.

'You going to wear that? I dare you.'

'No. Not unless I have a need to be really obnoxious sometime.'

'But you're going to keep it.'

'Oh, yes.'

Ivan stared off into space, or rather, at the cabin wall, and into space beyond by implication. 'The worm- hole nexus is a big place, and constantly getting bigger. Even the haut would have trouble filling it all, I think.'

'I hope so. Monocultures are dull and vulnerable. Lisbet knew that.'

Ivan chuckled. 'Aren't you a little short to be thinking of re-designing the universe?'

'Ivan.' Miles let his voice grow unexpectedly chill. 'Why should the haut Fletchir Giaja decide he needed to be polite to me? Do you really think this is just for my father's sake?' He ticked the medallion and set it spinning, and locked eyes with his cousin. 'It's not a trivial trinket. Think again about all the things this means. Bribery, sabotage, and real respect, all in one strange packet . . . we're not done with each other yet, Giaja and I.'

Ivan dropped his gaze first. 'You're a frigging crazy man, you know that?' After an uncomfortable minute of silence, he hoisted himself from Miles s station-chair, and wandered away, muttering about finding some real food on this boat.

Miles settled back with slitted eyes, and watched the shining circle spin like planets.