Komarr

private?'

'I'm not sure. He doesn't have school today anyway. Weren't you taking my uncle out to the experiment station this morning?'

'Directly. It can wait an extra hour for this.'

'I think … I would like it if you can stay. It's not good to make of the disease something all secret that's too awful to even talk about. That was Tien's mistake.'

'Yes,' he said encouragingly. 'It's just a thing. You deal with it.'

Her brows rose. 'As in, one damn thing after another?'

'Yes, very like.' He smiled at her, his gray eyes crinkling. Through whatever combination of luck and clever surgery, no scars marred his face, she realized. 'It works, as tactics if not strategy.'

True to his offer, Lord Vorkosigan drifted back into her kitchen as Nikki was finishing his breakfast. He lingered suggestively, stirring the coffee he took black and leaning against the far counter. Ekaterin took a deep breath and settled beside Nikki at the table, her own half-empty and cold cup a mere prop. Nikki eyed her warily.

'You won't be going to school tomorrow,' she began, hoping to strike a positive note.

'Is that when Da's funeral is? Will I have to burn the offering?'

'Not yet. Your Grandmadame has asked that we bring his body back to Barrayar, to bury beside your uncle who died when you were little.' Tien's mother's return message had come in by comconsole this morning, beamed and jumped through the wormhole-relays. In writing, as Ekaterin's had been, and perhaps for similar reasons; writing allowed one to leave so much out. 'We'll do all the ceremonies and burn the offering then, when everyone can be there.'

'Will we have to take him on the jumpship with us?' asked Nikki, looking disturbed.

From the side of the room Lord Vorkosigan said, 'In fact, ImpS—the Imperial Civil Service will take care of all those arrangements, with your permission, Madame Vorsoisson. He will probably be back home before you are, Nikki.'

'Oh,' said Nikki.

'Oh,' Ekaterin echoed. 'I … I was wondering. I thank you.'

He sketched a bow. 'Allow me to pass on your mother-in-law's address and instructions. You have enough other things to do.'

She nodded, and turned back to her son. 'Anyway, Nikki . . . you and I are going to Solstice tomorrow, to visit a clinic there. We never mentioned this to you before, but you have a condition called Vorzohn's Dystrophy.'

Nikki made an uncertain face. 'What's that?'

'It's a disorder where, with age, your body stops making certain proteins in quite the right shape to do their job. Nowadays the doctors can give you some retrogenes that produce the proteins correctly, to make up for it. You're too young to have any symptoms, and with this fix, you never will.' At Nikki's age, and on the first pass, it was probably not yet necessary to go into the complications it would entail for his future reproduction. She noticed dryly how she had managed to get through the long-anticipated spiel without once using the word mutation. 'I've collected a lot of articles about Vorzohn's Dystrophy, which you can read when you want to. Some of them are too technical, but there are a couple I think you could get through with a little help.' There. If she could avoid setting off his homework alarms, that ought to set up a reasonably neutral way to give him the information to which he had a right, and he could pursue it at his own pace thereafter.

Nikki looked worried. 'Will it hurt?'

'Well, they will certainly have to draw blood, and take some tissue samples.'

Vorkosigan put in, 'I've had both done to me, what seems like a thousand times over the years, for various medical reasons. The blood draw hurts for a moment, but not later. The tissue sampling doesn't hurt because they use a medical micro-stun, but when the stun wears off, it aches for a while. They only need a tiny sample from you, so it won't be much.'

Nikki appeared to digest this. 'Do you have Vorzohn's thing, Lord Vorkosigan?'

'No. My mother was poisoned with a chemical called soltoxin, before I was born. It damaged my bones, mainly, which is why I'm so short.' He wandered over to the table and sat down with them.

Ekaterin was expecting Nikki's next to be something along the lines of, Will I be short? but instead, his brown eyes widened in extreme worry. 'Did she die?'

'No, she recovered completely. Fortunately. For us all. She's fine now.'

He took this in. 'Was she scared?'

Nikki, Ekaterin realized, had not yet sorted out just who Lord Vorkosigan's mother was, in relation to the people he'd heard about in his history lessons. Vorkosigan's brows rose in some bemusement. 'I don't know. You can ask her yourself, someday, when—if you meet her. I'd be fascinated to hear the answer.' He caught Ekaterin's unsettled gaze, but his eyebrows remained unrepentant.

Nikki regarded Lord Vorkosigan dubiously. 'Did they fix your bones with retrogenes?'

'No, more's the pity. It would have been much easier on me, if it had been possible. They waited till they thought I was done growing, and then they replaced them with synthetics.'

Nikki was diverted. 'How d'you replace bones? How do you get them out?'

'Cut me open,' Vorkosigan made a slicing motion with his right hand along his left arm from elbow to wrist, 'chop the old bone out, pop the new one in, reconnect the joints, transplant the marrow to the new matrix, glue it up and wait for it to heal. Very messy and tedious.'

'Did it hurt?'

'I was asleep—anesthetized. You're lucky you can have retrogenes. All you have to have are a few fiddling injections.'

Nikki looked vastly impressed. 'Can I see?'

After an infinitesimal hesitation, Vorkosigan unfastened his shirt cuff and pushed back his left sleeve. 'That pale little line there, see?' Nikki stared with interest, both at Vorkosigan's arm and, speculatively, at his own. He wriggled his fingers, and watched his arm flex as the muscles and bones moved beneath his skin.

'I have a scab,' he offered in return. 'Want to see?' Awkwardly, he pushed up his pant leg to display the latest playground souvenir on his knee. Gravely, Vorkosigan inspected it, and agreed it was a good scab, and would doubtless fall off very soon now, and yes, perhaps there would be a scar, but his mother was very right to tell him not to pick it. To Ekaterin's relief, everyone then refastened their clothes and the contest went no further.

The conversation lagging after that high point, Nikki pushed a few last smears of groats and syrup artistically around the bottom of his dish, and asked, 'Can I be excused?'

'Of course,' said Ekaterin. 'Wash the syrup off your hands,' she called after his retreating form. She watched him—run, not walk—out, and said uncertainly, 'That went better than I expected.'

Vorkosigan smiled reassurance. 'You were matter-of-fact, so you gave him no reason to be otherwise.'

After a little silence Ekaterin said, 'Was she scared? Your mother.'

His smile twisted. 'Spitless, I believe.' His eyes warmed, and glinted. 'But not, I understand, witless.'

The two Auditors left for an on-site inspection of the Waste Heat experiment station shortly thereafter. Waiting carefully for a natural break in Nikki's quiet play in his room, Ekaterin called him in to her workroom to read the simplest and most straightforward article she had found on the subject of Vorzohn's Dystrophy. She sat him in her lap in her comconsole station chair, something she seldom did any more now he had become so leggy. It was a measure of his hidden unease this morning, she thought, that he did not resist the cuddle, nor her direction. He read through the article with fair understanding, stopping now and then to demand pronunciations and meanings of unfamiliar terms, or for her to rephrase or interpret some baffling sentence. If he had not been on her lap, she would not have detected the slight stiffening of his body as he read the line: . . . later investigations concluded this natural mutation first appeared in Vorinnis's District near the end of the Time of Isolation. Only with the arrival of galactic molecular biology was it determined that it was unrelated to several old Earth genetic diseases which its symptoms sometimes mimic.

'Any questions?' Ekaterin asked, when they'd finally wended to the end of the thing.

'Naw.' Nikki elbowed off her lap and slid to his feet.