Her breath drew in. I think that would be obscene. These relics had clearly been life and death to him. What possessed him, to make-believe they were no more than a child's playthings? She couldn't think how to discourage him from this horrifying notion without sounding as though she scorned his offer. Instead, after the moment's silence threatened to stretch unbearably, she blurted, "Would you go back? If you could?"
His gaze grew distant. "Well, now . . . now that's the strangest thing. I think I would feel like a snake trying to crawl back into its shed dead skin. I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back." He looked up, and twinkled at her. "Needle grenades are a learning experience, that way."
This was his idea of a joke, apparently. She wasn't sure if she wanted to kiss him and make it well, or run away screaming. She managed a faint smile.
He shrugged on his plain civilian tunic, and the sinister shoulder holster disappeared from view again. Closing the closet door firmly, he took her on a spin around the rest of the third floor; he pointed out his absent parents' suite, but to Ekaterin's secret relief did not offer to take her inside the succession of rooms. It would have felt very odd to wander through the famous Count and Countess Vorkosigan's intimate space, as though she were some voyeur.
They finally fetched up back on "his" floor, at the end of the main wing in a bright room he called the Yellow Parlor, which he apparently used as a dining room. A small table was elegantly set up for lunch for two. Good, they were not expected to dine downstairs in that elaborately-paneled cavern with the table that extended to seat forty-eight; ninety-six in a squeeze, if a second table, cleverly secreted behind the wainscoting, was brought out in parallel. At some unseen signal, Ma Kosti appeared with luncheon on a cart: soup, tea, an exquisite salad involving cultured shrimp and fruit and nuts. She left her lord and his guest discreetly alone after the initial flourishing serving, though a large silver tray with a domed cover which she left sitting atop the cart at Lord Vorkosigan's elbow promised more delights to come.
"It's a great house," Lord Vorkosigan told Ekaterin between bites, "but it gets really quiet at night. Lonely. It's not meant to be this empty. It needs to be filled up with life again, the way it used to be in my father's heyday." His tone was almost disconsolate.
"The Viceroy and Vicereine will be returning for the Emperor's wedding, won't they? It should be full again at Midsummer," she pointed out helpfully.
"Oh, yes, and their whole entourage. Everyone will be back on planet for the wedding." He hesitated. "Including my brother Mark, come to think of it. I suppose I should warn you about Mark."
"My uncle once mentioned you had a clone. Is that him, um . . . it?"
"It is the preferred Betan pronoun for a hermaphrodite; definitely him. Yes."
"Uncle Vorthys didn't say why you—or was it your parents?—had a clone made, except that it was complicated, and I should ask you." The explanation that leapt most readily to mind was that Count Vorkosigan had wanted an undeformed replacement for his soltoxin-damaged heir, but that obviously wasn't the case.
"That's the complicated part. We didn't. Some Komarran expatriates exiled to Earth did, as part of a much-too-baroque plot against my father. I guess when they couldn't get up a military revolution, they thought they'd try some biological warfare on a budget. They got an agent to filch a tissue sample from me—it couldn't have been that hard, I'd had hundreds of medical treatments and tests and biopsies as a child—and farmed it out to one of the less savory clone lords on Jackson's Whole."
"My word. But Uncle Vorthys said your clone didn't look like you—did he grow up without your, um, prenatal damage, then?" She gave him a short nod, but kept her eyes politely on his face. She'd already encountered his somewhat erratic sensitivity about his birth defects. Teratogenic, not genetic , he'd made sure she understood.
"If it had been that simple . . . He actually started to grow as he should, so they had to body-sculpt him down to my size. And shape. It was pretty gruesome. They'd intended him to pass close inspection as my replacement, so when I did things like have my busted leg bones replaced with synthetics, his got surgically replaced too. I know exactly how much that must have hurt. And they forced him to study to pass for me. All the years I thought I was an only child, he was developing the worst case of sibling rivalry you ever saw. I mean, think about it. Never allowed to be yourself, constantly—under threat of torture, in fact—compared with your older brother . . . By the time the plot fell through, he was on a fair way to being driven crazy."
"I should think so! But . . . how did you rescue him from the Komarrans?"
He was silent for a little, then said, "He kind of turned up on his own, at the last. As soon as he came within my Betan mother's orbit—well, you can imagine. Betans have very strict and clear convictions about parental responsibilities to clones. It surprised the hell out of him, I think. He knew he had a brother, God knows he'd had his face ground into that fact, but he wasn't expecting parents. He certainly wasn't expecting Cordelia Vorkosigan. The family has adopted him, I suppose is the simplest way of thinking about it. He was here on Barrayar for a while, then last year my mother sent him off to Beta Colony, to attend university and get therapy under the supervision of my Betan grandmother."
"That sounds good," she said, pleased with the bizarre tale's happy ending. The Vorkosigans stood by their own, it seemed.
"Mm, maybe. Reports leaking back from my grandmother suggest it's been pretty rocky for him. You see, he's got this obsession—perfectly understandable—about differentiating himself from me, so's no one could ever mistake one of us for the other ever again. Which is fine by me, don't get me wrong. I think it's a great idea. But . . . but he could have gotten a facial mod, or body sculpture, or growth hormones, or changed his eye color or bleached his hair, or anything but . . . instead what he decided to do was gain a great deal of weight. At my height, the effect is damned startling. I think he likes it that way. Does it on purpose." He stared rather broodingly at his plate. "I thought his Betan therapy might do something about that, but apparently not."
A scrabble at the edge of the tablecloth made Ekaterin start; a determined-looking half-grown black-and-white kitten hauled itself up over the side, tiny claws like pitons, and made for Vorkosigan's plate. He smiled absently, picked a couple of remaining shrimp from his salad, and deposited them before the little beast; it growled and purred through its enthusiastic chewing. "The gate guard's cat keeps having these kittens," he explained. "I admire their approach to life, but they do turn up . . ." He picked the large cover off the tray, and deposited it over the creature, trapping it. The undaunted purr resonated against the silver hemisphere like some small machine stripping its gears. "Dessert?"
The silver tray was loaded with eight different dessert pastries, so alarmingly beautiful Ekaterin thought it an aesthetic crime to eat them without making a vid recording for posterity first. "Oh, my." After a long pause, she pointed at one with thick cream and glazed fruit like jewels. Vorkosigan slipped it onto a waiting plate, and handed it across. He stared at the array longingly, but did not select one for himself, Ekaterin noticed. He was not in the least fat, she thought indignantly; when he'd played Admiral Naismith he must have been practically emaciated. The pastry tasted as wonderful as it looked, and Ekaterin's contribution to the conversation ceased for a short time. Vorkosigan watched her, smiling in, apparently, vicarious pleasure.
As she was scraping up the last molecules of cream from her plate with her fork, footsteps sounded in the hall, and men's voices. She recognized Pym's rumble, saying, " . . . no, m'lord's in conference with his new landscape designer. I really don't think he wishes to be disturbed."
A drawling baritone replied, "Yeah, yeah, Pym. Nor did I. It's official business from m'mother."
A look of extreme annoyance flashed over Vorkosigan's face, and he bit off an expletive too muffled to quite make out. As his visitor loomed in the doorway to the Yellow Parlor, his expression went very bland.
The man Pym was failing to impede was a young officer, a tall and startlingly handsome captain in undress greens. He had dark hair, laughing brown eyes, and a lazy smile. He paused to sweep Vorkosigan a mocking half-bow, saying, "Hail, O Lord Auditor coz. My God, is that a Ma Kosti lunch I spy? Tell me I'm not too late. Is there anything left? Can I lick your crumbs?" He stepped inside, and his eye swept over Ekaterin. "Oh ho! Introduce me to your landscape designer , Miles!"
Lord Vorkosigan said, somewhat through his teeth, "Madame Vorsoisson, may I make you known to my feckless cousin, Captain Ivan Vorpatril. Ivan, Madame Vorsoisson."