At one of Admiral Desplains’s suggestions, Tej also discovered the on-board language tutoring programs, and dipped into the Barrayaran dialects of Russian, French and Greek, none of which she claimed to have been taught before. Or plunged into, Ivan thought, when he ducked his head in to check her progress. So far from a trudge, she seemed to find the task tolerably amusing.
“Oh, languages aren’t work,” she explained cheerily. “They’re a game. Now, economics, that’s boring.” She made a face at some pedagogical memory Ivan couldn’t guess at.
For almost the first time, Ivan saw a glimpse in her of her haut genetic heritage, not only in the scary speed of her acquisition, but the purity of her accent, as she wandered around the ship to find bemused bilingual crewmen to practice upon. Her Komarran accent had certainly fooled him, and presumably the Komarrans as well. No question, she had a keen ear, and he wondered if she possessed perfect pitch, too, like a certain part-ghem Barrayaran he knew.
The off-shifts arranged themselves, though Ivan was beginning to think that even 26.7 hours was too short for a day, or rather, for a night.
The first snake in Ivan’s garden raised its head briefly on the fourth day out. He’d forwarded a memo to Desplains’s comconsole from General Allegre, Chief of ImpSec, marked Personal, Eyes Only. A few minutes later, Desplains looked up and remarked mildly, “Ivan—you have messaged home with an account of your adventures, have you not?”
“No reason to, sir. I mean, you know all about it. And my mother stopped asking about my girlfriends after I turned thirty.”
“Vorpatril, I decline to get between you and your mother on any of your personal matters.”
“As well you shouldn’t have to, sir.”
And that was, Ivan hoped, the end of that, but a number of hours later—they were, after all, getting closer to Barrayar—he fielded another Eyes Only message, from an all-too-familiar address. Though the temptation to make it vanish between his comconsole and Desplains’s was very strong, Ivan nobly resisted it, a spasm of virtue that he suspected no one was going to appreciate.
About fifteen minutes later, Desplains remarked, “May I ask why, if Lady Alys Vorpatril wishes to know what is going on in her only son’s life, she applies to me and not to you?”
Ivan blinked. “Experience?”
The silence from across the room took on a curious frigid quality, and Ivan looked up. “Oh. That was one of those, what d’you call it, rhetorical questions, was it, sir?”
“Yes.”
Ivan cleared his throat. “You don’t suppose ImpSec’s been feeding her their reports, do you? That’s bound to be confusing. I mean, look at the stuff they send us.”
That last line almost worked. But, alas, not quite. Desplains’s lips tightened. “As she works directly, every day, with General Allegre and his key staff on matters of the emperor’s personal security, and lives with the man who ran ImpSec out of his head for decades before that, and you are her closest living relative, I would think you were in a better position to guess the answer to that question than I am, Captain.”
“I’ll, ah”—Ivan swallowed—“I’ll just fire her off a little reassuring note right now, shall I, sir?”
“You do that.”
Ivan hated that dead-level tone. Ugly unnerving thing, it was. Reminded him of his Uncle Aral in a mood.
But a written note, that was the ticket. A vid recording was nothing but an invitation to blather, with no living person in real-time opposite you to give a visual or verbal cue how you were getting on, or when to stop.
Ivan bent to his comconsole, setting the header and the security codes. Medium security would likely do. Enough to shield the message from the eyes of people who didn’t need to know, not enough to make it sound like some sort of emergency.
Dear Mother.
He sat a moment, while lights blinked at him.
I don’t know what ImpSec’s been telling you, but actually, everything’s all right. I seem to have accidentally gotten married, but it’s only temporary. Don’t change the headings on your cards. I will explain it all to you when we get there.
Love, Ivan.
He contemplated that for a moment, then went back and cut the middle lines as redundant. If he was going to explain it all when he got there, surely he needn’t explain anything now.
I don’t know what ImpSec’s been telling you, but actually, everything’s all right. I will explain it all to you when we get there.
That looked much better. Now a little short, though. A slow smile turned his lips. He bent and added: P.S.—Byerly Vorrutyer has the whole story, if you can catch up with him.
Actually, he didn’t expect By to be back in Vorbarr Sultana till some days after he and Tej and Rish arrived, at the earliest. But what was that tale from Old Earth, about throwing one’s fellow traveler out of the troika to distract the pursuing wolves? Yeah, like that, only more virtual, since Mamere wouldn’t be able to lay her hands on By either. But it sounded good.
He sent the message on its way, racing ahead of them at the speed of light.
Chapter Nine
For a capital that had hosted so many wars, both civil and interplanetary, Vorbarr Sultana seemed in remarkably good shape to Tej’s eye. From her readings of Barrayaran history aboard the JP-9, she’d half expected to see gutted buildings with blackened timbers still smoking, bomb craters in the streets, and haunted, emaciated people scurrying like rats among the barricades. Instead, it was fully modernized, if not always fully modern, chock-a-block with galactic-standard transportation and architecture, with citizens—no, subjects, she corrected the term—out everywhere, looking busy and well-fed and alarmingly assertive. Terms like lively or even vibrant rose to Tej’s mind. It was extremely disorienting.
All right, the traffic congestion was appalling. The auto-cab that they’d taken from the military shuttleport took twenty minutes to crawl across what Ivan Xav assured her was a very famous bridge, but it did give her and Rish time to stare up and down the river valley, from the high bluffs crowned with strange archaic castles lit, their guide promised, with pretty colored floodlights at night, to the hillsides crowded with fine houses hogging the views, to the level areas sprouting high-rises, universities, and medical complexes. They pulled up in front of a tall residential building quite close to the center of things, or at least to the military headquarters. The government complexes were closer to the Old Town, nearly lost in the center of the sprawl, but Ivan Xav explained that the historical area was all cleaned up these days, with some quite fine restaurants to be found if one knew how to avoid the backcountry tourists.
The building harboring Ivan Xav’s flat reminded Tej very much of his place in Solstice, but the security was rather better; a human guard manned a reception desk, and Ivan Xav paused to have them scanned and entered as bona fide residents in the electronic database. The vidcams were unobtrusive but maintained a redundant overlap. He then whisked them up a lift tube and down a hallway, pulling out a remote to unlock a sliding, but not airsealed, door. “Home at last,” he announced cheerfully, “and boy, am I glad of it.”
His flat, too, reminded her of the place on Komarr—it lacked the separate entry hall, and the kitchen was bigger, but it boasted a balcony overlooking the street and a bit of the city. Not as high up. The rooms were larger, but they were much more cluttered, seeming closer and warmer somehow despite the stuffy smell of a place not occupied for the better part of a month.