“Ah?” When this encouraging noise did not pry out further clarification, Tej tried, “Do you still like him?”
“Well…he hasn’t stopped being interesting, yet.”
Tej dared, “Do you love him?”
Rish snorted. “He’s not the warm and fuzzy sort, sweetling.”
“Neither are you.”
Rish’s ambiguous smile crept a tiny bit wider, before she hid her expression in some toe-touches. “I did meet his infamous cousin Dono, in passing. At a party where By had gone to gossip.”
“I thought he wasn’t on speaking terms with his family?”
“Apparently Count Dono Vorrutyer is an exception to the general trend-he laughed when By introduced me. Delighted, apparently, by a Vorrutyer being even more shocking than himself. Herself. Whatever.” A few overhead reaches. “Still, By hasn’t spoken to his father for eighteen years, his mother has been estranged from everyone for a decade and barely communicates, and By secretly helped ImpSec put his even more obnoxious cousin Richars in prison. With cause. No love lost there. On the whole, not a close-knit clan.”
“How sad.”
“Not…really.”
“Oh?” Tej raised her arms and her eyebrows, waggling both.
A long pause, while Rish stretched hamstrings. “ In vino veritas, By calls it,” she said at last. “Like some primitive native fast-penta. Except By is almost never as drunk as he appears. If he’s slurring and staggering, he’s certainly spinning out lines to catch something. When he’s actually smashed, his diction gets very precise and distant, like…like a scientist reporting the results of an unsatisfactory experiment. It’s oddly disturbing.”
Tej sat on the floor with her legs out, put her hands behind her head, and bent to touch her elbows to her knees. And waited, not in vain.
Her voice and movements slowing, Rish went on, “We were watching some old vids of the Jewels’ performances that ImpSec came up with, and testing out some really dreadful Barrayaran inebriants. Which got us onto the subject of sisters, somehow, which got us onto the subject of his younger sister…It seems they were very close when they were teens-By fancied himself quite the brotherly protector. Till their father, as a result of some vile report he had from who-knows-where, accused By of molesting her. And went on believing it, despite the pair of them protesting to the rafters. By says he was more enraged at his father for swallowing the smear than he ever was at the anonymous clown who made it. Which was when he left school and came east to the capital. I’m not sure if you can disinherit your parents, but it seems that break was mutual.”
Rish stood on one foot, bent backward, and touched the sole of the other to the back of her head, then alternated. Tej merely essayed a few less ambitious back-bends, while she thought this through. She finally collapsed to the carpet and asked, “What in the world did you trade to him for that confession?”
“I’m not at all sure,” said Rish, in a tone that frankly echoed this wonder. “But he was enunciating very clearly, just before he passed out.”
Tej squinted. “Puts rather a different spin on his choice of careers, maybe?”
“I think, yeah. At first I thought he was in it for the money, and then for the mischief, and then I figured both of those were covers for this crazy Barrayaran patriotism all these Vor fellows go on and on about. Then I thought maybe it was for revenge, for nailing the guilty. Now I wonder if this furtive obsession for sorting truth from lies is actually in aid of clearing the innocent.”
“That seems like two sides of one coin, to me.”
“Yeah, but it’s like the man bets tails, every time.”
“Hm.”
“In which case…”
“Hm?”
“He won’t give it up. No matter how much he despises the work. Or his subjects. Or himself.”
“Do you think…this planet. Barrayar. Since this divorce thing snagged up, what would you think of staying here? For a while. Longer.” Tej forced herself not to hold her breath.
Rish shrugged. “It’s been a more interesting place to visit than I would’ve imagined, but I wouldn’t want to live here. I want”-she hesitated-“what I had.”
“You miss the Jewels.” It wasn’t a question.
Rish stretched like a starfish on her back, then closed her arms and legs in tight. “As I would miss my limbs, amputated. I keep reaching, but they’re not there.”
Tej buckled the bell straps around her ankles, rose, and stamped. The bells sang back in a ragged chorus. “I’ll take Jet’s part,” she offered again. Keeping, somehow, the quaver out of her voice.
Rish rolled to her bare blue feet, kicked once in air, and took up her position. “Do your best.” She eyed Tej more closely. “Don’t worry, sweetling. I won’t abandon you on this benighted world. We’ll get out together.”
That’s not quite what I meant, Rish… Tej bit her lip, nodded, extended her arms, and bent her legs, taking up the complex rhythm at the hub of the wheel, heel-and-toe. The music and motion flowed up through her body and out her spiraling fingertips, as she turned to track her spinning partner around the circle’s rim.
Ivan encountered By in the lobby of his building, entering just ahead of him. “Hey, wait up,” he called, and By paused. Ivan shifted his dinner bag from hand to hand and asked, “You going up to see Rish?”
“We’re heading out for the evening, yes.”
“Good-oh.”
They entered the up-tube together. Ivan pictured himself demanding of By, What are your intentions toward my sister-in-law? in the best paterfamilias style, and winced. Trouble was, By might answer. But as they exited to the hallway outside Ivan’s flat, his steps slowed nonetheless. By stopped with him, looking his inquiry.
“About Rish. You’re not making her, like, fall in love with you or anything, are you? Because you could be reassigned or something, and have to drop her. And I don’t want to be stuck in a flat full of weeping, angry women, with no male to take it out on but me.”
By tilted his head in appreciation of this concern. “No, I seem to be on the case, at least until they decamp for Escobar. Has your, ah, non-divorce affected the timetable on that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Have you asked?”
“Uh…no?”
“I see.”
By was dressed in casual garb, not evening wear; planning a night in, not a night out, apparently. Ivan went on in covert hope, “So, ah…any chance that you’ll invite her to move in with you? Save steps and all that. Or that she’ll decide to move in with you?”
By’s hooded eyes grew amused. “The topic has not come up.”
“But you could make it come up. Couldn’t you? S’true, I’d rather hug a snake, but there’s no accounting for tastes.”
“S-s-s-she is amazingly flexible,” By agreed. “I expect she could crush my skull with her thighs alone. Very talented thighs. I could be in danger of my life every time we go to bed. Just think of the obituary.”
Ivan heroically resisted the straight line, not to mention the spinning visions this comment engendered. “You could make her happy just by getting her off my couch.” Or off on my couch, I suppose. Except it was possible By already had. Dammit, I want my furniture back.
By snorted. “Happy? God, no, I couldn’t make her happy. Not in a thousand years.”
Ivan’s brows rose in surprise. “I don’t get it. She seems tolerably amused by you. I mean, you’ve made her laugh. I’ve heard her.”
By waved a dismissive hand. “She won’t be happy till she’s reunited with her odd sibs. The other Jewels. They’re more than just a troupe or a team, or even a family. I suspect something gengineered.”
Ivan’s nose wrinkled. “Are you suggesting they’re some sort of Cetagandan post-human group mind or, or something?”
“No, not that. Definitely not, by her account of some of their arguments. Something much more visceral. I suspect some sort of kinesthetic biofeedback in play. It’s not at all obvious when you see her in isolation. You have to see her with the others.”
“Uh, when did this happen?”
“I had ImpSec Galactic Affairs scrounge me some recordings of the Jewels’s performances. It’s…no, it’s not clear. But it becomes subtly apparent, if you watch them over enough, that the Jewels were sustaining each other, somehow. But Rish alone is…starving isn’t the word. I don’t know what is.” By had forgotten to be smarmy, as his eyes narrowed in memory and thought.