His wife’s face appeared, smiling, above the vid plate, and he paused the vid just to get a good look at her. She sailed through her days under such a constant barrage of interruptions, lately, he hardly ever saw her holding still unless she was sleeping. Clear blue-gray eyes raised in a candid gaze, sleek dark hair untouched by frost although she was his age plus a couple of months. Considering that he’d stuck her with four offspring in under six years, her lack of gray hairs seemed increasingly remarkable. They’d all been gestated in uterine replicators, but still. He’d been an only child himself, racked from birth by medical issues now not so much solved as exchanged for new ones. Perhaps—no, make that certainly—he’d underestimated how much work normal healthy children would take, even with all the help his money and position could buy. For there were some tasks you didn’t want to delegate, because then you’d be missing the best parts.
She was actually staring at a vid pick-up, not at him, he reminded himself, but under the weight of her faintly ironic look he set her back in motion, irrationally guilty at delaying her.
“Greetings, my love,” she said. “We’ve received your latest here with much relief and rejoicing, though fortunately I didn’t tell the children about that first alarming message before the second had overtaken it. I shudder to think what your parents went through during your old career. Though I suppose your father kept his high-Vor upper lip suitably stiff, and your mother, well, I can scarcely imagine. Said tart Betan things, I suppose.”
Actually, he’d dodged those issues during his covert ops days by almost never sending any messages, or updates. It wasn’t as if his father couldn’t have demanded a report on his missions from the head of ImpSec any time he wanted one. Or nerved himself to it, he imagined his mother’s voice remarking tartly.
Ekaterin swung into a crisp recounting of a few Vorkosigan District matters, before the news from his household, always first things first—if ever she put matters the other way around, he’d know to be really alarmed for his family. He was reminded that he was neglecting duties down in the District, as well, although this week there did not seem to be anything that called for an urgent message to his—his father’s, really—voting proxy in the Council of Counts. But both his parents were off tending to the Emperor’s business on Sergyar, viceroy and vicereine respectively, and had been for some years.
A fine tradition of neglect of one’s own in service to the Imperium, those Vorkosigans. At a cost. Miles recalled with a touch of wry pride what a District village speaker had once said to him of Ekaterin: We feel as though you belong to the Imperium, but Lady Vorkosigan belongs to us.
Indeed.
“On the home front,” Ekaterin went on, “here’s the latest achievement…”
The vid cut to another, less steady. “Good job, Helen,” said Ekaterin’s voice as a room spun dizzily—the library at Vorkosigan House, Miles recognized despite its rabbiting speed, “but pan more slowly or you’ll give your papa vertigo.”
“What’s vertigo?” came a young voice from off-side—Sasha? no, Lizzie, good heavens—and Ekaterin responded at once, “Dizzy.”
“Oh.” The new word was duly accepted.
The vid steadied on Taurie, ten months old, gray eyes wide under a mop of wispy black curls, clinging grimly to the edge of a low table. Sasha, five going on six, as he and his twin, Helen, phrased it, and their sister Lizzie, three, sat on a couch in the background, Sasha watching with interest, Lizzie looking bored and kicking her feet, as if to say, I’ve already done this, what’s the fuss?
“Come on, Taurie,” Ekaterin’s voice cooed. “Come to mama.” Effective—Miles undertook not to fall through the vid plate, reaching for that seductive voice.
Taurie turned, rocking, on her stout little legs, releasing one hand, which waved for balance. Then the other. Then began a bow-legged toddle toward her mama’s outstretched arms. How any child learned to walk while swaddled in a diaper, Miles didn’t know, but there she went, thump-thump-thump, to fall chortling into Ekaterin’s arms and be swung high in triumph.
“Let me try her,” said Sasha, much as if his little sister were a robot car. He slid to his knees on the rug across from Ekaterin, and called encouragingly, “Come on, Taurie, you can do it!”
Fresh from her first victory, Taurie screeched and toddled toward him even faster, promptly falling on her chin and setting up a wail, clearly more of outrage than pain—Miles could discern the different timbres while still lunging up from his sleep. Sasha gathered her up, laughing. “Hey, you’re supposed to learn to walk before you run!” He got her turned around and aimed back toward her mama, and the trial was repeated more successfully.
Lizzie, who had slid down off the couch during all this, gave up spinning herself in circles singing, “Vertigo, vertigo, vertigo!” and made a grab for the vid recorder, which, judging from the way the view jerked wildly, her elder sister promptly raised out of her reach. “No, I wanna run the vid now,” came Lizzie’s voice. “Let me, let me! Mama, make her let me… !”
Too soon, the domestic drama came to an end. Miles backed it up and re-ran it, wondering if these were indeed Taurie’s first steps, or a reenactment for his benefit. The vid recorder suggested the latter.
Ekaterin’s face returned against the cluttered background of her third-floor office, the one on the north side overlooking her Barrayaran garden through the Earth-import treetops.
“I’m so sorry Sergeant Taura never lived to see her namesake,” she said, looking reflective, “but I’m glad you were at least able to tell her about Taurie, before the end. Maybe we should have given her name to Lizzie, sooner, rather than your Betan grandmother’s. Oh, speaking of names. Sasha has now announced that he is Alex, I suppose because he gave up trying to talk everyone into Xander. Lexie and A.A. appear to be permanently rejected, now, too. Same rationale—if we don’t call him Aral because of Grandda Aral, we shouldn’t call him Sasha because of Grandpa Sasha, either. He seems to be sticking to this one, however, and he has Helen on his side at last, so in your next message, be sure to call him Lord Alex. That much logic and determination should be rewarded, I think.”
Indeed. Miles had been deeply alarmed, earlier in his fatherhood, by what seemed Sasha’s—Alex’s—delay in verbal development, compared to his age-mate Helen, till Ekaterin had pointed out that the boy’s sister never let him ask a question for himself or get a word in edgewise after. He wasn’t delayed, merely amiable, and had caught up with complete sentences soon enough thereafter, as long as Helen wasn’t in the same room translating for him.
“Come to think of it,” Ekaterin went on, “didn’t you once have some trouble deciding what you wanted to be called? And at a much older age. History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.
“But he loves you, whatever he’s named. We all do. Take care out there, Miles, and hurry home when you can.” The vid went dark.
If only I could crawl through that vid plate and have myself beamed back to Barrayar at the speed of light… Miles sighed. All his life, his home had been something he couldn’t wait to escape. How had his polarity become so profoundly reversed?
Roic’s remark stung: If only you’d quit while you were winning… Well, this tangle on Kibou-daini wasn’t all of his own making.