A quaddie usher wearing an air-jet belt took them in tow, after they had gawked their fill, and steered them gently wall-ward to their assigned hexagon. It was lined with some dark, soft, sound-baffling padding and convenient handgrips, and included its own lighting, the colored jewels seen from afar.
A dark shape and a gleam of motion in their generously sized box resolved itself, as they approached, as a quaddie woman. She was slim and long-limbed, with fine white-blond hair cut finger length and waving in an aureole around her head. It made Miles think of mermaids of legend. Cheekbones to inspire men to duel with each other, or perhaps scribble bad poetry, or drown in drink. Or worse, desert their brigade. She was clothed in close-fitting black velvet with a little white lace ruff at her throat. The cuff on the lower right elbow of her softly pleated black velvet pants . . . sleeve, Miles decided, not leg, had been left unfastened to make room for a medical air-filled arm immobilizer of a sort painfully familiar to Miles from his fragile-boned youth. It was the only stiff, ungraceful thing about her, a crude insult to the rest of the ensemble.
No mistaking her for anyone other than Garnet Five, but he waited for Bel to introduce them all properly, which Bel promptly did. They shook hands all around; Miles found her grip athlete-firm.
“Thank you for obtaining these—” seats did not apply, “this space for us on such short notice,” Miles said, releasing her slim upper hand. “I understand we are to be privileged to view some very fine work.” Work was a word with extra resonance in Quaddiespace, he had already gathered, like honor on Barrayar.
“My pleasure, Lord Vorkosigan.” Her voice was melodious; her expression seemed cool, almost ironic, but an underlying anxiety glowed in her leaf-green eyes.
Miles opened his hand to indicate her broken lower right arm. “May I convey my personal apologies for the poor behavior of some of our men. They will be disciplined for it, when we get them back. Please do not judge all Barrayarans by our worst examples.” Well, she can't; we actually don't ship out our worst, Gregor be praised.
She smiled briefly. “I do not, for I've also met your best.” The urgency in her eyes tinged her voice. “Dmitri—what will happen to him?”
“Well, that depends to a great extent on Dmitri.” Pitches, Miles suddenly realized, could run two ways, here. “It could range, when he is released and returns to duty, from a minor black mark on his record—he wasn't supposed to remove his wrist com while on station leave, you know, for just the sort of reason you unfortunately discovered—to a very serious charge of attempted desertion, if he fails to withdraw his request for political asylum before it is denied.”
Her jaw set a trifle. “Perhaps it won't be denied.”
“Even if granted, the long-term consequences could be more complex than you perhaps anticipate. He would at that point be plainly guilty of desertion. He would be permanently exiled from his home, never able to return or see his family. Barrayar might seem a world well lost now, in the first flush of . . . emotion, but I think—I'm sure—it's something he could come to deeply regret later.” He thought of melancholy Baz Jesek, exiled for years over an even more badly managed conflict. “There are other, if less speedy, ways Ensign Corbeau might yet end up back here, if his desire to do so is true will and not temporary whim. It would take a little more time, but be infinitely less damaging—he's playing for the rest of his life with this, after all.”
She frowned. “Won't the Barrayaran military have him shot, or horribly butchered, or—or assassinated?”
“We are not at war with the Union.” Yet, anyway . It would take more heroic blundering than this to make that happen, but he ought not to underestimate his fellow Barrayarans, he supposed. And he didn't think Corbeau was politically important enough to assassinate. So let's try to make sure he doesn't become so, eh? “He wouldn't be executed. But twenty years in jail is hardly better, from your point of view. You don't serve him or yourself by encouraging him to this desertion. Let him return to duty, serve out his hitch, get passage back. If you're both still of the same mind then, continue your relationship without his unresolved legal status poisoning your future together.”
Her expression had grown still more grimly stubborn. He felt horribly like some stodgy parent lecturing his angst-ridden teenager, but she was no child. He'd have to ask Bel her age. Her grace and authority of motion might be the results of her dancer's training. He remembered that they were supposed to be looking cordial, so tried to soften his words with a belated smile.
She said, “We wish to become partners. Permanently.”
After only two weeks of acquaintance, are you so sure? He strangled this comment in his throat as Ekaterin's sideways glance at him put him in mind of just how many days—or was it hours?—it had taken him to fall in love with her. Granted, the permanently part had taken longer. “I can certainly see why Corbeau would wish that.” The reverse was more puzzling, of course. In both cases. He himself did not find Corbeau lovable—his strongest emotion so far was a deep desire to whack the ensign on the side of the head—but this woman clearly didn't see him that way.
“Permanently?” said Ekaterin doubtfully. “But . . . don't you think you might wish to have children someday? Or might he?”
Garnet Five's expression grew hopeful. “We've talked about having children together. We're both interested.”
“Um, er,” said Miles. “Quaddies are not interfertile with downsiders, surely?”
“Well, one has to make choices, before they go into the replicators, just as a herm crossing with a monosexual has to choose whether to have the genetics adjusted to produce a boy or a girl or a herm. Some quaddie-downsider partnerships have quaddie children, some have downsiders, some have some of each—Bel, show Lord Vorkosigan your baby pictures!”
Miles's head swiveled around. “What?”
Bel blushed and dug in its trouser pocket. “Nicol and I . . . when we went to the geneticist for counseling, they ran a projection of all the possible combinations, to help us choose.” The herm held up a holocube and turned it on. Six full-length still shots of children sprang into being above its hand. They were all frozen in their early teens, with the sense of adult features just starting to emerge from childhood's roundness. They had Bel's eyes, Nicol's jawline, hair a brownish black with that familiar swipe of a forelock. A boy, a girl, and a herm with legs; a boy, a girl, and a herm quaddie.
“Oh,” said Ekaterin, reaching for it. “How interesting .”
“The facial features are just an electronic blend of Nicol's and mine, not a genuine genetic projection,” Bel explained, willingly giving the cube to her. “For that, they'd need an actual cell from a real conceptus, which, of course, they can't have till a real one is made for the genetic modifications.”