The love angle of it all was clear enough. Affairs between quaddies and downsiders apparently had a long and honorable history. It occurred to Miles that certain aspects of his youth might have been rendered much easier if Barrayar had possessed a repertoire of romantic tales starring short, crippled heroes, instead of mutie villains. If this was a fair sample, it was clear that Garnet Five was culturally primed to play Juliet to her Barrayaran Romeo. But let's not enact a tragedy this time, eh?
The enchanting piece drew to a climax, and the two dancers saluted the enthusiastically clapping audience before making their way out. The lights came up; break time. Performance art was fundamentally constrained, Miles realized, by biology, in this case the capacity of the human bladder, whether downsider or quaddie.
When they all rendezvoused again in their box, he found Garnet Five explaining quaddie naming conventions to Ekaterin.
“No, it's not a surname,” said Garnet Five. “When quaddies were first made by the GalacTech Corporation, there were only one thousand of us. Each had just one given name, plus a numerical designation, and with so few, each name was unique. When our ancestors fled to their freedom, they altered what the numbers coded, but kept the system of single, unique names, tracked in a register. With all of old Earth's languages to draw on, it was several generations before the system really began to be strained. The waiting lists for the really popular names were insanely long. So they voted to allow duplication, but only if the name had a numerical suffix, so we could always tell every Leo from every other Leo. When you die, your name-number goes back in the registry to be drawn again.”
“I have a Leo Ninety-nine in my Docks and Locks crew,” said Bel. “It's the highest number I've run across yet. Lower numbers, or none, seem to be preferred.”
“I've never run across any of the other Garnets,” said Garnet Five. “There were eight altogether somewhere in the Union, last time I looked it up.”
“I'll bet there will be more,” said Bel. “And it'll be your fault.”
Garnet Five laughed. “I can wish!”
The second half of the show was as impressive as the first. During one of the musical interludes, Nicol had an exquisite harp part. There were two more large group dances, one abstract and mathematical, the other narrative, apparently based on a tragic pressurization disaster of a prior generation. The finale put everyone out in the middle, for a last vigorous, dizzying whirl, with drummers, castanet players, and orchestra combining in musical support that could only be described as massive.
It felt to Miles as though the performance ended all too soon, but his chrono told him four hours had passed in this dream. He bade a grateful but noncommittal farewell to Garnet Five. As Bel and Nicol escorted the three Barrayarans back to the Kestrel in the bubble car, he reflected on how cultures told their stories to themselves, and so defined themselves. Above all, the ballet celebrated the quaddie body. Surely no downsider could walk out of the quaddie ballet still imagining the four-armed people as mutated, crippled, or otherwise disadvantaged or inferior. One might even—as Corbeau had demonstrated—walk out having free-fallen in love.
Not that all crippling damage was visible to the eye. All this exuberant athleticism reminded him to check his brain chemical levels before bed, and see how soon his next seizure was likely to be.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Miles woke from a sound sleep to tapping on his cabin door. “M'lord?” came Roic's hushed voice. “Admiral Vorpatril wants to talk with you. He's on the secured comconsole in the wardroom.”
Whatever inspiration his backbrain might have floated up to his consciousness in the drowsy interlude between sleep and waking flitted away beyond recall. Miles groaned and swung out of his bunk. Ekaterin's hand extended from the top bunk, and she peeked over blearily at him; he touched it and whispered, “Go back to sleep, love.” She snuffled agreeably and rolled over.
Miles ran his hands through his hair, grabbed his gray jacket, shrugged it on over his underwear, and padded out barefoot into the corridor. As the airseal door hissed closed behind him, he checked his chrono. Since Quaddiespace didn't have to deal with inconvenient planetary rotations, they kept a single time zone throughout local space, to which Miles and Ekaterin had supposedly adjusted on the trip in. All right, so it wasn't the middle of the night, it was early morning.
Miles sat at the wardroom table, straightened his jacket and fastened it to the neck, and touched the control on his station chair. Admiral Vorpatril's face and torso appeared over the vid plate. He was awake, dressed, shaved, and had a coffee cup at his right hand, the rat-bastard.
Vorpatril shook his head, lips tight. “How the hell did you know?” he demanded.
Miles squinted. “I beg your pardon?”
“I just got back the report on Solian's blood sample from my chief surgeon. It was manufactured, probably within twenty-four hours of its being spilled on the deck.”
“Oh.” Hell and damnation. “That's . . . unfortunate.”
“But what does it mean? Is the man still alive somewhere? I'd have sworn he wasn't a deserter, but maybe Brun was right.”
Like the stopped clock, even idiots could be correct sometimes. “I'll have to think about this. It doesn't actually prove if Solian's alive or dead, either way. It doesn't even, necessarily, prove that he wasn't killed there , just not by getting his throat cut.”
Armsman Roic, God bless and keep him forever, set a cup of steaming coffee down by Miles's elbow and withdrew to his station by the door. Miles cleared his mouth, if not his mind, with the first sluicing swallow, and took a second sip to buy a moment to think.
Vorpatril had a head start on both coffee and calculation. “Should we report this to Chief Venn? Or . . . not?”
Miles made a dubious noise in his throat. His one diplomatic edge, the only thing that had given him, so to speak, a leg to stand on here, had been the possibility that Solian had been murdered by an unknown quaddie. This was now rendered even more problematic, it seemed. “The blood had to have been manufactured somewhere. If you have the right equipment, it's easy, and if you don't, it's impossible. Find all such equipment on station—or aboard ships in dock—and the place it was done has to be one of 'em. The place plus the time should lead to the people. Process of elimination. It's the sort of footwork . . .” Miles hesitated, but went on, “that the local police are better equipped to carry out than we are. If they can be trusted.”
“Trust the quaddies? Hardly!”
“What motivation do they have to lie or misdirect us?” What, indeed? “I have to work through Greenlaw and Venn. I have no authority on Graf Station in my own right.” Well, there was Bel, but he had to use Bel sparingly or risk the herm's cover.
He wanted the truth. Ruefully, he recognized that he also would prefer to have a monopoly on it, at least until he had time to figure out how best to play for Barrayar's interests. Yet if the truth doesn't serve us, what does that say about us, eh? He rubbed his stubbled chin. “It does clearly prove that whatever happened in that freight bay, whether murder or cover-up, was carefully planned, and not spontaneous. I'll undertake to speak with Greenlaw and Venn about it. Talking to the quaddies is my job now, anyway.” For my sins, presumably. What god did I piss off this time? “Thank you, Admiral, and thank your fleet surgeon from me for a good job.”