The waitress delivered their salads and iced tea, and there was a short break in the conversation while her uncle appreciated the fresh spinach, mangoes and onions, and candied pecans. She'd guessed the candied pecans would please him. The market-garden hydroponics production in Serifosa was among Komarr's best.
She used the break to redirect the conversation toward her greatest current curiosity. "Your colleague Lord Vorkosigan– did he really have a thirteen-year career in Imperial Security?" Or were you just irritated by Tien?
"Three years in the Imperial Military Academy, a decade in ImpSec, to be precise."
"How did he ever get in, past the physicals?"
"Nepotism, I believe. Of a sort. To give him credit, it seems to have been an advantage he used sparingly thereafter. I had the fascinating experience of reading his entire classified military record, when Gregor asked me and my fellow Auditors to review Vorkosigan's candidacy, before he made the appointment."
She subsided in slight disappointment. "Classified. In that case, I suppose you can't tell me anything about it."
"Well," he grinned around a mouthful of salad, "there was the Dagoola IV episode. You must have heard of it, that giant breakout from the Cetagandan prisoner-of-war camp that the Marilacans made a few years ago?"
She recalled it only dimly. She'd been heads-down in motherhood, about that time, and scarcely paid attention to news, especially any so remote as galactic news. But she nodded encouragement for him to go on.
"It's all old history now. I understand from Vorkosigan that the Marilacans are engaged in producing a holovid drama on the subject. The Greatest Escape, or something like that, they're calling it. They tried to hire him—or actually, his cover identity—to be a technical consultant on the script, an opportunity he has regretfully declined. But for ImpSec to retain security classification upon a series of events that the Marilacans are simultaneously dramatizing planetwide strikes me as a bit rigid, even for ImpSec. In any case, Vorkosigan was the Barrayaran agent behind that breakout."
"I didn't even know we had an agent behind that."
"He was our man on-site."
So that odd joke about snoring Marilacans . . . hadn't been. Quite. "If he was so good, why did he quit?"
"Hm." Her uncle applied himself to mopping up the last of his salad dressing with his multigrain roll, before replying. "I can only give you an edited version of that. He didn't quit voluntarily. He was very badly injured—to the point of requiring cryo-freezing—a couple of years ago. Both the original injury and the cryo-freeze did him a lot of damage, some of it permanent. He was forced to take a medical discharge, which he—hm!—did not handle well. It's not my place to discuss those details."
"If he was injured badly enough to need cryo-freeze, he was dead!" she said, startled.
"Technically, I suppose so. 'Alive' and 'dead' are not such neat categories as they used to be in the Time of Isolation."
So, her uncle was in possession of just the sort of medical information about Vorkosigan's mutations she most wanted to know, if he had paid any attention to it. Military physicals were thorough.
"So rather than let all that training and experience go to waste," Uncle Vorthys went on, "Gregor found a job for Vorkosigan on the civilian side. Most Auditorial duties are not too physically onerous . . . though I confess, it's been useful to have someone younger and thinner than myself to send out-station for those long inspections in a pressure suit. I'm afraid I've abused his endurance a bit, but he's proved very observant."
"So he really is your assistant?"
"By no means. What fool said that? All Auditors are coequal. Seniority is only good for getting one stuck with certain administrative chores, on the rare occasions when we act as a group. Vorkosigan, being a well-brought-up young man, is polite to my white hairs, but he's an independent Auditor in his own right, and goes just where he pleases. At present it pleases him to study my methods. I shall certainly take the opportunity to study his.
"Our Imperial charge doesn't come with a manual, you see. It was once proposed the Auditors create one for themselves, but they—wisely, I think—concluded it would do more harm than good. Instead, we just have our archives of Imperial reports; precedents, without rules. Lately, several of us more recent appointees have been trying to read a few old reports each week, and then meet for dinner to discuss the cases and analyze how they were handled. Fascinating. And delicious. Vorkosigan has the most extraordinary cook."
"But this is his first assignment, isn't it? And … he was designated just like that, on the Emperor's whim."
"He had a temporary appointment as a Ninth Auditor first. A very difficult assignment, inside ImpSec itself. Not my kind of thing at all."
She was not totally oblivious to the news. "Oh, dear. Did he have anything to do with why ImpSec changed chiefs twice last winter?"
"I so much prefer engineering investigations," her uncle observed mildly.
Their vat-chicken salad sandwiches arrived, while Ekaterin absorbed this deflection. What kind of reassurance was she seeking, after all? Vorkosigan disturbed her, she had to admit, with his cool smile and warm eyes, and she couldn't say why. He did tend to the sardonic. Surely she was not subconsciously prejudiced against mutants, when Nikolai himself . . . In the Time of Isolation, if such a one as Vorkosigan had been born to me, it would have been my maternal duty to the genome to cut his infant throat.
Nikki, happily, would have escaped my cleansing. For a while.
The Time of Isolation is over forever. Thank God.
"I gather you like Vorkosigan," she began once again to angle for the kind of information she sought.
"So does your aunt. The Professora and I had him to dinner a few times, last winter, which is where Vorkosigan came up with the notion of the discussion meetings, come to think of it. I know he's rather quiet at first—cautious, I think—but he can be very witty, once you get him going."
"Does he amuse you?" Amusing had certainly not been her first impression.
He swallowed another bite of sandwich, and glanced up again at the white irregular blur in the clouds now marking the position of the soletta. "I taught engineering for thirty years. It had its drudgeries. But each year, I had the pleasure of finding in my classes a few of the best and brightest, who made it all worthwhile." He sipped spiced tea and spoke more slowly. "But much less often—every five or ten years at most—a true genius would turn up among my students, and the pleasure became a privilege, to be treasured for life."
"You think he's a genius?" she said, raising her eyebrows. The high Vor twit?
"I don't know him quite well enough, yet. But I suspect so, a part of the time."
"Can you be a genius part of the time?"
"All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters. Ah, dessert. My, this is splendid!" He applied himself happily to a large chocolate confection with whipped cream and more pecans.
She wanted personal data, but she kept getting career synopses. She would have to take a more embarrassingly direct path. While arranging her first spoonful of her spiced apple tart and ice cream, she finally worked up her nerve to ask, "Is he married?"