Barrayar

Chapter Twenty

One of Cordelia’s first orders was to assign Droushnakovi back to Gregor’s person, for his emotional continuity. This did not mean giving up the girl’s company, a comfort to which Cordelia had grown deeply accustomed, because upon Illyan’s renewed insistence Aral finally took up living quarters in the Imperial Residence. It eased Cordelias heart, when Drou and Kou were wed a month after Winterfair.

Cordelia offered herself as a go-between for the two families. For some reason, Kou and Drou both turned the offer down, hastily, though with profuse thanks. Given the bewildering pitfalls of Barrayaran social custom, Cordelia was just as happy to leave it to the experienced elderly lady the couple did contract.

Cordelia saw Alys Vorpatril often, exchanging domestic visits. Baby Lord Ivan was, if not exactly a comfort to Alys, certainly a distraction in her slow recovery from her physical ordeal. He grew rapidly despite a tendency to fussiness, an iatrogenic trait, Cordelia realized after a while, triggered by Alys’s fussing over him. Ivan should have three or four sibs to divide her attention among, Cordelia decided, watching Alys burp him on her shoulder while planning aloud his educational attack, come age eighteen, upon the formidable Imperial Military Academy entrance examinations.

Alys Vorpatril was drawn off her embittered mourning for Padma and her planning of Ivan’s life down to the last detail, when she was given a look at a picture of the wedding dress Drou was drooling over.

“No, no, no!” she cried, recoiling. “All that lace—you would look as furry as a big white bear. Silk, dear, long falls of silk is what you need—” and she was off. Motherless, sisterless Drou could scarcely have found a more knowledgeable bridal consultant. Lady Vorpatril ended by making the dress one of her several presents, to be sure of its aesthetic perfection, along with a “little holiday cottage” which turned out to be a substantial house on the eastern seashore. Come summer, Drou’s beach dream would come true. Cordelia grinned, and purchased the girl a nightgown and robe with enough tiers of lace layered on them to satiate the most frill-starved soul.

Aral lent the hall: the Imperial Residence’s Red Room and adjacent ballroom, the one with the beautiful marquetry floor, which to Cordelia’s immense relief had escaped the fire. In theory, this magnificent gesture was required to ease Illyan’s Security headaches, as Cordelia and Aral were to stand among the principal witnesses. Personally, Cordelia thought converting ImpSec into wedding caterers a promising turn of events.

Aral looked over the guest list and smiled. “Do you realize,” he said to Cordelia, “every class is represented? A year ago this event, here, would not have been possible. The grocer’s son and the non-com’s daughter. They bought it with blood, but maybe next year it can be bought with peaceful achievement. Medicine, education, engineering, entrepreneurship—shall we have a party for librarians?”

“Won’t those terrible Vorish crones all Piotr’s friends are married to complain about social over-progressiveness?”

“With Alys Vorpatril behind this? They wouldn’t dare.” The affair grew from there. By a week in advance Kou and Drou were considering eloping out of sheer panic, having lost all control of everything whatsoever to their eager helpers. But the Imperial Residence’s staff brought it all together with practiced ease. The senior housewoman flew about, chortling, “And here I was afraid we weren’t going to have anything to do, once the admiral moved in, but those dreadful boring General Staff dinners.”

The day and hour came at last. A large circle made of colored groats was laid out on the floor of the Red Room, encompassed by a star with a variable number of points, one for each parent or principal witness to stand at: in this case, four. In Barrayaran custom a couple married themselves, speaking their vows within the circle, requiring neither priest nor magistrate. Practically, a coach, called appropriately enough the Coach, stood outside the circle and read the script for the fainthearted or faint-headed to repeat. This dispensed with the need for higher neural functions such as learning and memory on the part of the stressed couple. Lost motor coordination was supplied by a friend each, who steered them to the circle. It was all very practical, Cordelia decided, as well as splendid.

With a grin and a flourish Aral placed her at her assigned star point, as if setting out a bouquet, and took his own place. Lady Vorpatril had insisted on a new gown for Cordelia, a sweeping length of blue and white with red floral accents, color-coordinated with Aral’s ultra-formal parade red-and-blues. Drou’s proud and nervous father also wore his red-and-blues and held down his point. Strange to think of the military, which Cordelia normally associated with totalitarian impulses, as the spearhead of egalitarianism on Barrayar. The Cetagandans’ gift, Aral called it; their invasion had first forced the promotion of talent regardless of origin, and the waves of that change were still traveling through Barrayaran society.

Sergeant Droushnakovi was a shorter, slighter man than Cordelia had expected. Either Drou’s mother’s genes, better nutrition, or both had boosted all his children up taller than himself. All three brothers, from the captain to the corporal, had been broken loose from their military assignments to attend, and stood now in the big outer circle of other witnesses along with Kou’s excited younger sister. Kou’s mother stood on the star’s last point, crying and smiling, in a blue dress so color-perfect Cordelia decided Alys Vorpatril must have somehow gotten to her, too.

Koudelka marched in first, propped by his stick with its new cover and Sergeant Bothari. Sergeant Bothari wore the most glittery version of Piotr’s brown and silver livery, and whispered helpful, horribly suggestive advice like “If you feel really nauseous, Lieutenant, put your head down.” The very thought turned Kou’s face greener, an extraordinary color-contrast with his red-and-blues that Lady Vorpatril would no doubt have disapproved.

Heads turned. Oh, my. Alys Vorpatril had been absolutely right about Drou’s gown. She swept in, as stunningly graceful as a sailing ship, a tall clean perfection of form and function, ivory silk, gold hair, blue eyes, white, blue, and red flowers, so that when she stepped up beside Kou one suddenly realized how tall he must be. Alys Vorpatril, in silver-grey, released Drou at the circle’s edge with a gesture like some hunting goddess releasing a white falcon, to soar and settle on Kou’s outstretched arm.

Kou and Drou made it through their oaths without stammering or passing out, and managed to conceal their mutual embarrassment at the public declaration of their despised first names, Clement and Ludmilla.

(“My brothers used to call me Lud,” Drou had confided to Cordelia during the practice yesterday. “Rhymes with mud. Also thud, blood, crud, dud, and cud.”

“You’ll always be Drou to me,” Kou had promised.)

As senior witness Aral then broke the circle of groats with a sweep of one booted foot and let them out, and the music, dancing, eating and drinking began.

The buffet was incredible, the music live, and the drinking … traditional. After the first formal glass of the good wine Piotr’d sent on, Cordelia drifted up to Kou and murmured a few words about Betan research on the detrimental effects of ethanol on sexual function, after which he switched to water.

“Cruel woman,” Aral whispered in her ear, laughing.

“Not to Drou, I’m not,” she murmured back.

She was formally introduced to the brothers, now brothers-in-law, who regarded her with that awed respect that made her teeth grind. Though her jaw eased a bit when a rhyming brother was waved to silence by Dad to make room for some comment by the bride on the topic of hand-weapons. “Quiet, Jos,” Sergeant Droushnakovi told his son. “You’ve never handled a nerve disruptor in combat.” Drou blinked, then smiled, a gleam in her eye.

Cordelia seized a moment with Bothari, whom she saw all too seldom now that Aral had split his household from Piotr’s.

“How is Elena doing, now she’s back home? Has Mistress Hysopi recovered from it all yet?”

“They’re well, Milady,” Bothari ducked his head, and almost-smiled. “I visited about five days ago, when Count Piotr went down to check on his horses. Elena, um, creeps. Put her down and look away a minute, you look back and she’s moved… .” He frowned. “I hope Carla Hysopi stays alert.”

“She saw Elena safely through Vordarian’s war, I suspect she’ll handle crawling with equal ease. Courageous woman. She should be in line for some of those medals they’re handing out.”

Bothari’s brow wrinkled. “Don’t know they’d mean much to her.”

“Mm. She does understand she can call on me for anything she needs, I trust. Any time.”

“Yes, Milady. But we’re doing all right for the moment.” A flash of pride, there, in that statement of sufficiency. “It’s very quiet down at Vorkosigan Surleau, in the winter. Clean. A right and proper place for a baby.” Not like the place I grew up in, Cordelia could almost hear him add. “I mean her to have everything right and proper. Even her da.”

“How are you doing, yourself?”

“The new med is better. Anyway, my head doesn’t feel like it’s stuffed with fog anymore. And I sleep at night. Besides that I can’t tell what it’s doing.”

Its job, apparently; he seemed relaxed and calm, almost free of that sinister edginess. Though he was still the first person in the room to look over to the buffet and ask, “Is he supposed to be up?”

Gregor, in pajamas, was creeping along the edge of the culinary array, trying to look invisible and nail down a few goodies before he was spotted and taken away again. Cordelia got to him first, before he was either stepped on by an unwary guest, or recaptured by Security forces in the persons of the breathless maidservant and terrified bodyguard who were supposed to be filling in for Drou. They were followed up by a paper-white Simon Illyan. Fortunately for Illyan’s heart, Gregor had apparently only been formally missing for about sixty seconds. Gregor shrank into her skirts as the hyperventilating adults loomed over him.

Drou, who had noticed Illyan touch his comm, turn pale, and start to move, checked in by sheer force of habit. “What’s the matter?”

“How’d he get away?” snarled Illyan to Gregor’s keepers, who stammered out something inaudible about thought he was asleep and never took my eyes off.

“He’s not away,” Cordelia put in tartly. “This is his home. He ought to be at least able to walk about inside, or why do you keep all those bloody useless guards on the walls out there?”

“Droushie, can’t I come to your party?” Gregor asked plaintively, casting around desperately for an authority to outrank Illyan.

Drou looked at Illyan, who looked disapproving. Cordelia broke the deadlock without hesitation. “Yes, you can.”

So, under Cordelia’s supervision, the Emperor danced with the bride, ate three cream cakes, and was carried away to bed satisfied. Fifteen minutes was all he’d wanted, poor kid.

The party rolled on, elated. “Dance, Milady?” Aral inquired hopefully at her elbow.

Dare she try it? They were playing the restrained rhythms of the mirror-dance—surely she couldn’t go too wrong. She nodded, and Aral drained his glass and led her onto the polished marquetry. Step, slide, gesture: concentrating, she made an interesting and unexpected discovery. Either partner could lead, and if the dancers were alert and sharp, the watchers couldn’t tell the difference. She tried some dips and slides of her own, and Aral followed smoothly. Back and forth the lead passed like a ball between them, the game growing ever more absorbing, until they ran out of music and breath.

The last snows of winter were melting from the streets of Vorbarr Sultana when Captain Vaagen called from ImpMil for Cordelia.

“It’s time, Milady. I’ve done all I can do in vitro. The placenta is ten months old and clearly senescing. The machine can’t be boosted any more to compensate.”

“When, then?”

“Tomorrow would be good.”

She barely slept that night. They all trooped down to the Imperial Military Hospital the next morning, Aral, Cordelia, Count Piotr flanked by Bothari. Cordelia was not at all sure she wanted Piotr present, but until the old man did them all the convenience of dropping dead, she was stuck with him. Maybe one more appeal to reason, one more presentation of the facts, one more try, would do the trick. Their unresolved antagonism grieved Aral; at least he let the onus for fueling it fall on Piotr, not herself. Do your worst, old man. You have no future except through me. My son will light your offering pyre. She was glad to see Bothari again, though.

Vaagen’s new laboratory was an entire floor in the most up-to-date building in the complex. Cordelia’d had him moved from his old lab on account of ghosts, having come in for one of her frequent visits soon after their return to Vorbarr Sultana to find him in a state of near-paralysis, unable to work. Every time he entered the room, he’d said, Dr. Henri’s violent and senseless death replayed in his memory. He could not step on the floor near the place where Henri’s body had fallen, but had to walk wide around; little noises made him jump and twitch. “I am a man of reason,” he’d said hoarsely. “This superstitious nonsense means nothing to me.” So Cordelia had helped him burn a private offering to Henri in a brazier on the lab floor, and disguised the move as a promotion.

The new lab was bright and spacious and free of revenant spirits. Cordelia found a mob of men waiting when Vaagen ushered her in: researchers assigned to Vaagen to explore replicator technology, interested civilian obstetricians including Dr. Ritter, Miles’s own pediatrician-to-be, and his consulting surgeon. The changing of the guard. Mere parents needed determination to elbow their way in.

Vaagen bustled about, happily important. He still wore his eyepatch, but promised Cordelia he would take the time for the last round of surgery to restore his vision very soon now. A tech trundled out the uterine replicator and Vaagen paused, as if trying to figure out how to put the proper drama and ceremony into what Cordelia knew for a very simple event. He settled on turning it into a technical lecture for his colleagues, detailing the composition of the hormone solutions as he injected them into the appropriate feed-lines, interpreting readouts, describing the placental separation going on within the replicator, the similarities and differences between replicator and body births. There were several differences Vaagen didn’t mention. Alys Vorpatril should see this, Cordelia thought.

Vaagen looked up to see her watching him, paused selfconsciously, and smiled. “Lady Vorkosigan.” He gestured to the replicator’s latch-seals. “Would you care to do the honors?”

She reached, hesitated, and looked around for Aral. There he was, solemn and attentive at the edge of the crowd. “Aral?”

He strode forward. “Are you sure?”

“If you can open a picnic cooler, you can do this.” They each took a latch and raised them in unison, breaking the sterile seal, and lifted the top off. Dr. Ritter moved in with a vibra-scalpel, cutting through the thick felt mat of nutrient tubing with a touch so delicate the silvery amniotic sac beneath was unscored, then cut Miles free of his last bit of biological packaging, clearing his mouth and nose of fluids before his first surprised inhalation. Aral’s arm, around her, tightened so hard it hurt. A muffled laugh, no more than a breath, broke from his lips; he swallowed and blinked to bring his features, suffused with elation and pain, back under strict control.

Happy birthday, thought Cordelia. Good color …

Unfortunately, that was about all that was really good. The contrast with baby Ivan was overwhelming. Despite the extra weeks of gestation, ten months to Ivan’s nine-and-a-half, Miles was barely half Ivan’s size at birth, and far more wizened and wrinkled. His spine was noticeably deformed, and his legs were drawn up and locked in a tight bend. He was definitely a male heir, though, no question about that. His first cry was thin, weak, nothing at all like Ivan’s angry, hungry bellow. Behind her, she heard Piotr hiss with disappointment.

“Has he been getting enough nutrition?” she asked Vaagen. It was hard to keep the accusation out of her tone.

Vaagen shrugged helplessly. “All he would absorb.”

The pediatrician and his colleague laid Miles out under a warming light, and began their examination, Cordelia and Aral on either side.

“This bend will straighten out on its own, Milady,” the pediatrician pointed. “But the lower spine should have surgical correction as early as possible. You were right, Vaagen, the treatment to optimize skull development also fused the hip sockets. That’s why the legs are locked in that strange position, m’lord. He’ll require surgery to crack those bones loose and turn them around before he can start to crawl or walk. I don’t recommend that in the first year, on top of the spinal work, let him gain strength and weight first—”

The surgeon, testing the infant’s arms, swore suddenly and snatched up his diagnostic viewer. Miles mewed. Aral’s hand clenched, by his trouser seam. Cordelia’s stomach sank. “Hell!” said the surgeon. “His humerus just snapped. You’re right, Vaagen, the bones are abnormally brittle.”

“At least he has bones,” sighed Vaagen. “He almost didn’t, at one point.”

“Be careful,” said the surgeon, “especially of the head and spine. If the rest are as bad as the long bones, we’re going to have to come up with some kind of reinforcement. …”

Piotr stamped toward the door. Aral glanced up, his lips thinning to a frown, and excused himself to follow. Cordelia was torn, but once observation assured her that the bone-setting was under way and the doctors’ new caution would protect Miles from further damage today, she left their ingenious heads bent over him and followed Aral.

In the corridor, Piotr was stalking up and down. Aral stood at parade rest, unmoved and unmoving. Bothari was a silent witness in the background.

Piotr turned and saw her. “You! You’ve strung me along. This is what you call ’great repairs’? Gah!”

“They are great repairs. Miles is unquestionably much better than he was. Nobody promised perfection.”

“You lied. Vaagen lied.”

“We did not,” denied Cordelia. “I tried to give you accurate summaries of Vaagen’s experiments all the way along. What he’s delivered is about what his reports led us to expect. Check your ears.”

“I see what you’re trying, and it won’t work. I’ve just told him,” he pointed at Aral, “this is where I stop. I don’t want to see that mutant again. Ever. While it lives, if it lives, and it looks pretty damned sickly to me, don’t bring it around my door. As God is my judge, woman, you won’t make a fool of me.”

“That would be redundant,” snapped Cordelia.

Piotr’s lips curled in a silent snarl. Cheated of a cooperative target, he turned on Aral. “And you, you spineless, skirt-smothered—if your elder brother had lived—” Piotr’s mouth clamped shut abruptly, too late.

Aral’s face drained to a grey hue Cordelia had seen but twice before; both times he’d been a breath and a chance away from committing murder. Piotr had joked about Aral’s famous rages. Only now did Cordelia realize Piotr, though he may have witnessed his son in irritation, had never seen the real thing. Piotr seemed to realize it, too, dimly. His brows lowered; he stared, off-balanced.

Aral’s hands locked to each other, behind his back. Cordelia could see them shake, white-knuckled. His chin lifted, and he spoke in a whisper.

“If my brother had lived, he would have been perfect. You thought so; I thought so; Emperor Yuri thought so, too. So ever after you’ve had to make do with the leftovers from that bloody banquet, the son Mad Yuri’s death squad overlooked. We Vorkosigans, we can make do.” His voice fell still further. “But my firstborn will live. I will not fail him.”

The icy statement was a near-lethal cut across the belly, as fine a slash as Bothari could have delivered with Koudelka’s swordstick, and very accurately placed. Truly, Piotr should not have lowered the tone of this discussion. The breath huffed from him in disbelief and pain.

Aral’s expression grew inward. “I will not fail him again,” he corrected himself lowly. “A second chance you were never given, sir.” Behind his back his hands unclenched. A small jerk of his head dismissed Piotr and all Piotr might say.

Blocked twice, visibly suffering from his profound misstep, Piotr looked around for a target of opportunity upon which to vent his frustration. His eye fell on Bothari, watching blank-faced.

“And you. Your hand was in this from beginning to end. Did my son place you as a spy in my household? Where do your loyalties lie? Do you obey me, or him?”

An odd gleam flared in Bothari’s eye. He tilted his head toward Cordelia. “Her.”

Piotr was so taken aback, it took him several seconds to regain his speech. “Fine,” he sputtered at last. “She can have you. I don’t want to see your ugly face again. Don’t come back to Vorkosigan House. Esterhazy will deliver your things before nightfall.”

He wheeled and marched away. His grand exit, already weak, was spoiled when he looked back over his shoulder before he rounded the corner.

Aral vented a very weary sigh.

“Do you think he means it this time?” Cordelia asked. “All that never-ever stuff?”

“Government concerns will require us to communicate. He knows that. Let him go home and listen to the silence for a bit. Then we’ll see.” He smiled bleakly. “While we live, we cannot disengage.”

She thought of the child whose blood now bound them, her to Aral, Aral to Piotr, and Piotr to herself. “So it seems.” She looked an apology to Bothari. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. I didn’t know Piotr could fire an oath-armsman.”

“Well, technically, he can’t,” Aral explained. “Bothari was just reassigned to another branch of the household. You.”

“Oh.” Just what I always wanted, my very own monster. What am I supposed to do, keep him in my closet? She rubbed the bridge of her nose, then regarded her hand. The hand that had encompassed Bothari’s on the swordstick. So. And so. “Lord Miles will need a bodyguard, won’t he?”

Aral tilted his head in interest. “Indeed.”

Bothari looked suddenly so intently hopeful, it made Cordelia catch her breath. “A bodyguard,” he said, “and backup. No raff could give him a hard time if … let me help, Milady.”

Let me help. Rhymes with I love you, right? “It would be …” impossible, crazy, dangerous, irresponsible, “my pleasure, Sergeant.”

His face lit like a torch. “Can I start now?”

“Why not?”

“I’ll wait for you in there, then.” He nodded toward Vaagen’s lab. He slipped back through the door. Cordelia could just picture him, leaning watchfully against the wall—she trusted that malevolent presence wouldn’t make the doctors so nervous they would drop their fragile charge.

Aral blew out his breath, and took her in his arms. “Do you Betans have any nursery tales about the witch’s name-day gifts?”

“The good and bad fairies seem to all be out in force for this one, don’t they?” She leaned against the scratchy fabric of his uniformed shoulder. “I don’t know if Piotr meant Bothari for a blessing or a curse. But I bet he really will keep the raff off. Whatever the raff turns out to be. It’s a strange list of birthday presents we’ve given our boychick.”

They returned to the lab, to listen attentively to the rest of the doctors’ lecture on Miles’s special needs and vulnerabilities, arrange the first round of treatment schedules, and wrap him warmly for the trip home. He was so small, a scrap of flesh, lighter than a cat, Cordelia found when she at last took him up in her arms, skin to skin for the first time since he’d been cut from her body. She had a moment’s panic. Put him back in the vat for about eighteen years, I can’t handle this… . Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation. Even Piotr knew that. Aral held the door open for them.

Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means “soldier,” but don’t let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn’t going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.