Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Chapter Thirteen

Ghost ship, was all Jole could think, strolling through the echoing, deserted corridors of the Prince Serg the next day. They glinted in the corners of his vision like fatigue hallucinations, those shades of anxious men. Some of them, he supposed, were dead for real by now; all were gone, scattered away from what had at the time seemed—been—their overwhelming purpose. From the pensive look on Miles’s face, Jole wondered if he was seeing similar specters.

So many crewmembers on the Vicereine’s expedition had wanted to see the Serg, the tour had been broken up into two groups. Hers, naturally, was led by the skeleton crew’s captain himself, and escorted by the chief engineer. Extra work for them all, but it did cast a validating few hours of importance across an otherwise boring routine voyage. And it never hurt to get the house cleaned up for guests.

Jole gazed around with almost as much curiosity as everyone else when they reached Engineering. He’d seldom been down here on his own long-ago months aboard. The kids were portioned out among the adults—Cordelia held Alex’s hand, Miles Helen’s, and Ekaterin Lizzie’s, to keep them from straying onto any unfortunate live controls. At a few points Cordelia looked as if she half wanted to pass off her charge to Jole and hold Miles’s hand instead, but he did manage to restrain himself and set a good example. His disturbingly expert lecture on the several ways one might go about hijacking the ship right from here was limited to a strictly verbal version, though he looked back wistfully over his shoulder as they left.

The bridge brought them to more-familiar old territory, from Jole’s point of view; and then the tactics room, doubly so. The old tactical computer had not been torn out or shut down with the weaponry, though its software had been sanitized of anything currently still classified. The hardware was too obsolete to recycle. It was plain that the skeleton crew, whiling away their voyage, had been using it to play war games, a skill-building leisure activity Jole could only approve. Here, at last, the visitors were allowed to push all the buttons their hearts desired. Miles led his children and Freddie into virtual battle with great enthusiasm.

Jole smiled and shook his head at an invitation to join the fray. “I’ve seen it in operation before,” he murmured, which, recalling where and when, daunted their hosts sufficiently not to press him. Cordelia also seemed to find the temptation resistible, sauntering up to companionably take his arm and watch.

“I’ve often wondered what it is the officers have left to do, when the tactical computer does so much,” Ekaterin, also observing, remarked after a time. “And so fast.”

“There are some classes of decisions it can’t make,” said Jole. “Mainly political ones. Also, rarely, an officer may know something it doesn’t. Even so, I only saw Aral override it a few times during the hot part of the Hegen Hub fight. Three instances out of four he was correctly guessing the psychology of the enemy’s next moves, when they were overriding their tac comps.”

And a hellish few hours the battle had been, but not nearly as hellish as the strained weeks leading up to it.

The official version was that young Emperor Gregor had secretly left the economics conference that he’d been attending with his Prime Minister on Komarr to go on an urgent personal diplomatic mission to the Hegen Hub, to try to pull its disparate polities together in the face of an imminent Cetagandan invasion of the planet Vervain. Since the Vervain system bordered the Hegen Hub, the expectation was that the Cetagandans would hopscotch the planet itself to seize the Hub and its vital multiple wormhole-nexus connections; and, if their momentum proved sufficient, perhaps move on to snap up the Pol system as well, which would have brought them right to the Barrayaran empire’s Komarran doorstep.

A hastily recruited double of Gregor had been sent back to Barrayar on the pretext of illness, to cover for the Emperor’s sudden absence. Another layer of supposed deception was that the Emperor had disappeared from Komarr, kidnapped or worse. This was supported by a frantic, if tightly closed-mouthed, ImpSec sweep of the domes and the system for the missing man. To this day, the confusion about which of the tales was true had been carefully maintained in the face of all commentary, well fogged. Every possible permutation had its variously fanatical supporters as the questions slowly segued from current events into history.

Jole and Cordelia were among the few who knew that the real answer was all of the above, and not necessarily in the order one would imagine. Evidently musing along similar lines, Cordelia pressed Jole’s arm and murmured, “I am so thankful that Aral had you with him, when I had to escort that poor boy we had playing emperor back to Barrayar. I had never seen Aral so mutely terrified as when we thought we’d lost Gregor, just when it had all seemed completed, Barrayar safely delivered to its future.”

“Not even during the Pretendership?”

“Not the same thing at all, no. And not just because he’d been twenty years younger then, I don’t think. This was a qualitatively different crisis, somehow. For a while there, he feared he might be looking down the throat of the third civil war on Barrayar in his lifetime, and it almost broke his heart. Finding himself facing Cetagandans instead was practically a joy, by contrast.”

That was almost too true to be funny. Fortunately, Aral’s usual stern and decisive facade had never cracked in public. Even Jole had only been treated to the occasional alarming flash of Aral’s doubts, like vivid filaments of lava seen through a surface one had thought safe stone. He’d done all he could to support the man, whether in his roles as aide, confidante, or lover, not that there’d been much time, energy, or attention left over for that last. Apparently, it had been enough, because they’d all won through alive somehow.

But when they’d received the confirmation that Gregor was at last coming aboard, Aral had smiled, snapped out the necessary orders, walked to his cabin, locked the door, sat down on his bunk with his face buried in his hands, and wept for the relief of it. Not for long; there’d been a wormhole to defend, coming right up. The maniacally cheerful edge with which the aging admiral had approached this task had been a big morale boost to the men, many of whom had never faced live fire before. That its source was far, far more complicated than a native enthusiasm for war was not something Jole had been able to explain to people, then or later. Except, perhaps, to Cordelia, who already understood. He covered the present Cordelia’s hand with his own, and pressed it in an unmoored gratitude.

The skeleton crew had offered a lunch of standard rations in the Serg’s mess as an authentic military experience, attempting to make a virtue of necessity; they were happily spared this charade by the Vicereine’s own chef, who provided for all. Scarfing it down, and discussing the vicissitudes of military chow generally, the engineer sighed to Jole, “I suppose at least the Admiral ate better, on board here.”

No, worse. During the lead-up, Aral had barely been able to eat at all, with his old stress-related stomach issues resurfacing, and he hadn’t dared start drinking. Jole edited this to, “Only during the diplomatic phases. During the crunch times, he hardly paid attention to what was shoved in front of him.” And Jole had quietly added badger him to eat to his growing list of key-man-maintenance tasks.

Following lunch, at Cordelia’s suggestion, the kids were sent to the ship’s gym with some of the younger crewmembers for a modified introduction to onboard military fitness routines. After a brief, surreal peek into what had been Aral’s quarters and his adjoining own, now stripped bare, gray and hollow, Jole rejoined the senior Vorkosigans in the corridor for a last slow stroll around.

“It seems so wasteful of resources,” Cordelia sighed. “All this short-lived military buildup.”

“Till it’s suddenly needed, and then it’s everyone wailing, Why didn’t we prepare?” Jole countered amiably.

Miles nodded. “And then you’re up to your asses in ghem. Again.”

Ekaterin said thoughtfully, “I do sometimes wonder what the purpose of the ghem brotherhood really is, with all their militant cultural traditions. I mean, from the Cetagandan haut viewpoint. Lately, I’ve started to think their main function is camouflage.”

Cordelia’s eyebrows went up. “For what, do you figure?”

“Cetagandan haut bioweapons. And very long-range agendas.” She extended a hand, turned it over. “I really gathered the impression, on my own trip behind the scenes on Rho Ceta, that the haut could destroy us at any time. The only reason why not is that they haven’t chosen to.”

Miles said reluctantly, “I’m afraid that’s true. The haut ladies of the Star Crèche have some biological agents that can melt your bones. Literally.” He shuddered in memory. “The crew of a ship like this one could all be dead in an hour.”

“How do you defend against something like that?” said Ekaterin.

Jole wasn’t sure if that was a real or a rhetorical question. He answered it anyway. “Current plans call for fully automated and drone ships. I can’t give you operational details, but I promise you, a large number of people both in and out of the military are working on the issues.”

“We used to call the biowar intelligence and analysis section at ImpSec HQ the Nightmare Barn,” Miles reminisced. “In a large building full of pale, overcaffeinated men, they had a reputation as being the pastiest and the twitchiest.”

Ekaterin shrugged. “There are organisms that attack plastics and metals. I can’t imagine that the haut haven’t thought of hyping them up as well.”

“They still have to be delivered,” Jole pointed out. “This is—fortunately—a nontrivial problem.” But he suspected the gentle gardener knew more than she was saying. As do we all, here.

“It’s a haunting image, though. Automated warships forever defending a world that has already died, with no one left alive to turn them off.” She stared away through the walls, in her mind’s eye seeing…what?

Cordelia, ever practical, broke the spell. “If you can find me a manufacturer of any machinery that will last forever, I want their address. Some of our stuff doesn’t last a week.”

Miles laughed blackly, and Ekaterin smiled a little. Cordelia had not, Jole noted, addressed the dead-world half of that scenario.

But then Miles bit his lip, his face scrunching down in some decision. Making it, he looked up. “There’s a thing coming along that Gregor’s been sitting on, which I should probably apprise you two of. Has to do with that goldmine of old Occupation data that was uncovered when they found that buried lab bunker. And why some of it hasn’t been declassified yet, despite the howls from the academic community. Duv Galeni’s been overseeing the work on it for ages, and even he agrees with Gregor. Though he’d love to publish—he’s actually written the book, which is sitting in his ImpSec secure files waiting for the go-ahead. He let me read the first draft.”

Jole had the utmost respect for Commodore Galeni, one of the more overworked men in Vorbarr Sultana, simultaneously holding down the ImpSec Komarran Affairs chief’s desk because of his background as a Komarran, and, because of his background as a trained historian, given oversight of the examination of an enormous cache of abandoned Cetagandan military and other data, left behind at the century-past pullout and not found until seven years ago. Jole wondered if his own high classification status would allow him to put himself forward as a peer reviewer for Galeni’s manuscript…

Miles was going on: “Anyway, he’s solved certain mysteries about the last days of the war and the pullout from the Occupation that we didn’t even know were mysteries, although, when the clues are laid out, you wonder how we missed them. I have some theories on that, too. The ghem only used lightweight chemical warfare on Barrayar, back then, and almost no biologicals, even when they were losing ground.”

The people they’d been used on might have a different opinion of that “light” classification, Jole reflected, but this was more-or-less true. “Because the haut wouldn’t let them use the good stuff, I’ve always understood. Which is part of how an apparently effete, apparently unmilitary genetic aristocracy keeps control of their own warrior class. Apparently.”

Miles’s grin flickered at the string of ironic apparentlys. He’d had more direct experience of the haut than even Jole had, and was quite alive to the depths those elegant, deceptive surfaces hid.

“A cabal in the ghem junta running the Occupation had an operational plan for stepping up the game, it turns out, after their nasty foray into nuclears backfired so thoroughly. Seems that wasn’t their last-ditch effort after all. The existence of the abandoned bunker itself was actually a fat clue, once you step back and squint—they wouldn’t have packed that much wealth and data into it if they hadn’t imagined they’d be coming back to collect it. Plus Galeni was also given some unique contemporaneous eyewitness testimony by Moira ghem Estif, though it was typically haut-oblique—even he took a while to decode her pointers.

“The real pullout plan called for the use of stolen haut bioweapons—some kind of virulent plague, as I understand it, rekeyed to Barrayaran genetics. Picture it. Pull all your people out, release this hell-brew, seal the wormholes behind you and let it work in tidy isolation. A planet-sized culture dish. Come back in a year or two to a neatly depopulated landscape freed of that pesky native crowd who kept irrationally refusing to be culturally uplifted, and move in. There would be galactic outcry, sure, but—too bad, so sad, too late.”

“How close to operational did this plan get?” asked Jole, chilled.

“They’d got as far as actually stealing the base material and trying to set up a crew of biochemists—with at least one suborned haut among them—for the modifications and replication. They were figuring on getting away with a fait accompli. But then their central Imperial—in other words, haut—government caught up with them. Remember all those famous executions when the junta returned to Eta Ceta? Everyone thought the ghem were being punished for losing, for losing the war, for losing face. Which made a handy dual duty for the exercise. But there was a second lesson for stroppy ghem embedded under the more public one.”

Cordelia blew out her breath. Jole’s brows couldn’t climb any higher. He observed slowly, “That…certainly puts a different spin on all our military self-congratulations for throwing the ghem off our world, back then.”

“Oh, yes.”

“No wonder Gregor’s been delaying this,” said Cordelia. “It must feel like brooding a bomb.”

“Yes, he keeps wondering and waiting for the right diplomatic time to let it hatch. Most useful or least destructive moment, whichever. Given haut lifespans, all the principals aren’t dead even yet. So is it history, or is it politics? I keep thinking such secrets should be out on the table, and then…I think some more.”

“So, Ekaterin is right,” murmured Cordelia. “We continue to exist at the discretion of the haut.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” said Miles. “Anybody got a solution?”

“Out of my own head? No,” said his mother. “Except to continue to improve our broad scientific and bioexpertise, and not just at the top. Which is a process that has to start at the primary school education level.” She sighed. “When everything is a priority, nothing is, but at least that one underlies all others. Thus, you would think people could agree on it, but. People.”

“It seems the haut aren’t interested in real estate alone—ah.” Miles broke off, as the herd of his children and their escorts appeared around the corner, finding their way back to the parental home base. Jole supposed that to Cordelia, the younger crewmen looked like children as well. He only had to squint a bit to see them that way himself.

In light of the conversation just interrupted, he didn’t have to work too hard to interpret the introspective, disquieted looks on the adults’ faces, regarding their offspring’s approach. Terror, once removed. He stared around one last time at the creaky old warship as they all started to make their way to the flex tubes.

If his life’s calling had been to defend Barrayar, and he did not think that notion was wholly self-delusion, had he been in the wrong line of work for the past thirty years?

The Vorkosigan family was safely delivered back to the base in the Kareenburg dawn. Oliver stopped by his apartment; Cordelia shepherded the rest on to the Viceroy’s Palace. She then spent the rest of the morning playing catch-up with all the duties that could not be accomplished by comconsole, mostly meeting with people petitioning her to provide them with goods or services, generally for free. It made her feel wearily maternal. She tried to extract as many chores as possible in return.

Such tasks were pleasant enough when she could actually supply their wants; less so when, more commonly, she couldn’t; and least of all when she was presented with multiple irreconcilably conflicting agendas. She wondered if being the parent of an only child had unfitted her for such situations. On the other hand, maybe all the practice at being vicereine would ready her for her rematch with motherhood. It was a consoling notion.

As she made her way back across the garden for the planned family lunch, she spotted Alex sitting alone on a secluded bench, kicking his heels—metaphorically as well as literally? Alex’s quiet demeanor was usually camouflaged by the uproar of his siblings, but when one saw him alone like this, it sprang out. She angled amiably over to him.

“Hey, kiddo.”

He looked up. “Hi, Granma.” As she continued to loom, he obligingly scooted over on the bench, and she sat down beside him. They both looked out into the variegated foliage and a winding path that might have gone on for kilometers, rather than meters.

“What’s everyone up to?” she asked, as a less-invasive version of Why are you all alone out here?

Alex gave a defensive kid-shrug nonetheless. But he answered, “Mama’s working on the garden project for you. Da went off to the base to see Admiral Jole about that war-gaming thing they were talking about. Helen and the rest of the girls are inside playing with Freddie.”

Leaving Alex odd-male-out? It was unfortunate that Selig was too young to be a companion for him. Miles’s idea of starting all his children as one fell squadron seemed a little less insane, in this retrospect.

“Did you enjoy the trip out to the old flagship?”

“Yeah, it was pretty interesting.” Perhaps worried that this sounded flat, he offered, “I liked the parts when Admiral Jole talked about Granda the best.”

“Those were my favorite bits, too.” She hesitated, then tried, “So why the long face today? Tuckered out?”

His nose wrinkled, but he waved this explanation-sparing notion away. Either not yet adept at personal subterfuge, or too honest, he sighed, “Not that. It’s just Da.”

Cordelia groped for neutral-yet-inviting wording. “What’s he up to now?”

“Nothing new. He was just going on about the Academy, again. He does that.”

Interesting description. At least Alex recognized that this family obsession was as much about Miles as it was about himself. Cordelia detected Ekaterin’s hand, there.

“He wants to encourage you, you know. He had so much trouble gaining entry himself due to his soltoxin damage, and went to such, really, extraordinary lengths to get around the barriers in his path that, well…he wants it to be easier for you.”

“I get that, it’s just…” Alex trailed off. “He makes it seem as much a, a thing as being count.”

“An unavoidable historical necessity?”

Alex’s brows scrunched down. “I guess. I mean, all the counts’ heirs went there, like, back since forever.”

“This is not technically true. The Imperial Service Academy didn’t actually exist till after the end of the Time of Isolation. Before that, officers were trained by an apprenticeship system. Including your great-grandfather Piotr.” Granted, Piotr’s apprenticeship had been during a real war, as a sort of genius-autodidact with very few seniors able to advise him in that beleaguered new Barrayar. Piotr had made it up as he went along, and his world had perforce followed. There was a lot of Piotr in Miles, Cordelia reflected, not for the first time.

“But Granda went there. And Da. And Uncle Ivan. And Uncle Gregor, and Uncle Duv Galeni, who isn’t even Vor, and everybody.”

“Not your Uncle Mark,” Cordelia offered. She perhaps deserved the Look she received in return.

“Uncle Mark’s different.”

“Very different,” she conceded, “yet genetically identical to your da. Biology isn’t destiny, you know.”

“He even looks different.”

“Yes, he goes to some trouble about that.” Mark worked to keep his formidable weight up as consciously as some people worked to keep theirs down, if more pleasurably. That this somatic choice disturbed the hell out of his progenitor-brother was more feature than bug, Cordelia gathered.

Alex focused on some unseen vision, apparently between his feet. “Not Great-uncle Vorthys, though.”

The Professor, as everyone called Dr. Vorthys, was Ekaterin’s late mother’s brother, and a galactic-class engineer in his own right. Perhaps Alex’s world was not as devoid of nonmilitary male role models as all that? Cordelia suddenly smiled. “Come into the house with me. I have something to show you. Just you.”

Alex followed her dutifully, but looking curious.

She led him up to her private office, closed the door, and cleared the small conference table. She then unlocked a tall cabinet stacked with wide, flat drawers. I haven’t had this open for over three years. She hesitated, then began pulling out sheet after sheet, some plastic flimsies but most real fiber-paper, all sizes from torn scraps to wide folios that half covered the table. Alex watched, then drifted up to tentatively finger them.

“These are your Granda Aral’s drawings,” she told him.

“I knew he drew pictures,” Alex offered. “He drew some of Helen and me once, I remember, when you were visiting for Winterfair.” That must have been on their last joint trip home, Cordelia calculated. “I didn’t know he drew so many.”

“For a long time, he didn’t,” said Cordelia. “He told me once he started when he was very young—younger even than you. But those were all lost. And some in his teens—those were mostly lost, too, but he kept a few hidden away. He didn’t really take it up again, as a hobby, till after the regency. More after we came to Sergyar.”

“Did he paint, too?”

“A little. I tried once to interest him in vid imaging, but he seemed to want that direct tactile connection. Something he did with his own hands and eye and brain and nothing else.” Belonging to no one else? Aral had spent so much of his life as a wholly-owned servant of the Imperium, perhaps it was natural to want to keep some tiny reserve sequestered.

Alex leaned his elbows on the table, staring more closely. “Why didn’t he show them to anybody? Or give them away? There’s so many. Didn’t anybody want them?”

“He showed them to a few people. Me, Oliver, Simon sometimes. I’m sure quite a few people would have wanted them, but not…not for the drawings themselves. They’d have wanted them because the Lord Regent or the Admiral or the Count had made them, or worse, to sell for money.” She paused. “He said it would be like that bicycle-riding bear someone was parading around the district, once. It wasn’t that the bear was good at bicycling, it was just the novelty of a bear riding at all.”

“They look pretty good to me.”

“You’re…not wrong.” Even for age eleven.

Alex sorted down through the stacks, handling the paper with reassuring care. “There’s lots of buildings. Is that Hassadar Square? Oh, look, here’s your Viceroy’s Palace! That’s good.”

Cordelia looked over his shoulder. “Especially considering it hadn’t been built yet, yes.” She swallowed, and launched her pitch. “Your granda never went to war, you know. War came to him. And he learned to deal with it because he had to. If his older brother hadn’t been killed, if he’d never become the heir, if Mad Yuri’s war had never happened, I suspect he might have gone on to be…possibly not an artist, but I’d bet an architect. Probably one of those men who takes on vast public projects, as complicated and demanding as commanding an army, because all that Vorkosigan energy would have found its path somehow.” Like a river running in flood down from his own Dendarii mountains, bursting its banks. “Building Barrayar in another way.”

Alex’s face had gone still. “But I am the heir.”

“But living, now, in the Barrayar your granda remade, which is not like the one he inherited. You have more choices. You have all the choices you can imagine. It would have pleased him very much to know that was a gift he gave you. That your life didn’t need to be like his.” She hesitated. “Nor like your da’s, or his granda’s, or like anyone’s but your own. To the top of your bent. Whatever that bent turns out to be.”

It was hard to tell how he processed that. The boy was almost as reserved as his mother. Miles’s mobile young face had revealed all his urgent soul, usually; this had spoiled her as a parent, Cordelia suspected. But Alex’s hand crept to the papers, and he said cautiously, “Can I have some of these?”

“In due course, you will inherit all of them. I’m so glad to know you’re interested. But if you would like a few to take with you now, you could pick out the ones you like best and I could have them made up into a kind of scrapbook for you, to protect them along the way.” Archival-grade backing and what-not—someone on staff would have a clue.

“I’d like that,” he said, in a voice so soft she had to bend her head to hear.

“Then it shall be so. Take your time.” She retreated to her comconsole to give him room to explore unhurried. Watching him covertly over the vid display, she tried to guess if this had been a good idea or not. Probably so, because they had to break off for lunch before he’d finished. Curiously, he did not mention the project over the dining table, not that he could much get a word in once the whole clan was gathered.

Surrounded by them all, she was reminded of the old parental curse—May you have six children just like you. Except that this curse seemed to have gone awry. Miles would have reveled at six children just like himself; he’d have known exactly what to do. Instead, he seemed to have received six children, none in the least like himself, and furthermore, each one different from all the others. As parental revenges went, this was actually much better.

Back in her personal office, she took up her reader and started on the next report, trying to make herself as unobtrusive as possible while Alex continued his quiet survey. She kept her ears pricked for his occasional noises of surprise or interest, or his undervoiced commentary. They were close to the time she would have to break this off and go back across the garden, when he said, “Oh, here’s you, Granma! Why aren’t you wearing any clothes? Were you swimming?”

Cordelia just kept herself from bolting up out of her chair, converting it into a casual approach. She should probably have locked that drawer, except there was no way to secure them individually, just the whole cabinet at once. “Artists are encouraged to draw nudes,” she said. “The human body is supposed to be the hardest thing to get really right. I posed for Aral when he wanted to practice.”

“It looks pretty good. I mean, it looks like you. And here’s Admiral Jole, too. I suppose you’d have to practice drawing both men and women.”

“That’s right.” The erotic edge to the portraits clearly escaped him. There were a few more down in that stack, she recalled, the tenor of which no one could mistake; she confiscated the pile under the pretext of picking it up to look through.

“Are there any herms, then? There ought to be herms, too. And maybe quaddies. And those water people. And heavy-worlders.”

“I think Aral lacked a live model. Consul Vermillion wasn’t here yet.” Would Vermillion have volunteered to pose if she’d hinted for it? Maybe so. Too late, as were so many things.

The next sheet down had a sketch of her and Oliver together, clearly in bed. That would have been harder to explain. She plucked out a couple of her, Oliver, and a few other people unexceptionably dressed, and set them down to distract Alex while she whisked the remainder out of sight. He would inherit them someday—she could never bear to destroy them—but not yet.

“Can I keep this one of you on the sailboat?”

She glanced over at it. “That’s one of a pair.” The sketch of Oliver, shirtless at the tiller, peeked out underneath. “They ought to be kept together.” Indeed. “How about this one, instead?”

“Are you in Mama’s garden here? All right.” He seemed satisfied with the substitution. She blew out a furtive breath of relief.

If he’d been raised a Betan child, would she have had to hide any of them? Well…maybe a few, yeah. Aral had been in a puckish humor when he’d done some of the caricatures, and in a serious one for a few more, some from memory, some from imagination, and a few as an aid to imagination. Those had proved useful. She wasn’t sure whether she was suppressing a grin or tears, but she kept her face turned away from Alex till she could smooth it once more, and restore the stack to its cave of fragile memories. Let it rest there in the dark till the edges no longer cut.

“No pictures of Granda, though,” Alex remarked.

“That is unavoidably true. Except…in a strange way, they all are. A view of him very few people ever had.”

“Huh.” His brows drew down, not so much puzzled as contemplative.

“Which is your favorite?” she asked, turning back to his selected treasures.

To her surprise, he pointed not to one of the portraits, but to a large, elaborate, and immensely detailed architectural drawing of the imposing facades of Vorkosigan House.

“Interesting. Why?” Was he homesick?

His hands worked, as if groping for an unknown tool. “It’s got the most…everything.”

She looked again. This was an unexpectedly recent piece, drawn here on Sergyar, presumably from some combination of memory and visual references. One would need a magnifying glass to take in all its features—if she recalled aright, Aral had used one in its composition—yet it didn’t feel in the least mechanical. Not Alex homesick, but someone else, perhaps?

“I do believe you are right, kiddo.”