Lois Bujold - Captain Vorpatril's alliance

Tej smiled a sharp little smile, and for a moment, he could see Shiv in her face. “What did my parents think about it all?”

Ivan read on. By could stand to have one of those accuracy-brevity-clarity tutorials, but maybe Allegre favored a different style. And he did still seem to have been quite upset when he’d composed this. Hysterical was probably not too strong a term. “The Baronne seems to have thought it wasteful. The Baron just laughed.”

“Despite all the mother-in-law jokes everyone tells,” Tej said meditatively, “Grandmama always did get along very well with Dada. I think it was because she spent the whole of her life up until the Barrayaran annexation of Komarr following all the rules, no matter how stupid they were, and being screwed over for it, and Dada finally taught her how to break them. And break away from them.”

“By wants to know, did either of us—meaning, probably, you—know? About the brooch, I think he’s asking, though it’s hard to tell.”

“Nope,” said Tej. “Tell him, sorry.”

“I guess.”

Ivan finally started on his own frosty fruity drink—nice kick—as Tej scrolled down. “Here’s one to me from your mother,” she said. “She and Simon are back safely from their big galactic trip, during which nobody tried to kill, kidnap, or otherwise vex anybody after all. Though she says she was a little afraid for some Tau Cetan customs inspectors at one point, but she got Simon calmed down…”

Simon and Lady Alys’s exile had not been nearly so summarily ordered as Ivan and Tej’s, a mere suggestion conveyed through Empress Laisa to her social secretary that she was overdue for a nice, long holiday. Though Ivan doubted that any Imperial nuances had been lost en route . Ivan remembered that part of his last conversation with Gregor, too.

Gregor had been pacing, exasperated, when he’d wheeled and burst out: “And Simon—what the hell ?”

Ivan hesitated, while his hope that this might be a rhetorical question died a lonely death, then ventured, “I think he was bored, Gregor.”

“Bored!” Gregor jerked to a halt, taken aback. “I thought he was exhausted.”

“Right after the chip breakdown, sure.” Profoundly so . “For a while, everyone—even Mamere and Simon himself—assumed he was some fragile convalescent. But…quietly—he does everything quietly—he’s grown better.”

“I thank your mother for that, yes.”

Yeah, really. Ivan shied from trying to imagine the biography of a post-chip-Simon minus Alys, but it might have been a much shorter tale. “He’s fine when she’s with him. But she’s been going off to the Residence a lot, lately, leaving him to his own devices. And then Shiv came along and pushed all his old buttons, and, well, here we all are.”

Gregor contemplated the hereness of everyone, grimly. “I see.”

“I think he needs something to do. Not a full-time job. Occasional. Varied. Not too much like his old job.”

“That…will take some careful thought.”

Ivan hoped their long trip had given Gregor time for that thinking. He couldn’t help noticing, in retrospect, that despite the reported outbreak of Imperial sarcasm, it had been the Illyan Plan for the Arquas that Gregor had finally adopted, more or less. And that it seemed to be working, so far.

Tej, still reading—Mamere could be chatty—went on: “Oh, good, the new ImpSec building has been dedicated. Not built opposite the old one. They found another site. With fewer holes under it.”

“There’s a kindness,” Ivan put in. “Miles used to say that the one advantage of working in ImpSec HQ was that you couldn’t see ImpSec HQ.”

“They got Simon to cut the ribbon, ah, that’s sweet. She says they wanted to name it after him, but he declined the honor very firmly, so it’s going to go nameless for now.”

“I suppose they can circle back after he’s dead…” Ivan plowed on to his next letter. “Huh. Aunt Cordelia writes to me?”

“I really enjoyed meeting her and your Uncle Aral, when we stopped at Sergyar,” said Tej.

“She says she liked, you, too. And to be sure to allow time to stop again on our way back. She seems to assume we’ll be let to come back—that’s heartening. Simon and Mamere dropped in on their way home, too, evidently. Probably what triggered this. Simon and Aral enjoyed their trip out to see the new settlement…so glad for a chance to catch up with Alys…heard all about their nice visit to Beta Colony , yes, Mamere wrote me all about that, too… what? ”

“What what?” said Tej agreeably.

Mamere hadn’t written her only son everything about her trip to Beta Colony, evidently. “ She took Simon to the Orb ? Or was it the other way around…? No, I guess not. Female collusion, I bet.” He read on, his face screwing up, then demanded of the auntless, and therefore blameless, air, “Why do you think you have to tell me these things, Aunt Cordelia?”

Tej’s lips twitched. “So what does she tell you?”

“They signed up for some sort of one-week deluxe instructional course. That doesn’t sound too…Role-playing? Because Mamere thought it might be easy for Simon to get into, on account of having done covert ops in his youth. And the first day was pretty rocky, but once she persuaded Simon to stop treating the mandatory psychological interest survey as a hostile interrogation, things smoothed out…and…Thank God, now Aunt Cordelia switches to telling me all about Commodore Jole’s new sailboat—the Sergyaran seas don’t dissolve human skin the way Ylla’s do, happily. He took them all out for a sail, good. And no one drowned. Much better.”

“Better than what?” Tej was still laughing at him, he feared.

“Just—better.” Ivan took refuge in what dignity a man wearing nothing but shorts and sipping fruity girly drinks could muster. And also in the drink.

“We should go to the Orb, on the way back,” mused Tej. “I mean, it’s famous for its erotic arts instruction, which I’ve already had, but I’ve always wanted to see it.”

Ivan was torn. “Yeah, so have I, but…what the hell is the mandatory psychological interest survey ? Nobody ever mentioned that before.” Not even Miles.

Tej brightened. “My Betan tutors told me all about that. It’s not like a multiple-choice test—it’s more like a brain scan, while they run all kinds of images and stimuli past you, and then put the response-data through their analysis program. They pitch it to the customers as a way of helping people with limited time sort through the menu of offerings to find what will please them most—and it does do that. But it also screens for problem customers.”

“Are they turned away?”

“No, no. They just get a different level of supervision. They mean a lot of varied things by problem , you see. Some people are very distressed by insights that the survey reveals about them, things that they didn’t want to know, and then they have to be sort of gently talked down.”

Ivan considered this, warily. “I think Simon already knows everything about himself that he doesn’t want to know. He never seemed much given to self-deception. All those years of non-adjustable memory.”

“I can believe that.”

But a new reason for some people not to talk much about their visits to the famous Orb glimmered in Ivan’s mind. The next time he caught up with Miles…

Speaking of that devil. “Ah, here’s one from my cousin, Lord-Auditor-and-don’t-you-forget-it.”

“Oh, those are always very interesting.” Tej perked up.