Lois Bujold - Mirror Dance

“It’s an optimistic theory, but if Ivan is so calculating, how can he have been like this since he could walk?” the Count asked plaintively. “You’d make of him a fiendishly Machiavellian five-year-old, dear Captain.”

“I don’t insist on the interpretation,” said the Countess comfortably. “The point is, if Mark were to choose a life on, say, Beta Colony, Barrayar would contrive to limp along somehow. Even your District would probably survive. And Mark would not be one iota less our son.”

“But I wanted to leave so much more… . You keep coming back to that idea. Beta Colony.”

“Yes. Do you wonder why?”

“No.” His voice grew smaller. “But if you take him away to Beta Colony, I’ll never get a chance to know him.”

The Countess was silent, then her voice grew firmer. “I’d be more impressed by that complaint if you showed any signs of wanting to get to know him now. You’ve been avoiding him almost as assiduously as he’s been ducking you.”

“I cannot stop all government business for this personal crisis,” said the Count stiffly. “As much as I might like to.”

“You did for Miles, as I recall. Think back on all the time you spent with him, here, at Vorkosigan Surleau … you stole time like a thief to give to him, snatches here and there, an hour, a morning, a day, whatever you could arrange, all the while carrying the Regency at a dead run through about six major political and military crises. You cannot deny Mark the advantages you gave Miles, and then turn around and decry his failure to outperform Miles.”

“Oh, Cordelia,” the Count sighed. “I was younger then. I’m not the Da Miles had twenty years ago. That man is gone, burned up.”

“I don’t ask that you try to be the Da you were then; that would be ludicrous. Mark is no child. I only ask that you try to be the father you are now.”

“Dear Captain …” His voice trailed off in exhaustion.

After a thoughtful silence, the Countess said pointedly, “You’d have more time and energy if you retired. Gave up the Prime Ministership, at long last.”

“Now? Cordelia, think! I dare not lose control now. As Prime Minister, Illyan and ImpSec still report to me. If I step down to a mere Countship, I am out of that chain of command. I’ll lose the very power to prosecute the search.”

“Nonsense. Miles is an ImpSec officer. Son of the Prime Minister or not, they’ll hunt for him just the same. Loyalty to their own is one of ImpSec’s few charms.”

“They’ll search to the limits of reason. Only as Prime Minister can I compel them to go beyond reason.”

“I think not. I think Simon Illyan would still turn himself inside out for you after you were dead and buried, love.”

When the Count spoke again at last his voice was weary. “I was ready to step down three years ago and hand it off to Quintillan.”

“Yes. I was all excited.”

“If only he hadn’t been killed in that stupid flyer accident. Such a pointless tragedy. It wasn’t even an assassination!”

The Countess laughed blackly at him. “A truly wasted death, by Barrayaran standards. But seriously. It’s time to stop.”

“Past time,” the Count agreed.

“Let go.”

“As soon as it’s safe.”

She paused. “You will never be fat enough, love. Let go anyway.”

Mark sat bent over, paralyzed, one leg gone pins and needles. He felt plowed and harrowed, more thoroughly worked over than by the three thugs in the alley. The Countess was a scientific fighter, there was no doubt.

The Count half-laughed. But this time he made no reply. To Mark’s enormous relief, they both rose and exited the library together. As soon as the door shut he rolled out of the wing-chair onto the floor, moving his aching arms and legs and trying to restore circulation. He was shaking and shivering. His throat was clogged, and he coughed at last, over and over, blessedly, to clear his breathing. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, felt like doing both at once, and settled for wheezing, watching his belly rise and fall. He felt obese. He felt insane. He felt as if his skin had gone transparent, and passers-by could look and point to every private organ.

What he did not feel, he realized as he caught his breath again after the coughing jag, was afraid. Not of the Count and Countess, anyway. Their public faces and their privates ones were … unexpectedly congruent. It seemed he could trust them, not so much not to hurt him, but to be what they were, what they appeared. He could not at first put a word to it, this sense of personal unity. Then it came to him. Oh. So that’s what integrity looks like. I didn’t know.

The Countess kept her promise, or threat, to send Mark touring with Elena. The ensuing few weeks were punctuated by frequent excursions all over Vorbarr Sultana and the neighboring Districts, slanted heavily to the cultural and historical, including a private tour of the Imperial Residence. Gregor was not at home that day, to Mark’s relief. They must have hit every museum in town. Elena, presumably acting under orders, also dragged him over what must have been two dozen colleges, academies, and technical schools. Mark was heartened to learn that not every institution on the planet trained military officers; indeed, the largest and busiest school in the capital was the Vorbarra District Agricultural and Engineering Institute.

Elena remained a formal and impersonal factotum in Mark’s presence. Whatever her own feelings upon seeing her old home for the first time in a decade, they seldom escaped the ivory mask, except for an occasional exclamation of surprise at some unexpected change: new buildings sprouted, old blocks leveled, streets re-routed. Mark suspected that the frenetic pace of the tours was just so she wouldn’t have to actually talk to him; she filled the silences instead with lectures. Mark began to wish he’d buttered up Ivan more. Maybe his cousin could have sneaked him out to go pub-crawling, just for a change.

Change came one evening when the Count returned abruptly to Vorkosigan House and announced that they were all going to Vorkosigan Surleau. Within an hour Mark found himself and his things packed into a lightflyer, along with Elena, Count Vorkosigan, and Armsman Pym, arrowing south in the dark to the Vorkosigans’ summer residence. The Countess did not accompany them. The conversation en route ranged from stilted to non-existent, except for an occasional laconic code between the Count and Pym, all half-sentences. The Dendarii mountain range loomed up at last, a dark blot against cloud shadows and stars. They circled a dimly glimmering lake to land halfway up a hill in front of a rambling stone house, lit up and made welcoming by yet more human servants. The Prime Minister’s ImpSec guards were discreet shapes exiting a second lightflyer in their wake. Since it was nearing midnight, the Count limited himself to giving Mark a brief orienting tour of the interior of the house, and depositing him in a second-floor guest bedroom with a view downslope to the lake. Mark, alone at last, leaned on the windowsill and stared into the darkness. Lights shimmered across the black silken waters, from the village at the end of the lake and from a few isolated estates on the farther shore. Why have you brought me here? he thought to the Count. Vorkosigan Surleau was the most private of the Vorkosigans’ several residences, the guarded emotional heart of the Count’s scattered personal realm. Had he passed some test, to be let in here? Or was Vorkosigan Surleau itself to be a test? He went to bed and fell asleep still wondering.

He woke blinking with morning sun slanting through the window he’d failed to re-shutter the night before. Some servant last night had arranged a selection of his more casual clothing in the room’s closet. He found a bathroom down the hall, washed, dressed, and went in cautious search of humanity. A housekeeper in the kitchen directed him outside to find the Count without, alas, offering to feed him breakfast.