Lois Bujold - Mirror Dance

“Yes?” It came out sounding too abrupt. Surly. He tried again with a more encouraging, “Lady—?”

“Oh,” she smiled, “I’m not Lady anything. I’m Kareen Koudelka.”

His brow wrinkled. “Are you any relation to Commodore Clement Koudelka?” A name high on the list of Aral Vorkosigan’s senior staff officers. Galen’s list, of further assassinations if opportunity had presented.

“He’s my father,” she said proudly.

“Uh … is he here?” Mark asked nervously.

The smile disappeared in a momentary sigh. “No. He had to go to HQ tonight, at the last minute.”

“Ah.” To be sure. It would be a revealing study, to count the men who should have been here tonight but weren’t because of the Prime Minister’s condition. If Mark were actually the enemy agent he’d trained to be, in that other lifetime, it would be a fast way for him to discover who were the real key men in Aral Vorkosigan’s support constellation, regardless of what the rosters said.

“You really don’t look quite like Miles,” she said, studying him with a critical eye—he stiffened, but decided sucking in his gut would only draw more attention to it—”your bones are heavier. It would be a treat to see you two together. Will he be back soon?”

She does not know, he realized with a kind of horror. Doesn’t know Miles is dead, doesn’t know I killed him. “No,” he muttered. And then, masochistically, asked, “Were you in love with him too?”

“Me?” She laughed. “I haven’t a chance. I have three older sisters, and they’re all taller than I am. They call me the dwarf.”

The top of his head was not quite level with the top of her shoulder, which meant that she was about average height for a Barrayaran woman. Her sisters must be valkyries. Just Miles’s style. The perfume of her flowers, or her skin, rocked him in faint, delicate waves.

An agony of despair twisted all the way from his gut to behind his eyes. This could have been mine. If I hadn’t screwed it up, this could have been my moment. She was friendly, open, smiling, only because she did not know what he had done. And suppose he lied, suppose he tried, suppose he found himself contrary to all reason walking in Ivan’s most drunken dream with this girl, and she invited him mountain-climbing, like Miles—what then? How entertaining would it be for her, to watch him choke half to death in all his naked impotence? Hopeless, helpless, hapless—the mere anticipation of that pain and humiliation, again, made his vision darken. His shoulders hunched. “Oh, for God’s sake go away,” he moaned.

Her blue eyes widened in startled doubt. “Pym warned me you were moody … well, all right.” She shrugged, and turned, tossing her head.

A couple of the little pink flowers lost their moorings and bounced down. Spasmodically, Mark clutched at them. “Wait—!”

She turned back, still frowning. “What?”

“You dropped some of your flowers.” He held them out to her in his two cupped hands, crushed pink blobs, and attempted a smile. He was afraid it came out as squashed as the blossoms.

“Oh.” She took them back—long clean steady fingers, short undecorated nails, not an idle woman’s hands—stared down at the blooms, and rolled up her eyes as if unsure how to reattach them. She finally stuffed them unceremoniously through a few curls on top of her head, out of order of their mates and more precarious than before. She began to turn away again.

Say something, or you’ll lose your chance! “You don’t wear your hair long, like the others,” he blurted. Oh, no, she’d think he was criticizing—

“I don’t have time to fool with it.” Unconsciously compelled, her fingers raked a couple of curls, scattering more luckless vegetation.

“What do you do with your time?”

“Study, mostly.” The vivacity his rebuff had so brutally suppressed began to leak back into her face. “Countess Vorkosigan has promised me, if I keep my class standing she’ll send me to school on Beta Colony next year!” The light in her eyes focused to a laser-scalpel’s edge. “And I can. I’ll show them. If Miles can do what he does, I can do this.”

“What do you know about what Miles does?” he asked, alarmed.

“He made it through the Imperial Service Academy, didn’t he?” Her chin rose, inspired. “When everyone said he was too puny and sickly, and it was a waste, and he’d just die young. And then after he succeeded they said it was only his father’s favor. But he graduated near the top of his class, and I don’t think his father had anything to do with that.” She nodded firmly, satisfied.

But they had the die-young part right. Clearly, she was not apprised of Miles’s little private army.

“How old are you?” he asked her.

“Eighteen-standard.”

“I’m, um, twenty-two.”

“I know.” She observed him, still interested, but more cautious. Her eye lit with sudden understanding. She lowered her voice. “You’re very worried about Count Aral, aren’t you?”

A most charitable explanation for his rudeness. “The Count my father,” he echoed. That was Miles’s one-breath phrase. “Among other things.”

“Have you made any friends here?”

“I … don’t quite know.” Ivan? Gregor? His mother? Were any of them friends, exactly? “I’ve been too busy making relatives. I never had any relatives before, either.”

Her brows went up. “Nor any friends?”

“No.” It was an odd realization, strange and late. “I can’t say as I missed friends. I always had more immediate problems.” Still do.

“Miles always seems to have a lot of friends.”

“I’m not Miles,” Mark snapped, stung on the raw spot. No, it wasn’t her fault, he was raw all over.

“I can see that …” She paused, as the music began again in the adjoining ballroom. “Would you like to dance?”

“I don’t know any of your dances.”

“That’s a mirror dance. Anybody can do the mirror dance, it’s not hard. You just copy everything your partner does.”

He glanced through the archway, and thought of the tall doors to the promenade. “Maybe—maybe outside?”

“Why outside? You wouldn’t be able to see me.”

“Nobody would be able to see me, either.” A suspicious thought struck him. “Did my mother ask you to do this?”

“No …”

“Lady Vorpatril?”

“No!” She laughed. “Why ever should they? Come on, or the music will be over!” She took him by the hand and towed him determinedly through the archway, dribbling a few more flowers in her wake. He caught a couple of buds against his tunic with his free hand, and slipped them surreptitiously into his trouser pocket. Help, I’m being kidnapped by an enthusiast … ! There were worse fates. A wry half-smile twitched his lips. “You don’t mind dancing with a toad?”

“What?”

“Something Ivan said.”

“Oh, Ivan.” She shrugged a dismissive white shoulder. “Ignore Ivan, we all do.”

Lady Cassia, you are avenged. Mark brightened still further, to medium-gloomy.

The mirror dance was going on as described, with partners facing each other, dipping and swaying and moving along in time to the music. The tempo was brisker and less stately than the large group dances, and had brought more younger couples out onto the floor.

Feeling hideously conspicuous, Mark plunged in with Kareen, and began copying her motions, about half a beat behind. Just as she had promised, it took about fifteen seconds to get the hang of it. He began to smile, a little. The older couples were quite grave and elegant, but some of the younger ones were more creative. One young Vor took advantage of a hand-pass to bait his lady by briefly sticking one finger up his nose and wriggling the rest at her; she broke the rule and didn’t follow, but he mirrored her look of outrage perfectly. Mark laughed.