Lois Bujold - Barrayar

Count Piotr swung into their room, and stood, feet planted. He was formally dressed in his old uniform with his general’s rank insignia. “There you are.” The liveried man trailing him took one uneasy glance at Aral and Cordelia, and removed himself without waiting to be dismissed. Count Piotr didn’t even notice him go.

Piotr focused on Aral first. “You. You dared to shame me in public. Entrap me.”

“You shamed yourself, I fear, sir. If you had not gone down that path, you would not have found that trap.”

Piotr’s tight jaw worked this one over, the lines in his face grooved deep. Anger; embarrassment struggling with self-righteousness. Embarrassed as only one in the wrong can be. He doubts himself, Cordelia realized. A thread of hope. Let us not lose that thread, it may be our only way out of this labyrinth.

The self-rightousness took ascendance. “I shouldn’t have to be doing this,” snarled Piotr. “It’s women’s work. Guarding our genome.”

“Was women’s work, in the Time of Isolation,” said Aral in level tones. “When the only answer to mutation was infanticide. Now there are other answers.”

“How strange women must have felt about their pregnancies, never knowing if there was life or death at the end of them,” Cordelia mused. One sip from that cup was all she desired for a lifetime, and yet Barrayaran women had drained it to the dregs over and over … the wonder was not that their descendants’ culture was chaotic, but that it wasn’t more completely insane.

“You fail all of us when you fail to control her,” said Piotr. “How do you imagine you can run a planet when you cannot run your own household?”

One corner of Aral’s mouth twisted up slightly. “Indeed, she is difficult to control. She escaped me twice. Her voluntary return still astounds me.”

“Awake to your duties! To me as your Count if not as your father. You are liege-sworn to me. Do you choose to obey this off-worlder woman before me?”

“Yes.” Aral looked him straight in the eye. His voice fell to a whisper. “That is the proper order of things.” Piotr flinched. Aral added dryly, “Attempting to switch the issue from infanticide to obedience will not help you, sir. You taught me specious-rhetoric-chopping yourself.”

“In the old days, you could have been beheaded for less insolence.”

“Yes, the present setup is a little peculiar. As a count’s heir, my hands are between yours, but as your Regent, your hands are between mine. Oath-stalemate. In the old days we could have broken the deadlock with a nice little war.” He grinned back, or at least bared his teeth. Cordelia’s mind gyrated, One day only: The Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object. Tickets, five marks.

The door to the hallway swung open, and Lieutenant Koudelka peered nervously within. “Sir? Sorry to interrupt. I’m having trouble with the comconsole. It’s down again.”

“What sort of trouble, Lieutenant?” Vorkosigan asked, wrenching his attention around with an effort. “The intermittency?”

“It’s just not working.”

“It was fine a few hours ago. Check the power supply.”

“Did that, sir.”

“Call a tech.”

“I can’t, without the comconsole.”

“Ah, yes. Get the guard commander to open it up for you, then, see if the trouble is anything obvious. Then send for a tech on his clear-link.”

“Yes, sir.” Koudelka backed out, after a wary glance at the three tense people still frozen in their places waiting for him to withdraw.

The Count wouldn’t quit. “I swear, I will disown it. That thing in the can at ImpMil. Utterly disinherit it.”

“Not an operative threat, sir. You can only directly disown me. By an Imperial order. Which you would have to humbly petition, ah … me, for.” His edged smile gleamed. “I would, of course, grant it to you.”

The muscles in Piotr’s jaw jumped. Not the irresistible force and the immovable object after all, but the irresistible force and some fluid sea; Piotr’s blows kept failing to land, splashing past helplessly. Mental judo. He was off-balance, and flailed for his center, striking out wildly now. “Think of Barrayar. Think of the example you’re setting.”

“Oh,” breathed Aral, “that I have.” He paused. “We have never led from the rear, you or I. Where a Vorkosigan goes, maybe others might not find it so impossible to follow. A little personal … social engineering.”

“Maybe for galactics. But our society can’t afford this luxury. We barely hold our own as it is. We cannot carry the deadweight of millions of dysfunctionals!”

“Millions?” Aral raised a brow. “Now you extrapolate from one to infinity. A weak argument, sir, unworthy of you.”

“And surely,” said Cordelia quietly, “how much is bearable each individual, carrying his or her own burden, must decide.”

Piotr swung on her. “Yes, and who is paying for all this, eh? The Imperium. Vaagen’s laboratory is budgeted under military research. All Barrayar is paying for prolonging the life of your monster.”

Discomfited, Cordelia replied, “Perhaps it will prove a better investment than you think.”

Piotr snorted, his head lowered mulishly, hunched between his skinny shoulders. He stared through Cordelia at Aral. “You are determined to lay this thing on me. On my house. I cannot persuade you otherwise, I cannot order you … very well. You’re so set on change, here’s a change for you. I don’t want my name on that thing. I can deny you that, if nothing else.”

Aral’s lips were pinched, nostrils flaring. But he never moved in his seat. The viewer glowed on, forgotten in his still hands. He held his hands quiet and totally controlled, not permitting them to clench. “Very well, sir.”

“Call him Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, then,” said Cordelia, feigning calm over a sick and trembling belly. “My father will not begrudge it.”

“Your father is dead,” snapped Piotr.

Smeared to bright plasma in a shuttle accident more than a decade ago … She sometimes fancied, when she closed her eyes, that she could still sense his death imprinted on her retina in magenta and teal. “Not wholly. Not while I live, and remember.”

Piotr looked as if she’d just hit him in his Barrayaran stomach. Barrayaran ceremonies for the dead approached ancestor-worship, as if remembrance could keep the souls alive. Did his own mortality run chill in his veins today? He had gone too far, and knew it, but could not back down. “Nothing, nothing wakes you up! Try this, then.” He straddled the floor, boots planted, and glared at Aral. “Get out of my house. Both houses, Vorkosigan House, too. Take your woman and remove yourself. Today!”

Aral’s eyes flicked only once around his childhood home. He set the viewer carefully aside, and stood. ’Very well, sir.”

Piotr’s anger was anguished. “You’d throw away your home for this?!”

“My home is not a place. It is a person, sir,” Aral said gravely. Then added reluctantly, “People.”

Meaning Piotr, as well as Cordelia. She sat bent over, aching with the tension. Was the old man stone? Even now Aral offered him gestures of courtesy that nearly stopped her heart.

“You will return your rents and revenues to the District purse,” said Piotr desperately.

“As you wish, sir.” Aral headed for the door.

Piotr’s voice went smaller. “Where will you live?”

“Illyan has been urging me for some time to move to the Imperial Residence, for security reasons. Evon Vorhalas has persuaded me Illyan is right.”

Cordelia had risen when Aral did. She went now to the window and stared out over the moody grey, green, and brown landscape. Whitecaps foamed on the pewter water of the lake. The Barrayaran winter was going to be so cold… .