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"It wasn't my idea to be your bodyguard," protested Martya. "Did I get a vote? No."

"Da and Mama—especially Da—have gone all Time-of-Isolation over this. It's just crazy. They're all the time telling you to grow up, and then when you do, they try to make you stop. And shrink. It's like they want to cryofreeze me at twelve forever. Or stick me back in the replicator and lock down the lid." Kareen bit her lip. "And I don't fit in there anymore, thank you."

"Well," said Ekaterin, a shade of sympathetic amusement in her voice, "at least you'd be safe there. I can understand the parental temptation of that."

"You're making it worse for yourself, you know," said Martya to Kareen, with an air of sisterly critique. "If you hadn't carried on like a madwoman being locked in an attic, I bet they wouldn't have gone nearly so rigid."

Kareen bared her teeth at Martya.

"There's something to that in both directions," said Ekaterin mildly. "Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It's so infuriating. It took me the longest time to figure out how to stop falling into that trap."

"Yes, exactly," said Kareen eagerly. "You understand! So—how did you make them stop?"

"You can't make them—whoever your particular them is—do anything, really," said Ekaterin slowly. "Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough . No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that , and walk away. But that's hard." Ekaterin looked up from her lap where her hands had been absently rubbing at the yard dirt smeared on them, and remembered to smile. Kareen felt an odd chill. It wasn't just her reserve that made Ekaterin daunting, sometimes. The woman went down and down, like a well to the middle of the world. Kareen bet even Miles couldn't shift her around at his will and whim.

How hard is it to walk away? "It's like they're that close," she held up her thumb and finger a few millimeters apart, "to telling me I have to choose between my family and my lover. And it makes me scared, and it makes me furious. Why shouldn't I have both? Would it be considered too much of a good thing, or what? Leaving aside that it'd be a horrid guilt to lay on poor Mark—he knows how much my family means to me. A family is something he didn't have, growing up, and he romanticizes it, but still."

Her flattened hands beat a frustrated tattoo on the garden tabletop. "It all comes back to the damned money. If I were a real adult, I'd have my own income. And I could walk away, and they'd know I could, and they'd have to back off. They think they have me trapped."

"Ah," said Ekaterin faintly. "That one. Yes. That one is very real."

"Mama accused me of only doing short-term thinking, but I'm not! The butter bug project—it's like school all over again, short-term deprivation for a really major pay-off down the line. I've studied the analyses Mark did with Tsipis. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's a get-rich-big scheme. Da and Mama don't have a clue how big. They imagine I've spent my time with Mark playing around, but I've been working my tail off, and I know exactly why. Meanwhile I have over a month's salary tied up in shares in the basement of Vorkosigan House, and I don't know what's happening over there! " Her fingers were white where they gripped the table edge, and she had to stop for breath.

"I take it you haven't heard from Dr. Borgos, either?" said Martya cautiously to Ekaterin.

"Why . . . no."

"I felt almost sorry for him. He was trying so hard to please. I hope Miles hasn't really had all his bugs killed."

"Miles never threatened all his bugs," Kareen pointed out. "Just the escapees. As for me, I wish Miles had strangled him. I'm sorry you made him stop, Ekaterin."

"Me!" Ekaterin's lips twisted with bemusement.

"What, Kareen," scoffed Martya, "just because the man revealed to everybody that you were a practicing heterosexual? You know, you really didn't play that one right, considering all the Betan possibilities. If only you'd spent the last few weeks dropping the right kind of hints, you could have had Mama and Da falling to their knees in thanks that you were only messing around with Mark. Though I do wonder about your taste in men."

What Martya doesn't know about my sampling of Betan possibilities , Kareen decided firmly, won't hurt me . "Or else they really would have locked me in the attic."

Martya waved this away. "Dr. Borgos was terrorized enough. It's really unfair to drop a normal person down in Vorkosigan House with the Chance Brothers and expect him to just cope."

"Chance Brothers?" Ekaterin inquired.

Kareen, who had heard the jibe before, gave it the bare grimace it deserved.

"Um," Martya had the good grace to look embarrassed. "It was a joke that was going around. Ivan passed it on to me." When Ekaterin continued to look blankly at her, she added reluctantly. "You know—Slim and Fat."

"Oh." Ekaterin didn't laugh, though she smiled briefly; she looked as though she was digesting this tidbit, and wasn't sure if she liked the aftertaste.

"You think Enrique is normal?" said Kareen to her sister, wrinkling her nose.

"Well . . . at least he's a change from the sort of Lieutenant Lord Vor-I'm-God's-Gift-to-Women we usually meet in Vorbarr Sultana. He doesn't back you into a corner and gab on endlessly about military history and ordnance. He backs you into a corner and gabs on endlessly about biology, instead. Who knows? He might be good husband material."

"Yeah, if his wife didn't mind dressing up as a butter bug to lure him to bed," said Kareen tartly. She made antennae of her fingers, and wriggled them at Martya.

Martya snickered, but said, "I think he's the sort who needs a managing wife, so he can work fourteen hours a day in his lab."

Kareen snorted. "She'd better seize control immediately. Yeah, Enrique has biotech ideas the way Zap the Cat has kittens, but it's a near-certainty that whatever profit he gets from them, he'll lose."

"Too trusting, do you think? Would people take advantage of him?"

"No, just too absorbed. It would come to the same thing in the end, though."

Ekaterin sighed, a distant look in her eyes. "I wish I could work four hours at a stretch without chaos erupting."

"Oh," said Martya, "but you're another. One of those people who pulls amazing things out of their ears, that is." She glanced around the tiny, serene garden. "You're wasted in domestic management. You're definitely R and D."

Ekaterin smiled crookedly. "Are you saying I don't need a husband, I need a wife? Well, at least that's a slight change from my sister-in-law's urgings."

"Try Beta Colony," Kareen advised, with a melancholy sigh.

The conversation grounded for a stretch upon this beguiling thought. The muted city street noises echoed over the walls and around the houses, and the slanting sunlight crept off the grass, putting the table into cool pre-evening shade.

"They really are utterly revolting bugs," Martya said after a time. "No one in their right mind will ever buy them."

Kareen hunched at this discouraging non-news. The bugs did too work. Bug butter was science's almost-perfect food. There ought to be a market for it. People were so prejudiced. . . .

A slight smile turned Martya's lip, and she added, "Though the brown and silver was just perfect. I thought Pym was going to pop."

"If only I'd known what Enrique was up to," mourned Kareen, "I could have stopped him. He'd been babbling on about his surprise, but I didn't pay enough attention—I didn't know he could do that to the bugs."