CHAPTER SIX
Bel arrived promptly at the Kestrel 's hatch, having changed from its staid work uniform into a startling but cheerful orange doublet with glinting, star-decorated blue sleeves, slashed trousers bloused into cuffs at the knee, and color-coordinated midnight-blue hose and friction boots. Variations of the style seemed to be the local high fashion for both males and females, whether with or without legs, judging by Greenlaw's less blinding outfit.
The herm conducted them to a hushed and serene restaurant on the grav side of the station with the usual transparent window-wall overlooking station and starscape. An occasional tug or pod zipped silently past outside, adding interest to the scene. Despite the gravitation, which at least kept food on open plates, the place bowed to quaddie architectural ideals by having tables set on their own private pillars at varying heights, using all three dimensions of the room. Servers flitted back and forth and up and down in floaters. The design pleased everyone but Roic, who cranked his neck around in dismay, watching for trouble in 3-D. But Bel, ever thoughtful, as well as trained in security protocols, had provided Roic with his own perch above theirs, with an overview of the whole room; Roic mounted to his eyrie looking more reconciled.
Nicol was waiting for them at their table, which commanded a superior view out the window-wall. Her garments ran to form-fitting black knits and filmy rainbow scarves; otherwise, her appearance was not much changed from when Miles had first met her so many years and wormhole jumps ago. She was still slim, graceful of movement even in her floater, with pure ivory skin and short-clipped ebony hair, and her eyes still danced. She and Ekaterin regarded each other with great interest, and fell at once into conversation with very little prompting from Bel or Miles.
The talk ranged widely as exquisite food appeared in a smooth stream, presented by the place's well-trained and unobtrusive staff. Music, gardening, and station bio-recycling techniques led to discussion of quaddie population dynamics and the methods—technical, economic, and political—for seeding new habitats in the growing necklace along the asteroid belt. Only old war stories, by a silent, mutual agreement, failed to trickle into the conversational flow.
When Bel guided Ekaterin off to the lavatory between the last course and dessert, Nicol watched her out of earshot, then leaned over and murmured to Miles, “I am glad for you, Admiral Naismith.”
He touched a finger briefly to his lips. “Be glad for Miles Vorkosigan. I certainly am.” He hesitated, then asked, “Should I be equally glad for Bel?”
Her smile crimped a little. “Only Bel knows. I'm done with traveling the Nexus. I've found my place, home at last. Bel seems happy here too, most of the time, but—well, Bel is a downsider. They get itchy feet , I'm told. Bel talks about making a commitment to the Union, yet . . . somehow, never gets around to applying.”
“I'm sure Bel's interested in doing so,” Miles offered.
She shrugged, and drained the last of her lemon drink; anticipating her performance later, she had forgone the wine. “Maybe the secret of happiness is to live for today, to never look ahead. Or maybe that's just a habit of mind Bel got into in its former life. All that risk, all that danger—it takes a certain sort to thrive on it. I'm not sure Bel can change its nature, or how much it would hurt to try. Maybe too much.”
“Mm,” said Miles. I can't offer them a false oath, or divided loyalties , Bel had said. Even Nicol, apparently, was not aware of Bel's second source of income—and hazard. “I do note, Bel could have found a portmaster's berth in quite a few places. It traveled a very long way to get one here, instead.”
Nicol's smile softened. “That's so.” She added, “Do you know, when Bel arrived at Graf Station, it still had that Betan dollar I'd paid you on Jackson's Whole tucked in its wallet?”
Miles managed to stop the logical query, Are you sure it was the same one? on his lips before it fell out of his mouth leaving room for his downsider foot. One Betan dollar looked like any other. If Bel had claimed it for the same one, when making Nicol's reacquaintance, who was Miles to suggest otherwise? Not that much of a spoilsport, for damn sure.
After dinner they made their way under Bel and Nicol's guidance to the bubble-car system, its arteries of transit recently retrofitted into the three-dimensional maze Graf Station had grown to be. Nicol left her floater in a common rack on the passenger platform. It took their car about ten minutes to wend through the branching tubes to their destination; Miles's stomach lifted when they crossed into the free fall side, and he made haste to slip his antinausea meds from his pocket, swallow one, and offer them discreetly to Ekaterin and Roic.
The entrance to the Madame Minchenko Memorial Auditorium was neither large nor imposing, being just one of several accessible airseal doorways on different levels of the station here. Nicol kissed Bel and flitted off. No crowds yet clogged the cylindrical corridors, as they'd come early to give Nicol time to make her way backstage and change. Miles was therefore unprepared for the vast chamber into which they floated.
It was an enormous sphere. Nearly a third of its interior surface was a round, transparent window-wall, the universe itself turned into backdrop, thick with bright stars on this shaded side of the station. Ekaterin grabbed his hand rather abruptly, and Roic made a small choked noise. Miles had the sense of having swum inside a giant beehive, for the rest of the wall was lined with hexagonal cells like a silver-edged honeycomb filled with rainbow jewels. As they floated out toward the middle the cells resolved into velvet-lined boxes for the audience, varying in size from cozy niches for one patron to units spacious enough for parties of ten, if the ten were quaddies, not trailing long useless legs. Other sectors, interspersed, seemed to be dark, flat panels of various shapes, or to contain other exits. He tried at first to impose a sense of up and down upon the space, but then he blinked, and the chamber seemed to rotate around the window, and then he wasn't sure if he was looking up, down, or sideways through it. Down was a particularly disturbing mental construction, as it gave the dizzy impression of falling into a vast well of stars.
A quaddie usher wearing an air-jet belt took them in tow, after they had gawked their fill, and steered them gently wall-ward to their assigned hexagon. It was lined with some dark, soft, sound-baffling padding and convenient handgrips, and included its own lighting, the colored jewels seen from afar.
A dark shape and a gleam of motion in their generously sized box resolved itself, as they approached, as a quaddie woman. She was slim and long-limbed, with fine white-blond hair cut finger length and waving in an aureole around her head. It made Miles think of mermaids of legend. Cheekbones to inspire men to duel with each other, or perhaps scribble bad poetry, or drown in drink. Or worse, desert their brigade. She was clothed in close-fitting black velvet with a little white lace ruff at her throat. The cuff on the lower right elbow of her softly pleated black velvet pants . . . sleeve, Miles decided, not leg, had been left unfastened to make room for a medical air-filled arm immobilizer of a sort painfully familiar to Miles from his fragile-boned youth. It was the only stiff, ungraceful thing about her, a crude insult to the rest of the ensemble.
No mistaking her for anyone other than Garnet Five, but he waited for Bel to introduce them all properly, which Bel promptly did. They shook hands all around; Miles found her grip athlete-firm.
“Thank you for obtaining these—” seats did not apply, “this space for us on such short notice,” Miles said, releasing her slim upper hand. “I understand we are to be privileged to view some very fine work.” Work was a word with extra resonance in Quaddiespace, he had already gathered, like honor on Barrayar.