“My pleasure, Lord Vorkosigan.” Her voice was melodious; her expression seemed cool, almost ironic, but an underlying anxiety glowed in her leaf-green eyes.
Miles opened his hand to indicate her broken lower right arm. “May I convey my personal apologies for the poor behavior of some of our men. They will be disciplined for it, when we get them back. Please do not judge all Barrayarans by our worst examples.” Well, she can't; we actually don't ship out our worst, Gregor be praised.
She smiled briefly. “I do not, for I've also met your best.” The urgency in her eyes tinged her voice. “Dmitri—what will happen to him?”
“Well, that depends to a great extent on Dmitri.” Pitches, Miles suddenly realized, could run two ways, here. “It could range, when he is released and returns to duty, from a minor black mark on his record—he wasn't supposed to remove his wrist com while on station leave, you know, for just the sort of reason you unfortunately discovered—to a very serious charge of attempted desertion, if he fails to withdraw his request for political asylum before it is denied.”
Her jaw set a trifle. “Perhaps it won't be denied.”
“Even if granted, the long-term consequences could be more complex than you perhaps anticipate. He would at that point be plainly guilty of desertion. He would be permanently exiled from his home, never able to return or see his family. Barrayar might seem a world well lost now, in the first flush of . . . emotion, but I think—I'm sure—it's something he could come to deeply regret later.” He thought of melancholy Baz Jesek, exiled for years over an even more badly managed conflict. “There are other, if less speedy, ways Ensign Corbeau might yet end up back here, if his desire to do so is true will and not temporary whim. It would take a little more time, but be infinitely less damaging—he's playing for the rest of his life with this, after all.”
She frowned. “Won't the Barrayaran military have him shot, or horribly butchered, or—or assassinated?”
“We are not at war with the Union.” Yet, anyway . It would take more heroic blundering than this to make that happen, but he ought not to underestimate his fellow Barrayarans, he supposed. And he didn't think Corbeau was politically important enough to assassinate. So let's try to make sure he doesn't become so, eh? “He wouldn't be executed. But twenty years in jail is hardly better, from your point of view. You don't serve him or yourself by encouraging him to this desertion. Let him return to duty, serve out his hitch, get passage back. If you're both still of the same mind then, continue your relationship without his unresolved legal status poisoning your future together.”
Her expression had grown still more grimly stubborn. He felt horribly like some stodgy parent lecturing his angst-ridden teenager, but she was no child. He'd have to ask Bel her age. Her grace and authority of motion might be the results of her dancer's training. He remembered that they were supposed to be looking cordial, so tried to soften his words with a belated smile.
She said, “We wish to become partners. Permanently.”
After only two weeks of acquaintance, are you so sure? He strangled this comment in his throat as Ekaterin's sideways glance at him put him in mind of just how many days—or was it hours?—it had taken him to fall in love with her. Granted, the permanently part had taken longer. “I can certainly see why Corbeau would wish that.” The reverse was more puzzling, of course. In both cases. He himself did not find Corbeau lovable—his strongest emotion so far was a deep desire to whack the ensign on the side of the head—but this woman clearly didn't see him that way.
“Permanently?” said Ekaterin doubtfully. “But . . . don't you think you might wish to have children someday? Or might he?”
Garnet Five's expression grew hopeful. “We've talked about having children together. We're both interested.”
“Um, er,” said Miles. “Quaddies are not interfertile with downsiders, surely?”
“Well, one has to make choices, before they go into the replicators, just as a herm crossing with a monosexual has to choose whether to have the genetics adjusted to produce a boy or a girl or a herm. Some quaddie-downsider partnerships have quaddie children, some have downsiders, some have some of each—Bel, show Lord Vorkosigan your baby pictures!”
Miles's head swiveled around. “What?”
Bel blushed and dug in its trouser pocket. “Nicol and I . . . when we went to the geneticist for counseling, they ran a projection of all the possible combinations, to help us choose.” The herm held up a holocube and turned it on. Six full-length still shots of children sprang into being above its hand. They were all frozen in their early teens, with the sense of adult features just starting to emerge from childhood's roundness. They had Bel's eyes, Nicol's jawline, hair a brownish black with that familiar swipe of a forelock. A boy, a girl, and a herm with legs; a boy, a girl, and a herm quaddie.
“Oh,” said Ekaterin, reaching for it. “How interesting .”
“The facial features are just an electronic blend of Nicol's and mine, not a genuine genetic projection,” Bel explained, willingly giving the cube to her. “For that, they'd need an actual cell from a real conceptus, which, of course, they can't have till a real one is made for the genetic modifications.”
Ekaterin turned the array back and forth, examining the portraits from all angles. Miles, looking over her shoulder, told himself firmly that it was probably just as well that his holovid of the blandly blastular Aral Alexander and Helen Natalia was still in his luggage back aboard the Kestrel . But maybe later he would have a chance to show Bel—
“Have you two finally decided what you want?” asked Garnet Five.
“A little quaddie girl, to start. Like Nicol.” Bel's face softened, then, abruptly, recovered its habitual ironic smile. “Assuming I take the plunge and apply for my Union citizenship.”
Miles imagined Garnet Five and Dmitri Corbeau with a string of handsome, athletic quaddie children. Or Bel and Nicol, with a clutch of smart, musical ones. It made his head spin. Roic, looking quietly boggled, shook his head at Ekaterin's profferment of a closer examination of the holo-array.
“Ah,” said Bel. “The show's about to start.” The herm retrieved the holocube and switched it off, and plunged it back safely deep in the pocket of its baggy blue knee breeches, carefully fastening the flap.
The auditorium had filled to capacity while they spoke, the honeycomb of cells now harboring an attentive crowd including a fair smattering of other downsiders, though whether Union citizen or galactic visitor Miles could not always tell. No green Barrayaran uniforms tonight, in any case. The lights dimmed; the hubbub quieted, and a few last quaddies sped across to their boxes and settled in. A couple of downsiders who had misjudged their momentum and were stranded in the middle were rescued by the ushers and towed to their box, earning a quiet snicker from the quaddies who noticed. An electric tension filled the air, the odd blend of hope and fear that any live performance bore, with its risk of imperfection, chance of greatness. The lights dimmed further, till only the blue-white starshine glinted off the chamber's array of now-crowded cells.
Lights flared, an exuberant fountain of red and orange and gold, and from all sides, the performers flowed in. Thundered in. Quaddie males, athletic and vastly enthusiastic, in skin-fitting ship knits made splendid with glitter. Drumming .
I wasn't expecting hand drums. Other free fall performances Miles had seen, whether dance or gymnastic, had been eerily silent except for the music and sound effects. Quaddies made their own noise, and still had hands left to play hands-across; the drummers met in the middle, clasped, gripped, exchanged momentum, turned, and doubled back in a shifting pattern. Two dozen men in free fall took up perfect station in the center of the spherical auditorium, their motion so controlled as to permit no sideways drift as the energy of their spins and duckings, twistings and turnings, flowed through their bodies one to another and on around again. The air pulsed with the rhythm of their drumming: drums of all sizes, round, oblong, two-headed; not only played by each holder, but some batted back and forth among them in an eye-and-ear-stunning cross between music and juggling, never missing a beat or a blow. The lights danced. Reflections spattered on the walls, picking out flashes from the boxes of upraised hands, arms, bright cloth, jewelry, entranced faces.