Miles in Love (89 page)

"Wow, wow, wow," husked Kareen. "Now
that
is a
glorious
bug!"

"I believe that was what you ordered, yes," murmured Ekaterin.

She touched a vid control, and the static bug came to life momentarily. It flicked its carapace, and a luminous lace of wing flashed out, like a spray of red sparks from a fire. "If Enrique can figure out how to make the wings bio-fluoresce at the right wavelength, they could twinkle in the dark. A group of them might be quite spectacular."

Enrique leaned forward, staring avidly. "Now
there's
an idea. They'd be a
lot
easier to catch in dim locations that way . . . There would be a measurable bio-energy cost, though, which would come out of butter production."

Mark tried to imagine an array of these glorious bugs, gleaming and flashing and twinkling in the twilight. It made his mind melt. "Think of it as their advertising budget."

"Which one should we use?" asked Kareen. "I really liked the one that looked like a flower . . ."

"Take a vote, I guess," said Mark. He wondered if he could persuade anyone else to go for the slick black model. A veritable assassin-bug, that one had looked. "A shareholder's vote," he added prudently.

"We've hired a consultant for aesthetics," Enrique pointed out. "Perhaps we should take her advice." He looked over to Ekaterin.

Ekaterin opened her hands back to him. "The aesthetics were all I could supply. I could only guess at how technically feasible they were, on the bio-genetic level. There may be a trade-off between visual impact, and the time needed to develop it."

"You made some good guesses." Enrique hitched his chair over to the comconsole, and ran through the series of bug vids again, his expression going absent.

"Time is important," Kareen said. "Time is money, time is . . . time is everything. Our first goal has to be to get some saleable product launched, to start cycling in capital to get the basic business up, running, and growing. Then play with the refinements."

"And get it out of Vorkosigan House's basement," muttered Mark. "Maybe . . . maybe the black one would be quickest?"

Kareen shook her head, and Martya said, "No, Mark." Ekaterin sat back in a posture of studied neutrality.

Enrique stopped at the glorious bug, and sighed dreamily. "This one," he stated. One corner of Ekaterin's mouth twitched up, and back down. Her order of presentation hadn't been random, Mark decided.

Kareen glanced up. "Faster than the flower-bug, d'you think?"

"Yes," said Enrique.

"Second the motion."

"Are you sure you don't like that black one?" said Mark plaintively.

"You're outvoted, Mark," Kareen told him.

"Can't be, I own fifty-one percent . . . oh." With the distribution of shares to Kareen and to Miles's cook, he'd actually slipped below his automatic majority. He intended to buy them back out, later . . .

"The glorious bug it is," said Kareen. She added, "Ekaterin said she'd be willing to be paid in shares, same as Ma Kosti."

"It wasn't that hard," Ekaterin began.

"Hush," Kareen told her firmly. "We're not paying you for hard. We're paying you for good. Standard creative consultant fee. Pony up, Mark."

With some reluctance—not that the workwoman was unworthy of her hire, but merely covert regret for the additional smidge of control slipping through his fingers—Mark went to the comconsole and made out a receipt of shares paid for services rendered. He had Enrique and Kareen countersign it, sent off a copy to Tsipis's office in Hassadar, and formally presented it to Ekaterin.

She smiled a little bemusedly, thanked him, and set the flimsy aside. Well, if she took it for play-money, at least she hadn't supplied play-work. Like Miles, maybe she was one of those people who was incapable of any speeds but
off
and
flat-out
. All things done well for the glory of God, as the Countess put it. Mark glanced again at the glorious bug, which Enrique was now making cycle through its wing-flash some more. Yeah.

"I suppose," said Mark with a last longing look at Kareen, "we'd better be going." Time-the-essence and all that. "The bug hunt has stopped everything in its tracks. R and D is at a standstill . . . we're barely maintaining the bugs we have."

"Think of it as cleaning up your industrial spill," Martya advised unsympathetically. "Before it crawls away."

"Your parents let Kareen come here today. Do you think they'd at least let her come back to work?"

Kareen grimaced hopelessly.

Martya screwed up her mouth, and shook her head. "They're coming down some, but not that fast. Mama doesn't say much, but Da . . . Da has always taken a lot of pride in being a good Da, you see. The Betan Orb and, well, you, Mark, just weren't in his Barrayaran Da's instruction manual. Maybe he's been in the military too long. Although truth to tell, he's barely handling
Delia's
engagement without going all twitchy, and she
is
playing by all the old rules. As far as he knows."

Kareen raised an inquiring eyebrow at this, but Martya did not elaborate.

Martya glanced aside to the comconsole, where the glorious bug sparked and gleamed under Enrique's enraptured gaze. "On the other hand—the guard-parents haven't forbidden
me
to go over to Vorkosigan House."

"Martya . . ." Kareen breathed. "Oh, could you?
Would
you?"

"Eh, maybe." She glanced under her lashes at Mark. "I was thinking maybe I could stand to get into some of this share-action myself."

Mark's brows rose. Martya? Practical Martya? To take over the bug hunt and send Enrique back to his genetic codes, without sestinas? Martya to maintain the lab, to deal with supplies and suppliers, to not flush bug butter down the sink? So what if she looked on him as a sort of oversized repulsive fat butter bug that her sister had inexplicably taken for a pet. He had not the least doubt Martya could make the brains run on time . . . . "Enrique?"

"Hm?" Enrique murmured, not looking up.

Mark got his attention by reaching over and switching off the vid, and explained Martya's offer.

"Oh, yes, that would be lovely," the Escobaran agreed sunnily. He smiled hopefully at Martya.

The deal was struck, though Kareen looked as if she might be having second thoughts about sharing shares with her sister. Martya electing to return to Vorkosigan House with them on the spot, Mark and Enrique rose to make their farewells.

"Are you going to be all right?" Mark asked Kareen quietly, while Ekaterin was busy getting her bug designs downloaded for Enrique to carry off.

She nodded. "Yeah. You?"

"I'm hanging on. How long will it take, d'you suppose? Till this mess gets resolved?"

"It's resolved already." Her expression was disturbingly fey. "I'm done arguing, though I'm not sure they realize it yet. I've had it. While I'm still living in my parents' house, I'll continue to hold myself honor-bound to obey their rules, however ludicrous. The moment I've figured out how to be somewhere else without compromising my long-range goals, I'll walk away. Forever, if need be." Her mouth was grim and determined. "I don't expect to be there much longer."

"Oh," said Mark. He wasn't exactly sure what she meant, or meant to do, but it sounded . . . ominous. It terrified him to think that he might be the cause of her losing her family. It had taken him a lifetime, and dire effort, to win such a place of his own. The Commodore's clan had looked to be such a golden refuge, to him . . . "It's . . . a lonely place to be. On the outside like that."

She shrugged. "So be it."

The business meeting broke up. Last chance . . . They were in the tiled hallway, with Ekaterin ushering them out, before Mark worked up the courage to blurt to her, "Are there any messages I can take for you? To Vorkosigan House, I mean?" He was absolutely certain he would be ambushed by his brother on his return, given the way Miles had briefed him on his departure.

Renewed wariness closed down the expression on Ekaterin's face. She looked away from him. Her hand touched her bolero, over her heart; Mark detected a faint crackle of expensive paper beneath the soft fabric. He wondered if it would have a salutary humbling effect on Miles to learn where his literary effort was being stored, or whether it would just make him annoyingly elated.

"Tell him," she said at last, and no need to specify which
him
, "I accept his apology. But I can't answer his question."

Mark felt he had a brotherly duty to put in a good word for Miles, but the woman's painful reserve unnerved him. He finally mumbled diffidently, "He cares a lot, you know."

This wrenched a short little nod from her, and a brief, bleak smile. "Yes. I know. Thank you, Mark." That seemed to close the subject.

Kareen turned right at the sidewalk, while the rest of them turned left to head back to where the borrowed Armsman waited with the borrowed groundcar. Mark walked backwards a moment, watching her retreat. She strode on, head down, and didn't look back.

Miles, who had left the door of his suite open for the purpose, heard Mark returning in the late afternoon. He nipped out into the hall, and leaned over the balcony with a predatory stare down into the black-and-white paved entry foyer. All he could tell at a glance was that Mark looked overheated, an inescapable result of wearing that much black and fat in this weather.

Miles said urgently, "Did you see her?"

Mark stared up at him, his brows rising in unwelcome irony. He clearly sorted through a couple of tempting responses before deciding on a simple and prudent, "Yes."

Miles's hands gripped the woodwork. "What did she say? Could you tell if she'd read my letter?"

"As you may recall, you explicitly threatened me with death if I dared ask her if she'd read your letter, or otherwise broached the subject in any way."

Impatiently, Miles waved this off. "
Directly
. You know I meant not to ask
directly
. I just wondered if you could tell . . . anything."

"If I could tell what a woman was thinking just by looking at her, would I look like
this
?" Mark made a sweeping gesture at his face, and glowered.

"How the hell would I know? I can't tell what you're thinking just because you look surly. You usually look surly."
Last time, it was indigestion
. Although in Mark's case, stomach upset tended to be disturbingly connected with his other difficult emotional states. Belatedly, Miles remembered to ask, "So . . . how
is
Kareen? Is she all right?"

Mark grimaced. "Sort of. Yes. No. Maybe."

"Oh." After a moment Miles added, "Ouch. Sorry."

Mark shrugged. He stared up at Miles, now pressed to the uprights, and shook his head in exasperated pity. "In fact, Ekaterin did give me a message for you."

Miles almost lurched over the balcony. "What,
what
?"

"She said to tell you she accepts your apology. Congratulations, dear brother; you appear to have won the thousand-meter crawl. She must have awarded you extra points for style, is all I can say."

"Yes! Yes!" Miles pounded his fist on the rail. "What else? Did she say anything else?"

"What else d'you expect?"

"I don't know. Anything.
Yes, you may call on me
, or
No, never darken my doorstep again
, or
something
. A clue, Mark!"

"Search me. You're going to have to go fish for your own clues."

"Can I? I mean, she didn't actually
say
I was not to bother her again?"

"She said, she couldn't answer your question. Chew on it, crypto-man. I have my own troubles." Shaking his head, Mark passed out of sight, heading for the back of the house and the lift tube.

Miles withdrew into his chambers, and flung himself down in the big chair in the bay window overlooking the back garden. So, hope staggered upright again, like a newly revived cryo-corpse dizzied and squinting in the light. But not, Miles decided firmly, cryo-amnesiac. Not this time. He lived, therefore he learned.

I can't answer your question
did not sound like
No
to him. It didn't sound like
Yes
either, of course. It sounded like . . . one more last chance. Through a miracle of grace, it seemed he was to be permitted to begin again. Scrape it all back to Square One and start over, right.

So, how to approach her?
No more poetry, methinks. I was not born under a rhyming planet
. Judging from yesterday's effort, which he had prudently removed from his wastebasket and burned this morning along with all the other awkward drafts, any verse flowing from his pen was likely to be ghastly. Worse: if by some chance he managed something good, she'd likely want more, and then where would he be? He pictured Ekaterin, in some future incarnation, crying angrily
You're not the poet I married!
No more false pretences. Scam just wouldn't do for the long haul.

Voices drifted up from the entry hall. Pym was admitting a visitor. It wasn't anyone Miles recognized at this muffled distance; male, so it was likely a caller upon his father. Miles dismissed it from his attention, and settled back down.

She accepts your apology. She accepts your apology
. Life, hope, and all good things opened up before him.

The unacknowledged panic which had gripped his throat for weeks seemed to ease, as he stared out into the sunny scene below. Now that the secret urgency driving him was gone, maybe he could even slow down enough to make of himself something so plain and quiet as her friend. What would
she
like . . . ?

Maybe he would ask her to go for a walk with him, somewhere pleasant. Possibly not in a garden, quite yet, all things considered. A wood, a beach . . . when talk lagged, there would be diversions for the eye. Not that he expected to run short of words. When he could speak truth, and was no longer constrained to concealment and lies, the possibilities opened up startlingly. There was so much more to say . . . Pym cleared his throat from the doorway. Miles swiveled his head.

"Lord Richars Vorrutyer is here to see you, Lord Vorkosigan," Pym announced.