“Yes, till the House fell.”
He tilted his head back and forth, as if thinking. Or puzzling. “Uh…I need to ask this, don’t mean to embarrass you or anything, and any answer is fine, as long as it’s true. Because I kind of need to know. Are you still a virgin?”
“Good heavens, no. Not since age fifteen.”
“Oh, was it fifteen for you, too? I mean, oh good. That’s not a problem for me, I don’t have any of that Time-of-Isolation baggage about marrying a virgin, that would be hypocritical, after all. Especially for a temporary-though-legal marriage. Easier the other way around anyway, really.” He paused again. “Contraceptive implant?”
“Also since age fifteen,” she assured him.
“Ah.” He smiled beatifically, and closed in for a kiss.
It was a good kiss, quite as good as her dream or better. She snaked her fingers up between them to deal with his first button. The flattering uniform seemed to have rather a lot of them. For the first time, his hand strayed below her shoulders, in a tentative, reverent touch; good, he wasn’t going to be grabby.
“So what happened when you were fifteen?” she asked, during their next break for air. “Was it a positive experience?”
This surprised a laugh from him, and a look of fond reminiscence. “I was a desperately randy adolescent—almost any experience would have seemed positive, but yes, I guess it was. She was one of the girl grooms at my great-uncle’s stables down at the long lake, a summer fling at a summer place, pretty damned idyllic, really. I thought I seduced her, but in retrospect, I realize she seduced me. Older woman, y’know—she was nineteen. Dear God, but I was a clumsy young lout. But fortunately, or maybe it was mercifully, she didn’t trample on my young ego. Though she would probably have had to gallop one of the dressage horses across it to make a dent, I was so chuffed with myself.”
Tej laughed at his laughter, pleased for his covertly tender former self.
A finger ran lightly over her cheekbone, tracing its curves. He started to speak, shook his head, but then, as if he could not help himself, asked, “And you? I hope you weren’t afflicted with a clumsy and self-absorbed young lout.”
“By no means. The Baronne wanted to make sure we knew what we were about—me and my siblings and the Jewels. So she imported an eminent team of licensed practical sexuality therapists from the Betan Orb for us, for erotic arts training. A man, a woman, and a hermaphrodite. They stayed two years—I was so sorry when they went back home. It was the only thing I was ever better at than my sisters.”
The hand stopped. He made a weird little noise down in his throat that she was completely unable to interpret. “I’ve never been to the Orb,” he said at last, in a faraway voice. “My cousin Miles has been there, though he won’t talk about it. Mark and Kareen have been there. Hell, even Commodore Kou and Madame Drou have been there…”
“Well, I’ve never been there, either,” she said. “Except by proxy, I suppose. But I did like the arts. They meshed well with my perception drills. It was like dance, in a way. For a little while, you live in your body, in the now, not all up in your head, all torn between the past and the future and missing the moment.”
That gentle hint brought him back to the now; the hand began to move again.
“I had two allowed suitors after that,” she went on. “But they didn’t work out. There’s another fortunately-in-retrospect for you.”
“Allowed suitors? I don’t know what—is that a Jacksonian term?”
“You don’t have allowed suitors on Barrayar?” she asked. He shook his head. She couldn’t say she was surprised, merely surprised at his ignorance. “It’s for when one is considering some sort of House alliance by marriage. Try before you buy, and I’m glad I did. The first was plainly far more interested in House politics than in me. When I told him that in that case maybe he should go to bed with my father, instead, he wasn’t too pleased. And nor was I. The other…I don’t know. There was nothing wrong with him, I just didn’t like the way he smelled.”
“Did he…not bathe?” Ivan Xav’s arm made an abortive jerk, as if he thought, but then thought better, of trying to sniff his own armpit.
“No, he was perfectly hygienic. Just not, I don’t know…compatible. The Baronne suggested later that maybe our immune systems were too similar, but that didn’t seem quite right to me. I thought he was just boring.”
“Oh,” said Ivan Xav.
She took the opportunity of his distraction to unwrap his shirt a few more buttons. Ah, nice chest hair. Not too much, not too little, a fine masculine dusting. The dark color made a pleasing aesthetic contrast with his pale skin, and she made sure to savor it. One should notice one’s partner’s gifts, and let them know one was pleased, or so her erotic arts training had emphasized. She curled a bit of hair over her finger, in signal of appreciation, and danced her fingertips down his torso.
The bunk room door slid open partway, and he flinched at the slight noise. Rish’s voice floated out. “Shower’s yours. I’m going to sleep now, so close both doors between when you’re done, eh?” The door slid shut, firmly.
“Rish has very sensitive hearing,” said Tej, “but she sleeps like a brick.”
“Ah,” said Ivan Xav, faintly. “Well. It’s been a long day, perhaps I’d better hit the lav—uh, unless you’d like first crack?”
“Or we could share the shower…” Her fingers twirled some more.
He shook his head in regret. “Not this one. It’s only a sonic, and two people wouldn’t fit.” He brightened. “But when we get back to my place in Vorbarr Sultana, I know that, um…another time?”
They should have taken advantage of the amenities back in his Solstice flat, but how were they to have known? Timing. The best chances of life all ran afoul of timing.
He kissed her again, then peeled himself away, lips last.
When they rendezvoused again in the bed, most of the unwrapping was already done, to Tej’s mild regret, but perhaps there would be other occasions. She slid between the sheets he had warmed. Clean sheets, she noticed in appreciation, a thoughtful touch from the busy bâtman, at a guess. Ivan Xav rolled over, and up on one elbow, his hand hovering uncertainly over her, as if he didn’t know where to begin.
She smiled up at him. “Are you shy, Ivan Xav?”
“No!” he denied indignantly. “It’s just…I’ve never made love to a wife, before. I mean, to my wife. A wife of my own. Not having had one. I don’t know how a few words in a groat circle can make what should be familiar feel very strange all of a sudden. Power of suggestion or something.”
She rolled up on her own elbow, to free a hand to reach his face, trace the bones beneath the skin. Good bones. Her body shifted with the motion, and then he wasn’t looking deep into her eyes anymore, but he was looking, pupils wide and black. Noticing gifts with due reverence needn’t always take the form of speech, she was reminded.
“I always kept it light, y’know?” he gasped.
“I can do light,” she said, leaning in. “My name means light.”
He leaned to meet her. “So…so illuminate me,” he breathed, and then there was much less talking.
* * *
The admiral’s bâtman brought breakfast on a trolley—not intending it to be indolently consumed in bed, Ivan suspected, but rather to make sure Ivan was out of his in a timely fashion. The military servant knocked politely on both bedroom doors and set up the meal in the sitting room, effacing himself promptly as soon, Ivan also suspected, as he’d ascertained who had slept with whom last night, the better to report that intelligence back to their mutual boss. Desplains had very obviously left it up to Ivan and his guests to sort themselves out, but he had to be curious as to the results.
Ivan felt…chipper, he decided, was a good word. Remarkably chipper. He put himself together in immaculate military order, waved to Rish, who was blearily sucking tea, kissed his wife goodbye—make that, his beautiful bed-rumpled exquisitely edible wife, who, to cap his enchantment
, did not appear to be chatty in the mornings—and chippered off to work, approximately twelve steps down the corridor to Desplains’s on-board office, adjoining the ship’s compact tactics room.
Desplains was there before him, not unexpectedly—the admiral found the constraints of jump travel minus combat boring, and, unless Madame Desplains was along, worked longer shifts to fill the time. Since this often resulted in his generating yet more things for his subordinates to do, it was one of Ivan’s duties not mentioned in the manual to make sure he didn’t extend those hours indefinitely. But this shift, Ivan felt ready to wrestle a thousand snakes. He greeted the admiral with a snappy salute and a “Good morning, sir!” and fell to.
Desplains merely raised a brow; they slid at once into the practiced routine, Ivan triaging the messages coming in semi-continuously over secured tightbeam, shooting notes back and forth, the occasional spoken query or order, returning memos, messages, and orders in a steady stream back to Komarr Operations or ahead to Ops HQ in Vorbarr Sultana, still five flight-days away. As Ivan had anticipated, the uncovering of the theft and smuggling ring had generated a load of new traffic, though not yet the interesting explosions that would no doubt ensue when word had finally made it all the way to Commodore Jole’s Sergyar Command and back.
“Ivan?” said Desplains, about an hour into this.
“Sir?”
“Stop whistling. You sound like an air leak.”
“Sorry, sir. Didn’t realize I was doing that.”
“So I eventually concluded.”
When the first wormhole jump came up, Ivan took a break to warn the ladies, which was when he discovered that both were susceptible to jump-sickness, Rish far more than Tej. He then pulled off the world’s easiest heroics by popping to the infirmary and collecting jump medication—the admiral’s ship carried the good stuff—and hand-delivering it, though Tej had to forcibly excavate the whimpering Rish from her bedding to administer her dose. “Five jumps in five days, why did I agree to this?” she moaned. But within twenty minutes she was sitting up blinking in agreeable surprise, reconciled once more with her inner ears, her stomach, her vision, and, apparently, her hearing—unpleasant auditory hallucinations from jump sickness were a new one to Ivan. All he ever experienced was a brief twinge of nausea and having everything appear to turn green, requiring him to remember to use caution in interpreting indicator lights for about a minute.
He returned to work, intensely aware that mere meters away, a pocket paradise awaited.
At the end of the shift, Desplains cordially invited Ivan and his female entourage to join him for dinner, which was laid on privately, just the four of them, in the little observation lounge. While ship food was not elaborate—Desplains was an indifferent gourmet—Ivan detected the hand of his loyal crew in fresh produce picked up before they’d left Komarr, and Ivan himself had long ago made sure that the admiral’s all-Barrayaran wines were something to be proud of. And the bâtman’s service was impeccable.
Observation lounge proved an apt description, as Ivan quickly became aware that Desplains was using the opportunity to study Ivan’s new bride and her companion. Well, evaluating personnel was one of the man’s jobs, after all. Tej did quite well, Ivan thought. It occurred to him that a Jacksonian Great House might be not-dissimilar to a District count’s household, with its demands for the regular entertainment of assorted business associates and odder guests, and a lot of potentially hazardous politics going on under the table. She certainly had the how-to-make-small-talk and which-fork-to-use down smoothly.
Desplains drew her out on her recent flight, avoiding the most distressing parts because this was, after all, dinner. A few of her stories were unconsciously hair-raising, but mostly they were neutral-to-opaque. Morozov might have done some groundwork, there, unconsciously supplying her with clues of what to say to Barrayarans, and she hadn’t missed the turns. Rish, more wary, spoke less.
In any case, Desplains seemed to have enjoyed the diversion and the company, for the invitation was repeated on succeeding evenings, with various of the ship’s crew gradually added in as shifts permitted—the captain, the off-duty pilots, the chief engineer, and Desplains’s physician, because the admiral traveled with his own as per Service regs. But by whatever mercy, Desplains did not let the meals stretch too far into the night, for which Ivan was intensely grateful.
During the dayshift hours when Ivan was closeted with Desplains, Tej seemed to be reasonably content reading and watching vids, or primping, or playing games with Rish. The crew of JP-9 were among the more sophisticated fellows the Service could supply, and any comments they had to make on Rish’s boggling physical appearance they at least kept out of her keen hearing. Rish made heavy use of the exercise room, first alarming and then impressing some of the crewmen who shared it. She somehow discovered three more addicts of Komarran holovid dramas, and ganged up with them during their off-duty time to obtain fresh episodes snuck in during slack periods in the tightbeaming.
At one of Admiral Desplains’s suggestions, Tej also discovered the on-board language tutoring programs, and dipped into the Barrayaran dialects of Russian, French and Greek, none of which she claimed to have been taught before. Or plunged into, Ivan thought, when he ducked his head in to check her progress. So far from a trudge, she seemed to find the task tolerably amusing.
“Oh, languages aren’t work,” she explained cheerily. “They’re a game. Now, economics, that’s boring.” She made a face at some pedagogical memory Ivan couldn’t guess at.
For almost the first time, Ivan saw a glimpse in her of her haut genetic heritage, not only in the scary speed of her acquisition, but the purity of her accent, as she wandered around the ship to find bemused bilingual crewmen to practice upon. Her Komarran accent had certainly fooled him, and presumably the Komarrans as well. No question, she had a keen ear, and he wondered if she possessed perfect pitch, too, like a certain part-ghem Barrayaran he knew.
The off-shifts arranged themselves, though Ivan was beginning to think that even 26.7 hours was too short for a day, or rather, for a night.
The first snake in Ivan’s garden raised its head briefly on the fourth day out. He’d forwarded a memo to Desplains’s comconsole from General Allegre, Chief of ImpSec, marked Personal, Eyes Only. A few minutes later, Desplains looked up and remarked mildly, “Ivan—you have messaged home with an account of your adventures, have you not?”
“No reason to, sir. I mean, you know all about it. And my mother stopped asking about my girlfriends after I turned thirty.”
“Vorpatril, I decline to get between you and your mother on any of your personal matters.”
“As well you shouldn’t have to, sir.”
And that was, Ivan hoped, the end of that, but a number of hours later—they were, after all, getting closer to Barrayar—he fielded another Eyes Only message, from an all-too-familiar address. Though the temptation to make it vanish between his comconsole and Desplains’s was very strong, Ivan nobly resisted it, a spasm of virtue that he suspected no one was going to appreciate.
About fifteen minutes later, Desplains remarked, “May I ask why, if Lady Alys Vorpatril wishes to know what is going on in her only son’s life, she applies to me and not to you?”
Ivan blinked. “Experience?”
The silence from across the room took on a curious frigid quality, and Ivan looked up. “Oh. That was one of those, what d’you call it, rhetorical questions, was it, sir?”
“Yes.”
Ivan cleared his throat. “You don’t suppose ImpSec’s been feeding her their reports, do you? That’s bound to be confusing. I mean, look at the stuff they send us.”
That last line almost worked. But, alas, not quite. Desplains’s lips tightened. “As she works directly, every day, with General Allegre and his key staff on matters of the emperor’s personal security, and lives with the man who ran ImpSec out of his head for decades before that, and you are her closest living relative, I would think you were in a
better position to guess the answer to that question than I am, Captain.”
“I’ll, ah”—Ivan swallowed—“I’ll just fire her off a little reassuring note right now, shall I, sir?”
“You do that.”
Ivan hated that dead-level tone. Ugly unnerving thing, it was. Reminded him of his Uncle Aral in a mood.
But a written note, that was the ticket. A vid recording was nothing but an invitation to blather, with no living person in real-time opposite you to give a visual or verbal cue how you were getting on, or when to stop.
Ivan bent to his comconsole, setting the header and the security codes. Medium security would likely do. Enough to shield the message from the eyes of people who didn’t need to know, not enough to make it sound like some sort of emergency.
Dear Mother.
He sat a moment, while lights blinked at him.
I don’t know what ImpSec’s been telling you, but actually, everything’s all right. I seem to have accidentally gotten married, but it’s only temporary. Don’t change the headings on your cards. I will explain it all to you when we get there.
Love, Ivan.
He contemplated that for a moment, then went back and cut the middle lines as redundant. If he was going to explain it all when he got there, surely he needn’t explain anything now.
I don’t know what ImpSec’s been telling you, but actually, everything’s all right. I will explain it all to you when we get there.
That looked much better. Now a little short, though. A slow smile turned his lips. He bent and added: P.S.—Byerly Vorrutyer has the whole story, if you can catch up with him.
Actually, he didn’t expect By to be back in Vorbarr Sultana till some days after he and Tej and Rish arrived, at the earliest. But what was that tale from Old Earth, about throwing one’s fellow traveler out of the troika to distract the pursuing wolves? Yeah, like that, only more virtual, since Mamere wouldn’t be able to lay her hands on By either. But it sounded good.
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