Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (29 page)

“Don’t you need lawyers and things?” said Rish.

“Shouldn’t think so. You’re not suing me for support, are you?” Ivan Xav asked Tej.

She shook her head. “No, just for a ride to Escobar, which The Gregor is giving us anyway.”

“If it’s something this Count Falco only does once a week, for a whole District—how many people are in the Vorpatril’s District, anyway?” said Rish.

“I dunno. Millions?”

“How does one man play judge to millions of people?” asked Rish, astonished.

“He doesn’t, of course. He’s got a whole District justice department, with all kinds of sub-territorial divisions for cities and towns and right on down to the Village Speaker level. But he keeps a hand in for the political symbolism of it, and to sample what his people really have to say. Most counts do, even Uncle Aral when he’s home. Which isn’t very often, true.”

“Hadn’t you better
check
his
schedule
?” asked Rish, sounding a trifle exasperated. “In case ImpSec calls with our ride, oh, say,
tomorrow morning
?”

“Um. Yeah, maybe…” said Ivan Xav, and lumbered off reluctantly to his comconsole. He was gone for a long time.

When he came back, he looked sheepish. “In fact, Falco’s Count’s Court docket is packed for months out. If that fast courier opening comes up sooner, I’ll have to pull personal strings. Which I can do, but would rather avoid if I can. Because the thing about me owing a big favor to Falco is, he’ll collect. And grin while he’s doing it. But I put us on the court’s waiting list—they say they sometimes get last-minute openings, which they fill first-come, first-served.” He took a breath. “Your protection won’t be withdrawn till you’re safe on Escobar, anyway, regardless of when we do this divorce deal.”

Rish nodded. Tej felt…odd.

They were going to Escobar, in theory, to take up a new life under new identities.
Lady Vorpatril
was certainly a new identity, enjoying a safety that didn’t rely on obscurity…
No. Stick to the plan
. Without the plan, they had no anchor at all; it was the last lifeline her parents had thrown to her, as they went down with their House.

*
 
*
 
*

Worried that Tej might be a little homesick, Ivan stopped on the way back to his flat one afternoon and found a brand-new
Great House
set, with six player panels. If he’d had any doubt that Rish was Byerly’s assignment as well as his hobby, it was put to rest by By’s apparent willingness to devote several evenings in a row to a children’s game, if, admittedly, a fast-moving, complex, and strangely addictive one. It didn’t help that By took to it so well, he was soon giving the born Jacksonians real competition, leaving Ivan to bring up the rear time and time again.

But Ivan found Morozov’s
other
way of winning at
Great House
to carry over, too. As one friendly anecdote followed another, in the relaxation and triggering reminders of the old game, Ivan learned a great deal about Tej’s upbringing as a real Jacksonian Great House baron’s daughter, apparently much doted-upon by her powerful Dada. Ivan traded with a few tales out of school, himself. Only Byerly did not contribute to the exchange, although Ivan was sure he was sucking it all in. But they were in the middle of a round of
Great House
when Ivan finally learned the real relationship of the late Baronne, her children, and her Jewels.

“Even-sister and odd-sister?” said Tej. “We call each other that because we are, more-or-less. Half-siblings, at least. The Baronne used a lot of her own genome as a base to create the Jewels. Although not Dada’s, except for the Y chromosome for Onyx. In a way, Ruby was really the first, the Baronne’s prototype, so she claims to count as One, in a class by herself. Erik was the next first, and then Topaz, and Star, then Pearl, and then Pidge, and then Emerald, and then Amiri, and then Rish and then finally me, and right after me, Jet—Onyx, that is. Odds and evens, see? It became a sort of family joke.” She sighed in memory. “Only now we’re all scattered. And Erik…I wish we could get some word about Topaz. I won’t say it’s worse, not knowing if she’s alive or not. But it’s…not good.”

Ivan stared open-mouthed at Rish, who stared back in somewhat affronted dignity. “So you’re my
sister-in-law
?” He sat a moment, not so much in reflection as stunned—like an ox that had just met a mallet. “That sure explains a lot…”

Byerly didn’t help by laughing like a loon.

*
 
*
 
*

“You could take some other course,” said Ivan Xav a week later, when Tej’s ground-vehicle operation training had concluded in triumph, or at least not disaster, and left her with a certification giving her the freedom of the city—if she could, first, borrow a vehicle, and second, wedge through the traffic. Bubble-tube systems were being retrofitted in some areas, but the installation was evidently slow, plagued with problems. It sometimes seemed to Tej as if this entire
planet
was in process of being retrofitted.

“There are three major universities and over a dozen colleges and who knows how many tech schools in this town,” Ivan Xav went on. “They have courses for
everything
. Well, maybe not licensed practicing sexuality whats-its, but given the way the conservative crowd complains, that may be next. You’re smart. You could pick anything you liked.”

Tej contemplated this offer, both uneasy and enticed. “I always had tutors, before. I never chose my own, like, off a
menu
.”

“It might be a way for you to meet more people, too,” Ivan Xav speculated. “I should really introduce you to more than the Koudelka girls, come to think. All the women I know have women friends—to excess, sometimes.” He paused for thought. “There’s Tatya Vorbretten, though she’s up to her ears in infants right now, as bad as Ekaterin and Delia. Tattie Vorsmythe? She was always fun, despite her strange taste in men. Not sure who all Mamere could suggest, of the younger generation. She used to know lots of Vor maidens, daughters of her cronies, y’know, but they mostly seem to have gotten married and moved along.”

This mental search for names was interrupted when he went to answer his comconsole. When he came back, he looked stricken.

“Bad news?” asked Tej, sitting up on the couch and setting aside her reader.

“No, not…not really. It was the Clerk’s office at the Vorpatril District Court. Says they had a case fall off Falco’s docket for the first afternoon of next week, and did I want the slot? I, uh…said yes. Because God knows when there’ll be another, y’know?”

“Oh, excellent,” said Rish, wandering in from the kitchen with a fresh mug of tea in her hand in time to hear this. “One more chore out of the way.”

“Oh,” Tej echoed hollowly. “Yeah. Good.”

*
 
*
 
*

It was like some weird sort of honeymoon in reverse, Ivan thought. Taking a personal day’s leave from Ops left him facing a three-day weekend, not something to waste. So Ivan seized the chance to show Tej more of Barrayar while he could, outside of the hectic confines of the capital. Rish, upon finding that her witness was not required, elected to stay behind under the loose supervision of Byerly, and just how
loose
that might be, Ivan wasn’t asking, gift horses and all that. It left him with a great chance for a real get-away with Tej, just the two of them at last.

It was not the season for tourists in the northeastern coastal District traditionally held by the Vorpatril counts. As his lightflyer beat its way up the shoreline against a cold sea wind, Ivan explained to Tej, “People come up here from the south in the summer to escape the heat. Then go back down in the winter to find it again. If there’s time, maybe I could take you down to see the south coast, too.” Time. There wasn’t enough time. Yes, the marriage was supposed to have been temporary. But not bleeding
instantaneous
.

He took a detour over the rural territory, to give Tej an idea of the extent of it. A few areas of early snow, just inland, proved no novelty to her, as Jackson’s Whole was apparently temperate all the way to the equator, with large and barren polar regions. Happily, the snow covered up the last few biocide blights lingering from the Occupation. But a little way up the coast past the summer resort town of Bonsanklar,
Good Saint Claire
in one of the old tongues, lay a cozy little inn specializing in the Vor trade, fondly remembered from a few visits in Ivan’s youth. It was still there, perhaps a little shabbier, but just as cozy. He and Tej managed one walk on the pebbled beach before darkness drove them indoors; the next day it rained, but their end room boasted its own fireplace, food service, and no reason to go out. None at all.

Far too soon the next morning, they were back in his lightflyer, threading their way upriver to the Vorpatril District capital city of New Evias.

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to call him,” said Tej, peering anxiously ahead out the front canopy. “Count Vorpatril or Count Falco? And if only his heir is Lord Vorpatril, why are you Lord Vorpatril too, or are you?”

“All right, I’ll try to explain it. Again,” said Ivan. “There are the Counts and their heirs, political heirs. Count Vorwho, Lord Vorwho, Lord Firstname—the firstborn males—like Aral, Miles, and Sasha, all right?”

“That, I got.”

“Any other siblings of Lord Firstname, like Sasha’s twin Lady Helen, get to stick on a Lord or Lady in front of their names too, as a courtesy title. Whether they drool or not. But those titles aren’t inherited in the next generation. So we have a case like By, whose grandfather was a count, whose father was a younger son and so Lord Firstname, and then Byerly, who is just Vorrutyer, the Vor part standing in for any other honorific. So you’d never introduce him as Mister or Monsieur Vorrutyer, just as Vorrutyer. Although his wife, if he had one, would be Madame Vorrutyer, and his sister, before she married, was Mademoiselle Vorrutyer.”

“All right,” said Tej, more doubtfully.

“Then, just to confuse the tourists, there are a bunch more Lord Vorlastnames running around, like me, who have the title as a permanent inheritance even though we aren’t in line for any Districts. My grandfather, who was just a younger grandson of that generation’s Count Vorpatril and so didn’t even rate a Lord Firstname, was given his when he married Princess Sonia, as some sort of prize, I guess.”

“Oh,” said Tej, fainter but still valiant. “But…”

“Those are the correct formal titles. Then we come to casual conversation. Falco, or Aral, would be Falco or Aral to their close friends and cronies, wives, and what-not. But I’d never call ’em that; it would be Count Falco or Count Aral, sort of like Uncle Aral. Informal but not so familiar or intimate, y’see? And also useful when there are a bunch of people with the same last name in the conversation, to keep straight which is which. So my mother gets called Lady Alys a lot, because there’s another Lady Vorpatril in town, Falco’s daughter-in-law, as well as his Countess Vorpatril. Er, and you, now.”

“But…I’m not intimate with the same people you’re intimate with—so I can’t just copy you, can I?”

“Keep it simple,” advised Ivan. “Just call him
Count Vorpatril
or
Sir
, unless he tells you otherwise. And still call him Count Vorpatril when we’re actually in his court, because that’s very formal, see?” He added after a moment, “I sure plan to.”

The outskirts of New Evias hove into view, and Ivan had to give over his lightflyer’s control to the municipal traffic computer. New Evias was maybe one-tenth the size of Vorbarr Sultana, but perhaps for that very reason, more uniformly modernized. In any case, the control system brought them down neatly into one of the few empty circles painted atop the parking garage next to the assorted District offices of justice. The targeting was accurate to within, oh, twenty centimeters or so. Or thirty. Ivan rubbed his jaw, made sure Tej hadn’t bitten her tongue or anything in the hard landing, and escorted her out.

Count Falco Vorpatril sat in judgment, as had several equally stodgy ancestors before him, in one of the few remaining Time-of-Isolation public buildings still left standing in downtown New Evias. The structure’s musty legal smell seemed to be ageless. Tej, who had grown very silent, perked up at the dark woodwork and elaborate stone carving gracing the architecture. “Now, this really looks like Barrayar,” she said. Ivan was gratified.

In a second-floor corridor, they encountered, prematurely, the count himself, who seemed to be on his way back from lunch.

“Ivan, my boy!” Falco hailed them.

He was still white-haired, stout, jovial—like a sly Father Frost with a hidden agenda. Falco was nothing if not a political survivor, Conservative by inclination, Centrist by calculation. He wore the formal Vorpatril House uniform of dark blue and gold, which adapted itself to his contours much as he adapted himself to the political landscape. A clerk bearing an electronic case filer stamped with the Vorpatril crest dogged his steps, obsequiously. Falco eyed Tej in open appreciation as they stopped and he strolled up.

“Sir.” Ivan came to attention. “May I introduce my wife, Lady Tej?”

“Indeed, you may.” Count Falco shook Tej’s hand, aborting a vague attempt on her part at a curtsey. “I’ve heard about you, young lady.”

“How do you do, Count Vorpatril, sir,” said Tej. Loading it all in, just in case, Ivan guessed.

“Talk with Mamere, did you, sir?” Ivan hazarded.

“Quite an entertaining talk, yes.”

“Oh, good, that’ll save a shipload of time.” Ivan squeezed Tej’s hand. “See, didn’t I say it’ll be fine?” Tej smiled gratefully and squeezed back, huddling closer. Ivan slipped a supporting arm around her waist.

Falco smiled benignly. “Countess Vorpatril was very curious about your nuptials, Ivan,” he went on, tapping Ivan familiarly on the chest with one broad finger. “She’d like to hear about them from you, by preference. We will both be down to the capital later in the week, note, where you may find her at Vorpatril House at the usual hours. You are behindhand on your courtesy visit, head of the clan and all that.”