Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (32 page)

Rish stood on one foot, bent backward, and touched the sole of the other to the back of her head, then alternated. Tej merely essayed a few less ambitious back-bends, while she thought this through. She finally collapsed to the carpet and asked, “What in the
world
did you trade to him for
that
confession?”

“I’m not at all sure,” said Rish, in a tone that frankly echoed this wonder. “But he was enunciating very clearly, just before he passed out.”

Tej squinted. “Puts rather a different spin on his choice of careers, maybe?”

“I think, yeah. At first I thought he was in it for the money, and then for the mischief, and then I figured both of those were covers for this crazy Barrayaran patriotism all these Vor fellows go on and on about. Then I thought maybe it was for revenge, for nailing the guilty. Now I wonder if this furtive obsession for sorting truth from lies is actually in aid of clearing the innocent.”

“That seems like two sides of one coin, to me.”

“Yeah, but it’s like the man bets tails, every time.”

“Hm.”

“In which case…”

“Hm?”

“He won’t give it up. No matter how much he despises the work. Or his subjects. Or himself.”

“Do you think…this planet. Barrayar. Since this divorce thing snagged up, what would you think of staying here? For a while. Longer.” Tej forced herself not to hold her breath.

Rish shrugged. “It’s been a more interesting place to visit than I would’ve imagined, but I wouldn’t want to live here. I want”—she hesitated—“what I had.”

“You miss the Jewels.” It wasn’t a question.

Rish stretched like a starfish on her back, then closed her arms and legs in tight. “As I would miss my limbs, amputated. I keep reaching, but they’re not
there
.”

Tej buckled the bell straps around her ankles, rose, and stamped. The bells sang back in a ragged chorus. “I’ll take Jet’s part,” she offered again. Keeping, somehow, the quaver out of her voice.

Rish rolled to her bare blue feet, kicked once in air, and took up her position. “Do your best.” She eyed Tej more closely. “Don’t worry, sweetling. I won’t abandon you on this benighted world. We’ll get out together.”

That’s not quite what I meant, Rish…
Tej bit her lip, nodded, extended her arms, and bent her legs, taking up the complex rhythm at the hub of the wheel, heel-and-toe. The music and motion flowed up through her body and out her spiraling fingertips, as she turned to track her spinning partner around the circle’s rim.

*
 
*
 
*

Ivan encountered By in the lobby of his building, entering just ahead of him. “Hey, wait up,” he called, and By paused. Ivan shifted his dinner bag from hand to hand and asked, “You going up to see Rish?”

“We’re heading out for the evening, yes.”

“Good-oh.”

They entered the up-tube together. Ivan pictured himself demanding of By,
What are your intentions toward my sister-in-law?
in the best paterfamilias style, and winced. Trouble was, By might
answer
. But as they exited to the hallway outside Ivan’s flat, his steps slowed nonetheless. By stopped with him, looking his inquiry.

“About Rish. You’re not making her, like, fall in love with you or anything, are you? Because you could be reassigned or something, and have to drop her. And I don’t want to be stuck in a flat full of weeping, angry women, with no male to take it out on but me.”

By tilted his head in appreciation of this concern. “No, I seem to be on the case, at least until they decamp for Escobar. Has your, ah, non-divorce affected the timetable on that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Have you asked?”

“Uh…no?”

“I see.”

By was dressed in casual garb, not evening wear; planning a night in, not a night out, apparently. Ivan went on in covert hope, “So, ah…any chance that you’ll invite her to move in with you? Save steps and all that. Or that she’ll decide to move in with you?”

By’s hooded eyes grew amused. “The topic has not come up.”

“But you could make it come up. Couldn’t you? S’true, I’d rather hug a snake, but there’s no accounting for tastes.”

“S-s-s-she is amazingly flexible,” By agreed. “I expect she could crush my skull with her thighs alone. Very talented thighs. I could be in danger of my life every time we go to bed. Just think of the obituary.”

Ivan heroically resisted the straight line, not to mention the spinning visions this comment engendered. “You could make her happy just by getting her off my couch.”
Or off on my couch, I suppose
. Except it was possible By already had.
Dammit, I want my furniture back
.

By snorted. “Happy? God, no, I couldn’t make her happy. Not in a thousand years.”

Ivan’s brows rose in surprise. “I don’t get it. She seems tolerably amused by you. I mean, you’ve made her laugh. I’ve heard her.”

By waved a dismissive hand. “She won’t be happy till she’s reunited with her odd sibs. The other Jewels. They’re more than just a troupe or a team, or even a family. I suspect something gengineered.”

Ivan’s nose wrinkled. “Are you suggesting they’re some sort of Cetagandan post-human group mind or, or something?”

“No, not that. Definitely not, by her account of some of their arguments. Something much more visceral. I suspect some sort of kinesthetic biofeedback in play. It’s not at all obvious when you see her in isolation. You have to see her with the others.”

“Uh, when did this happen?”

“I had ImpSec Galactic Affairs scrounge me some recordings of the Jewels’s performances. It’s…no, it’s not clear. But it becomes subtly apparent, if you watch them over enough, that the Jewels were sustaining each other, somehow. But Rish alone is…starving isn’t the word. I don’t know what is.” By had forgotten to be smarmy, as his eyes narrowed in memory and thought.

“So what’s the difference?”

By’s hand reached out and closed, as if trying to grasp something elusive. “Rish with the Jewels looks like a woman with a beating heart. Rish in exile looks like…a woman with a muscle in her chest that pumps blood.”

Ivan tried to unravel this. “Y’know…I haven’t the
least
idea what you’re on about, By.”

By rubbed his forehead and laughed shortly. “Yeah, neither do I. You should watch the vids sometime, though.”

“Is Tej in any of ’em?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

They walked on; Ivan coded open his door. A sound of bells and rhythmic thumping wafted out.

They entered to find Tej and Rish engaged in some sort of vigorous dance practice. Tej spared Ivan a flashing smile, as she turned and stomped. She seemed to dance with every part of her, from her toes to her face; the expressive movements of her arms reminded him, for a moment, of the quaddies. The cadences moved through her generous flesh as though her body danced with itself, joyously. Ivan’s lips parted.

Rish, spotting By, glinted a grin like a sickle moon hung in an evening sky, and switched from spinning along around a wide circle like some planetary epicycle, to a kind of precise hand-to-hand-to-foot-to-foot rotation, a blue spider turning cartwheels. Ivan blinked dizzily as the grin rolled upside down with each turn.

“Now…now
that’s
just showing off,” he muttered to By.

For just a second, By grinned back, though not at him.

Tej, who seemed to be performing the same function as the drummer in a band backing the lead singer, brought the bells and thumps to a graceful closure. The two women stretched and made obeisance to each other, for all the world like two martial arts players completing a satisfactory round. Ivan wasn’t sure who’d won.

Rish waved at By and dashed toward the lav. “A quick shower, and I’ll be right with you.”

Ivan put the dinner bags down on the table and watched as Tej, arrestingly warm and breathless, sat on the carpet and began to unbuckle the ankle bells. By folded his arms and leaned against the wall, till Tej and Ivan drafted him to help pull furniture back into place. Ivan sighed meaningfully at his couch, but he wasn’t sure if By got the message. The Creatures absconded without dropping any further hints of their intentions, anyway.

All right, Ivan supposed he was slow. He’d been told so often enough by his assorted relatives, colleagues, and so-called friends. But it wasn’t until tripping over the ankle bells on the way back from the lav in the night, and wrapping himself around a warm, squirmy, sleeping Tej, that the thought crossed his mind like a bright, evasive—unhelpful—shooting star.

So…how does a fellow ask his own wife to marry him…?

It took him a long time to fall asleep again, after that.

*
 
*
 
*

“Tej? Tej!” A hand shook her shoulder; Tej swam up out of slumber. A dim yellow pool of light from the bedside lamp pushed back the shadows. Ivan Xav was sitting on her side of the bed with his trousers on, his face in that scrunched expression it wore when he’d bitten into something he didn’t quite like.

Tej rubbed her eyes and sat up on one elbow. “What
time
’zit?” She tried a sleepy smile on him, but it won only a return lip-twitch.

“A little after oh-three-hundred. I just got a rather strange call from a Customs & Security officer out at the Vorbarr Sultana Shuttleport. Says they’ve detained some fellow out there who claims to be a relative of yours. Or at any rate, he was asking for Madame Tejaswini Arqua Vorpatril, which is at least part-right.”

“What?” Tej sat bolt upright.
“
Who
?”

“Supposedly, some Escobaran tourist named Dr. Dolbraco Dax. Held up because of irregularities, Customs said, although the fellow’s documentation seemed to be all in order. I’m not sure what that meant, except that this Dax fellow was insistent that if you would come identify him, you could straighten it all out.”

“That’s
Amiri’s
identity!” Tej cried, scrambling from her covers. “Oh, what’s he doing
here
? We have to go out there!”

Ivan Xav prudently ducked out of the way as she lunged for her clothes. “Well, either your brother, or some really clever bounty hunter. Morozov was pretty sure some of those would be showing up in due course. Although a bounty hunter would have to be downright crazy to try a snatch in the middle of shuttleport security.” Ivan Xav scratched his stubbled chin. “Or maybe just lazy. Not as far to drag you to the exit, after all.”

“Most of them actually are crazy, but…” Tej’s thoughts whirled, as she shoved her head through her turtleneck and clawed her hair free. “If it’s really Amiri, how did he find me? Here, put your shirt on.” She crawled back across the rumpled bed in search of her socks. “Did your ImpSec people contact him or something?”

“Shouldn’t think he’d have been detained, in that case.” Ivan Xav shook his head. “Though I could see…If Miles gossiped to Mark or Kareen about you and me, and he probably couldn’t resist doing so, Mark might have told this Lily Durona woman who runs his clinic. Who could have said something to your brother. I can’t guess how much information might have been dropped out or added with each link. Or how it was spun. Mark and I, um…don’t always get along.”

As Tej got him dressed and pulled him toward the door, Ivan Xav added, “I’m leaning toward bounty hunters, myself. I did alert my ImpSec outer perimeter, though I don’t much care to talk to those fellows if I don’t have to. But at least it’ll give the night shift something to do that doesn’t involve voyeurism. I expect they’ll like that.”

“Voyeurism?” Despite her hurry, Tej froze. “I hope that’s a joke.”

“Well, I hope so, too,” confessed Ivan Xav. “Grant you, I gave up asking them questions I didn’t want to hear the answers to some time back.”

Shaking her head, Tej abandoned this side issue and shoved him into the hallway.

For the first time ever, as his two-seater arrowed out through the wintry margins of the city, she thought that Ivan Xav was driving too slowly. She leaned forward anxiously into her seat straps as the civilian shuttleport at last rose into view. This was her first look at the place, as they’d come downside before via the military shuttleport, where arrangements had been very different. VBS Main looked very much like every other big galactic port she’d ever seen—under construction. Ivan Xav wove handily around worksite barricades. Fortunately, he seemed to know where he was going, and the place was thinly populated at this dark off-hour.

His military ID whisked them past the first layer of security like a magic wand, at which point they were met by a man in a customs uniform, a lieutenant in military undress greens with ImpSec Horus-eyes on his collar, and, hurrying up last, Byerly and Rish, out of breath. The customs man stepped back at the sight of Rish, his lips parting in astonishment, but he glanced at the unreactive ImpSec fellow, swallowed, and carried on.

“I’ve arranged a preliminary look through a monitor for you, Madame Vorpatril,” the customs man told her, and it was a sign of something that Ivan Xav didn’t correct the title. “As it seemed to be thought that there could be some safety and security issue.” Tej wasn’t sure if his irritated glance at the ImpSec officer suggested a conflict of jurisdictions or procedures, or just the accumulated frustrations of trying to get ImpSec to give a straight answer to any question.

The customs man guided them through a code-locked door labeled
Authorized Personnel Only
and threaded a maze of office corridors, mostly with doors shut for the night. Down two floors, through some utilitarian tunnels smelling of dry concrete and machine oil, up again, then to an unlabeled door in a broader corridor. Some kind of satellite security office, judging by the consoles; on duty was only a single clerk, who gave way to the customs officer and gestured to the vid. “Nothing of interest so far, sir.”

The plate showed four views of what appeared to be a midsized, private waiting room, brightly lit if a touch shabby, neither luxury lounge nor prison chamber. The ambiguous space was occupied by nine people and many jumbled piles of luggage. The figures were variously sitting up looking very bored, or lying across rearranged chairs and cases, uncomfortably dozing. Three men and six women. Tej’s heart seemed to stop beating altogether.