Diplomatic Immunity (12 page)

"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.

Then, from another entrance, a dozen female quaddies all in blues and greens geysered up into the growing, geodesic pattern and joined the dance. All Miles could think was,
Whoever first brought castanets to Quaddiespace has much to answer for.
They added a laughing descant note to the percussive braid of sound: hand drums and castanets, no other instruments. None needed. The round chamber reverberated, fairly rocked. He stole a glance sideways; Ekaterin's lips were parted, her eyes wide and shining, drinking in all this booming splendor without reserve.

Miles considered Barrayaran marching bands. It wasn't enough that humans did something so difficult as learning to play a musical instrument. Then they had to do it in
groups
. While
walking around.
In
complicated patterns
. And then they competed with one another to do it even
better
. Excellence, this kind of excellence, could never have any sane economic justification. It had to be done for the honor of one's country, or one's people, or the glory of God. For the joy of being human.

The piece ran for twenty minutes, until the players were gasping and sweat spun off them in tiny drops to speed in sparking streaks into the darkness, and still they whirled and thundered. Miles had to stop himself from hyperventilating in sympathy, heartbeat synchronized with their rhythms. Then, one last grand blast of joyous noise—and somehow the shifting net of four-armed men and women resolved itself into two chains, which flowed away into the exits from which they had emerged a revelation ago.

Darkness again. The silence was like a blow; behind him, Miles heard Roic exhale reverently, longingly, like a man home from war easing himself into his own bed for the first time.

The applause—hand-clapping, of course—rocked the room. No one in the Barrayaran party, Miles thought, had to
pretend
enthusiasm for quaddie culture now.

The chamber hushed again as the orchestra emerged from four points and filtered into positions all around the great window. The half-a-hundred quaddies bore a more standard array of instruments—all acoustic, Ekaterin observed to him in a fascinated whisper. They spotted Nicol, assisted by two more quaddies who helped manage and secure her harp, which was nearly the usual shape for a harp, and her double-sided hammer dulcimer, appearing to be a dull oblong box from this angle. But the piece that followed included a solo section for her with the dulcimer, her ivory face picked out in spotlights, and the music that poured forth between her four flashing hands was anything but dull. Radiantly ethereal; heartbreaking; electrifying.

Bel must have seen this dozens of times, Miles guessed, but the herm was surely as entranced as any newcomer. It wasn't just a lover's smile that illuminated Bel's eyes.
Yes. You would not be loving her properly if you did not also love her improvident, lavish, spendthrift excellence.
No jealous lover, greedy and selfish, could hoard it all; it had to be poured forth upon the world, or burst its wellspring. He glanced at Ekaterin and thought of her glorious gardens, much missed back on Barrayar.
I shall not keep you away from them much longer, love, I promise.
 

There was a brief pause, while quaddie stagehands arranged a few mysterious poles and bars sticking in at odd angles around the interior of the sphere. Garnet Five, floating sideways with respect to Miles, murmured over her shoulder, "Coming up is the piece I usually dance. It's an excerpt from a larger work, Aljean's classic ballet
The Crossing
, which tells the story of our people's migration through the Nexus to Quaddiespace. It's the love duet between Leo and Silver. I dance Silver. I hope my understudy doesn't muck it up . . ." She trailed off as the overture swelled.

Two figures, a downsider male and a blond quaddie woman, floated in from opposite sides of the space, picked up momentum with hand-spins around a couple of the poles, and met in the middle. No drums this time, just sweet, liquid sound from the orchestra. The Leo character's legs trailed uselessly, and it took Miles a moment to realize that he was being played by a quaddie dancer with dummy legs. The woman's use of angular momentum, drawing in or extending various arms as she twirled or spun, was brilliantly controlled, her changes of trajectory around the various poles precise. Only a few indrawn breaths and critical mutters from Garnet Five suggested anything less than perfection to Miles's perceptions. The false-legged fellow was deliberately clumsy, earning a chuckle from the quaddie audience. Miles shifted uncomfortably, realizing he was watching a near-parody of how downsiders looked to quaddie eyes. But the woman's charming gestures of assistance made it seem more endearing than cruel. Bel, grinning, leaned over to murmur in Miles's ear, "It's all right. Leo Graf's supposed to dance like an engineer. He was."

The love angle of it all was clear enough. Affairs between quaddies and downsiders apparently had a long and honorable history. It occurred to Miles that certain aspects of his youth might have been rendered much easier if Barrayar had possessed a repertoire of romantic tales starring short, crippled heroes, instead of mutie villains. If this was a fair sample, it was clear that Garnet Five was culturally primed to play Juliet to her Barrayaran Romeo.
But let's not enact a tragedy this time, eh?
 

The enchanting piece drew to a climax, and the two dancers saluted the enthusiastically clapping audience before making their way out. The lights came up; break time. Performance art was fundamentally constrained, Miles realized, by biology, in this case the capacity of the human bladder, whether downsider or quaddie.

When they all rendezvoused again in their box, he found Garnet Five explaining quaddie naming conventions to Ekaterin.

"No, it's not a surname," said Garnet Five. "When quaddies were first made by the GalacTech Corporation, there were only one thousand of us. Each had just one given name, plus a numerical designation, and with so few, each name was unique. When our ancestors fled to their freedom, they altered what the numbers coded, but kept the system of single, unique names, tracked in a register. With all of old Earth's languages to draw on, it was several generations before the system really began to be strained. The waiting lists for the really popular names were insanely long. So they voted to allow duplication, but only if the name had a numerical suffix, so we could always tell every Leo from every other Leo. When you die, your name-number goes back in the registry to be drawn again."

"I have a Leo Ninety-nine in my Docks and Locks crew," said Bel. "It's the highest number I've run across yet. Lower numbers, or none, seem to be preferred."

"I've never run across any of the other Garnets," said Garnet Five. "There were eight altogether somewhere in the Union, last time I looked it up."

"I'll bet there will be more," said Bel. "And it'll be your fault."

Garnet Five laughed. "I can wish!"

The second half of the show was as impressive as the first. During one of the musical interludes, Nicol had an exquisite harp part. There were two more large group dances, one abstract and mathematical, the other narrative, apparently based on a tragic pressurization disaster of a prior generation. The finale put everyone out in the middle, for a last vigorous, dizzying whirl, with drummers, castanet players, and orchestra combining in musical support that could only be described as massive.

It felt to Miles as though the performance ended all too soon, but his chrono told him four hours had passed in this dream. He bade a grateful but noncommittal farewell to Garnet Five. As Bel and Nicol escorted the three Barrayarans back to the
Kestrel
in the bubble car, he reflected on how cultures told their stories to themselves, and so defined themselves. Above all, the ballet celebrated the quaddie body. Surely no downsider could walk out of the quaddie ballet still imagining the four-armed people as mutated, crippled, or otherwise disadvantaged or inferior. One might even—as Corbeau had demonstrated—walk out having free-fallen in love.

Not that all crippling damage was visible to the eye. All this exuberant athleticism reminded him to check his brain chemical levels before bed, and see how soon his next seizure was likely to be.

Miles woke from a sound sleep to tapping on his cabin door. "M'lord?" came Roic's hushed voice. "Admiral Vorpatril wants to talk with you. He's on the secured comconsole in the wardroom."

Whatever inspiration his backbrain might have floated up to his consciousness in the drowsy interlude between sleep and waking flitted away beyond recall. Miles groaned and swung out of his bunk. Ekaterin's hand extended from the top bunk, and she peeked over blearily at him; he touched it and whispered, "Go back to sleep, love." She snuffled agreeably and rolled over.

Miles ran his hands through his hair, grabbed his gray jacket, shrugged it on over his underwear, and padded out barefoot into the corridor. As the airseal door hissed closed behind him, he checked his chrono. Since Quaddiespace didn't have to deal with inconvenient planetary rotations, they kept a single time zone throughout local space, to which Miles and Ekaterin had supposedly adjusted on the trip in. All right, so it wasn't the middle of the night, it was early morning.

Miles sat at the wardroom table, straightened his jacket and fastened it to the neck, and touched the control on his station chair. Admiral Vorpatril's face and torso appeared over the vid plate. He was awake, dressed, shaved, and had a coffee cup at his right hand, the rat-bastard.

Vorpatril shook his head, lips tight. "How the hell did you know?" he demanded.

Miles squinted. "I beg your pardon?"

"I just got back the report on Solian's blood sample from my chief surgeon. It
was
manufactured, probably within twenty-four hours of its being spilled on the deck."

"Oh."
Hell and damnation.
"That's . . . unfortunate."

"But what does it mean? Is the man still alive somewhere? I'd have sworn he wasn't a deserter, but maybe Brun was right."

Like the stopped clock, even idiots could be correct sometimes. "I'll have to think about this. It doesn't actually prove if Solian's alive or dead, either way. It doesn't even, necessarily, prove that he wasn't killed
there
, just not by getting his throat cut."

Armsman Roic, God bless and keep him forever, set a cup of steaming coffee down by Miles's elbow and withdrew to his station by the door. Miles cleared his mouth, if not his mind, with the first sluicing swallow, and took a second sip to buy a moment to think.