“Aside from Galen, does Aral’s private orientation matter? To you?”

“I don’t know. Truth matters.”

“So it does. Well, in truth … I judge him to be bisexual, but subconsciously more attracted to men than to women. Or rather—to soldiers. Not to men generally, I don’t think. I am, by Barrayaran standards, a rather extreme, er, tomboy, and thus became the solution to his dilemmas. The first time he met me I was in uniform, in the middle of a nasty armed encounter. He thought it was love at first sight. I’ve never bothered explaining to him that it was his compulsions leaping up.” Her lips twitched.

“Why not? Or were your compulsions leaping up too?”

“No, it took me, oh, four or five more days to come completely unglued. Well, three days, anyway.” Her eyes were alight with memory. “I wish you could have seen him then, in his forties. At the top of his form.”

Mark had overheard himself verbally dissected by the Countess too, in this very library. There was something weirdly consoling in the knowledge that her scalpel was not reserved for him alone. It’s not just me. She does this to everybody. Argh.

“You’re … very blunt, ma’am. What did Miles think of this?”

She frowned thoughtfully. “He’s never asked me anything. It’s possible that unhappy period in Aral’s youth has come to Miles’s ears only as the garbled slander of Aral’s political enemies, and been discounted.”

“Why tell me?”

“You asked. You are an adult. And … you have a greater need to know. Because of Galen. If things are ever to be square between you and Aral, your view of him should be neither falsely exalted nor falsely low. Aral is a great man. I, a Betan, say this; but I don’t confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is … the higher achievement.” She gave him a crooked smile. “It should give you hope, eh?”

“Huh. Block me from escape, you mean. Are you saying that no matter how screwed up I was, you’d still expect me to work wonders?” Appalling.

She considered this. “Yes,” she said serenely. “In fact, since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.”

It wasn’t just his father who had made Miles crazy, Mark decided. “I’ve never heard you analyze yourself, ma’am,” he said sourly. Yes, who shaved the barber?

“Me?” she smiled bleakly. “I’m a fool, boy.”

She evaded the question. Or did she? “A fool for love?” he said lightly, in an effort to escape the sudden awkwardness his question had created.

“And other things.” Her eyes were wintry.

A wet, foggy dusk was gathering to cloak the city as the Countess and Mark were conveyed to the Imperial Residence. The splendidly liveried and painfully neat Pym drove the groundcar. Another half-dozen of the Count’s armsmen accompanied them in another vehicle, more as honor guards than bodyguards, Mark sensed; they seemed to be looking forward to the party. At some comment of his to the Countess she remarked, “Yes, this is more of a night off for them than usual. ImpSec will have the Residence sewn up. There is a whole parallel sub-society of servants at these things—and it’s not been totally unknown for an armsman of address to catch the eye of some junior Vor bud, and marry upward, if his military background is good enough.”

They arrived at the Imperial pile, which was architecturally reminiscent of Vorkosigan House multiplied by a factor of eight. They hurried out of the clinging fog into the warm, brilliantly-lit interior. Mark found the Countess formally attached to his left arm, which was both alarming and reassuring. Was he escort, or appendage? In either case, he sucked in his stomach and straightened his spine as much as he could.

Mark was startled when the first person they met in the vestibule was Simon Illyan. The security chief was dressed for the occasion in Imperial parade red-and-blues, which did not exactly render his slight form inconspicuous, though perhaps there were enough other red-and-blues present for him to blend in. Except that Illyan wore real lethal weapons at his hip, a plasma arc and a nerve disrupter in used-looking holsters, and not the blunted dual dress sword sets of the Vor officers. An oversized earbug glittered in his right ear.

“Milady,” Illyan nodded, and drew them aside. “When you saw him this afternoon,” he said in a low voice to the Countess, “how was he?”

No need to specify who he was, in this context. The Countess glanced around, to be sure they were out of earshot of casual passers-by. “Not good, Simon. His color’s bad, he’s very edemic, and he tends to drift in and out of focus, which I find more frightening than all the rest put together. The surgeon wants to spare him the double stress of having a mechanical heart installed while they’re waiting to bring the organic one up to size, but they may not be able to wait. He could end up in surgery for that at any moment.”

“Should I see him, or not, in your estimation?”

“Not. The minute you walk in the door he’ll sit up and try to do business. And the stress of trying will be as nothing compared to the stress of failing. That would agitate the hell out of him.” She paused. “Unless you just popped in for a moment to, say, convey a bit of good news.”

Illyan shook his head in frustration. “Sorry.”

Since the Countess did not speak again immediately into the silence that followed, Mark dared to say, “I thought you were on Komarr, sir.”

“I had to come back for this. The Emperor’s Birthday Dinner is the security nightmare of the year. One bomb could take out practically the whole damned government. As you well know. I was en route when the news of Aral’s … illness, reached me. If it would have made my fast courier go any faster, I would have gotten out and pushed.”

“So … what’s happening on Komarr? Who’s supervising the, uh, search?”

“A trusted subordinate. Now that it appears we may be searching only for a body—” Illyan glanced at the Countess, and cut himself off. She frowned grayly.

They’re dropping the priority of the search. Mark took a disturbed breath. “So how many agents do you have searching Jackson’s Whole?”

“As many as can be spared. This new crisis,” a jerk of Illyan’s head indicated Count Vorkosigan’s dangerous illness, “is straining my resources. Do you have any idea how much unhealthy excitement the Prime Minister’s condition is going to create on Cetaganda alone?”

“How many?” His voice went sharp, and too loud, but the Countess at least made no motion to quiet him. She watched with cool interest.

“Lord Mark, you are not yet in a position to request and require an audit of ImpSec’s most secret dispositions!”

Not yet? Not ever, surely. “Request only, sir. But you can’t pretend that this operation is not my business.”

Illyan gave him an ambiguous, noncommittal nod. He touched his earbug, looked abstracted for a moment, and gave the Countess a parting salute. “You must excuse me, Milady.”

“Have fun.”

“You too.” His grimace echoed the irony of her smile.

Mark found himself escorting the Countess up a wide staircase and into a long reception room lined with mirrors on one side and tall windows on the other. A major domo at the wide-flung doors announced them by title and name in an amplified voice.

Mark’s first impression was of a faceless, ominous blur of colorful forms, like a garden of carnivorous flowers. A rainbow of Vor house uniforms, heavily sprinkled with parade red-and-blues, actually outshone the splendid dresses of the ladies. Most of the people stood in small, changing groups, talking in a babble; a few sat in spindly chairs along the walls, creating their own little courts. Servants moved smoothly among them, offering trays of food and drink. Mostly servants. All those extremely physically-fit young men in the uniform of the Residence’s staff were surely ImpSec agents. The tough-looking older men in the Vorbarra livery who manned the exits were the Emperor’s personal armsmen.