Say something, or you’ll lose your chance! “You don’t wear your hair long, like the others,” he blurted. Oh, no, she’d think he was criticizing—

“I don’t have time to fool with it.” Unconsciously compelled, her fingers raked a couple of curls, scattering more luckless vegetation.

“What do you do with your time?”

“Study, mostly.” The vivacity his rebuff had so brutally suppressed began to leak back into her face. “Countess Vorkosigan has promised me, if I keep my class standing she’ll send me to school on Beta Colony next year!” The light in her eyes focused to a laser-scalpel’s edge. “And I can. I’ll show them. If Miles can do what he does, I can do this.”

“What do you know about what Miles does?” he asked, alarmed.

“He made it through the Imperial Service Academy, didn’t he?” Her chin rose, inspired. “When everyone said he was too puny and sickly, and it was a waste, and he’d just die young. And then after he succeeded they said it was only his father’s favor. But he graduated near the top of his class, and I don’t think his father had anything to do with that.” She nodded firmly, satisfied.

But they had the die-young part right. Clearly, she was not apprised of Miles’s little private army.

“How old are you?” he asked her.

“Eighteen-standard.”

“I’m, um, twenty-two.”

“I know.” She observed him, still interested, but more cautious. Her eye lit with sudden understanding. She lowered her voice. “You’re very worried about Count Aral, aren’t you?”

A most charitable explanation for his rudeness. “The Count my father,” he echoed. That was Miles’s one-breath phrase. “Among other things.”

“Have you made any friends here?”

“I … don’t quite know.” Ivan? Gregor? His mother? Were any of them friends, exactly? “I’ve been too busy making relatives. I never had any relatives before, either.”

Her brows went up. “Nor any friends?”

“No.” It was an odd realization, strange and late. “I can’t say as I missed friends. I always had more immediate problems.” Still do.

“Miles always seems to have a lot of friends.”

“I’m not Miles,” Mark snapped, stung on the raw spot. No, it wasn’t her fault, he was raw all over.

“I can see that …” She paused, as the music began again in the adjoining ballroom. “Would you like to dance?”

“I don’t know any of your dances.”

“That’s a mirror dance. Anybody can do the mirror dance, it’s not hard. You just copy everything your partner does.”

He glanced through the archway, and thought of the tall doors to the promenade. “Maybe—maybe outside?”

“Why outside? You wouldn’t be able to see me.”

“Nobody would be able to see me, either.” A suspicious thought struck him. “Did my mother ask you to do this?”

“No …”

“Lady Vorpatril?”

“No!” She laughed. “Why ever should they? Come on, or the music will be over!” She took him by the hand and towed him determinedly through the archway, dribbling a few more flowers in her wake. He caught a couple of buds against his tunic with his free hand, and slipped them surreptitiously into his trouser pocket. Help, I’m being kidnapped by an enthusiast … ! There were worse fates. A wry half-smile twitched his lips. “You don’t mind dancing with a toad?”

“What?”

“Something Ivan said.”

“Oh, Ivan.” She shrugged a dismissive white shoulder. “Ignore Ivan, we all do.”

Lady Cassia, you are avenged. Mark brightened still further, to medium-gloomy.

The mirror dance was going on as described, with partners facing each other, dipping and swaying and moving along in time to the music. The tempo was brisker and less stately than the large group dances, and had brought more younger couples out onto the floor.

Feeling hideously conspicuous, Mark plunged in with Kareen, and began copying her motions, about half a beat behind. Just as she had promised, it took about fifteen seconds to get the hang of it. He began to smile, a little. The older couples were quite grave and elegant, but some of the younger ones were more creative. One young Vor took advantage of a hand-pass to bait his lady by briefly sticking one finger up his nose and wriggling the rest at her; she broke the rule and didn’t follow, but he mirrored her look of outrage perfectly. Mark laughed.

“You look quite different when you laugh,” Kareen said, sounding startled. She cocked her head in bemusement.

He cocked his head back at her. “Different from what?”

“I don’t know. Not so … funereal. You looked like you’d lost your best friend, when you were hiding back there in the corner.”

If only you knew. She pirouetted; he pirouetted. He swept her an exaggerated bow; looking surprised but pleased, she swept one back at him. The view was charming.

“I’ll just have to make you laugh again,” she decided firmly. So, perfectly deadpan, she proceeded to tell him three dirty jokes in rapid succession; he ended up laughing at the absurdity of their juxtaposition with her maidenly airs as much as anything else.

“Where did you learn those?”

“From my big sisters, of course,” she shrugged.

He was actually sorry when the music came to an end. This time he took the lead, and urged her back into the next room for something to drink, and then out onto the promenade. After the concentration of the dance was over he’d become uncomfortably conscious of just how many people were looking at him, and it wasn’t paranoid dementia this time. They’d made a conspicuous couple, the beautiful Kareen and her Vorkosigan toad.

It was not as dark outside as he’d hoped. In addition to the lights spilling from the Residence windows, colored spotlights in the landscaping were diffused by the fog to a gentle general illumination. Below the stone balustrade the slope was almost woods-like with old-growth bushes and trees. Stone-paved walkways zig-zagged down, with granite benches inviting lingerers. Still, the night was chilly enough to keep most people inside, which helped.

It was a highly romantic setting, to be wasted on him. Why am I doing this? What good was it to bait a hunger that could not feed? Just looking at her hurt. He moved closer anyway, more dizzy with her scent than with the wine and the dancing. Her skin was radiantly warm with the exercise; she’d light up a sniper-scope like a torch. Morbid thought. Sex and death seemed too close-connected, somewhere in the bottom of his brain. He was afraid. Everything I touch, I destroy. I will not touch her. He set his glass on the stone railing and shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets. His left fingertips compulsively rotated the little flowers he’d secreted there.

“Lord Mark,” she said, after a sip of wine, “you’re almost a galactic. If you were married, and going to have children, would you want your wife to use a uterine replicator, or not?”

“Why would any couple not choose to use a replicator?” he asked, his head spinning with this sudden new tack in conversation.

“To, like, prove her love for him.”

“Good God, how barbaric! Of course not. I’d think it would prove just the opposite, that he didn’t love her.” He paused. “That was a strictly theoretical question, wasn’t it?”

“Sort of.”

“I mean, you don’t know anyone who’s seriously having this debate—not your sisters or anything?” he asked in worry. Not you, surely? Some barbarian needed his head stuck in a bucket of ice water, if so. And held under for a good long time, like till he stopped wriggling.

“Oh, none of my sisters are married yet. Though it’s not for lack of offers. But Mama and Da are holding out. It’s a strategy,” she confided.

“Oh?”

“Lady Cordelia encouraged them, after the second of us girls came along. There was a period soon after she immigrated here, when galactic medicine was really spreading out, and there was this pill you could take to choose the sex of your child. Everyone went crazy for boys, for a while. The ratio’s evened up again lately. But my sisters and I are right in the middle of the girl-drought. Any man who won’t agree in the marriage contract to let his wife use a uterine replicator is having a real hard time getting married, right now. The go-betweens won’t even bother dealing for him.” She giggled. “Lady Cordelia’s told Mama if she plays the game well, every one of her grandchildren could be born with a Vor in front of their names.”