Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold [80]
Raven frowned. "You think Jin and Mina's mother might still be alive out there? In that case, why didn't she let her poor kids know?"
"Depends entirely on how dangerous that knowledge might have been."
Raven's frown deepened.
"Well, I can tell you one thing straight off," said Medtech Tanaka, bending to retrieve a scrap of plastic caul from the waste bin and holding it up to the light. "This woman here wasn't frozen in place of the one you're looking for, not in the past eighteen months at least. This is an older style of wrapping."
Three heads turned abruptly toward her. "How old?" said Miles. "And how do you know?"
Her wrinkled eyelids narrowed. "Oh, heavens. I haven't seen this brand with the hexagonal netting inside since my student days. At least thirty years old, maybe fifty?"
Miles groaned. "So this woman could have come from any time in the last two hundred and fifty years?"
"No, because there were other styles and brands before then. And after. This type was only on the market for about three decades."
"Thank you, Medtech Tanaka," said Miles. "That's a start."
His mystery, it seemed, had just split into two. Mystery mitosis. It seemed a retrograde sort of progress.
Raven lifted his first instrument and bent to his patient-turned-subject.
It was very quiet in the lift van for the first part of the trip back to the consulate. Jin's throat was choked with disappointment. Mina, strapped in the middle of the next seat to the rear, was pale and withdrawn. Vorlynkin negotiated traffic by hand till they were well away from Suze-san's, then linked to the municipal control grid and leaned back with a sigh.
He hitched around sideways to regard Jin and Mina both. "I'm really sorry about all this mix-up."
"It wasn't your fault," Jin conceded.
Vorlynkin opened his mouth to say something, evidently thought better of it, and substituted simply, "Thank you." After a moment he added, "Although if you two had been my daughter, I'd have been furious to have you dragged into something like this."
Before Jin could say, But I thought we dragged you in, Mina piped up eagerly, "You have a daughter? How old is she? Can she play with us?"
Vorlynkin grimaced. "Annah's six, so she probably would like to play with you, but I'm afraid not. She's on Escobar. With her mother."
"Are they coming back soon?" asked Mina.
"No." Vorlynkin hesitated. "We're divorced."
Both Jin and Mina flinched a little at the scary word.
"Why are you divorced?" asked Mina. If they'd been sitting together, Jin could have kicked her in the ankle to shut her up, but unfortunately she was out of reach.
Vorlynkin shrugged. "It wasn't anyone's fault, really. She was an Escobaran. I met her when I was stationed at the embassy there as a junior secretary. When we first married, I thought it was understood that she would follow where my career took me. But by the time I was offered the promotion and the transfer to the Barrayaran embassy on Pol, Annah had come along. And my wife changed her mind. With a baby to look out for, she didn't want to leave the security of her family and her homeworld. Or she didn't trust me enough. Or something."
After a silence, which Jin endured in faint embarrassment and Mina, apparently, in deep fascination, Vorlynkin added, "My ex-wife remarried recently. Another Escobaran. She wrote me that her new husband wants to adopt Annah. I don't know. It might be better for her than a father she sees for maybe three days every three years. It's hard to decide. To let go." He had been talking to his lap but, unexpectedly, he raised his shrewd blue glance to Jin and Mina. "What do you think?"
Mina blinked, and blurted, "I'd want my real daddy."
Vorlynkin didn't look terribly cheered by this reply. Jin said more cautiously, "It depends, I guess. If he's a nice guy or not."