Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold [91]
"What's vertigo?" came a young voice from off-side-Sasha? no, Lizzie, good heavens-and Ekaterin responded at once, "Dizzy."
"Oh." The new word was duly accepted.
The vid steadied on Taurie, ten months old, gray eyes wide under a mop of wispy black curls, clinging grimly to the edge of a low table. Sasha, five going on six, as he and his twin, Helen, phrased it, and their sister Lizzie, three, sat on a couch in the background, Sasha watching with interest, Lizzie looking bored and kicking her feet, as if to say, I've already done this, what's the fuss?
"Come on, Taurie," Ekaterin's voice cooed. "Come to mama." Effective-Miles undertook not to fall through the vid plate, reaching for that seductive voice.
Taurie turned, rocking, on her stout little legs, releasing one hand, which waved for balance. Then the other. Then began a bow-legged toddle toward her mama's outstretched arms. How any child learned to walk while swaddled in a diaper, Miles didn't know, but there she went, thump-thump-thump, to fall chortling into Ekaterin's arms and be swung high in triumph.
"Let me try her," said Sasha, much as if his little sister were a robot car. He slid to his knees on the rug across from Ekaterin, and called encouragingly, "Come on, Taurie, you can do it!"
Fresh from her first victory, Taurie screeched and toddled toward him even faster, promptly falling on her chin and setting up a wail, clearly more of outrage than pain-Miles could discern the different timbres while still lunging up from his sleep. Sasha gathered her up, laughing. "Hey, you're supposed to learn to walk before you run!" He got her turned around and aimed back toward her mama, and the trial was repeated more successfully.
Lizzie, who had slid down off the couch during all this, gave up spinning herself in circles singing, "Vertigo, vertigo, vertigo!" and made a grab for the vid recorder, which, judging from the way the view jerked wildly, her elder sister promptly raised out of her reach. "No, I wanna run the vid now," came Lizzie's voice. "Let me, let me! Mama, make her let me . . . !"
Too soon, the domestic drama came to an end. Miles backed it up and re-ran it, wondering if these were indeed Taurie's first steps, or a reenactment for his benefit. The vid recorder suggested the latter.
Ekaterin's face returned against the cluttered background of her third-floor office, the one on the north side overlooking her Barrayaran garden through the Earth-import treetops.
"I'm so sorry Sergeant Taura never lived to see her namesake," she said, looking reflective, "but I'm glad you were at least able to tell her about Taurie, before the end. Maybe we should have given her name to Lizzie, sooner, rather than your Betan grandmother's. Oh, speaking of names. Sasha has now announced that he is Alex, I suppose because he gave up trying to talk everyone into Xander. Lexie and A.A. appear to be permanently rejected, now, too. Same rationale-if we don't call him Aral because of Grandda Aral, we shouldn't call him Sasha because of Grandpa Sasha, either. He seems to be sticking to this one, however, and he has Helen on his side at last, so in your next message, be sure to call him Lord Alex. That much logic and determination should be rewarded, I think."
Indeed. Miles had been deeply alarmed, earlier in his fatherhood, by what seemed Sasha's-Alex's-delay in verbal development, compared to his age-mate Helen, till Ekaterin had pointed out that the boy's sister never let him ask a question for himself or get a word in edgewise after. He wasn't delayed, merely amiable, and had caught up with complete sentences soon enough thereafter, as long as Helen wasn't in the same room translating for him.
"Come to think of it," Ekaterin went on, "didn't you once have some trouble deciding what you wanted to be called? And at a much older age. History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.
"But he loves you, whatever he's named.