Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [193]
"You are planning on the District University, aren't you?" said Mama, chinning herself gently on the bar hung from the ceiling joists, swinging her legs out horizontally, and holding them there for a silent count of twenty. "We didn't pinch marks to provide you with a galactic education to have you quit halfway. That would be heartbreaking."
"Oh, yes, I want to keep going. I want to go back to Beta Colony." There.
A brief silence. Then Da, plaintively: "But you just got home, lovie."
"And I wanted to come home," she assured him. "I wanted to see you all. I just thought . . . it wasn't too soon to begin planning. Knowing it's a big thing."
"Campaigning?" Da raised an eyebrow.
She controlled irritation. It wasn't as though she were a little girl begging for a pony. This was her whole life on the line, here. "Planning. Seriously."
Mama said slowly, perhaps because she was thinking or perhaps because she was folding herself upside-down, "Do you know what you would study this time? The work you selected last year seemed a trifle . . . eclectic."
"I did well in all my classes," Kareen defended herself.
"All fourteen completely unrelated courses," murmured Da. "This is true."
"There was so much to choose from."
"There is much to choose from at Vorbarr Sultana District," Mama pointed out. "More than you could learn in a couple of lifetimes, even Betan lifetimes. And the commute is much less costly."
But Mark won't be at Vorbarr Sultana. He'll be back on Beta. "Mark's therapist was telling me about some scholarships in her field."
"Is that your latest interest?" asked Da. "Psycho-engineering?"
"I'm not sure," she said honestly. "It is interesting, the way they do it on Beta." But was it psychology in general that entranced her, or just Mark's psychology? She couldn't really say. Well . . . maybe she could. She just didn't entirely like how the answer sounded.
"No doubt," said Mama, "any practical galactic medical or technical training would be welcome back here. If you could focus on one long enough to . . . The problem is money, love. Without Lady Cordelia's scholarship, we couldn't have dreamed of sending you off world. And as far as I know, her next year's grant has already been awarded to another girl."
"I didn't expect to ask her for anything more. She's done so much for me already. But there is the possibility of a Betan scholarship. And I could work this summer. That, plus what you would have spent anyway on the District University . . . you wouldn't expect a little thing like money to stop, say, Lord Miles?"
"I wouldn't expect plasma arc fire to stop Miles." Da grinned. "But he is, shall we say, a special case."
Kareen wondered momentarily what fueled Miles's famous drive. Was it frustrated anger, like the kind now heating her determination? How much anger? Did Mark, in his exaggerated wariness of his progenitor and twin, realize something about Miles that had eluded her? "Surely we can come up with some solution. If we all try."
Mama and Da exchanged a look. Da said, "I'm afraid things are a bit in the hole to start with. Between schooling for all of you, and your late grandmother Koudelka's illness . . . we mortgaged the house by the sea two years ago."
Mama chimed in, "We'll be renting it out this summer, all but a week. We figure with all the events at Midsummer we'll hardly have time to get out of the capital anyway."
"And your mama is now teaching self-defense and security classes for Ministerial employees," Da added. "So she's doing all she can. I'm afraid there aren't too many sources of cash left that haven't already been pressed into service."
"I enjoy the teaching," Mama said. Reassuring him? She added to Kareen, "And it's better than selling the summer place to clear the debt, which for a time we were afraid we'd have to do."
Lose the house by the sea, focus of her childhood? Kareen was horrified. Lady Alys Vorpatril herself had given the house on the eastern shore to the Koudelkas for a wedding present, all those years ago; something about saving her and baby Lord Ivan's