Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [247]
Mark slipped the lightflyer back into its corner in the subbasement garage of Vorkosigan House, and followed Enrique into the lab to help him give the butter bugs their evening feed and checkup. Enrique did stop short of singing lullabies to the little creepy-crawlies, though he was in the habit of talking, half to them and half to himself, under his breath as he puttered around the lab. The man had worked all alone for too damned long, in Mark's view. Tonight, though, Enrique hummed as he separated his new supply of plants according to a hierarchy known only to himself and Madame Vorsoisson, some into beakers of water and some spread to dry on paper on the lab bench.
Mark turned from weighing, recording, and scattering a few generous scoops of tree bits into the butter bug hutches to find Enrique settling at his comconsole and firing it up. Ah, good. Perhaps the Escobaran was about to commit some more futurely-profitable science. Mark wandered over, preparing to kibitz approvingly. Enrique was busying himself not with a vertigo-inducing molecular display, but with an array of closely-written text.
"What's that?" Mark asked.
"I promised to send Ekaterin a copy of my doctoral thesis. She asked," Enrique explained proudly, and in a tone of some wonder. "Toward Bacterial and Fungal Suite-Synthesis of Extra-cellular Energy Storage Compounds. It was the basis of all my later work with the butter bugs, when I finally hit upon them as the perfect vehicle for the microbial suite."
"Ah." Mark hesitated. It's Ekaterin for you too, now? Well, if Kareen had got on a first-name basis with the widow, Enrique, also present, couldn't very well have been excluded, could he? "Will she be able to read it?" Enrique wrote just the same way he talked, as far as Mark had seen.
"Oh, I don't expect her to follow the molecular energy-flow mathematics—my faculty advisors had a struggle with those—but she'll get the gist of it, I'm sure, from the animations. Still . . . perhaps I could do something about this abstract, to make it more attractive at first glance. I have to admit, it's a trifle dry." He bit his lip, and bent over his comconsole. After a minute he asked, "Can you think of a word to rhyme with glyoxylate?"
"Not . . . off-hand. Try orange. Or silver."
"Those don't rhyme with anything. If you can't be helpful, Mark, go away."
"What are you doing?"
"Isocitrate, of course, but that doesn't quite scan . . . I'm trying to see if I can produce a more striking effect by casting the abstract in sonnet form."
"That sounds downright . . . stunning."
"Do you think?" Enrique brightened, and started humming again. "Threonine, serine, polar, molar . . ."
"Dolor," Mark supplied at random. "Bowler." Enrique waved him off irritably. Dammit, Enrique wasn't supposed to be wasting his valuable brain-time writing poetry; he was supposed to be designing long-chain molecule interactions with favorable energy-flows or something. Mark stared at the Escobaran, bent like a pretzel in his comconsole station chair in his concentration, and his brows drew down in sudden worry.
Even Enrique couldn't imagine he might attract a woman with his dissertation, could he? Or was that, only Enrique could imagine . . . ? It was, after all, his sole signal success in his short life. Mark had to grant, any woman he could attract that way was the right sort for him, but . . . but not this one. Not the one Miles had fallen in love with. Madame Vorsoisson was excessively polite, though. She would doubtless say something kind no matter how appalled she was by the offering. And Enrique, who was as starved for kindness as . . . as someone else Mark knew all too well, would build upon it . . .
Expediting the removal of the Bugworks to its new permanent site in the District seemed suddenly a much more urgent task. Lips pursed, Mark tiptoed quietly out of the lab.
Padding up the hall, he could still hear Enrique's happy murmur, "Mucopolysaccharide, hm, there's