Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [293]
"Da and Mama—especially Da—have gone all Time-of-Isolation over this. It's just crazy. They're all the time telling you to grow up, and then when you do, they try to make you stop. And shrink. It's like they want to cryofreeze me at twelve forever. Or stick me back in the replicator and lock down the lid." Kareen bit her lip. "And I don't fit in there anymore, thank you."
"Well," said Ekaterin, a shade of sympathetic amusement in her voice, "at least you'd be safe there. I can understand the parental temptation of that."
"You're making it worse for yourself, you know," said Martya to Kareen, with an air of sisterly critique. "If you hadn't carried on like a madwoman being locked in an attic, I bet they wouldn't have gone nearly so rigid."
Kareen bared her teeth at Martya.
"There's something to that in both directions," said Ekaterin mildly. "Nothing is more guaranteed to make one start acting like a child than to be treated like one. It's so infuriating. It took me the longest time to figure out how to stop falling into that trap."
"Yes, exactly," said Kareen eagerly. "You understand! So—how did you make them stop?"
"You can't make them—whoever your particular them is—do anything, really," said Ekaterin slowly. "Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that's hard." Ekaterin looked up from her lap where her hands had been absently rubbing at the yard dirt smeared on them, and remembered to smile. Kareen felt an odd chill. It wasn't just her reserve that made Ekaterin daunting, sometimes. The woman went down and down, like a well to the middle of the world. Kareen bet even Miles couldn't shift her around at his will and whim.
How hard is it to walk away? "It's like they're that close," she held up her thumb and finger a few millimeters apart, "to telling me I have to choose between my family and my lover. And it makes me scared, and it makes me furious. Why shouldn't I have both? Would it be considered too much of a good thing, or what? Leaving aside that it'd be a horrid guilt to lay on poor Mark—he knows how much my family means to me. A family is something he didn't have, growing up, and he romanticizes it, but still."
Her flattened hands beat a frustrated tattoo on the garden tabletop. "It all comes back to the damned money. If I were a real adult, I'd have my own income. And I could walk away, and they'd know I could, and they'd have to back off. They think they have me trapped."
"Ah," said Ekaterin faintly. "That one. Yes. That one is very real."
"Mama accused me of only doing short-term thinking, but I'm not! The butter bug project—it's like school all over again, short-term deprivation for a really major pay-off down the line. I've studied the analyses Mark did with Tsipis. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's a get-rich-big scheme. Da and Mama don't have a clue how big. They imagine I've spent my time with Mark playing around, but I've been working my tail off, and I know exactly why. Meanwhile I have over a month's salary tied up in shares in the basement of Vorkosigan House, and I don't know what's happening over there!" Her fingers were white where they gripped the table edge, and she had to stop for breath.
"I take it you haven't heard from Dr. Borgos, either?" said Martya cautiously to Ekaterin.
"Why . . . no."
"I felt almost sorry for him. He was trying so hard to please. I hope Miles hasn't really had all his bugs killed."
"Miles never threatened all his bugs," Kareen pointed out. "Just the escapees. As for me, I wish Miles had strangled him. I'm sorry you made him stop, Ekaterin."
"Me!" Ekaterin's lips twisted with bemusement.
"What, Kareen," scoffed Martya, "just because the man revealed to everybody