Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [359]
Tante Cordelia said thoughtfully, "It's not entirely that simple. Both societies seek to solve the same fundamental problem—to assure that all children arriving will be cared for. Betans make the choice to do it directly, technologically, by mandating a biochemical padlock on everyone's gonads. Sexual behavior seems open at the price of absolute social control on its reproductive consequences. Has it never crossed your mind to wonder how that is enforced? It should. Now, Beta can control one's ovaries; Barrayar, especially during the Time of Isolation, was forced to try to control the entire woman attached to them. Throw in Barrayar's need to increase its population to survive, at least as pressing as Beta's to limit its to the same end, and your peculiar gender-biased inheritance laws, and, well, here we all are."
"Scrambling in the dark," growled Kareen. "No thank you."
"We should never have sent her there. With him," Da grumbled.
Tante Cordelia observed, "Kareen was committed to her student year on Beta before she ever met Mark. Who knows? If Mark hadn't been there to, ah, insulate her, she might have met a nice Betan and stayed with him."
"Or it," Kareen murmured. "Or her."
Da's lips tightened.
"These trips can be more one-way than you expect. I haven't seen my own mother face-to-face more than three times in the last thirty years. At least if she sticks with Mark, you may be certain Kareen will return to Barrayar frequently."
Mama appeared very struck by this. She eyed Mark in new speculation. He essayed a hopeful, helpful smile.
Da said, "I want Kareen to be safe. Well. Happy. Financially secure. Is that so wrong?"
Tante Cordelia's lips twisted up with sympathy. "Safe? Well? That's what I wanted for my boys, too. Didn't always get it, but here we are anyway. As for happiness . . . I don't think you can give that to anyone, if they don't have it in them. However, it's certainly possible to give un-happiness—as you are finding."
Da's frown deepened in a somewhat surly manner, quelling Kareen's impulse to loudly cheer on this line of reasoning. Better let the Baba handle this . . .
The Countess continued, "As for that last . . . hm. Has anyone discussed Mark's financial status with you? Kareen, or Mark . . . or Aral?"
Da shook his head. "I thought he was broke. I assumed the family made him an allowance, like any other Vor scion. And that he ran through it—like any other Vor scion."
"I'm not broke," Mark objected strenuously. "It's a temporary cash-flow problem. When I budgeted for this period, I wasn't expecting to be starting up a new business in the middle of it."
"In other words, you're broke," said Da.
"Actually," Tante Cordelia said, "Mark is completely self-supporting. He made his first million on Jackson's Whole."
Da opened his mouth, but then shut it again. He gave his hostess a disbelieving stare. Kareen hoped it would not occur to him to inquire closely into Mark's method for winning this fortune.
"Mark has invested it in an interesting variety of more and less speculative enterprises," Tante Cordelia went on kindly. "The family backs him—I've just bought some shares in his butter bug scheme myself—and we'll always be here for emergencies, but Mark doesn't need an allowance."
Mark looked both grateful and awed to be so maternally defended, as if . . . well . . . just so. As if no one had ever done so before.
"If he's so rich, why is he paying my daughter in IOUs?" demanded Da. "Why can't he just draw something out?"
"Before the end of the period?" said Mark, in a voice of real abhorrence. "And lose all that interest?"
"And they're not IOUs," said Kareen. "They're shares!"
"Mark doesn't need money," said Tante Cordelia. "He needs what he knows money can't buy. Happiness, for