Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [36]
"Not at all." Indeed, he did not look or sound annoyed, his posture open and inviting as he leaned back and watched her. "Not at all."
Thus encouraged, she decided to be daring again. When would she ever repeat such a chance, after all? "Perhaps . . . what happened to you was a different kind of wall for her."
"Yes, it makes sense that you would see it from her point of view, I guess."
"What . . . exactly did happen . . . ?"
"To me?" he finished. He did not grow stiff as he had in that prickly moment over dinner the other night, but instead regarded her thoughtfully, with a kind of attentive seriousness that was almost more alarming. "What do you know?"
"Not a great deal. I'd heard that the Lord Regent's son had been born crippled, in the Pretender's War. The Lord Regent was noted for keeping his private life very private." Actually, she'd heard his heir was a mutie, and kept out of sight.
"That's all?" He looked almost offended—that he wasn't more famous? Or infamous?
"My life didn't much intersect that social set," she hastened to explain. "Or any other. My father was just a minor provincial bureaucrat. Many of Barrayar's rural Vor are a lot more rural than they are Vor, I'm afraid."
His smile grew. "Quite. You should have met my grandfather. Or . . . perhaps not. Well. Hm. There's not a great deal to tell, at this late date. An assassin aiming for my father managed to graze both my parents with an obsolete military poison gas called soltoxin."
"During the Pretendership?"
"Just prior, actually. My mother was five months pregnant with me. Hence this mess." A wave of his hand down his body, and that nervous jerk of his head, both summed himself and defied the viewer. "The damage was actually teratogenic, not genetic." He shot her an odd sidelong look. "It used to be very important to me for people to know that."
"Used to be? And not now?" Ingenuous of him—he'd managed to tell her quickly enough. She was almost disappointed. Was it true that only his body, and not his chromosomes, had been damaged?
"Now . . . I think maybe it's all right if they think I'm a mutie. If I can make it really not matter, maybe it will matter less for the next mutie who comes after me. A form of service that costs me no additional effort."
It cost him something, evidently. She thought of Nikolai, heading into his teens soon, and what a hard time of life that was even for normal children. "Were you made to feel it? Growing up?"
"I was of course somewhat protected by Father's rank and position."
She noted that somewhat. Somewhat was not the same as completely. Sometimes, somewhat was the same as not at all.
"I moved a few mountains, to force myself into the Imperial Military Service. After, um, a few false starts, I finally found a place for myself in Imperial Security, among the irregulars. The rest of the irregulars. ImpSec was more interested in results than appearances, and I found I could deliver results. Except—a slight miscalculation—all the achievements upon which I'd hoped to be rejudged disappeared into ImpSec's classified files. So I fell out at the end of a thirteen-year career, a medically discharged captain whom nobody knew, almost as anonymous as when I started." He actually sighed.
"Imperial Auditors aren't anonymous!"
"No, just discreet." He brightened. "So there's some hope yet."
Why did he make her want to laugh? She swallowed the impulse. "Do you wish to be famous?"
His eyes narrowed in a moment of introspection. "I would have said so, once. Now I think . . . I just wanted to be someone in my own right. Make no mistake, I like being my father's son. He is a great man. In every sense, and it's been a privilege to know him. But there is, nevertheless, a secret fantasy of mine, where just once, in some history somewhere, Aral Vorkosigan gets introduced as being principally important because he was Miles Naismith Vorkosigan's father."
She did laugh then, though she muffled it almost immediately with a hand over her mouth. But he did not seem to take offense,