Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [37]
"No . . . no, not that," she hastily denied. "It just seems like some kind of hubris, I guess."
"Oh, it's all kinds of hubris." Except that he did not look in the least daunted by the prospect, merely calculating.
His thoughtful look fell on her then; he cleared his throat, and began, "When I was working on your comconsole yesterday morning—" The deceleration of the bubble-car interrupted him. The little man craned his neck as they slid to a halt in the station. "Damn," he murmured.
"Is something wrong?" she asked, concerned.
"No, no." He hit the pad to raise the canopy. "So, let's see this Docks and Locks district . . ."
Lord Vorkosigan seemed to enjoy their stroll through the organized chaos of the Shuttleport Locks district, though the route he chose was decidedly nonstandard; he zig-zagged by preference down to what Ekaterin thought of as the underside of the area, where people and machines loaded and unloaded cargo, and where the less well-off sorts of spacers had their hostels and bars. There were plenty of odd-looking people in the district, in all colors and sizes, wearing strange clothes; snatches of conversations in utterly strange languages teased her ear in passing. The looks they gave the two Barrayarans were noted but ignored by Vorkosigan. Ekaterin decided that his lack of offense wasn't because the galactics stared less—or more—at him, it was that they stared equally at everybody.
She also discovered that he was attracted by the dreadful, among the galactic wares cramming the narrow shops into which they ducked. He actually appeared to seriously consider for several minutes what was claimed to be a genuine twentieth-century reproduction lamp, of Jacksonian manufacture, consisting of a sealed glass vessel containing two immiscible liquids which slowly rose and fell in the convection currents. "It looks just like red blood corpuscles floating in plasma," Vorkosigan opined, staring in fascination at the underlit blobs.
"But as a wedding present?" she choked, half amused, half appalled. "What kind of message would people take it for?"
"It would make Gregor laugh," he replied. "Not a gift he gets much. But you're right, the wedding present proper needs to be, er, proper. Public and political, not personal." With a regretful sigh, he returned the lamp to its shelf. After another moment, he changed his mind again, bought it, and had it shipped. "I'll get him another present for the wedding. This can be for his birthday."
After that, he let Ekaterin lead him into the more sophisticated end of the district, with shops displaying well-spread-out and well-lit jewelry and artwork and antiques, interspersed with discreet couturiers of the sort, she thought, who might send minions to his aunt. He seemed to find it much less interesting than the galactic rummage sale a few streets and levels away, the animation fading from his face, until his eye was caught by an unusual display in a jeweler's kiosk.
Tiny model planets, the size of the end of her thumb, turned in a grav-bubble against a black background. Several of the little spheres were displayed under various levels of magnification, where they proved to be perfectly-mapped replicas of the worlds they represented, right down to the one-meter scale. Not just rivers and mountains and seas, but cities and roads and dams, were represented in realistic colors. Furthermore, the terminator moved across their miniature landscapes in real-time for the planetary cycle in question; cities lit the night side like living jewels. They could be hung in pairs as earrings, or displayed in pendants or bracelets. Most of the planets in the wormhole nexus were available, including Beta Colony and an Earth that included as an option its famous moon circling a handspan away, though how this pairing was to be hung on someone's body was not entirely clear. The prices, at which Vorkosigan did not even glance, were alarming.
"That's rather fine," he murmured approvingly, staring in fascination at the little