Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [9]
Miles had realized within five minutes of his arrival that he should probably not have let the genial and expansive Vorthys bully him into accompanying him downside, but the man seemed constitutionally incapable of not sharing a treat. That the pleasures of this family reunion might not be equally enjoyed by an awkward outsider—or the family into which he'd been thrust—had clearly never occurred to the Professor.
Miles sighed envy of his host. Administrator Vorsoisson seemed to have achieved a perfect little Vor clan. Of course, he'd had the wit to start a decade ago. The arrival of galactic sex-selection technologies had resulted in a shortage of female births on Barrayar. This dearth of women had reached its lowest ebb in Miles's generation, though parents seemed to be coming back to their senses now. Still, every Vor woman Miles knew close to his own age was already married, and had been for years. Was he going to have to wait another twenty years for his own bride?
If necessary. No lusting after married women, boy. You're an Imperial Auditor now. The nine Imperial Auditors were expected to be models of rectitude and respectability. He could not recall ever hearing of any kind of sex scandal touching one of Emperor Gregor's handpicked agent-observers. Of course not. All the rest of the Auditors are eighty years old and have been married for fifty of 'em. He snorted. Besides, she probably thought he was a mutant, though thankfully she'd been too polite to say so. To his face.
So find out if she has a sister, eh?
He wallowed out of the grav-bed's indolence-inducing clutches and sat up, forcing his mind to switch gears. At a conservative guess, a couple hundred thousand words of new data on the soletta accident and its consequences would be incoming this shift. He would, he decided, start with a cold shower.
No comfortable ship-knits today. After selecting among the three new formal civilian suits he'd packed along from Barrayar—in shades of gray, gray, and gray—Miles combed his damp hair neatly and sauntered out to Madame Vorsoisson's kitchen, from which voices and the perfume of coffee wafted. There he found Nikolai munching Barrayaran-style groats and milk, Administrator Vorsoisson fully dressed and apparently on the verge of leaving, and Professor Vorthys, still in pajamas, sorting through a new array of data disks and frowning. A glass of pink fruit juice sat untasted at his elbow. He looked up and said, "Ah, good morning, Miles. Glad you're up," seconded by Vorsoisson's polite, "Good morning, Lord Vorkosigan. I trust you slept well?"
"Fine, thanks. What's up, Professor?"
"Your comm link arrived from ImpSec's local office." Vorthys pointed to the device beside his plate. "I notice they didn't send me one."
Miles grimaced. "Your father was not so famous in the Komarran conquest."
"True," agreed Vorthys. "The old gentleman fell in that odd generation between the wars, too young to fight the Cetagandans, too old to aggress on the poor Komarrans. This lack of military opportunity was a source of great personal regret to him, we children were given to understand."
Miles strapped the comm link onto his left wrist. It represented a compromise between himself and ImpSec Serifosa, which would otherwise be responsible for his health here. ImpSec had wanted to err on the side of caution and surround him with an inconvenient mob of bodyguards. Miles had ventured to test his Imperial Auditor's authority by ordering them to stay out of his hair; to his delight, it had worked. But the link gave him a straight line to ImpSec, and tracked his location—he tried not to feel like an experimental animal released into the wild. "And what are those?" He nodded to the data disks.
Vorthys spread the disks like a bad hand of cards. "The morning courier also brought