Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [14]
"Huh."
"If you like, I can try to look it up in my resource materials."
"Would you? I'd like that very much." He folded the flimsy back up and handed it to her. "Uh . . . I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't show it to anyone else, though."
"Oh?" She let the syllable hang there, Oh . . . ?
"Excuse me. Professional paranoia. I, uh . . ." He was getting in deeper and deeper. "It's a habit."
He was rescued from tripping further over his tongue by the return of Ivan. Ivan's practiced eye summed up the attractions of the Vervani woman instantly, and he smiled attentively at her, as sincerely delighted as he had been with the last girl, and would be with the next. And the next. The ghem-lord artiste was still glued to his elbow; Miles perforce introduced them both. Maz seemed not to have met Lord Yenaro before. In front of the Cetagandan, Maz did not repeat to Ivan her message of boundless Vervani gratitude to the Vorkosigan clan, but she was definitely friendly.
"You really ought to let Lord Yenaro take you on the tour of his sculpture, Miles," Ivan said ruthlessly. "It's quite a thing. An opportunity not to be missed and all that."
I found her first, dammit. "Yes, it's very fine."
"Would you be interested, Lord Vorkosigan?" Yenaro looked earnest and hopeful.
Ivan bent to Miles's ear to whisper, "It was Lord Yenaro's gift to the Marilacan embassy. Don't be a lout, Miles, you know how sensitive the Cetagandans are about their artsy, uh, things."
Miles sighed, and mustered an interested smile for Yenaro. "Certainly. Now?"
Miles excused himself with unfeigned regrets to Maz the Vervani. The ghem-lordling led him down the stairs to the lobby, and had him pause at the entrance of the walk-through sculpture to wait for the show-cycle to begin anew.
"I'm not really qualified to judge aesthetics," Miles mentioned, hoping to head off any conversation in that direction.
"So very few are," smiled Yenaro, "but that doesn't stop them."
"It does seem to me to be a very considerable technical achievement. Do you drive the motion with antigrav, then?"
"No, there's no antigrav in it at all. The generators would be bulky and wasteful of power. The same force drives the leaves' motion as drives their color changes—or so my technicians explained it to me."
"Technicians? I somehow pictured you putting all this together with your own hands."
Yenaro spread his hands—pale, long-fingered, and thin—and stared at them as if surprised to find them on the ends of his wrists. "Of course not. Hands are to be hired. Design is the test of the intellect."
"I must disagree. In my experience, hands are integral with brains, almost another lobe for intelligence. What one does not know through one's hands, one does not truly know."
"You are a man capable of true conversation, I perceive. You must meet my friends, if your schedule here permits. I'm hosting a reception at my home in two evenings' time—do you suppose—?"
"Um, maybe . . ." That evening was a blank as far as the funeral formalities went. It could be quite interesting, a chance to observe how the ghem-lordlings of his own generation operated without the inhibitions of their elders; a glimpse into the future of Cetaganda. "Yes, why not?"
"I'll send you directions. Oh." Yenaro nodded toward the fountain, which was starting up with its high-canopied summer greens again. "Now we can go in."
Miles did not find the view from inside the fountain-maze all that much different from the outside. In fact, it seemed less interesting, as at close range the illusion of forms in the flitting leaves was reduced. The music was clearer, though. It rose to a crescendo, as the colors began to change.
"Now you'll see something," said Yenaro, with evident satisfaction.
It was all sufficiently distracting that it took another moment for Miles to realize that he