Captain Vorpatril's alliance

Tej gestured to the now‑blank vid‑plate. “I can hear it in their voices. Can’t you?”

“Accents, sure. But he sounded pure Vorbarr Sultana to me.”

“Not really. I haven’t got all the District dialect variations sorted out yet, though. Sixty‑times‑four plus South Continent. I have to pick up more local geography.”

“Do you expect to? Sort them all out?”

She shrugged. “If I’m here long enough, they’ll sort themselves.”

“Tej…” He wanted to follow up that ambiguous‑sounding if I’m here long enough, but stuck to his first thought. “How many languages do you speak?”

“I dunno.” Her nose wrinkled. “Since I came here‑nine?”

“That’s a lot.”

“Not really. Good translator earbugs will handle hundreds. Why bother making work out of it, when the ones you need likely won’t be the ones you learned anyway? I never even heard of Barrayaran Russian before I came here. Or your local Greek dialect, which is pretty corrupt‑well, altered‑see, I didn’t say mutated. I mean, learning them yourself isn’t a practical hobby. The earbugs do it better.” A crooked smile. “Kind of fun, though. I like fun.”

“Fun,” said Ivan, bemusedly reflecting on all the lack of fun he’d had in his school language drills.

Rish emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed. “Tej, did you get the ground‑van and the big speakers? Are we ready to go now?”

“Yes and yes.” Tej popped up and offered Ivan a placatory kiss on the cheek. “Gotta run.”

“Where are you going?”

“The Jewels wanted a place for some dance practice, since this is the first they’ve been together for ages, and Simon found us this nice park. There wasn’t any place big enough in the hotel. I’m doing tech on the music.”

“Outdoors? In this weather?” Ivan wandered to a window and peered blearily out. All right, the angled winter sun was shining brightly, and it was windless and well above freezing, but still.

“It’s really pretty nice out today. Supposed to change tomorrow, though, so I really have to go now…”

She and Rish blew out.

Ivan munched groats, a little later, with his uneasiness growing. He shaved, dressed, and, with extreme reluctance, called his mother.

“Mamere,” he said, when her impeccably groomed features appeared over the vid plate, wearing an expression of surprised inquiry. “Do you know anything about some dance practice place Simon recommended to the Jewels? A park or commons, outdoors.” Vorbarra Sultana had dozens of such nooks.

“Oh, yes, he mentioned that. He’s gone off to watch. I thought it was good for him to get out. I’d have loved to go with him, but I’m running a diplomatic luncheon at the Residence today for Laisa, as she had to go down to that Vorbarra District economics conference in Nizhne‑Whitekirk.”

“Where? The dance practice, I mean.”

“He suggested the little park across the street from ImpSec headquarters. Hardly anyone ever uses it, you know. Except those poor fellows with that seasonal affective problem, who come out to eat their lunches sometimes. Simon did make full‑spectrum lighting an allowable requisition, years back.”

“Um, yeah. Thanks.” About to sign off, he hesitated. “Mamere‑has Simon told you anything about what Shiv had to say to him? Or vice versa?”

Her smile never shifted. So why did he get the impression of her putting on her most diplomatic poker‑face? “He said they had a very enjoyable exchange. I was pleased. I quite liked Udine and Moira, you know. Such adventurous lives! Earth! I’ve never been further than Komarr.” She sighed.

“You should get Simon to take you,” Ivan suggested. “Or take him. Lever him out of his comfy rut. Four, pushing five years since his retirement, all the really hot stuff in his head‑whatever’s left of it‑has to have cooled off some by now. Doesn’t he think it’s safe to travel out of the Empire yet?”

Her brows rose in a thoughtful way. “He’s never suggested travel farther than the south coast. He was really…extremely exhausted, immediately after all that‑” a flick of her hand summed the nightmare weeks of Simon’s chip breakdown. And nightmare decades of its full function, before that, Ivan supposed. “More so than I think he let on.”

“He always was pretty closed,” said Ivan, in what had to be the understatement of the century. “It’s not like you could tell the difference from the outside.”

“No, I suppose you couldn’t.”

Ivan heard the faint emphasis on that you. Which presumably did not include her. Her thirty years of working with Simon hadn’t exactly been like one of those long marriages where people started finishing each other’s sentences, but it did perhaps partake of some of the elements. Ivan tried to remember what had been the longest time he’d ever stuck with one girlfriend. Or vice versa. Surely at least one of them had been more than a year? Almost a year? More than a half‑year…?

“Delightful for you to call, but I must go,” his mother said firmly. “Tomorrow, we really must come up with something else to do with your visitors. Properly, it would be their turn to invite us to dinner, but they may not like to do so in that hotel.”