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By the time the fire burned down to a bed of coals they had cubes of dark red meat on sticks ready to broil. “How do you like yours?” Vorkosigan asked. “Rare? Medium?” “I think it had better be well done,” suggested Cordelia. “We hadn’t completed the parasite survey yet.” Vorkosigan glanced at his cube with a new dubiousness. “Ah. Quite,” he said faintly.
“From spaceman to caveman in three days,” she meditated aloud. “How we imagine our civilization is in ourselves, when it’s really in our things.”
His curtness she could meet and match with her own flippancy, guarding herself as with a fencer’s foil. His kindness was like fencing with the sea, her strokes going soft and losing all volition.
Vorkosigan shared his Barrayaran field rations at last. Even after four days of oatmeal and blue cheese dressing, they were a disappointment. “Are you sure this isn’t instant boots?” asked Cordelia sadly, for in color, taste, and smell they resembled pulverized shoe leather pressed into wafers. Vorkosigan grinned sardonically. “They’re organic, nutritious, and they’ll keep for years—in fact, they probably have.”
“Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long they stand around chatting before they shoot you.”
At the current rate of gossip I’m bound to encounter some joke soon about the privileges of rank that I can’t pretend not to hear, and I’ll have to quash the unlucky, er, humorist. I have an aversion to closed doors anyway. You never know what’s on the other side.” Cordelia laughed outright. “It reminds me of that old joke, where the girl says, ‘Let’s not, and tell everybody we have.’ ”
No fear trembled his voice. Well, she reflected, perhaps he was not old enough yet to have really come to believe in death after life.
by far the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen in a man’s face. They triggered a small subliminal wailing deep in her mind, crying, you thought you had faced fear earlier today, but you were mistaken; here is the real thing, fear without exhilaration or hope;
“Bureaucratic weaselwording,” put in Vorkosigan. He added to Cordelia, “The lieutenant spies on me. He represents a compromise between the Emperor, the Ministry of Political Education, and myself.” “The phrase the Emperor used,” said Illyan distantly, “was ‘cease-fire.’ ”
“East is west, up is down, and being falsely arrested for getting your C.O.’s throat cut is a simplification. I must be on Barrayar. I don’t suppose you’d care to explain what’s going on around here?”
Why can’t you just lose your temper with subordinates, like normal men, instead of with superiors, like a lunatic? I thought you were cured of that, after what I saw you take from Vorrutyer.” “That’s dead and buried now.”
The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present—they are real.”
“Put all the bad eggs in one basket,” she muttered. “And—drop the basket? Oh, it couldn’t have been his own plan! Surely not . . .”
She turned on her side and stared into the dimness. “Pigs have wings, and I can fly home on one.”
“He was the man in charge. If he knew about them, he should have stopped them. If he didn’t know, he was incompetent. Either way, he was responsible.”
I’ve always tried to walk the path of honor. But what do you do when all choices are evil? Shameful action, shameful inaction, every path leading to a thicket of death.”
The medtech smiled sourly. “We’re returning these to the senders.” Vorkosigan walked around the pallet. “Yes, but what are they?” “All your bastards,” said the medtech.
“That will be my problem. My word. Your responsibility will end there. Twenty-five minutes, Doctor. If you’re on time I may let you ride up on the inside of the shuttle.”
“Um, I think we may be at cross-purposes. I remember everything that happened during that time with the utmost clarity. I have no trouble getting it into my consciousness. What I would like is to get it out, at least long enough to sleep now and then.”
“Well, I don’t hate him. Can’t say as I worship him, either.” She paused a long time, and looked up to meet her mother’s eyes square on. “But when he’s cut, I bleed.”
