Second Cream Cake: [Action/Written]

[vor]

It’s a bad night.

Gregor hasn’t slept. The boredom in this place leaves him too much time to think, and his thoughts revolve around what he learned on Komarr. Alone at night, wondering when his genes will start generating monsters in his head. Prince Serg, the longed-for father, the hero of the last generation, also a sadist who tortured pregnant women. Great Uncle Yuri, Mad Emperor Yuri, slaughterer of almost all his relatives. Ezar, who married his own cousin, Yuri’s sister, and produced Serg. Genes doubled and redoubled, madness folded over itself and compressed into Gregor’s own flesh, sleeping, latent. When will it raise its head?

He wishes and doesn’t wish for Aral Vorkosigan, Prime Minister and Puppet Master, foster-father and cousin, former regent and perpetual mentor. Aral would have answers, but Aral is the last person Gregor wants to hear them from. Aral led the retreat from Escobar after Serg’s death, then taken his place in the Imperium and at home until Gregor reached his majority. The truth about Serg can’t be heard from many others. Why has it never been revealed to him? Why didn’t they warn him of this latent threat? Did they think he would go mad simply from the revelation?

I am glass. Drop me and break me.

He finds himself leaning out the third-story window and wondering if it’s high enough. It’s the thought of Cordelia that makes him back away and close the window after several minutes of leaning. Cordelia, wrapping a protective arm around him after he lit his mother’s funeral offering.

Are they going to kill me, too?

No. I won’t let them.

Cordelia was far more a mother to him than Aral was a father. Still, unlike with Serg, Gregor remembers Kareen. She was murdered when he was five, but he still remembers her, maybe because his subconscious has to hold on to all the memories of his mother that it can. Cordelia had been her friend. Cordelia had tried to save her. Cordelia had taken care of her son. But he still remembers a time when someone else was his mother. He still knows he can’t compete with Cordelia’s actual son.

All the same, she might be the only person who loves him for himself. To her Betan mind, all these formal titles are sort of an optical illusion. And she’d be the first to point out that pitching himself over the side would only make him wake up a week later with his life even more in shambles than before. It doesn’t make him stop wanting to test whether or not he’d really come back, if even that escape is closed to him.

He pries himself away from the window. He should go do something else. Not get drunk, because that would make it worse. But it’s three in the morning and there’s not much else to do except wait till dawn. And that’s what he does, curled on his side on the couch, until the sky begins to lighten and he finally falls asleep.

He dreams about Serg melting the skin off one side of Captain Negri’s body with a plasma arc, mouth open with pleasure.

[He wakes up early in the afternoon and doesn’t feel better until after he’s taken a shower. It takes a lot of motivation to go outside at all. He spends a little time in the stables just to remember the smell of horses even if there aren’t any that belong to him. Riding. That’s the only thing he can think of that’s worth going outside for, and he can’t do it.

He tries the library. Barrayaran history won’t hold any answers about Serg, so maybe Escobaran. He doesn’t find Escobaran history. He does, however, find some psychology books that he winds up taking with him to the tea shop on a whim. There, he sits and sips his cuppa while devouring one book about mental illness by a supposedly distinguished author. There’s comfort in looking at it from a curable, clinical perspective. Most of the actual content matter he’s already learned at Cordelia’s knee.

Feeling like he’s doing something helps. He starts to look up more information about missions. He wants at least one horse, dammit, and the currency here seems to be these points earned by doing favors for the Malnosso. Maybe during a research mission, he could even learn something about what happened at Escobar.

He has a plan. Horse, psychology, and Escobar. And after the first horse? Maybe another. Maybe he’ll fill the stables so people can travel more easily within the enclosure. It would be good to have horses around. Maybe he could take up a career as a groom. Ma and Da (Illyan and Aral) would have conniptions. Cordelia would say it’s good for him.

He writes:]

Would anyone ride horses if we had them?

Also: I would like to speak with anyone who has died here and come back, if anyone would be willing to speak of it.

-GVB

Comments

[fleurdesel]

Then the world turns on, long after twenty twelve. It is good to know.

I've only ever known but one Russian- and that is not enough to have a proper view of them as a whole. Especially since I am to understand he was uncommonly short.

[vor]

[Kind of a weird joke to hear when your foster-brother stands at four foot nine at the age of twenty.]

We come in all heights. I think my father was taller than me.

[fleurdesel]

Marion is my height. And oft given trouble for it- though I've never met a more capable or paranoid soldier.

[vor]

That does sound Russian.

[fleurdesel]

He kept at least three handguns, two combat knives and a garrote on his person at all times. I think I found a handgun in his fridge, once. Set in the well where one would normally leave the eggs.

[vor]

[Yeah, you got him to really grin, albeit briefly. Sounds like some Armsmen he's had.]

Wouldn't want it to spoil.

[fleurdesel]

A Sig Sauer is a terrible thing to waste. At least that is more reasonable than the shotgun he has inset next to his shower.

[vor]

Never want to be unprepared.

[The grin is mostly gone now, leaving the echo of amusement on his lips.]

Where do you come from?

[fleurdesel]

I suppose you are not familiar with the accent- or I am beginning to lose it.

[Which was a frightening thought in a small way. She would have to stick to French for awhile longer in the future to counteract this.]

France.

[vor]

Russia, France, and Greece are where most of Barrayaran ancestry comes from. I speak Barrayaran French, but it's...sort of a thousand years and a planet removed from yours.

[fleurdesel]

I shudder to think of how much the language has changed in that time. It's fluid enough in my own century.

[vor]

It's what languages do.

[fleurdesel]

Change, grow, and evolve. Not only languages follow this pattern.

[vor]

[Gregor finishes straightening one shelf and starts the next, contemplating her words without response.]

[fleurdesel]

...is there a particular compulsion behind this, or are you simply bored?

[vor]

[Delicately, he leaves off his self-appointed task and shrugs.]

Humanity hasn't really changed that much. New cultures, of course. New spin-offs of old systems of government. But the basic nature is pretty much the same.

[fleurdesel]

I would imagine so. Change comes slow to us at the best of times. Are we still persecuting others for having different forms of religious inclinations, skin color, and sexual orientation, though?

[vor]

Depends on where you come from. [One hand twitches, then goes back to arranging books.] Genetic defects are subject to a strong prejudice on my world, but there's an historical reason for that. Sexual orientation, yes, unfortunately. Skin color, no, but the Greek population is a minority and subject to political incorrectness. You could almost call it racism. On Beta Colony, on the other hand, none of these things are considered noteworthy, let alone important.

[fleurdesel]

[Compulsion it was, then. Or at least seemed to be. It's easier to focus on that than the strange wave of. Disappointment, if she had to put a name to it, that she experiences. She'd have thought herself beyond such naivete- to think or hope humanity would be beyond that by his time.]

...we have not changed much at all, then. Pity. We're capable of better, or at least I thought as much as a younger, more optimistic woman.

[vor]

Madam, Barrayar is not a good model of what humanity in general is, in my time. We have a complicated history. I daresay, more complicated than most.

[fleurdesel]

Then the trend of Russian history being, to use the colloquialism, a 'clusterfuck' continues?

[vor]

Most of us are Russian-descended, but we are not Russian. But yes. Vivid and appropriate description, if not especially elegant.

[But neither is Barrayaran history.]

[fleurdesel]

Some cultural habits transcend labels of ancestry.

[She lifts a shoulder.]

Would you prefer I compare it to the Gordian knot instead? I might, if you desire elegance.

[vor]

Very elegant. Some people have even tried cutting through it, but it didn't work.

[fleurdesel]

Such situations are better served by patience and meticulous picking. The strands will unravel in time. It may take decades, but. It may.