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.