"He'll do all right, when he settles down. Vorbarra's personal secretary has taken him in hand, and is showing him how to organize himself. After Kou follows him through the funeral protocol, he should be able to tackle anything. That swordstick was a stroke of genius, by the way; thank you."

"Yes, I noticed he was pretty touchy about his handicaps. I thought it might unruffle his feathers a little."

"It's our society. It tends to be . . . rather hard on anyone who can't keep up."

"I see. Strange . . . now that you mention it, I don't recall seeing any but healthy-looking people, on the streets and so on, except at the hospital. No float chairs, none of those vacuous faces in the tow of their parents . . ."

"Nor will you." Vorkosigan looked grim. "Any problems that are detectable are eliminated before birth."

"Well, we do that, too. Though usually before conception."

"Also at birth. And after, in the backcountry."

"Oh."

"As for the maimed adults . . ."

"Good heavens, you don't practice euthanasia on them, do you?"

"Your Ensign Dubauer would not have lived, here."

Dubauer had taken disruptor fire to the head, and survived. Sort of.

"As for injuries like Koudelka's, or worse . . . the social stigma is very great. Watch him in a larger group sometime, not his close friends. It's no accident that the suicide rate among medically discharged soldiers is high."

"That's horrible."

"I took it for granted, once. Now . . . not anymore. But many people still do."

"What about problems like Bothari's?"

"It depends. He was a usable madman. For the unusable . . ." he trailed off, staring at his boots.

Cordelia felt cold. "I keep thinking I'm beginning to adjust to this place. Then I go around another corner and run headlong into something like that."

"It's only been eighty years since Barrayar made contact with the wider galactic civilization again. It wasn't just technology we lost, in the Time of Isolation. That we put back on again quickly, like a borrowed coat. But underneath it . . . we're still pretty damned naked in places. In forty-four years, I've only begun to see how naked."

Count Vortala and his "strays" came in soon after, and Vorkosigan vanished into the library. The old Count Piotr Vorkosigan, Aral's father, arrived from his District later that evening, come up to attend the full Council vote.

"Well, that's one vote he's assured of tomorrow," Cordelia joked to her father-in-law, helping him get stiffly out of his jacket in the stone-paved foyer.

"Ha. He's lucky to get it. He's picked up some damned peculiar radical notions in the last few years. If he wasn't my son, he could whistle for it." But Piotr's seamed face looked proud.

Cordelia blinked at this description of Aral Vorkosigan's political views. "I confess, I've never thought of him as a revolutionary. Radical must be a more elastic term than I thought."