"Then how can anybody get their schooling?"

"They don't."

Cordelia stared. "I don't understand. How do they get their jobs?"

"A few escape to the Service. The rest prey on each other, mostly." Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. "Have you no poverty on Beta Colony?"

"Poverty? Well, some people have more money than others, of course, but . . . no comconsoles?"

Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. "Is not owning a comconsole the lowest standard of living you can imagine?" he said in wonder.

"It's the first article in the constitution. 'Access to information shall not be abridged.' "

"Cordelia . . . these people barely have access to food, clothing, and shelter. They have a few rags and cooking pots, and squat in buildings that aren't economical to repair or tear down yet, with the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls."

"No air-conditioning?"

"No heat in the winter is a bigger problem, here."

"I suppose so. You people don't really have summer. . . . How do they call for help when they're sick or hurt?"

"What help?" Vorkosigan was growing grim. "If they're sick, they either get well or die."

"Die, if we're lucky," muttered Piotr. "Vermin."

"You're not joking." She stared back and forth between the pair of them. "That's horrible . . . why, think of all the geniuses you must be missing!"

"I doubt we're missing very many, from the caravanserai," said Piotr dryly.

"Why not? They have the same genetic complement as you," Cordelia pointed out the, to her, obvious.

The Count went rigid. "My dear girl! They most certainly do not! My family have been Vor for nine generations."

Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "How do you know, if you didn't have gene typing till eighty years ago?"

Both the guard commander and the footman were acquiring peculiar stuffed expressions. The footman bit his lip.

"Besides," she went on reasonably, "if you Vor got around half as much as those histories I've been reading imply, ninety percent of the people on this planet must have Vor blood by now. Who knows who your relatives are on your father's side?"

Vorkosigan bit his linen napkin absently, his eyes gone crinkly with much the same expression as the footman, and murmured, "Cordelia, you can't . . . you really can't sit at the breakfast table and imply my ancestors were bastards. It's a mortal insult here."

Where should I sit? "Oh. I'll never understand that, I guess. Oh, never mind. Koudelka, and Bothari."

"Quite. Go on, duty officer."

"Yes, sir. Well, sir, they were coming back, I was told, about an hour after midnight, when they were set on by a gang of area toughs. Evidently Lieutenant Koudelka was too well dressed, and besides there's that walk of his, and the stick . . . anyway, he attracted attention. I don't know the details, sir, but there were four deaths and three in the hospital this morning, in addition to the ones that got away."

Vorkosigan whistled, very faintly, through his teeth. "What was the extent of Bothari's and Koudelka's injuries?"