"Thinking about the uncle we neither of us ever knew.  Our father's older brother, who was killed in that same attack that took out our Barrayaran grandmother, in the opening salvo of Mad Yuri's war.  He was in his mid-teens, I believe.  I was thinking how strange it was that I had a brother I never knew till I was an adult, and our father had a brother everyone had forgotten by the time he was an adult.  Were you ever told anything about him at all, when you were being trained about Barrayar?"

Mark shrugged.  "Just a name.  No time was spent on him, when there was so much else to learn."

"That's about all I've ever gotten from Da, either.  A painful period of his life, I gather.  Maybe if you and Kareen do Winterfair, we can tag-team him and get him to disgorge more.  Because I'm thinking . . . there's hardly anyone else alive who knows anything about the fellow, by now."

Mark nodded.  "It's a deal.  If we come.  Could be interesting.  Or hair-raising."

"Or both.  I sometimes wonder how different things would be if he'd lived.  Our father would never have become the count, for one.  Maybe not even Lord Vorkosigan, if his brother had managed to pop an heir before our grandfather died.  He'd have spent his life as Lord Aral."

"I'll bet he'd still have had a military career, though," said Mark judiciously.

"Perhaps.  Or perhaps, with the responsibility for our House taken up by someone else, he'd have felt freer to rebel.  Do something else, be someone else."

"Huh," said Mark.

Miles fingered the holocube in his pocket.  There was no point in pulling it out and showing it to Mark again, as he'd already done so.  Twice.  "You and Kareen planning kids yet?  Not to mention marriage," Miles added in an afterthought.  The couple's informal partnership, which would have been unremarkable on Beta Colony, had been a difficult pill for Kareen's very Barrayaran parents to swallow, but after several years the senior Koudelkas seemed pretty reconciled.  And Kareen had three older married sisters, all of whom had sprung at least one sprog, so there wasn't the family pressure on her that there had been on, say, Miles.

"Children frighten me," Mark confessed.  "You had your Da as a role model, but all I ever had growing up was an insane Komarran terrorist who spent all his time trying to train me to be you."

"Da spent a good bit of time trying to train me to be me, too," said Miles, "but it wasn't at all the same thing."

Mark snorted.  "Indeed."

We can laugh about this now, sort of, Miles thought, pleased and bemused.  What a journey that's been.  "You'd have Kareen for a co-parent," Miles offered.  "She's one of the sanest people I know."

"There is that," Mark admitted.  "So what's your greatest terror, now you're a Da yourself?"