"Tell her that. It would please her."
"Do you really think so?" she asked shyly.
"Absolutely." He shook himself into alertness. Perhaps not a totally empty future . . .
She chewed gently on her lower lip, large eyes drinking in his face.
"You look absolutely smashed."
He would not bleed on Elena. He banished his blackness in self-
mockery, leaning back expansively and grinning. "Literally. Too true.
I'll get over it. You, ah—heard all about it, I suppose."
"Yes. Did, um, it go all right with my lord Count?"
"Oh, sure. I'm the only grandson he's got, after all. Puts me in an excellent position—I can get away with anything."
"Did he ask you about changing your name?"
He stared. "What?"
"To the usual patronymic. He'd been talking about, when you—oh."
She cut herself off, but Miles caught the full import of her half
revelation.
"Oh, ho—when I became an officer, was he finally planning to
break down and allow me my heir's names? Sweet of him—seventeen
years after the fact." He stifled a sick anger beneath an ironic grin.
"I never understood what that was all about."
"What, my name—Miles Naismith, after my mother's father,
instead of Piotr Miles, after both? It all goes back to that uproar when I was born. Apparently, after my parents had recovered from the
soltoxin gas and they found out what the fetal damage was going to
be—I'm not supposed to know this, by the way—Grandfather was all
for an abortion. Got in a big fight with my parents—well, with Mother, I suppose, and Father caught in the middle—and when my father
backed her up and faced him down, he got huffy and asked his name
not be given me. He calmed down later, when he found I wasn't a total disaster." He smirked, and drummed his fingers on the chair arm. "So he was thinking of swallowing his words, was he? Perhaps it's just as well I washed out. He might have choked." He closed his teeth on further bitterness, and wished he could call back his last speech. No point in being more ugly in front of Elena than he already was.
"I know how hard you studied for it. I—I'm sorry."
He feigned a surface humor. "Not half as sorry as I am. I wish you could have taken my physicals. Between us we'd make a hell of an
officer."
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Something of the old frankness they had shared as children
escaped her lips suddenly. "Yes, but by Barrayaran standards I'm more handicapped than you—I'm female. I wouldn't even be
permitted to petition to take the tests."
His eyebrows lifted in wry agreement. "I know. Absurd. With what your father's taught you, all you'd need is a course in heavy weapons and you could roll right over nine-tenths of the fellows I saw out