"Konstantine Bothari junior," Elena mused. "Hm."
Miles stared into the blank screen, and suppressed an urge to
scream with frustration. Another damned artificial social wedge
driven between himself and Elena. A father who was a bastard was
about as far from being "right and proper" for a young Barrayaran virgin as anything he could think of. And it was obviously no secret—
his father must know, and God knew how many hundreds of other
people besides. Equally obviously, Elena did not. She was rightfully proud of her father, his elite service, his position of high trust. Miles knew how painfully hard she struggled sometimes for some
expression of approval from the old stone carving. How strange to
realize that pain might cut both ways—did Bothari then dread the loss
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of that scarcely acknowledged admiration? Well, the Sergeant's semi-secret was safe with him.
He flipped, fast-forward, through the years of Bothari's life. "Still no sign of your mother," he said to Elena. "She must be under that seal. Damn, and I thought this was going to be easy." He stared thoughtfully into space. "Try hospital records. Deaths, births—you sure you were born here in Vorbarr Sultana?"
"As far as I know."
Several minutes of tedious search produced records on a fair
number of Botharis, none related to the Sergeant or Elena in any way.
"Ah ha!" Miles broke out suddenly. "I know what I haven't tried. Imp Mil!"
"They don't have an obstetrics department," Elena said doubtfully.
"But if an accident—soldier's wife and all that—maybe she was
rushed to the nearest facility, and the Imperial Military Hospital was it . . ." He crooned over the machine. "Searching, searching . . . huh!"
"Did you find me?" she asked excitedly.
"No—I found me." He flipped over screen after screen of
documentation. "What a scramble it must have been, making military research clean up after its own product. Lucky for me they'd imported those uterine replicators—yes, there they are—they could never have tried some of those treatments in vivo, they'd have killed Mother.
There's good old Dr. Vaagen—ah ha! So he was in military research,
before. Makes sense—I guess he was their poison expert. I wish I'd
known more about this when I was a kid, I could have agitated for two birthdays, one when Mother had the cesarian, and one when they
finally popped me out of the replicator."
"Which did they choose?"
"Cesarian day. I'm glad. Makes me only six months younger than you are. Otherwise you'd be nearly a year older—and I've been warned about older women . . ." This babble won a smile at last, and he relaxed a little.
He paused, staring at the screen with slitted eyes, then entered
another search query. "That's weird," he muttered.