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intend to walk around for the next six weeks with your hands over
your ears . . ."
She replaced her hands hastily in her lap, and glowered at him.
"It can get awfully peculiar, I know," he offered apologetically. A scorching memory of just how peculiar disturbed him for a moment.
He had been fifteen on his year-long school visit to Beta Colony,
and he'd found himself for the first time in his life with what looked like unlimited possibilities for sexual intimacy. This illusion had crashed and burned very quickly, as he found the most fascinating
girls already taken. The rest seemed about equally divided among
good Samaritans, the kinky/curious, hermaphrodites, and boys.
He did not care to be an object of charity, and he found himself too Barrayaran for the last two categories, although Betan enough not to mind them for others. A short affair with a girl from the
kinky/curious category was enough. Her fascination with the
peculiarities of his body made him, in the end, more self-conscious than the most open revulsion he had experienced on Barrayar, with
its fierce prejudice against deformity. Anyway, after finding his sexual parts disappointingly normal, the girl had drifted off.
The affair had ended, for Miles, in a terrifying black depression
that had deepened for weeks, culminating at last late one night in the third, and most secret, time the Sergeant had saved his life. He had cut Bothari twice, in their silent struggle for the knife, exerting hysterical strength against the Sergeant's frightened caution of
breaking his bones. The tall man had finally achieved a grip that held him, and held him, until he broke down at last, weeping his self-hatred into the Sergeant's bloodied breast until exhaustion finally stilled him. The man who'd carried him as a child, before he first
walked at age four, then carried him like a child to bed. Bothari
treated his own wounds, and never referred to the incident again.
Age fifteen had not been a very good year. Miles was determined
not to repeat it. His hand tightened on the balcony railing, in a mood of objectless resolve. Objectless, like himself; therefore useless. He frowned into the black well of this thought, and for a moment even
Beta Colony's glitter seemed dull and grey.
* * *
Four Betans stood nearby, arguing in a vociferous undertone.
Miles turned half around, to get a better view of the speakers past Elena's elbow. Elena began to speak, something about his abstraction.
He shook his head, and held up a hand, begging silence. She subsided, watching him curiously.
"Damn it," a heavy man in a green sarong was saying, "I don't care how you do it, but I want that lunatic pried out of my ship. Can't you rush him?"
The woman in the uniform of Betan Security shook her head.
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