Read Miles in Love for Free Online

common names, the lost Barrayaran colonists had not loved their new xenobotany: damnweed, henbloat, goatbane . . .  It's beautiful. How did she make it beautiful? He'd never seen anything like it. Maybe that kind of artist's eye was something you just had to be born with, like perfect pitch, which he also lacked.
    In the Imperial capital of Vorbarr Sultana, there was a small and dull green park at the end of the block beside Vorkosigan House, on a site where another old mansion had been torn down. The little park had been leveled with more of an eye to security concerns for the neighboring Lord Regent than any aesthetic plan. Would it not be splendid, to replace it with a larger version of this glorious subtlety, and give the city-dwellers a taste of their own planetary heritage? Even if it would—he checked—take fifteen years to grow to this mature climax . . . .
    The virtual garden program was supposed to help prevent time-consuming and costly design mistakes. But when all the garden you could have was what you could pack in your luggage, he supposed it could be a hobby in its own right. It was certainly neater, tidier, and easier than the real thing. So . . . why did he guess she found it approximately as satisfying as looking at a holovid of dinner instead of eating it?
    Or maybe she's just homesick . Regretfully, he closed down the display.
    In pure trained habit, he next called up her financial program, for a little quick analysis. It turned out to be her household account. She ran her home on a quite tight budget, given what Administrator Vorsoisson's salary ought to be, Miles thought; her biweekly allowance was rather stingy. She didn't spend nearly as much on her botanical hobbies as the results suggested she must. Other hobbies, other vices? The money trail was always the most revealing of people's true pursuits; ImpSec hired the Imperium's best accountants to find ingenious ways to hide their own activities, for that very reason. She spent damn little on clothes, except for Nikolai's. He'd heard parents of his acquaintance complain about the cost of dressing their children, but surely this was extraordinary . . . wait, that wasn't a clothing expenditure. Funds squeezed here, here, and there were all being funneled into a dedicated little private account labeled "Nikolai's Medical." Why? As dependents of a Barrayaran bureaucrat on Komarr, weren't the Vorsoissons' medical expenses covered by the Imperium?
    He called up the account. A year's worth of savings from her household budget did not make a very impressive pile, but the pattern of contributions was steady to the point of being compulsive. Puzzled, he backed out again and called up the whole program list. Clues?
    One file, down at the end of the list, had no name. He called it up immediately. It turned out to be the only thing on her comconsole which required a password for entry. Interesting.
    Her comconsole program was the simplest and cheapest commercial type. ImpSec cadets dissected files like this as a class warmup exercise. A touch of homesickness of his own twinged through him. He dropped to the underlayer and had its password choked out in about five minutes. Vorzohn's Dystrophy? Well, that wasn't a mnemonic he would have guessed offhand.
    His reflexes overtook his growing unease. He had the file open simultaneously with belated second thoughts, You're not in ImpSec anymore, you know. Should you be doing this?
    The file proved to contain a medical course's worth of articles, culled from every imaginable Barrayaran and galactic source, on the topic of one of Barrayar's rarer and more obscure home-grown genetic disorders. Vorzohn's Dystrophy had arisen during the Time of Isolation, principally, as its name suggested, among the Vor caste, but had not been medically identified as a mutation until the return of galactic medicine. For one thing, it lacked the sort of exterior markers that would have caused, well, him for example, to have had