Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold Page B

earshot, then leaned over and murmured to Miles, "I am glad for you, Admiral Naismith."
    He touched a finger briefly to his lips. "Be glad for Miles Vorkosigan. I certainly am." He hesitated, then asked, "Should I be equally glad for Bel?"
    Her smile crimped a little. "Only Bel knows. I'm done with traveling the Nexus. I've found my place, home at last. Bel seems happy here too, most of the time, but—well, Bel is a downsider. They get itchy feet , I'm told. Bel talks about making a commitment to the Union, yet . . . somehow, never gets around to applying."
    "I'm sure Bel's interested in doing so," Miles offered.
    She shrugged, and drained the last of her lemon drink; anticipating her performance later, she had forgone the wine. "Maybe the secret of happiness is to live for today, to never look ahead. Or maybe that's just a habit of mind Bel got into in its former life. All that risk, all that danger—it takes a certain sort to thrive on it. I'm not sure Bel can change its nature, or how much it would hurt to try. Maybe too much."
    "Mm," said Miles. I can't offer them a false oath, or divided loyalties , Bel had said. Even Nicol, apparently, was not aware of Bel's second source of income—and hazard. "I do note, Bel could have found a portmaster's berth in quite a few places. It traveled a very long way to get one here, instead."
    Nicol's smile softened. "That's so." She added, "Do you know, when Bel arrived at Graf Station, it still had that Betan dollar I'd paid you on Jackson's Whole tucked in its wallet?"
    Miles managed to stop the logical query, Are you sure it was the same one? on his lips before it fell out of his mouth leaving room for his downsider foot. One Betan dollar looked like any other. If Bel had claimed it for the same one, when making Nicol's reacquaintance, who was Miles to suggest otherwise? Not that much of a spoilsport, for damn sure.
    After dinner they made their way under Bel and Nicol's guidance to the bubble-car system, its arteries of transit recently retrofitted into the three-dimensional maze Graf Station had grown to be. Nicol left her floater in a common rack on the passenger platform. It took their car about ten minutes to wend through the branching tubes to their destination; Miles's stomach lifted when they crossed into the free fall side, and he made haste to slip his antinausea meds from his pocket, swallow one, and offer them discreetly to Ekaterin and Roic.
    The entrance to the Madame Minchenko Memorial Auditorium was neither large nor imposing, being just one of several accessible airseal doorways on different levels of the station here. Nicol kissed Bel and flitted off. No crowds yet clogged the cylindrical corridors, as they'd come early to give Nicol time to make her way backstage and change. Miles was therefore unprepared for the vast chamber into which they floated.
    It was an enormous sphere. Nearly a third of its interior surface was a round, transparent window-wall, the universe itself turned into backdrop, thick with bright stars on this shaded side of the station. Ekaterin grabbed his hand rather abruptly, and Roic made a small choked noise. Miles had the sense of having swum inside a giant beehive, for the rest of the wall was lined with hexagonal cells like a silver-edged honeycomb filled with rainbow jewels. As they floated out toward the middle the cells resolved into velvet-lined boxes for the audience, varying in size from cozy niches for one patron to units spacious enough for parties of ten, if the ten were quaddies, not trailing long useless legs. Other sectors, interspersed, seemed to be dark, flat panels of various shapes, or to contain other exits. He tried at first to impose a sense of up and down upon the space, but then he blinked, and the chamber seemed to rotate around the window, and then he wasn't sure if he was looking up, down, or sideways through it. Down was a particularly disturbing mental construction, as it gave the dizzy impression of falling