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The room was spare and tidy, the linens clean, the corners swept: entirely free of ornamentation, excess, or security. Small, but not shipboard small, or panic room small—perhaps this was the small people meant when they called a room cozy? The furniture was old, but not antique; the only history here was in the scuffed floor, and a somewhat rude phrase he'd found scratched into the inside of one of the desk drawers.
Though it was designed for two occupants, Gregor had the suite all to himself. He wasn't certain if it represented Morrowlea's sole concession to ImpSec or a genuine coincidence, but he decided on the whole that he was grateful for it. He'd not slept in a room with another person since he was young enough to need lullabies, and he’d spent enough time around ImpSec for its paranoia to prove contagious.
For perhaps the first time in his life, he was alone. No agents sweeping every room before he entered or checking his dresser drawers for spyware. No armsmen lurking in the next room, only a bell-pull—or screamer button—away.
The walls were thin enough that he could hear the two occupants of a neighboring room chatting and laughing as they scraped their furniture around, but not so thin that he could hear what they were saying. There was a shout, a final scrape, and a floor-juddering thud, followed by a beat of silence and two near-simultaneous bursts of laughter, so no great damage seemed to have been done.
Sitting at his desk chair, with his scant belongings already tucked away neatly in the desk drawers and bedroom, Gregor looked across at the empty desk, and the closed door of the unoccupied bedroom beyond.
Certainly he would prefer being alone to being surrounded by serious, liveried men with stunners, who would have been on their feet with weapons in hand before Gregor could blink. Behind the wall, footsteps, a door closing, the pair of voices rising as they passed his door and receding again down the stairs. Silence.
That silence was surely not so cavernous and echoing as it seemed inside his head.
Gregor realized he had unconsciously fallen into what Lady Vorkosigan dryly called his campstool bearing: spine stiff, chin up, knees square and spread just wider than his shoulders. Ready to receive a district’s ceremonial gold or hear a petition, neutral, attentive, confident. Deliberately, he slid down into a slouch, crossed one ankle carelessly over the other, twisted to prop an elbow over the low back of the chair. But that wasn’t right either. Gregor had not brought the Emperor of Barrayar here with him to Morrowlea, but neither did he have a nature that could carry insouciance. Perhaps if he started from the outer edges and worked inwards, he would find himself somewhere in the middle.
What was that old philosophical question—when a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? He felt like a tree whose forest was suddenly empty, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answer.
He stood and crossed the room to the window. He knew how to put on a dozen postures, but not how to take them off; he let his arms swing freely, then held them still, then relaxed them again. How did a university student who had never taken a comportment lesson walk?
The window looked out on a pleasant open green, not the main quadrangle with its spread of ancient oaks but lovely nonetheless. ImpSec would never have chosen this room; his eye had already picked out the three most likely lines of fire before he realized he was doing it. Almost defiantly, he squared his shoulders in the full frame of the window and let himself admire the view.
The grounds of Morrowlea were handsome and well-kept. The green was wide and lush, with a shallow incline up to an academic building on the far side. A few broad trees offered the choice of shade or sun; flower beds splashed color here and there along the walking paths. One of the benches was occupied by a student lounging with a book, the very image of studious indolence. Through the gap between two buildings Gregor could also see a corner of the vegetable gardens, where two more students were busily… gardening. Weeding, perhaps? That was the only gardening task anyone ever seemed to do in books. He knew it wasn’t pruning, at least, which was the Sisyphean task of the Residence gardeners, and which in his experience involved ladders and large pairs of scissors.
Well, he would find out soon enough. The Chancellor’s letter had indicated that students were expected to carry out menial tasks as well as academic ones; Gregor had found this unaccountably alluring. He had one childhood memory, very hazy, of being permitted to “help” knead the bread dough in the kitchens—in retrospect, he had probably only assisted in getting flour everywhere—and though he could remember a woman’s hands guiding his, he could not say whether she had been his mother or Drou or one of the cooks. But emperors did not go down to the kitchens, not even small boy emperors; it made the staff nervous and ImpSec twitchy.
He went back to the desk to retrieve the Chancellor’s letter. As it was the only piece of correspondence he had brought with him, and he did not yet have any academic papers, it was something of a pathetic sight, filed neatly away alone in the capacious drawer. Several months ago when he had received it the creases had been crisp and sharp, but they had softened over time from his reading and rereading. He ought to have it practically memorized by now, but still the words held an air of unreality, as the bare and silent room around him did not.
Those who come here are known not by their titles or trappings of wealth or poverty, but by their own merits.
Lady Vorkosigan had done her best to ensure that he could tell the difference between compliment and flattery. He knew he was intelligent, insightful, and competent. Anything less would be unacceptable, of course, but he knew where his limits lay, and he knew how to respect them. He was certain—mostly certain—that he was not conceited or deluding himself in believing so. Proving his merit was not precisely what he had come to Morrowlea to achieve.
We believe quite strongly that students should have the opportunity to try and fail at new things as well as succeed at what they already know.
The idea of failure was intriguing, scratching some primal id-itch he had been able to ignore until it was brought to his attention. Failure was too costly to permit, on Gregor’s part; failure meant blood, and civil war, and small boys torn from their mothers. Gregor was not allowed to fail. (Losing at tacti-go didn’t count.)
And how if he did? If he burnt a loaf of bread, or killed a tomato plant, or even failed an exam? His heart began to race even at the hypothetical. But he had mastered his external reactions by age ten, learned how to sidle around difficult topics and come up at them from the other side. If he failed here, he would be given the opportunity to try again. And life would go on—everyone’s lives.
It was a very small thought, in all that echoing silence, but it was striking all the same.