Title: Green Silk Rooms
Author: Minor Ramblings
Rating: G
For a ficathon, the challenge of 'Something set during the period of Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Events that take place within the books, but from a different character's point of view.' Title taken from Cordelia's musings about men in green silk rooms. This is a scene taking place between Mehta's first visit to Cordelia, and her subsequent escape, exploring why Commodor Tailor let her go.
---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
They tried to make a joke of it back at Expeditionary HQ. Parnell, who hadn't voted for him anyways, had managed to get his hands on a holovid clip of Cordelia's 'Presidential coupe de jewels' as he was calling it, and had pulled stills from it. Repetitive close-ups of Steady Freddy's florid, agonized face as that polished jackboot hit home peered out from the monitors of workstations all throughout the dome.
Jokes masked worry, and focusing on the slapstick inherant in one's president (Although who had voted for him, anyways?) taking one to the groin kept focus off of unspoken rumours, and kept unacknowledged the bizarre expression on Cordelia's face as she'd broken down at last.
The holo-news agencies lingered on it. Denied their holiday, they pounced on scandal, and the stories flew large and loud, ranging from post-traumatic stress syndrome and government programming of the armed forces to the satire news' bold claim that Steady Freddy (I didn't vote for him anyways.) was a sinister Barrayaran plant, and Captain Cordelia Naismith their clear-seeing salvation.
The others could joke, and worry, and hope it would pass. The burden of command, however, was on his shoulders, and with it, the burden of proof. Commodore Bill Tailor, on his third cup of coffee, sat outside the offices of the Admiralty and waited to hear about the fate of his lost lamb.
And waited.
And waited a little more, as aides and visitors hop-scotched past him, in a whirl of Important Business and blue uniforms. The ensign secretary, an androgynously pretty young herm who'd gotten no closer to Escobar than incoming reports, kept feeding him more coffee. Perhaps he could pass off the growing knot of irritation as the minutes passed as heartburn.
At five and a half cups, the door opened for him, and he was escorted in to where Admiral James White, up about fifty pounds, and with thinning hair to match his name, was seated unapologetically behind his desk.
"Bill, good to see you," he boomed, extending one meaty hand to engulf his own far narrower one. "Sorry for the wait, you know how it goes," he continued, racing through the formalities with the smooth speed of one who'd made a lifetime career out of first academia, and then politics, and then, finally, the Expeditionary Force. A finger pointed at a chair. Bill sat.
"Frankly," the admiral continued, "Your decision to personally oversee the situation was a bit unconventional, and you know how things bog down when they get unconventional. I've had the psych service in here screaming at me about mixed intentions and contaminating the subject since your message hit the desk. You deciding to turn unpredictable's left me with quite a headache, Bill my boy."
"You started it." White had always favoured a forthright approach, and so Bill treated him to one, leaned against the arm of a chair and turning a careful smirk upon him. Legendary Betan tolerance for insubordination or not, it wouldn't do to let the anger through to his voice.
"Oh?" White waved an encouraging hand, and paired it with an equally encouraging politician's smile. "Tell me my sins, Commodore Tailor."
"Mehta." One name. A good, strong opener, he told himself. Set the tone, set the stage for this little operation. White sat silent, eyebrows raised and waiting.
"The conspiracy nut?" he continued. "You remember two years ago, the Amonti case? The man was in therapy for six months because she thought he was a Jacksonian tech-spy – and he needed another six months to undo what the first six did to him when we found out that he wasn't. And you want to turn this woman lose on Cordelia Naismith? She already prompted a severe drug reaction on the first session because she didn't bother to so much as do a skin test. The woman's dangerous!"
A bit off there, he realized, too late to call back the words, which had risen in volume and tempo until ending in a near-shout, spurred on by memories of Cordelia's frantic, unbalanced confusion, and Dr. Mehta's smugly rationalized pleasure at seeing it.
Admiral White gave him a benevolent look, befitting his existence as just another high-strung researcher to soothe.
"Even paranoids are right sometimes, Bill," he reminded, calm and wise and grandfatherly. "And in this case, she's been requested specifically for her expertise in recovering buried memories. The evidence is clear. Our little Heroine of Escobar is not a well woman. That letter…"
"Was, to all intents and purposes, just a letter. She's an astrocartographer, not a cryptographer." With a continued bleed of irritation, Tailor's head snapped in a smart shake. "Even if we go with Mehta's nonsense about Barrayaran programming, there's no way she could be taught the art of generating uncrackable written codes in the couple days she was unaccounted for!"
"Watch it, Commodore." The sudden disappearance of White's good cheer was alarming. "She may not be a cryptographer, but you're not Intelligence. Don't talk about what they could or couldn't do. Now, your defending her does you credit, but I'm afraid you're just going to have to live with this. Mehta's assignment was passed down from levels even higher than mine."
"The President's Office? Surely—"
"They're very concerned. He's taken a personal interest in her case, you know."
"That doesn't explain Mehta."
"Oh, but it does, Bill." Rising from his seat with a sigh, White motioned for him to follow, over to a view screen rigged to manufacture a windowed look at the desert, despite their location twenty sublevels down.
"Therapy is the basis of our system of social order. It's a nice, palatable way for the public to feel they're safe from the criminal element, and it's a nice way of making sure the government is safe from any lone mavericks the public might throw up. Now don't pull that face at me, Bill," he warned, for Tailor's expression had suddenly imploded on itself.
"You don't like thinking of it, none of us does, but it's a fact that Beta Colony survives only through near-complete adherence to social order. We give them all the liberal freedoms and education they can eat, but when it comes to political stability, we're a string of human terrariums in the middle of a desert. We can't i afford /i breakaways, Bill.
"We need Barrayar as a scapegoat right now – this is the first time in years that the public's been behind the armed forces. We need our Heroine of Escobar, but we need her supporting us. She's unpredictable right now, could jump any which way – and the consequences could be much worse than Steady Freddy needing a new pair grown for him."
Touching a button, the screen melted away from a view of Quartz desert trekkers, bringing up charts and graphs instead. Dipping trendlines blazed in red.
"There are always those cases where therapy, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how regulated, ends up being administered by mistake. The Amonti case is one of them. We'll make our mistakes, now and again. I'm man enough to admit i that /i , at least.
"Problem is, Bill, Betans are smart people. There's that old quote about fooling all the people some of the time, and we've been pushing that envelope. There've been too many mistakes, recent years, and too many at a high enough profile. Too many assumptions, too many of the damn' shrinks forgetting that little fact that we can rewrite minds, but that doesn't make us God. And that brings us to Cordelia Naismith."
Pausing to advance his projections a bit, the admiral surveyed the commodore and his slowly tightening jawline.
"The public are behind her. First she was a heroine, and now she's a tragic, troubled one. They're eating it up, and they want to know what happened. Now, she comes out as one of Barrayar's most secret victims, then the solution is therapy, and being cured and welcomed back into the fold, warm and happy. The public's pleased."
Stopping, White turned old, wary eyes upon him.
"Picture what happens if they find out that it's therapy to blame for that scene on the podium."
He let the trendlines make his point.
Uneasy, but left without an argument after a final subtle inference that therapy wasn't an option only for Cordelia, Commodore Tailor made his return to Mrs. Naismith's apartment, with Dr. Mehta and a burly medtech in tow.