Pedigree Matters

Title: Pedigree Matters
Author: quietann
Rating: none
Character: Gregor Vorbarra (Vorkosigan fandom)
Written for: lmb_challenge
Prompt: unromantic




Gregor had just finished a discussion with the Imperial Stallion Manager about the season's breedings. They'd pored over pedigrees, discussed conformation faults, and reviewed show records for hours. Shuffled around a few pairings on the comconsole, decided to sell one of the lesser stallions and geld another, hoped that an elderly mare who had been Gregor's first serious mount would catch once again.

His thoughts were interrupted by Simon Illyan entered the room and handed a data disk to Gregor. "The latest potential matches, Sire," he said, with only a hint of embarrassment. Gregor had to wonder sometimes if the man was a eunuch. "They've all passed Lady Vorpatril's vetting. Nice girls, good families, no political scandals -- or anything else -- touching them," Simon continued, with a smidgen of a smile at the end that suggested Simon might be sympathetic as much as embarrassed.

"Now, Simon, I'm sure you have better things to do than watch over my shoulder while I perform this unromantic task," Gregor said. It came out more sharply than he'd intended, but this process always put him into a bad mood.

As Simon left, Gregor sighed, and turned to his comconsole. One of the reasons he liked to be alone for this was that the program he used was the same one he'd used with the stallion manager.

Lady Alissa Vordovan. Age 18. Enrolled at Miss Featherly's Academy, Bonsanklar. Brown hair, blue eyes. Father Count Boris Vordovan. Mother Countess Emilie Vordovan, nee Vorfolse. The photograph showed a slender, pretty girl -- as they always were, so much so that Gregor could rarely tell if he'd met any particular one before. Well, it was not likely that he'd ever met Lady Alissa, as the Vordovans were very traditional in their beliefs about how daughters should be brought up. They were kept in their home district on the South Continent until ready for marriage, no random or even Imperial Vorbarr Sultana social events allowed. Lady Alissa must be exceptionally mature, to be offered up at just 18.

He touched the screen to open his own family tree, dragged the icon for hers over it, shut his eyes, and listened to his tap on the screen.

There was red everywhere, splattered across the super-imposed charts. They were cousins too many times over to count. He sank back in his chair as a familiar anger took him. There was no place for it to go but back in time.

Emperor Ezar had been shrewd, selecting Kareen for his son out of an obscure branch of a lesser Vor family who'd kept to the South Continent. Gregor barely remembered his father, a bear of a man in a glittering uniform, who never looked at his son with anything but coldness. He shivered, as the doubts about Prince Serg swelled up. There was something wrong about the way his father, a supposedly glorious martyr to Barrayar's military expeditions, had been disappeared.

Gregor had gone as far as to ask Lady Cordelia Vorkosigan, who would almost always give a straight Betan answer to any question he had, but she'd shied away from enlightening him much at all. There were old rumors about his father and Ges Vorrutyer, Cordelia and Ges Vorrutyer, even Aral Vorkosigan and Ges Vorrutyer, and Gregor supposed that some of them must be true, or his most honest advisor would have been more characteristically forthright.

But if the Prince had been his father, he surely had inherited something of the mysterious wrongness. He'd searched his own mind, looking for what could be so awful, and found nothing but his own sad thoughts, his own dreams of escape, the occasional desire to get laid regardless of the consequences. But he was still convinced it was there, and how could he gift his children with such a burden? He'd never had time to develop a sophisticated understanding of genetics, but he'd learned enough from the stallion manager to know that pedigree mattered -- that perhaps the future of Barrayar depended on it.

This line of thought took him nowhere good, so he switched off the comconsole and turned to a stack of flimsies he needed to deal with before the upcoming trip to Komarr, the first in the five years since he'd come into his majority. And got nowhere with the task, as his mind filled with images of Komarran women -- modern, educated, and certainly not Vor. It was impossible that Barrayar would accept a Komarran Empress, yet he fell anyway into a fantasy that started with a comconsole display completely lacking any red highlights.