Jole arrived twenty minutes early for his appointment with Dr. Tan at the rep center, and then couldn’t make himself step inside. He walked up and down the side street, instead.

Kareenburg actually had side streets now, some thirty-five or forty years, depending on how one counted it, after its founding. Barrayar’s first imprint on its new colony world had been a military base and shuttleport half-sheltered by a volcanic mountain that had blown out its side in some ancient cataclysm, standing sentinel with a string of sisters upon a wide plain. The pictures Jole had seen of earliest Kareenburg depicted a mud street lined with repurposed, and in some cases doubtless stolen, old military field shelters, as the base slowly upgraded from its first primitive incarnation. Like any up-sprung village serving a fortress on Old Earth or on Barrayar going back to the Time of Isolation, it had run heavily to such services as bars and brothels, but with the arrival of the first legitimate civilian colonists and a string of Imperial viceroys, government functions had slowly taken over the space, and the livelier aspects of the settlement had relocated. Historical redaction had cut in with amazing speed, and those grubby early days were well on their way to being rewritten mainly as a setting for romantic adventure stories.

The hottest local political argument at the moment, and for the last ten years, was the transfer of the capital to some more selectively chosen region of the continent or one of the five others, resisted fiercely by those with major speculative investments in the present site. The Vicereine had dozens of scientific surveys on her side in favor of relocation, but Jole suspected she might be fighting one of her few losing battles with inertia and human nature. In the meanwhile, the racket of new construction extended and entrenched the proto-city in all directions.

These ruminations brought Jole around again to the doors of what the sign proclaimed as Kareenburg Reproductive and Obstetrical Services. Kayross for short, the intimidating polysyllables tamed and made friendly by the nickname. The building was not one of the old field shelters, but instead purpose-built, in a utilitarian mode that spoke of constrained budgets, as a clinic - if not this clinic, which had taken over the premises more recently.

I can do this. I can do anything. Hadn’t Aral Vorkosigan taught him that? Jole took a breath and pushed inside.