Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - eARC Read online

“A co-parent is legally, and usually genetically, the same as a parent—a godfather is more like the orphan’s legal guardian in the event of parental death. And yes, I’m going to have to give thought to my new will. Fortunately, I have access to the best lawyers on the planet. And so will you, in the event.”

  “Aral Kosigan Jole…?” he muttered, as if he hadn’t heard this, though she knew he had.

  “No one would blink,” she assured him. “Or Oliver Jole, Junior, or anything you like.”

  “How could I…explain their mother? Or their lack of a mother?”

  “Anonymously donated eggs purchased from the gamete bank, perfectly standard. Which isn’t even untrue. You hit fifty, and suddenly decided to have a child for your midlife crisis instead of a shiny red lightflyer, whatever.”

  He swiped a hand through his tarnished gold hair, and laughed uncertainly. “I am beginning to think you are my midlife crisis, Cordelia.”

  She shrugged, amused. “Shall I apologize?”

  “Never.” The best smile tugged up his lips, despite his dismay.

  No—they hadn’t seen enough of each other these past three years, had they. They’d merely swept past each other often. She and Oliver had both been running like hell for their work and other duties, frequently on different planets, or on opposite ends of a gravity well, and the last thing the widowed Vicereine, under intense scrutiny in her new solo position, possessed was any personal privacy. She envied Aral his cool former command of his privacy, in retrospect. And how his cloak of loyalties had stretched to cover them all.

  She dug a card out of her pocket, scribbled a note on the back, and handed it across. “This is the doctor to see, if you decide to stop in at the rep center and leave a donation. My key Betan man, Dr. Tan. He’s been fully apprised. In your own time, Mister Jole.”

  Jole took it gingerly, and read it closely. “I see.” His long fingers placed it in his shirt pocket with care, and touched it again as if to make sure. “This is an astounding gift. I would never have thought of it.”

  “So I concluded.” She scrubbed her lips with her napkin. “Well, think about it now.”

  “I doubt I’ll be able to think about anything else.” His smile tilted. “Thank you for not dropping this on me in the middle of a working day, by the way.”

  She cast him a ghost of a salute.

  His eyes grew warmer, intent upon her. “Huh…This makes it the second time that my life has been turned upside-down and sent in directions I’d never even imagined by a Vorkosigan. I might have known.”

  “The first being, ah, when Aral fell in love with you?”

  “Say, fell in love on me. It was like being hit by a falling building. Not a building falling over—a building falling from the sky.”

  She grinned back. “I am familiar with the sensation.” She regarded him in reminded curiosity. “Aral talked to me about nearly everything—I was his only safe repository for that part of himself, till you came along—but he was always a bit cagey about how you two got started. The empire was at peace, Miles was safely locked up in the Academy, political tensions were at an all-time low—not that that lasted—I go off to visit my mother on Beta Colony leaving him in no worse straits than another of his unrequited silent crushes. I come back to find you two up and running and poor Illyan having a meltdown—it was like talking him in off a ledge.” Aral’s utterly loyal security chief had never come closer to, if not weeping with relief, at least cracking an expression, to find in her not an outraged spouse, but an unruffled ally. I knew Aral was bisexual when I married him. And he knew I was Betan. Melodrama was never an option, Illyan. “The only surprise was how you two ever got past all your Barrayaran inhibitions in the first place.”

  A flash of old amusement crossed Jole’s always-expressive face. “Well—I’m afraid you’d think it was all more Barrayaran than Betan. It doubtless involved a lot less talking, which I cannot regret. The standard for declassification is still fifty years, isn’t it? That sounds about right to me.”

  Cordelia snickered. “Never mind, then.”

  Jole cocked his head in turn. “Did he have that many, er, silent crushes? Before me?”

  “I ought to make you trade”—Jole made his own never mind, then, gesture, and Cordelia smiled—“but I’ll have pity. No, for all that the capital was awash with handsome officers, he more appreciated them as a man would a good sunset or a fine horse, abstractly. Intelligent officers, he recruited whenever he could, and if they happened to intersect the first set, well and good. Officers of extraordinary character—were always thinner on the ground. All three in one package—”

  Jole made another fending gesture, which Cordelia brushed aside. “Oh, behave. The first time he ever saw you it was to pin that medal on you, wasn’t it? He’d already studied the reports of the orbital accident, in detail—he always did, for those honors—and all your prior records. If nothing else, you’d just saved the Emperor the trouble of replacing about a hundred very expensively trained men.” No wonder that Aral had recruited Jole as nearly on the spot as the paperwork and his physicians permitted. The other recruitment had come rather later.

  Jole grimaced. “That always felt strange, to be cited for a set of actions I could barely remember. The hypoxia was cutting in badly by then. Not to mention the blood loss, I suppose. Or so my ImpMil physicians suggested, later. I could only think—but what if I had to do it again, and couldn’t remember how?” His lips twisted up in belated amusement. “God, I was young, wasn’t I?”

  “You were as old as you’d ever been. As were we all, I suppose.” After a moment, she added curiously, “Had you thought you were monosexual, before Aral?”

  He shrugged. “If one doesn’t count experiments at age fourteen. I’d dated women, as much as my career up till then permitted, which wasn’t much. But things never quite clicked. After Aral, I thought I knew why.” He glanced up through those lashes at her. “I was quite terrified of you, at first. Thought my head was going to end up in a sack.”

  “Yes, it took some time to talk you down, too.”

  “And I found out what the Countess’s famous Betan conversations were all about. I’d never thought of myself as a naïve backcountry boy, till then.”

  Cordelia chuckled. “On Beta Colony, we’d have had earrings for it. We could have bought them in any jewelry shop.”

  “Ha. Remind me to tell you about the Betan herm merchanter I once met when I was out on my third escort tour. Without your tutoring, I’d have missed…well, an extraordinary week.” He looked, for just a second, salaciously cheerful in his apparently fond memory. It wasn’t a look she’d surprised on him for quite some time. It was no mystery why they’d both been getting through on zombie-pilot, these past three years; but she wondered when it had become a habit.

  “I’m glad you were over your, er, shyness by the time you came to us again on Sergyar.”

  “The extra years and the captaincy under my belt probably helped.”

  “Something had, certainly.” She bent her head, ambiguously but amiably. Silence fell between them, not unduly strained.

  He twisted the stem of his wineglass; looked up at her directly. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it. Or simple.”

  “It never has before; I have no idea why it should start now.”

  His laugh was low, but real.

  They lingered only a little longer, reverting to talking shop—Chaos Colony made sure that they never ran out of shop—and then rose together. He did not offer his arm, although he might have done so here unexceptionably enough, and she did not walk too close. He helped her into her groundcar, brought round to the front; as it pulled away she twisted and studied him through the canopy, striding off to his own vehicle. He did wheel and give her a bemused little wave as her car turned into the street. His hand, falling again, touched his breast pocket in passing.

  Cordelia was conscious of a twinge of frustration on Oliver’s behalf, mostly because he never seemed to muster it for himself. D
ammit, if there was ever a man who deserved to be loved…But if he’d made any connections since Aral’s death, he hadn’t confided them to her, not that he was under any obligation to do so. Her attempts at Barrayaran-style matchmaking had been extremely hit-or-miss over her lifetime, or she’d be tempted to try to help him somehow. But Oliver was…complicated. Which was why I broached this to him in the first place, she reminded herself.

  His tall, solitary figure was lost to her sight as her car rounded the next corner.

  Chapter Two

  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.

  …But, as he stepped into the queue at the reception counter, he was nonetheless glad he was wearing his anonymous casual civvies, and not his rank-heavy undress greens. Not that Imperial uniforms were an unusual sight on Kareenburg’s streets. There were several people in line ahead of him—another man, a woman, and a couple, whose heads all swung around to observe him in turn—and he wasn’t sure whether to be glad he had company, or to wish them all to oblivion. They were all sent to wait on uncomfortable-looking seats lining the side of the room, but when Jole stated his name, the receptionist jumped up, saying in a far-too-carrying voice, “Oh, yes, Admiral Jole! The Vicereine told us to expect you. Dr. Tan is right this way,” and ushered him through a door into a short corridor, which had the faint chemical-and-disinfectant smell of every med clinic he’d ever unhappily encountered. So maybe it was some visceral memory of old pain and injury that was making him edgy? No, probably not.

  She led him first into a room containing several comconsole desks, half of them manned by intent staffers and displaying dauntingly dense data readouts, or gaudy tangles that he guessed were molecular maps. The various colors and cuts of lab coats might proclaim different functions, ranks, and responsibilities, just as Imperial uniforms and insignia did, but this wasn’t a code to which he had the key. And there were a lot more personal touches—plants, toys, holocubes, souvenirs. The clothing under the coats was anything but uniform, including a couple of young people wearing what were clearly Betan sarongs and sandals, though it was less clear if they were actually Betans. The coffee mugs, at least, were familiar.

  The receptionist delivered him to the desk of a slight, dark-haired young man in a light blue coat that went to his knees, though he was wearing Sergyaran-style trousers and a shirt underneath.

  “Dr. Tan, Admiral Jole is here.”

  “Ah, excellent! Just a sec…” He flung up a finger and finished whatever he had been about at his comconsole, shut down the baffling display of vibrant light lines, then stood up to offer Jole a firm handshake and a smile. The receptionist flitted away.

  Dr. Tan was tan, and very healthy-looking, though his features were hard to map to any particular Earth ancestry—unlike Barrayar’s population, lost and isolated for six hundred years and only rediscovered a century ago, the Betans had been using gene cleaning and rearranging for generations, which meant anyone’s ancestors could be anything. “How do you do, Admiral? Welcome to Kayross. I’m so glad you came in. Any friend of the Vicereine’s is a friend of ours, I assure you!”

  Jole was a bit disoriented by that familiar Betan accent coming out of such an unfamiliar mouth, but he managed the handshake and suitable greetings. He tried not to let the accent sway him—he was here to make his own judgments…Or had he already decided, and all this going-through-the-motions was for what audience, exactly?

  “Vicereine Vorkosigan said you would have questions, and that I was to answer them all. Would you care to start with a short tour?”

  “Uh…yes, actually. Please. The only rep center I’ve ever been in wasn’t up and running yet.” That had been at a dedication ceremony in the Vorkosigan’s District capital of Hassadar, back on Barrayar, which then-Prime Minister Vorkosigan, and therefore his aide, had attended in public support of his wife’s manifold medical projects there.

  Tan led him off to get suited up in some disposable paper garments, and then ushered him through the double doors at the end of the corridor. There, Jole found himself in a brightly lit clinical laboratory—busy lab benches cluttered with equipment under filtering vent hoods, a dozen absorbed techs bent over scanner stations. It reminded him a little of his tactics room, except that no one here seemed in the least bored. All the meticulously moving hands were smooth and gloved and steady.

  The work stations on the first bench, featuring some especially rapt techs, were devoted to what Jole thought was the heart of the matter, fertilization. A couple of tightly temperature-controlled storage chambers held the culture dishes with early cell divisions. The lab stations on next bench over were devoted to what Dr. Tan dubbed quality control, gene scanning and repair. A second bank of warming cupboards continued the next stage of closely observed development, and then a last bench was devoted to implanting the ratified embryos and their placentas in the uterine replicators that would house them for the next nine months.

  Through the next door, Tan relieved his guest of his crinkly paper overalls and hat, and guided him through a series of chambers devoted to the banks of replicators themselves, stacked five high. Panels of readouts monitored their progress. Pleasant music alternated with assorted natural sounds over speakers hidden somewhere. Individual jacks allowed soft, piped-in recordings of parental voices, speaking or reading. Jole found it creepily cheerful. Or cheerfully creepy, he wasn’t sure which. He reminded himself that all those arrayed containers held individual people’s—or couples’—most ardent hopes for the future. The next generation of Sergyarans. In fifteen years, all those disturbing biological blobs would be out on Kareenburg’s streets, wearing strange fashions, listening to annoying music, and disagreeing politically with their beleaguered parents. In twenty-five years, they’d be taking on tasks that he couldn’t p
resently imagine, though he guessed a few would be right back here working in this rep center, or its successor. Or offering up their own gametes for what the Vicereine dubbed the genetic lottery.

  Could his own children be among them?

  Why, yes, they could.

  “Can conceptions—babies—ever get mixed up?” There were stories about such mishaps…Many of them passed along, Cordelia had pointed out, by people with irrational objections to the rep centers.

  Dr. Tan smiled at him in a pained fashion. “Our techs are extremely conscientious, but to soothe the doubts of the, shall we say, biologically less educated, the genetics of any infant can be checked against that of its parents with a few cheek swabs and three minutes on the scanner at the time they take delivery. Or at any prior time, actually, amniocentesis being a trivial procedure with a replicator. The service is offered for free—or rather, included at no extra charge.” He added after a moment, “We get that question a lot, from you Barrayarans. The Vicereine once told me to point out that our error rate is provably statistically lower than that of the natural method, but the late Viceroy advised me that it might not be taken in good part.”

  “I see,” said Jole. He tried to come up with a few more suitably technical questions that would redeem his Barrayaran IQ in this man’s eyes. Jole enjoyed Sergyar’s sprinkling of galactic immigrants, on the whole, but he had to admit that they could sometimes also be remarkably annoying. He managed not to blurt out his own history as a natural, un-gene-cleaned body birth, in attempted proof of what, he could not say.

  The fact came up shortly, however, when Dr. Tan took him back out to another room off the reception area, and left him to get on with an unmanned station that took his medical history in exhaustive detail. Jole was able to speed up this tedious process by plugging in his military medical records, which, after checking over to remove anything still classified, he’d stored on his wristcom for the purpose last night. This program was used to dealing with the arcana of Barrayaran military records, fortunately—quite a few veterans from the base chose to muster out here, or to come back later. Had Cordelia supplied Aral’s? Yes, she must have, when she’d done her own. No one asked Jole for it, anyway, when Tan came back to rescue him.