Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Read online

  “A recoverable glitch, surely. The misdelivery address alone should put you on solid legal ground. Make them come and take it back, and recoup your credit. Aral would have.”

  “Aral would have threatened to make them eat it—and made them believe him.” Jole paused in brief retrospective envy of a command style that had always seemed beyond his touch, or at least his acting abilities. Aral’s trick had been that it was no trick. “I already have. Well, not the eat-it part. They claim that such a move would bankrupt their business—leaving them unable to deliver next year. And no other vendor to replace them, not for those volumes. I sent one of my more forensically inclined procurement fellows to check out that assertion, and he claims that it’s true.”

  Cordelia’s brow wrinkled. “Those fellows—Plas-Dan, isn’t it?—you’d think they’d know better than to piss in the bucket they’re trying to drink from.”

  Jole grinned at Aral’s old plaint about politics. Not one of his public utterances, to Jole’s regret. “You would, yet here we are. And—civilian colonists. Belonging, therefore, to you—Your Excellency. A word in your private ear, as it were.” His thoughts veered a bit—her private ears nestled coyly in her wild hair, when he studied them from this distance. Different somehow from when she’d worn her hair long, weighted down by its own mass or aristocratically bound back and adorned with live flowers.

  Her face twisted up in expressive dismay. “Dammit, I knew you lied.…Do you want me to look into Plas-Dan, see if I can turn up some better handle on them?”

  “It’s worth a go. Without endangering next year’s supply of plascrete, if you please.”

  “Right-oh…” She scowled around at their fortress of moldering solitude. “Is this why you brought me out here, sort of a do-it-yourself cone-of-silence without the cone-of-silence alerting everyone that we were talking secrets? Not that it wasn’t a pleasant-enough walk.”

  The afternoon was warmer than the one of her garden party, the air even brighter, as the sun slanted gold. Did her feet hurt, after him making her march out to the far backside of the base? He glanced at her shoes, which seemed sensible enough. For about the eleventh time since then, he regretted not volunteering to rub her toes when they had been so invitingly bared to him, but he had still been off-balance from his trip to the rep center, and what would she have thought of so arrogant an offer, anyway? That had been Aral’s place.

  “Yes…no. Not only that,” he admitted. Not that at all. Was Plas-Dan merely convenient camouflage, the first he could grab off the shelf? Although setting Cordelia on them did seem the next logical step. “I had an unrelated personal addendum.”

  She leaned against the stack, crossed her arms under her breasts, and smiled at him. “You always have claim on my ear for those.”

  He took a breath. “After we talked the other day, I went ahead and ordered Tan to complete the fertilizations.”

  “Congratulations! You’re almost a father, then. I’m guessing you went with freezing the zygotes, till you work through your career decisions, though?”

  “Yes, in fact. Anyway, that’s what I told Tan when he called with the update this morning. It wasn’t that. It was…one of the four didn’t make it, Tan said. Normal attrition for this stage, he said.”

  She hesitated, then gave a conceding nod. “I’d started out with twenty eggs, brought from Barrayar. Half of them failed, for one subtle reason or another. Biology at that micro-level is trickier than most people realize. And more cruel.”

  And his added one more to that loss. Will you always be ahead of me, Cordelia? “Yes, Tan was very willing to explain all the details, boiled down for the layperson, I gather. Molecular biology never having been my forte. It wasn’t the mechanics. It was…”

  She waited, still leaning relaxed against the shadowed sack-wall but, he thought, keenly alert. In your own time, Mister Jole.

  He stared down at his regulation shoes. “Two weeks ago, none of this was even part of my mental furniture in any way. One week ago, I was simply…unnerved, I guess. Boggled. But that quartet of shadow-sons took root in my mind so fast. I was thinking, only the one. And then we’d see. Then two, because there’s this assumption that a boy ought to have a brother, although I’m not so sure mine appreciated me. And then, but what if…How can I be, already by today, how could I be…” He trailed off, not so much tongue-tied as baffled by his own churning thoughts.

  “Mourning for a lost dream-child?”

  He nodded. “Something like that.” It wasn’t what he’d expected of himself. When he’d blurted to Tan to begin, some part of his mind had been arguing—hoping?—that they might all fail, and then this test would be over. Resetting his life to zero. Ending the suspense. Soonest begun, soonest done. But then, when he’d been handed a part of that dark wish…had he any right to call it grief? He glanced up at her. “And no one on this world I could talk with about it except you. Which is really why we are out here. To tell you the truth.” Finally.

  She sucked on her lower lip, and scuffed her shod toe in the red dirt. “You know, Oliver…I wonder if you aren’t being ambushed by your own habits a bit, here. None of this is anything illegal, or immoral, or scandalous, or anything but good for the future of Sergyar. Or likely to bring an Imperial government crashing down. That painstaking discretion is all from the past, now, along with the reasons for it. You went down to the rep center and bought a donated egg or three. Lots of people do. You can talk about it with anyone, really.”

  “Easier said than done, and you know why.”

  “If you’re wincing at the thought of criticism from people with their heads still stuck in the Time of Isolation, or more fundamental places—even though the T-oh-I was over before any of them were born—well…if you want to play What would Aral do? you know he’d have said Publish and be damned, or choicer words.” She blinked thoughtfully. “Grant you, that attitude always terrified his younger advisors, once he finally got old enough to have younger advisors. The older men, who remembered what he’d been like raging around Vorbarr Sultana in that bad patch in his twenties after his first wife died so brutally…would have been unsurprised at anything. But of course, the youngsters didn’t talk to the old sticks if they could possibly avoid it, so they mostly never had their illusions shattered.” He wondered if she was thinking of her son Miles. She looked up, her gray eyes urgent and earnest. “Oliver, you are all right. This is all right. This is the new Sergyar, not the old Barrayar. No one is going to try to assassinate anyone over it in a fit of vicarious outrage, really.”

  “And yet even you say, anonymously donated egg.”

  Her smile slid sideways. “Well…no reason to go actively hunting for trouble, either, eh?”

  He had to laugh a little.

  “Try it,” she challenged, absurdly forthright as usual. “Next time you’re all gossiping around the water cooler, or whatever you fellows do on base or upside. For my fiftieth birthday, I’ve decided to have a son, or whatever. All right, maybe the younger lads won’t understand, but most of the older officers are parents themselves. You may find out you’ve joined a club you never knew existed. Ask them for advice—that’ll win them over in a hurry.”

  That last was a convincing argument, to be sure. But he managed, austerely, “Soldiers of the Imperium do not gossip. We just exchange mission-critical information.”

  She snickered. “Right. All your fellows gossip like washerwomen.”

  He grinned back, his heart lightened, though he could not say exactly how. “Except with more bragging and lies, pretty much, yeah.”

  He became aware that he was standing very close to her, in the cool-warm shade of the concealing sack-walls, his arm out propping him almost over her. When at this rare range it always vaguely surprised him to rediscover that, though a tallish woman, she was shorter than himself. The air was very quiet, not even the distant boom or whine of one of the orbital shuttles taking off or landing. They might have been a hundred kilometers away from anyone, out in the ru
gged volcanic hills somewhere. Picnicking, perhaps. Now, there was an idea for a weekend retreat…

  The scents trapped on the still air teased his senses—light sweat, her hair, the perfume of her soap, the dry dust of the plascrete. He became conscious of her lips, as she regarded him with a quizzical half smile, face tipped up, and that she had gone quite still, and what did that mean? He also became aware that a certain witless part of his body was earnestly suggesting that backing up the Vicereine to a wall of plascrete sacks and doing her standing would be a delightful addition to both their afternoons.

  Hell you say. I’m not putting you in charge of anything to do with the Vicereine ever.

  How long did that bloody Betan nasal spray last, anyway?

  He shook himself out of his temporary hypnosis and took an abrupt step backward. Did she just catch her breath? He had to, though he trusted he concealed it. “Well!” he said brightly. “Supper, Your Excellency?”

  She did not, immediately, push off from the wall. Her chin tucked. Her smile didn’t thin, exactly, it just became a little stiffer—the nice smile she used for the holovids, not for him. “If you say so, Oliver. Lead on.”

  He almost offered her his arm, but hesitated too long; she was already striding off. He followed.

  I have to find a boat. Somehow.

  * * *

  As they walked back toward the building housing the officers’ mess, Cordelia suppressed a scowl. She had been very nearly certain Oliver had been about to kiss her. And she had been very nearly certain that she would like it. She had before, on certain special occasions…

  Don’t be stupid, woman. You know he prefers men. She’d known that for decades.

  Do I? In that case, why hadn’t he found himself one, in the past three years? Not in those first few shell-shocked months, no. But she knew that he collected passes from both sexes—and the rare visiting herm—she’d seen that both back in their Vorbarr Sultana period, and since he’d been assigned to Sergyar Command. Oliver had been awkward at ducking them in his first days, absorbed in learning his new tasks as the overworked aide to one of the most high-powered men on the planet, and then there had followed that amusing period when he’d been so caught up in Aral that barely anyone else seemed to register. But in time, he’d become as deft at giving off silent don’t try me vibes as any virtuously faithful Vor matron. As had she, she supposed, but given that she was Aral’s wife, very few men who weren’t obviously insane had ever bothered her with unwanted advances. Although her own social obliviousness had doubtless also helped smooth things over. Any whose futile hopes she could not depress herself, she could send ImpSec to hand on a clue to. Word like that got around.

  Which suggested that she, too, might be out of practice at this sort of thing, except that she had never been in practice in the first place. She’d been thirty-three years old, a Betan Astronomical Survey commander, in a situation as unconducive to romance as any she could imagine, when Aral had, ha, fallen in love on her—her lips curved up again at the memory of Oliver’s extremely apt turn of phrase, melting her urge to scowl—and her life had never been the same again.

  She considered Oliver’s confidence—the real one, not the Plas-Dan smokescreen. He was, she realized belatedly, trying to process a sort of technological miscarriage, without the words or even the concepts for it. No way to package the experience for himself at all. Would it help if she suggested he name the lost zygote? Volunteer to aid him in burning a Barrayaran death-offering? Or would that be too intrusive? Offensive? Or just incomprehensible? No, not that—she had not mistaken the bewildered pain in his voice. Maybe just being his good listener was enough. The one friend he could talk to. Damn. I meant to give you a gift of joy, not…this.

  The base officers’ mess was divided into two sections, an efficient cafeteria downstairs for the people in a hurry, and a somewhat less utilitarian dining room upstairs, with wide windows looking out over the shuttleport. The food all came out of the same kitchen, merely being plated and served more nicely up here. She and Aral had eaten many working meals with the military staff in this mess, when colony concerns had taken them onto the base, usually in one of the smaller private rooms off either end of the main one. Today Oliver simply guided her to a table by the windows. Heads turned as they passed. The service was instantly attentive, certainly. Happily, the enlisted server was one of the older hands, undaunted by his Admiral and the Vicereine.

  Discussions of what were, Cordelia suspected, only going to be the first of several thousand other practical issues involving the impact of the new base carried them through the salad and the main course. Oliver was clearly amused by her not-at-all secret hope that the boost to the Gridgrad settlement by this huge infusion of military money and construction people would shift the center of colonization away from Kareenburg’s why-for-the-love-of-logic semi-desert ecosystem—not to mention the active tectonic boundary and not-actually-dead volcanoes—to the much more salubrious, well-watered, and geologically stable zone around Gridgrad.

  “This place was never picked for a colony site in the first place,” she argued. “It was picked because the caves in what is now Mount Thera made a dandy cache to hide an invasion fleet’s worth of supplies from people like, well, passing Betan Astronomical Survey vessels, while the old war party scraped together that insanely stupid Escobar conquest scheme. Grant you, the caves did work exactly as hoped, I’ll give old Emperor Ezar’s bloodthirsty cutthroats that much credit.”

  Oliver held up his hands palm-out in nondisagreement—he’d heard this rant from her before. A motion by the table that was not their server bearing dessert caught her eye, and she stopped in mid-spate to look around. Oliver’s aide, Lieutenant Vorinnis, presented herself, and Cordelia’s heart caught with the fear that it might be some crisis, soothed when the girl offered a hesitant, even hangdog, salute.

  “Admiral Jole, sir. Good evening, Your Excellency.” A respectful motion in Cordelia’s direction that was neither salute nor bow nor curtsey—more of a bob. “My apologies for interrupting”—a glance at their empty plates indicated hope that she was not too ill-timed—“but I received this…this thing, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I showed it to Colonel Martin, but she didn’t know either, so she said I should ask you, sir, because you’d probably know all about this kind of stuff. And someone said they saw you come up here, and—well, here.”

  She thrust out her hand, holding a stiff, colored-paper envelope in a style Cordelia recognized, but hadn’t expected to see in this place. Oliver, too, recognized it, his brows rising as he took it for closer examination. “Well, well. What have we here, Lieutenant?”

  “I think it says it’s an invitation to a party at the Cetagandan consulate. Although the wording’s a little…oblique. From Lord ghem Soren. Supposedly.” She said this in a voice of gruff suspicion.

  “Well, that it is. Addressed to you personally, I see, no mistake there. Hand-calligraphed, too, as is right and proper for a rising young ghem. Someone made him practice, once. Assuming he didn’t panic and pay someone more expert to do the task for him, which would be considered terribly déclassé if he were caught at it. Paper hand-made, good touch, though doubtless purchased.” He ran the card extracted from within delicately under his nose, and sniffed.

  Cordelia sat back, beginning to be amused. “What else can you determine?”

  “Cinnamon, rose, and gardenia, I think. Not terribly subtle, but perhaps he was making allowances for the recipient, which suggests a certain effort at diplomatic courtesy. Or perhaps even straightforwardness, perish the thought. See what you make of it, Cordelia.” He handed the card and its envelope across to her.

  “A fellow shouldn’t be drenching letters in perfume, should he?” asked Vorinnis uneasily. “Or are all their consulate invitations like that?”

  “You’ve heard of the language of flowers, Lieutenant?” asked Cordelia.

  The girl’s rather straight and thick eyebrows lowered. “Wasn’t that some Time
of Isolation custom? Different flowers would have different meanings. Red roses for love, white lilies for grief, that sort of cra—thing?”

  “That’s right,” said Oliver. “Well, Cetagandan ghem culture, when it’s at home, doesn’t just stop at flowers. Objects, artistic choices and their juxtapositions, flowers—naturally—scents, you name it. All convey coded messages.”

  “Should I take this to Base Security, then? I wondered.”

  “Ah—coded social messages, usually,” Oliver clarified. “The things the ghem say with plasma cannons tend to be more direct. I’m sure it pains their sense of aesthetics.”

  “Oh. Aesthetics,” said Vorinnis. Her tone conveyed uncoded dubiousness.

  Oliver went on, “So the elements you need to observe to deconstruct this will be the choices of paper, ink, the particular style of the calligraphy, wording—extra points for obscure poetic references—the method of delivery—which was what, by the way?”

  “I think somebody handed it in at the gate, and it went by base mail after that.”

  “I see.”

  The girl craned her neck at the paper still in Cordelia’s hand. “So what does it say? Convey.”

  “Well, to start with, it is in the correct form, which indicates some baseline of respect, personal or professional,” Oliver began.

  “Or a basic ability to follow the instructions in an etiquette manual,” Cordelia put in. “Which is not a point against the boy, mind you.”

  She handed it back across, and Oliver turned it over once more. He said, “The paper itself is relatively neutral, the colors of envelope and card blend pleasingly enough, so there is no covert hostility. Calligraphy style is formal, not familiar, but not official. The scents, however…heh.”

  “What?” Vorinnis did not quite wail.

  Cordelia put in, “Cinnamon for warmth, which is supposed to give a hint how to construe the other odors blended in. Roses—for once, even the Cetagandans follow the old Earth traditions—love, lust, or friendship, depending on the color of the rose.”