Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (18 page)

Chapter Nine

Dinner at the terrace restaurant followed by a confidential conference at the Viceroy’s Palace had worked so well the prior week, they repeated it midweek.
Worked again
, Jole thought, swimming muzzily up out of his sex-stunned haze to find a warm, naked Cordelia tucked up under his arm. He lifted his head to find her eyes slitted open, silvery-gray in the night-gleam, not asleep but just as obviously not going anywhere in particular right now. He squinted past her hair, tickling his nose, at the bedside chrono, and made a faint disgruntled noise.

“Hm?” Cordelia inquired, still not moving.

“Should get up an’ go. Doan’ wanna.”

“Don’t, then.” She backed a little more firmly into him.

“Mm…” He sighed, thinking of his empty bed back in his base apartment, and how small and cold the place had grown of late. “Should.”

“See, there’s another advantage to a public relationship. You could stay here all night. Get more sleep. Be fresher for work in the morning.”

“Temptress. You know a man’s susceptibilities, don’t you.”

She smiled sleepily. “Only my men.”

He grinned into her hair and kissed the top of her head. “Lake Serena again this weekend?”

Her lips pursed in doubt. “It has been brought to my attention that maybe we ought to vary our pattern. Our repeated trips out there seem to have triggered a spate of speculation, and not the sort I would have thought. Apparently, nobody under thirty thinks anyone over fifty has sex, so the explanations, while inventive, are bound to lead people astray.”

He returned a disappointed
mm
. Just
having
a pattern seemed a nice change. He could imagine this one repeating for quite a long time before he became bored with it. Months at least. Maybe years. A regular schedule that no one had to fret about. Nevertheless…

“We’ll have to vary the pattern anyway. My upside rotation starts next week.” An utterly routine inspection tour of the wormhole stations guarding the two blank-or-might-as-well-be wormholes. This supervisory task had slipped from exciting to dull with repetition, but not nearly as dull as the station-keeping duty itself. The brief, artificial excitement of their sector commander’s personal attention was about the only validation the fellows manning the wormhole forts ever received, and while boring was
good
on a space station, considering the alternatives, there were morale issues to consider. And, once in a great while, a real problem to uncover, preemptively making sure no one literally died of boredom. These inspections were worthwhile on several levels; Jole had never
resented
them before.

It was Cordelia’s turn to make a disappointed noise. “Ah, that’s right.” She rolled over; Jole obligingly turned on his back and let her rearrange herself with her head on his shoulder, her arm draped possessively over his chest. “I suppose vid sex is right out. I can’t see how it would work with several light-hours of time delay, anyway.”

Jole sniggered. “No. Not that I wouldn’t love to see that, mind you.”

“You, ImpSec, anyone on the tightbeam repeater-route with the clearance to tap the link…”

“Exactly what I was thinking. Don’t want to share.” He gave her a hug with his woman-weighted arm. “At least…if anything happened to you while I was out there, this time I could order
myself
home.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Hm?”

“I was just thinking of that frantic mess during my second trade-fleet escort tour.” He had advanced to exec on the
New Athens
, a then-new ship and a plum posting, he’d thought. “We were out halfway past Earth, at about the farthest jump on our route, when the news of the Prime Minister’s heart attack came through. I could do
nothing
, stuck where I was. And no one to talk to. Oh, there was plenty of political gossip and speculation, and of course everyone knew I’d been on his staff for years, so people interrogated me, sure.
That
was excruciating, even with the few who realized he wasn’t just a figure to me, but a friend. No basis to ask for compassionate leave, no way to get home in much less time than the fleet itself was going to take…I was never closer to deserting.”

Cordelia sighed. “I’m sorry my bulletins were so terse. Things were utterly crazy in Vorbarr Sultana, what with Miles missing-presumed-dead, and Mark coming in from the cold, and all the medical anxieties…I won’t say it was worse than the Pretender’s War, but it gave me flashbacks.”

His hug tightened. “Your bulletins were lifesavers, from my point of view. I watched them over and over. Trying to read between the lines, then trying
not
to read between the lines…That last one, after his heart transplant—you looked so exhausted, but it was like the sun had come up in your face.” He smiled. “And the next one was from him, and then…it was all right.”
All right for then
, at least. But that unwanted preview of mortality and loss and helplessness had been part of what had turned his career toward Sergyar space, as soon as he could engineer it.

She’d known what he’d wanted to hear, she’d known what he’d
needed
to hear…her first private tightbeam had been sped on its way within a day of the disaster, before she’d even slept, as far as he’d been able to discern. For all the assurances, subtle and unsubtle, that he’d received from her before, that message and the ones that soon followed had finally driven home to him that she truly considered him not a Betanly tolerated caprice of her husband’s, but an equal partner,
worthy
of all consideration. He’d always been a little bit in love with her, as what men around Aral were not? It wasn’t that he was more in love with her after, either. Yet there had flowed in under his feet with those messages, almost unseen, a profound and unshakable
trust
which had given him a new place to stand, when they all met again. And from that had followed…well, the rest of his life, so far.

When I was alone and afraid, you comforted me
. He turned up her face and kissed her properly for that, a mere decade-and-a-half late. She looked pleased, if bemused; he did not attempt to explain.

He was dressing before they returned to weekend plans. She rolled over, plucked her wristcom from the bedside table, called up her calendar, and frowned. “Ah, I was afraid of that. I have two afternoon meetings that will put a hole in anything out of town…booked ages ago. I must tell Ivy to guard my weekends better in future.”

He sat beside her with his own wristcom, and they compared calendars. The results were disheartening.

“Dinner and a conference here again, that night?” Cordelia suggested at last, pointing. “We could even
have
dinner here. In Ekaterin’s garden—that would be nice. As long as we don’t let anyone else know where to find us. At least we can leave room at Penney’s for his other customers.”

Cordelia had expressed some guilt when she’d learned that having Penney’s Place to themselves had been no accident, but a security compromise Jole had arranged. His argument that Penney didn’t suffer since he was paid for a full occupancy that he and Ma Penney didn’t actually have to serve had only made a small dent in this.

“I won’t be able to stay very late. I have an early lift-off the next morning.”

She nodded understanding and blocked out the time, with a note to her kitchen staff. A mental review of his tomorrow-morning’s schedule was not much motivation, consolation, or help for tearing himself away, but with a heroic effort that he suspected wouldn’t garner much sympathy even if there
were
someone he could complain to, he decamped into the Kayburg night.

* * *

Oliver had been gone on his upside rotation for only half a week, and Cordelia wondered how it was that she felt
bored
. Bored and restless. Drumming her fingers on the black glass of the comconsole desk in her personal office, she stared out into the rainy night of the back garden. Low, colored lights among the plantings and walkways made oddly cheerful accents in the dark blur.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plenty to do. Once she’d worked through the top layer of the day’s crises, there was always another layer, further down and more detailed. And a third one below that. The best camouflage for work-avoidance was more work? She contemplated the paradox, and decided, in all fairness, that it was just task-avoidance. One particular task, albeit with subheadings.
Drat it
, as her delightful daughter-in-law would say. She’d been thinking about this for months, years. Decades, in a sense. There was no reason for it to suddenly seem hard, here at the point of final fruition.

She called up her secured-tightbeam recording program and settled more firmly in her chair, straightening her shoulders and fixing a reassuring smile on her face.

“Hello, Gregor. This isn’t a crisis-call; I’m merely making it emperor’s-eyes-only because it contains personal elements, and also to be sure it gets to you promptly.” Because the next message out would go to Miles, and on the not-unlikely chance that her son and foster-son compared notes, Gregor should not be blindsided. “The first thing you should know is that I am planning to hand in my resignation as Vicereine of Sergyar within a year. Or so. So you’ll be wanting to keep your eyes open for a possible replacement. Or choice of replacements, since the list of those willing shall likely be a subset of those most able and suitable.” She paused the recording to mentally muster her own list of qualities most desirable in the person or persons who would be inheriting responsibility for
her planet
. People who wouldn’t screw up all the projects she’d started or had in progress—certainly nothing on Sergyar was
finished
. And yet, wasn’t part of
turning over
turning over just such choices of direction, as well? Starting with
turning over
to Gregor, which had first been done almost three decades ago when Aral had laid down the regency, to generally good effect, barring a few shakedown problems. Which she tried not to remember and hold against Gregor, maternally or otherwise. The grinding nightmare with that ugly plot of Vordrozda’s and Hessman’s had worked out all right in the end, after all. Not to mention the whole Hegen Hub near-disaster,
argh
. Both of which, possibly, might seem longer ago to Gregor than to her.

She shook her head ruefully, jotted down a written list of her bullet-points—thankfully not with real bullets these days—and drew lines through half of them. Then through a few more, till she had winnowed it to her top three concerns. There would be time later to discuss the details, after all. She restarted the recording and delivered them with the clipped efficiency she had honed through decades of reports. Then paused once more. Restarted.

“Which brings me to the reason for my resignation. My health continues excellent, by the way,” she added hastily, anticipating and with luck heading off any alarm her emperor might be feeling on that score. She could barely recall what all she had said to Gregor when sending the first message about Aral’s death, three years back. She could call it up from the files to refresh her memory, she supposed. If given a choice between that and sticking her hand in a campfire, she’d pick the fire, thanks.
Focus, woman
. “That being the case, I have decided now is the time to pursue a long-delayed wish of mine.”

In much the same terms as she’d first explained it to Oliver, she went over the history of the sequestered gametes, their legal status, their journey with her to Sergyar, and the techno-conception of Aurelia and her five still-frozen sisters. Six weeks old, Aurelia now was—Cordelia had visited the rep center again just last night—two weeks past the time she had promised herself to make this happy announcement. Historically, the standard for such news had been three months past conception, she understood. In part because so many early hopes could be dashed with early miscarriages, in part because—what had they called it?—
quickening
, that was it, was the first certain proof of progress, back in medieval times before reliable pregnancy tests. She still remembered that strange faint flutter in her lower belly with Miles, of, heavens, forty-four years ago now. For which
quickening
had been all too prescient a term. She smiled a little, then paused the recording to consider the place of Oliver’s potential sons in this report. Miles’s half-brothers, technically.

There were a great many people whose business this was not. If there was a short list of others, Gregor probably headed it, as usual. She sighed and started again.

“What follows is, for the moment, strictly confidential between me and you.” She explained about the leftover eggshells, and her bright idea of offering them to Oliver. She underlined the issue of Barrayaran special custody rights of fathers and sons, parallel with that of mothers and daughters. “Which makes this Miles’s legal business not at all, although I expect we shall apprise him in due course, just as a family courtesy. But too much is still uncertain about Oliver’s future choices, and their timing, for premature announcements in that direction.” And so there was one decision about her next message, made.

“And to close on a still-more-personal, if happy, note, I should probably mention that Oliver and I have started, er, dating.” Her lips curved up in memory of her debate with Oliver over the best terminology, but she wasn’t sure if she ought to share the joke with Gregor. Gregor harbored a sense of humor under his deep reserve somewhere, but the weight of the Imperium did a pretty good job of keeping it suppressed, poor boy. “Neither of us have any idea where this will be going in the long run, so there is no point in asking, but…it’s good to know we both can grow a little more alive again after all.”
In the midst of death, reaching out for life. With all due defiance.
Ekaterin might well offer some lovely metaphor about shoots struggling up from a burned-over place
.
Cordelia’s emotions certainly felt like that, tender and green and vulnerable. She hoped her parting smile looked happy and not just goofy. Not able to think of what else to add, she signed off.

She reran the message for review, but it all seemed sound; true and succinct. That last smile did indeed look a trifle goofy, but a replacement would probably just come out looking strained, which would be worse. Whatever else Gregor wanted to know, he could ask. She set the security code to the highest level, and sent it on its way. She pictured the data packet traveling from the Viceroy’s Palace to the orbital relay station, from there to the wormhole jump-point on the Komarr route, and onward, stitched from jump to jump at light speed, past Komarr, into the cul-de-sac route to Barrayar itself, to its governmental orbital communications station to the Imperial Residence to Gregor’s comconsole desk, in that sober, modern office he kept, also looking out over a garden. Would it be day or night when it arrived? She was too tired just now to work out the time differentials in her head.