Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (21 page)

“Wait, you were
awake
during the surgery?”

“Initially. Have I mentioned that this way is better?”

“Repeatedly.”

Miles turned with some relief to the new visitor. “Good morning, Admiral Jole. Mother said you’d come through for her. I’m amazed, but gratified.”

Good
. Cordelia’s call to Jole last night had been very late and very brief, but he seemed to have figured out her chief concern correctly. The labor shortage on Sergyar was a challenge at every level. He was nonetheless glad he hadn’t had to raid his actual chain of command for her, though he would have if put to it. Fyodor, when approached, had sacrificed Freddie not only without a qualm, but with a certain degree of enthusiasm.

Greeting Miles, Jole wondered for the first time how he had dealt with being the child whose life his mother had famously
decapitated an emperor
to save. Was it the sort of thing a boy was teased about at school? Miles had been twenty when Jole had first encountered him, soon to graduate from the Academy and laser-focused on his upcoming, and certainly hard-won, military career. Awed by the father he adored, he’d seemed to take his mother for granted. Would Cordelia consider that a subtle victory?

Jole led smoothly into his planned olive branch. “I thought you might be interested to know, Count, that the old
Prince Serg
is passing through local space shortly, on its way to cold storage. Decommissioned, you know.”

Miles’s eyes widened. “Really!” And, after a moment, “Already?”

“My feelings exactly, but there you go. I now have baby officers who are younger than that ship. I’d been planning to pay it a short visit while it’s in transit. Because…” Sentiment? Historical wonder? Mourning? He escaped the sentence with a shrug. “I wondered if you might like to go along. Together with whatever family members you deem appropriate.” Not, pray God, the toddlers.

Ekaterin had wandered up during this, Freddie and the twins at her elbow; Lizzie followed. It even drew Cordelia away from the scanner.

“Now, there’s a remarkable idea,” said Cordelia. “History and family history at one go.”

“
I’m
not history,” said Miles under his breath. “…Am I?”

His eye summing the assembled offspring, Jole could only think,
You are now
.

“What do you think, kids?” said Miles. “Would you like to see your grandfather’s old ship?”

“Wow, sure!” said Helen, echoed by Lizzie’s “Neat!” Alex looked wary, again. Freddie breathed, “Go upside…?” her babysitting job plainly acquiring an unexpected new glamour. Taurie cast no vote, having apparently abandoned hopscotch as so last-minute in favor of competitive twirling.

“Ekaterin…?” Miles belatedly sought endorsement.

Ekaterin looked to her mother-in-law. “Do you think it would be all right? Safe?”

“Sure,” said the Vicereine. “I’d love to go, too. I haven’t seen that old ship since I exploded a bottle of champagne on its hull when it was formally commissioned. Several months after its return from the Hegen Hub war, mind you, when they’d finished the repairs. Hugely fun, that. They produce a special break-away safety glass for the bottle, and you have to work in a force bubble to capture the debris. Entirely pointless and insane. Very Barrayaran.”

“That one’s not
just
a Barrayaran tradition,” Jole objected. “Other people’s orbital shipyards do things like it, too.” He added after a curious moment, “So what’s the Betan custom?”

“Splash the hull with water. Which, in a vacuum, is actually more exciting than it sounds.” She glanced down at the interested children. “It all goes back to superstitious Old Earth customs of making sacrifices to dangerous gods of fortune and the sea. Like a bribe. Take this wine, not my ship, as it were. Or our lives.”

Alex frowned. “But…Old Earthers didn’t have
space
gods back then, did they? So why do it now?”

“Because we still have fortune and misfortune, I suppose.” Cordelia shrugged. “Remind me to explain symbolism, projection, and displacement to you sometime.”

“Much easier than explaining fear, loss, death, and grief,” Jole murmured to her ear alone.

“Isn’t it, though?” she whispered back. “Why d’you suppose people made this psych stuff up? Distancing, that’s another one for you.”

Jole thought that asking an ex-Betan-Survey commander for safety judgments might be going to the wrong store, but after making a few more cautious-mother noises Ekaterin allowed Cordelia to soothe her. Miles was all for the proffered treat, and regarded Jole almost favorably.

His invitation and the teen slave labor delivered, Jole bade everyone farewell and made to decamp, despairing of getting a private word with Cordelia, but she nipped out after him to the corridor. A brief handclasp was all they dared offer each other here.

“Six more children, Cordelia?” he teased her, with a glance back at the doors. “Are you so sure?”

“Not all at
once
,” she protested. “And I could stop any time. In theory.”

He snorted, then said more seriously, “Did you get any further with Miles this morning?”

“Not yet, no. It was noisy at breakfast. And you have to let me know what you want. I can’t…” She didn’t seem to know how that sentence should end, either. “I thought taking Miles to the rep center would help him process it all, but so far he seems to be less processing than, than storing it all up in his cheeks. Like a hamster.”

Jole tried not to be too distracted by this word-picture. “I had a couple more thoughts last night,” he told her. While lying awake for hours. “Until and unless my share of this project goes live, I don’t really suppose we
have
to tell Miles anything. Could be years. Decades. And even then, purchased donated eggs would cover it.” That had been her very own initial argument, come to think. Miles and his family had seemed a lot more remote, then.

“Mm,” she said.

“Or, a perfectly valid half-truth. We could say you donated those eggs to me entire. The boys would still be his half-brothers, same as before.” Well…not quite the same.

“Let me think about that.” Her expression was unpromising, but he wasn’t sure which aspect of these suggestions she was disliking most.

“No rush,” he backpedalled slightly.

“No, I suppose not.”

A couple of techs came through then, and the Vicereine’s bodyguard poked his head around the corner, and they both gave up and wryly parted.

Walking back toward the palace where he’d left his groundcar, Jole wondered how his personal life had grown so tangled in so short a time. Vorkosigans did that to you, though. Flung you off cliffs, expected you to absorb the flying lessons on the way down. And yet, if some—not good, not evil—if some ambiguity fairy suddenly appeared amidst the screams and offered to undo it all, roll back your life to
Go
, you would refuse her. Unsettling insight, that.

If you want a simple life, Adm’ral Oliver, you are making sacrifice to the wrong gods.

* * *

Jole detoured to grab lunch in downtown Kayburg before going back to the base. Returning along the main street, he was surprised to see Kaya Vorinnis coming down the steps of the city council building. She also had been due some leave after the long upside tour, and was dressed in civvies: Komarran trousers, sandals, and a halter top. She was waving a hand and talking to a tall, male companion whom Jole belatedly recognized as the Cetagandan cultural attaché, Mikos ghem Soren. Ghem Soren, too, was casually dressed in trousers, shirtsleeves, and sandals, and not only lacked face paint, but had foregone his ghem clan face decal. For a Cetagandan, that was downright going native. His symmetrical features looked younger without the window-dressing.

The pair turned onto the sidewalk, and Kaya glanced up and saw Jole. Her face lit not with the natural distanced courtesy of a subordinate encountering a boss outside of work, but with an alarming
Aha!
expression. She punched ghem Soren on the arm and gestured more vigorously at Jole, talking faster; as they came alongside, Jole caught the tail end of some pitch: “Well,
ask
him! One rebuff doesn’t make a defeat!”

“No, but that was the fourth—” Ghem Soren broke off, switching to, “Good afternoon, Admiral Jole. I trust this day finds you well.”

“Yes, thank you,” responded Jole. He nodded. “Kaya.”

“Sir.”

Ghem Soren fell awkwardly silent. Another arm-poke failing to goose him into gear, Kaya went on, “Mikos has an interesting idea for a project. A cultural outreach sort of thing. He calls it a Cetagandan discernment garden.”

“Although it doesn’t actually have to be in a garden.” Ghem Soren quickly modified this. “Any publicly accessible venue would do to house the display.”

“And that’s the problem,” Kaya went on. “He hasn’t been able to find one. We’ve tried the library, two business headquarters, and city hall, and no one will give him the time of day. Or, more practically, a room.”

“I was told this would be a challenging posting,” said ghem Soren. “But surely a simple discernment garden should not inflame Barrayaran historical sensitivities. How can I work to overcome cultural ignorance if cultural prejudice refuses me any platform?”

“It might not be, ah, prejudice,” said Jole. “Space in Kayburg is at a premium, with new immigrants coming in every day seeking not only housing, but business sites. Why not just set up this…display, whatever it is, at the Cetagandan consulate?”

“But that fails the educational outreach purpose,” said ghem Soren earnestly. “No one goes there except on consulate business. Such persons are
already
willing to talk to us.” He added after a moment, “And also, my consul said it would be too childish. But to make a start with people, one must begin where they
are
.”

“But what the devil
is
—oh, here.” Jole jerked his thumb over his shoulder back to the cafe. “Let’s go sit down.”

Perhaps taking this as a chink in some imagined armor, rather than as Jole’s feet being tired, both Kaya and ghem Soren brightened up. They followed him to the cafe, and a few more minutes were spent securing coffee and finding a table for three. The lunch crowd was tailing off, but that was just the difference between
jammed
and
busy
. When they were settled at last, Jole continued, “So what exactly is a discernment garden, Lord ghem Soren?”

The cultural attaché’s spine straightened, perhaps at the prospect of a Barrayaran who actually showed some interest in culture. “It’s such a simple thing, really it’s not
hard
. You could find one at any children’s art museum, or academy, or in private homes, or anywhere there is an interest in cultivating our youth. A training aid, to put it in military terms. A well-designed display offers a carefully curated progression of challenges to each of the five senses, to increase the fine awareness of each. At the end, the student is invited to observe a piece of artwork aesthetically combining, first, a blend appealing to one sense, then a more complex work combining several senses.”

Kaya put in, “I guess it’s like tasting a string of varietal wines, and then trying some balanced blends and trying to guess what went into each. Except not with wine.”

Ghem Soren nodded. “Tastes, sights, sounds, textures, and scents.”

“The finer the gradations a person can distinguish, the more…the more points they get, I guess,” said Kaya. Ghem Soren looked faintly pained at this athletic metaphor, but Jole suspected she’d hit it square on.

“Your base,” said ghem Soren carefully, “is very large, and many people go there…”

Oh, right!
thought Jole.
By all means, let us expose as many of our soldiers as possible to the ingestion of untested Cetagandan biochemistry!
And whatever else could be slipped into the audiovisual portion. All right, Jole couldn’t exactly see the somewhat feckless ghem Soren as such an agent provocateur, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t being operated by someone subtler. On the other hand, perhaps the young man was simply trying to do his job, and without much support from his consulate, it sounded like. Or, even more likely, trying to impress a girl.

“Mm, I think using the base would be starting at the most difficult end of your cultural teaching challenge,” Jole said, more diplomatically. “I’d advise some practice in civilian venues, first. Observe, learn, modify, move up.”

Ghem Soren’s face pinched, trying to decode this; Kaya, sighing, translated, “That means no, Mikos.”

Jole thought she knew very well it meant,
Over my dead body
, but the lieutenant wouldn’t have been sent to him if she’d been as lacking in nous as some of the rank-and-file.

A little silence fell around the table, as each person followed out his or her not-necessarily-related line of reflection.

“Starting smaller,” said Kaya. “There’s a thought. What about—what about some temporary, simplified demonstration model, for a first outing? To prove the principle.”

“A discernment garden is
already
a simplified model,” objected ghem Soren. “It can’t get much simpler and still perform its function.”

“Yes, but I’m thinking…there’s an event coming up which will have base people
and
town people
and
all the consulates, and square
kilometers
of spare space. The Admiral’s birthday picnic. They’re setting it up a ways outside town. You could plunk in your garden as a sort of kiosk, and anybody could come by and look at it. It could be an advertisement. Then, once you’d worked up some interest, you might have a better chance setting up something more permanent in town.”

“You would have to clear it with the officers’ committee organizing the picnic,” said Jole, thinking,
Wait, how did the consulates get in on this?
He had steadfastly refused to involve himself in any planning for a party he didn’t actually want in the first place; perhaps he should have been paying closer attention…?

“Yes, I’m on the committee,” said Kaya. “It’s, um, it grew a bit while we were on upside rotation. We’ve got a lot of townies to help, including some of the galactics, and since the Vicereine’s coming you can’t invite one consulate without inviting them all. And some of the local businesses chipped in a bunch of supplies, so they had to be invited as well, of course.”