Read Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Online
Authors: Lois McMaster Bujold
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (3 page)
“No, only since my conference with Dr. Tan, three days ago. We were discussing what to do with the leftovers, which was the one question I’d never anticipated. He suggested I donate the eggshells to the clinic, which could use them, and if this doesn’t interest you, I probably will. But then I had a better idea.” She’d hardly slept that night, thinking about it. And then she’d given up on running in circles inside her head trying to second-guess herself, and just invited Oliver to lunch.
“I’d never thought—I’d given up all thought—of ever having children, you know,” he said. “There was my career, there was Aral, there was…what we three had. Which was more than I’d ever dreamed of having.”
“Yes. I’d thought you insufficiently imaginative.” She took a fortifying crunch of chicken salad. “Not to mention insufficiently greedy in the extreme.”
“How could I ever take care of…” he began, then cut himself off.
“Plenty of time to think about the practical details,” Cordelia assured him. “I just wanted to put the idea into your head.”
Oliver made a hair-clutching gesture, not quite jesting. “And explode it? You always did have that little sadistic streak, Cordelia.”
“Now, Oliver.
Assertive
, perhaps. As you may recall.”
From the way he choked on his next swallow of wine, he did.
Good
. But the next words out of his mouth were, unexpectedly, “Everard Piotr Jole?”
Good grief, he’s naming them already!
Well…she’d had her hypothetical girls named for a year.
Wow, this pitch went fast
. Fortunately, there was a certain amount of time built-in for second thoughts, and the cascade of worrying that she knew from experience would follow. “We’re on Sergyar, here. Not bound to tradition. You could choose any names you liked. I’m going to name my first girl Aurelia Kosigan Naismith. They’re all going to be named Kosigan Naismith, actually. Except the Kosigan will be an actual middle name, no hyphens or anything.”
Or prefixes.
“I’m not sure they’ll thank me, later.”
“What, um…what does your son Miles think of this? Or his clone-brother Mark, for that matter?”
“I haven’t discussed it with them yet. Nor do I intend to, till after the fact. I won’t say,
Not Miles’s business
, but I will say,
Not his decision
.”
“Did you—or Aral—ever tell him about us? Does he know? I was never quite sure. That is, if he knew and accepted me, or if he just didn’t know.”
And the grueling state funeral, which had been the last time Oliver and her sons had crossed paths in person, had been no place to bring it up. “Ha. No. Speaking of exploding heads, Aral always spared Miles that. I never much agreed with that choice, but I have to admit it was simpler.”
He nodded relieved acceptance.
She regarded him a moment, and added, deliberately, “Aral was always so very proud of you. I hope you know that.”
His breath caught, and he looked away. Swallowed. Nodded shortly. It took him another few breaths, but he recovered his train of thought: “When you started to tell me about this, I thought perhaps you were going to ask me to stand as godfather or something—what’s that Betan term, co-parent?”
“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, touching 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.” Not that she and Aral hadn’t discussed Oliver in
theory
.
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. Dammit, 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. There were valid reasons, she recognized ruefully, why Aral might have avoided her aid back when wooing Oliver. 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 presently 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.
“Any more questions? Are you ready for the next step?” Tan inquired jovially.
Jole searched his mouth with his tongue for an answer without finding one; in any case, Tan didn’t wait, but motioned his VIP visitor along after him. He dodged aside to pick up some objects Jole could not quite make out, then brought him to another closed, blank door, labeled
Paternity Room
, with a sliding slot bearing the words
un/occupied
. A magnetized flip label read
Clean
on one side and
Do Not Disturb
on the other, to which Tan flipped it.
“Here is your sample jar,” Tan announced, handing it across, “properly labeled as you see. The fluid inside will keep your semen alive and healthy until it can be processed. Check the label for accuracy, please.”
Jole squinted and found his name and numbers duly recorded on the side. “Right…correct, that is.”
“In the event of, so to speak, shyness, you will find a number of aids inside. I can also issue you a single-dose aphrodisiac nasal spray. We used to put them out in a basket, but they kept disappearing, so we had to go to rationing—my apologies.” Tan held out a small ampoule.
Somewhat hypnotized by now, Jole warily accepted it. Tan opened the door and ushered him inside.
“Take all the time you need. Come find me personally when you’re done,” Tan told him, his tones brightly encouraging. The door shut, leaving Jole alone in the quiet, dimly lit little room. He heard the slight scrape of the slot-label sliding to
occupied
.
The chamber contained a comfortable-looking armchair, a straight chair, and a narrow cot with a fitted sheet. A shelf offered a line-up of sex toys, most of which Jole had encountered less depressingly in other contexts, all with little paper ribbons around them proclaiming their sterilized state. The room also contained a holovid player—a quick check of the contents found a number of titles Jole recognized from barracks and shipboard life, plus a few that seemed highly unlikely to ever have played to that audience. Which made him wonder, just for a moment, what equivalents were passed around in the ISWA barracks, and if there were any of the women he dared to ask. Not Vorinnis, anyway. Maybe the colonel, if they ever got drunk enough together. The vid also offered an array of slide shows of beautiful young women, a few of beautiful young men, one of beautiful young herms, one of rather eye-grabbing beautiful young obese ladies, and others that became increasingly more otherly—this
had
been programmed by the galactic crew. A few more collections of images were downright repulsive, and a couple were simply incomprehensible, though Jole considered himself a traveled man. What none of them seemed, just at the moment, was arousing in any way. He shut the machine off.
I’ve been doing this since I was thirteen. It shouldn’t be hard.
Which, in fact, it wasn’t—he’d never been more limp in his life.
He sat down on the edge of the cot, examined the instructions on the collection jar, and considered the nasal spray. It seemed like cheating, letting down the side, unbecoming to a manly, virile Imperial officer. Did he get any slack for being almost fifty?
This had to be the most un-erotic, not to mention unromantic, place he’d ever been in. What kind of bizarre irony was it, that it should also be the one to fulfill the main biological purpose of his ever having had a sexuality in the first place?
I could have done this when I was twenty…
But he’d added thirty years of exposure to hard radiation, biological hazards, and chemical toxins atop them, here and there in his varied military career. God knew what insults his gonads had accumulated, starting with the space accident that had put him in hospital at ImpMil in his twenties. Jole also recalled, in an ancient untethered scrap of memory from his training days, some fellows who’d been working with experimental microwave weaponry making jokes about fathering only girls…Even if he were in the most traditional relationship imaginable, he’d still want to be doing it this way. Surely
no preventable defects or diseases
was the foremost birthday gift any father could give to his firstborn son…er, hypothetical child.
