Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - eARC

by Lois McMaster Bujold

Just as Cordelia was slipping over from seriously hungry to savagely starving, and starting to wonder if the Cetagandan consul was planning to leave his son overnight in jail for a life-lesson, the cultural attaché Lord ghem Soren arrived, in the same formal face paint and attire he’d worn to her garden party last week. He smelled of strange esters—perfumes, inebriants? in any case, not Barrayaran-style alcoholic beverages—and looked faintly harassed. The hand-off hit a snag when it was determined that he was not Lon’s actual parent.

  Cordelia intervened smoothly, assuring the dubious guard sergeant that as an officer of the consulate, ghem Soren constituted a legal authority sufficient to the purpose.

  “Where are Lord and Lady ghem Navitt tonight, Lord ghem Soren?” Cordelia inquired easily.

  “Hosting a moon-poetry party at the consulate, Your Excellency. An autumn observance at the Celestial Garden on Eta Ceta, which, uh, it is there now. Autumn. They couldn’t leave the ceremony in the middle, so they sent me.”

  Did that mark ghem Soren as a trusted confidant, or low man on the duty roster? The latter, Cordelia decided, which simultaneously explained his otherwise after-hours aroma. Oliver looked enlightened and amused. Bean Plant No. 3 made no objection, seeming more relieved than disappointed at this substitution. In any case, the pair traipsed out again with as little further interaction with the local authorities as ghem Soren could manage.

  It was now officially Bloody Late, and Cordelia still had a string of report files to read before her morning meetings. She let Oliver escort her up the main street with no more than the briefest detour through an all-night sandwich shop, one of the few places still open in downtown Kayburg on this dull midweek night. They walked on toward the Viceroy’s Palace munching their sandwiches out of their wrappings. At the corner of the side street that led to Kayross, she balled up the paper in her hand, dropped it in a trash receptacle, and hesitated, staring down toward the half-lit facade of the replicator clinic.

  Oliver followed her glance, and gave her a lopsided smile. “Did you want to stop in and see Aurelia?”

  “They keep a night staff, but it isn’t really visiting hours.”

  “I’m sure they’d make an exception for you.”

  “I’m sure they would, too. But I shouldn’t impose. And there really isn’t that much to see even on the magnifying monitor yet. People are pretty blobby at this stage.”

  Oliver wasn’t buying her nonchalance. Was she that transparent, or was he just being Oliver? “You still want.”

  “Well…yes.”

  He turned her firmly leftward. “It’s been a long day, and tomorrow is another one. Grab your treat while you can.”

  “Are you thinking of keeping me in a good mood for the sake of my oppressed subordinates?” She took his arm as they started off again.

  “Maybe it’s enlightened self-interest, then.”

  “Ha.”

  The medtech who came, after a few minutes, to the front door buzzer did indeed recognize her at once, and let them in without demur. He cross-checked the records and led them back through several doors to a freshly arrayed bank of replicators, and sorted through to the right monitor. The light level was muted, the picture indeed tiny and blobby, like some low form of sea life.

  Oliver peered dubiously over her shoulder. “So strange. And yet amazing.” He glanced around as if wondering in what freezer his own future hopes were being stored. But he didn’t quite muster the boldness to ask.

  “Yes,” she had to agree.

  “You’re smiling.”

  “Yes,” she had to admit. Her smile crept wider, igniting a reflecting glint in Oliver’s eyes. Even the medtech, when he let them out and locked the doors again, smiled back, as if infected by her compressed joy. Her weary stride widened to almost an Oliver-stretch as they turned up the main street once more.

  At the Palace gate, Cordelia apologized for keeping him up past his bedtime and hers. “I didn’t anticipate all the complications on that outing. I suppose one never does.”

  “If you anticipated them, they wouldn’t be complications, eh?”

  She laughed and bade him goodnight.

  * * *

  Cordelia woke in the small hours, as she so often did these days, with an old memory floating up out of her dream fragments. An unvoiced huh of bemusement shook her.

  She’d been in her twenties, eager to advance into her adult life. Tops in her Survey classes, clumsy in her social interactions, she’d been thrilled to at last acquire her first real sexual partner. Their affair had been sporadically renewed as their duties in the Betan Astronomical Survey permitted, culminating in a several-month voyage as declared affiliates, sharing a cabin and junior-officer duties. They’d made plans for the future. Equals in love and life, she’d thought, till it came time to put in for the same promotion.

  He would go first, they decided; she would take downside duties to raise their allotted two kids, and then it would be her turn. She applied for and took the desk job as planned, but somehow the declaration of co-parent status and the fertilizations were not forthcoming, though she’d had her egg extraction and signed up for her mandatory parenting course. But he’d had no time to attend to those details before he shipped out in his first captaincy; too many new duties to get atop of right now. It had seemed reasonable.

  All ran to plan till he’d returned from that first voyage with a different woman in tow, a junior ensign and xeno-chemist uninterested in having children. We just made a mistake, Cordelia, he told her, as if correcting an error in her navigational math. It’s nobody’s fault, really.

  Even if she’d been the scene-making type, she wouldn’t have made protest in the public place he’d prudently chosen for this revelation, and she’d let him slither away, imagining his lie undetected. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted him back. He’d gone on to a steady career in the B.A.S.—even, eventually, the two kids, with a partner a few down the line from either Cordelia or her replacement. And the next year, the captaincy of the René Magritte had opened up for her, a better ship than his if the truth be told, so, no harm done, right?

  And two voyages after that she’d discovered this planet and Aral, and the rest was, very literally, history.

  The tale of that duplicity was the first intimate secret about herself she’d shared with Aral, during their fraught trek here, in fair trade for one of his own, considerably more blood-soaked and lurid. Aral had come by his gift for the dramatic honestly, she had to concede, and she smiled to recollect how even at age eighty he could still electrify a room just by walking into it.

  Which made, in retrospect, her Betan clot’s betrayal the best thing he’d ever done for her. Was it too late to send him a thank-you note? She wondered if her face was as much of a blur in his mind by now as his was in hers. All that lingered of him was the picture of the pain, not even the pain itself, of that stab through the center of her soul. An image still strangely clear.

  Catastrophic events had conspired against Aral’s hopes to repair that old wound of hers, yet decades later he’d made sure to leave in her hands the means to do so herself, if she chose. Trust Aral to honor even a tacit promise grandly.

  These weren’t tales she could share with Oliver, she realized, at the moment or perhaps ever. He might take them the wrong way. In fact, they were of no use to anyone at all, not even to her, now were they? Sighing, she folded the memories back into herself, and turned over in the dark.

  * * *

  Jole arrived at his downside base office the next morning to find his aide neither late, nor hung-over.

  “How was the party at the Cetagandan consulate last night, Lieutenant?” he asked her, as she presented him with a sacrificial offering of coffee. “Did you learn anything interesting?”

  “Very odd.” Vorinnis wrinkled her nose in distaste. “The food was…tricky. And then they passed around these things that you were supposed to sniff, but I only pretended to inhale.” Jole gathered that this was less for the sake of virtue than of paran
oia. “And then my so-called date went off and left me halfway through. I had to sit through about an hour and a half of this weird poetry recital all by myself. By the time Lord ghem Soren got back, he’d lost his turn at reciting, which made him all miffed and not much company.”

  Jole suppressed a smile. “Ah. I’m afraid that was not exactly his fault. Lon ghem Navitt was picked up with a group of his classmates by the Kayburg guard after an, er, self-inflicted accident out in the backcountry last night, and the guard wouldn’t let the kids go till they had inconvenienced all the parents sufficiently to make their point. Ghem Soren was apparently told off by his boss to go collect the lad. For what it’s worth, he didn’t seem too happy with being assigned the detail.”

  “Oh.” Vorinnis blinked, taking this in. She did not then inquire, How do you know all this, sir? Was he simply presumed to be omniscient? But she grew a shade less peeved. “Other than that, he mainly seemed to want to tell me all about his family tree. Did you know he had a Barrayaran ancestor? Ancestoress, I guess.”

  Jole raised his eyebrows. That tidbit had not been in the cursory ImpSec dossier he’d read on the fellow, though it had named a couple of unexceptionably Cetagandan-sounding parents from ghem Soren’s planet of origin, a lesser satrap world which lay beyond the higher-status capital of Eta Ceta from Barrayar. “No, I didn’t. Do tell.”

  “It seems his great-grandmother on his father’s side was a Barrayaran collaborator during the Occupation, and got taken along with the family when the Cetagandans pulled out. I can’t quite figure out if she was Vor or prole, or a servant or mistress or what, though he called her a third wife. Sounded like some kind of concubine to me.”

  “Mm, more than a servant, anyway. That’s a status with official standing and rights, but her children would certainly be lower in rank than their senior half-siblings.” Jole sipped coffee and considered his next leading question in this engaging debriefing. “And what sorts of things did he ask you about?”

  “He wanted to know if I rode horses, back on Barrayar. He seemed to think all Vor did. I mean, all the time, to get around. And carriages.”

  “And, ah, did you ride? As a sport, of course.” Aral had instructed him in horseback riding on those long-ago country weekends down at Vorkosigan Surleau, though they had both preferred the sailing. He’d apologized that he was not so expert a cavalryman as his late father General Count Piotr Vorkosigan had been, and sounded almost sorry that he could not gift Jole with this superior mentor; Simon Illyan had just muttered, Count your blessings.

  “Not really, except a couple of times when I visited some cousins. My family lives in Ouest Higgat.” The Vorinnis’s District capital, that, and like most such cities a major political and commercial hub. “My father works in the District Bureau of Roads and Bridges. Mostly on the lightflyer traffic control systems. He’d been an orbital-and-air traffic controller back when he was in the Service, which was how he got into that line. Mikos seemed sort of, I don’t know, disappointed when I told him that.”

  “What, is our ghem lord a historical romantic?”

  “Well, that’s another explanation,” she allowed.

  “As opposed to…?”

  “He’s a twit?” But her tone was by no means definitive.

  “Mm,” said Jole, declining to commit to an opinion on this point yet. “I wonder if this supposed connection to Barrayar is why his superiors assigned him to this post? Or if it was the other way around—exploring his roots?”

  “I…we didn’t get that far.”

  “I also wonder if that’s why we find a ghem of his age and lord’s rank on the civilian side. Did that little Barrayaran blot in his genetics bar him from the military brotherhood?”

  “We didn’t get that far, either. I wonder…if I shouldn’t have been quite so short with him.” She frowned in fresh doubt. “Maybe I should invite him back. To do something. Give him another chance.”

  Jole shrugged noncommittally. “Some innocuous outdoor activity, perhaps? Gives him an opportunity to amend his lapses without committing you to any implied, ah, implications.” Although not, by preference, a night hunt for vampire balloons, despite the chance to demonstrate the Barrayaran cultural passion for fireworks; they were not in need of more brushfires. He bit back the impulse to pass on Cordelia’s tip about the laser pointers. Although he rather thought that he would pay money to see the Vicereine deploy that technique.

  Vorinnis’s thick brows drew down. “I’ll have to think about that, sir.”

  And then his coffee cup was empty and it was time to gather up the agendas and move on to the next materials-procurement meeting. Jole, glancing out the window at the light-drenched morning activities of the base, wondered how all his youthful dreams of military glory had come down to this. On the other hand, these current mundane labors might silently serve some future smoking sod who’d had glory dumped on him, who wouldn’t have to spare a single frantic thought for Where the hell can I land this thing? Invisible victories, eh.

  Aral, he thought, would understand.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when Cordelia called him on his office comconsole. He hit the key that would signal No Interruptions to Lieutenant Vorinnis in the outer office, and leaned back in his station chair. The look on Cordelia’s face over the vidplate was amicable enough, but her lips were compressed.

  “What’s afoot, Your Excellency?”

  “Not a great deal, unfortunately. I received an interim report from my people on your Plas-Dan friends.”

  “Ah? Anything I can use?”

  “I don’t yet see how. They were able to trace the, I guess you could call it a life-history, of your mixer. It was an order that was cancelled in the middle of its production run last year when the customer switched to a cheaper product. Plas-Dan couldn’t force them to take it, though they tried. So there it sat, a blockage in their overheated yard, till some bright soul figured out they could shift it onto you, solving the problem on their end. They think they’ve done nothing wrong. Or at least—alas—nothing actionable. We checked that out, too.”

  Jole grimaced. “At least not any kind of action we’re allowed to take. Granted, suppliers have been foisting overpriced crap and spoiled goods onto their military customers since armies were invented. You would think they would be more cautious about who they were offending.”

  “Given that you and I between us are the biggest on-going customers on the planet, yes. There are, hm, things we can do back to them, down the line. Their trick seems short-sighted.”

  “We may be the biggest, but we aren’t necessarily the most profitable. A lot of civilian projects are willing and able to outbid us, or so I am lately told. If all of Plas-Dan’s production is tied up with our large, low-margin orders, they can’t squeeze in the plums.” He hesitated. “Also, I can’t help wondering if they’re trying to sabotage the move to Gridgrad. Or at least delay it.”

  Cordelia tapped her lips, considering this. “Delay to what end?”

  “The arrival of a new, more pliable viceroy?”

  “Mm, but I haven’t discussed my retirement plans with anyone but you. I don’t see how anybody else could anticipate it.”

  That was…flattering. If also slightly alarming. “You still haven’t told Gregor yet? Or Miles?”

  “Gregor’s heads-up will be next. Once Aurelia passes the one-month mark safely, I figured. Eight months should be plenty of time for him to look around for my replacement. Or a bit longer, maybe—there’s room in the Palace for one baby, but I’d really like to be out of there before her first sister comes along. I don’t think Gregor’ll send me an idiot, do you? Nor some political remittance-man he just wants exiled from Vorbarr Sultana. Though he does need to corner a candidate both able plus willing.”

  Jole smiled a little, though the vision of having to work with some other civilian boss than Cordelia opened at his feet like an unexpected sinkhole in the road. He hadn’t really thought ahead to that aspect, had he? “I thi
nk you may find it harder to let go than you imagine. You’ve had it your own way on Sergyar with very little Imperial oversight. I know the Komarran Imperial Councilor gets far closer attention.”

  “Well, Komarr.” She shrugged. “Anyway, the point is, there is some wriggle-room in my nine-month goal. Maybe some time to break in the new Viceroy, before I run?”

  Historically, Jole thought, such changes-of-command were usually more sharp-cut, reflected and reinforced by the elaborate formal hand-off ceremonies. And for good reasons. “You might not have to linger. If you’re on the same planet, they can always track you down for consults on the comconsole. You can run, but you can’t hide.”

  Her lips twisted in new repugnance. “Hadn’t thought about that. Oh, lord, do you imagine they’ll still want speeches?”

  He hid a laugh in a cough. “Probably. You’ll just have to learn to say no, Cordelia.”

  “I say no to people all day long. They don’t like it one bit.”

  “It’s true you’re at odds with a lot of the investment money and energy in Kareenburg, right now. You haven’t made a secret of your long-term plans for the place.”

  She swiped her hands through her hair. “What part of ‘Let’s not site the planetary capital next to an active volcano’ do they find hard? This place should be a nature reserve. All right, maybe a historical park, later on. But then when that damned mountain next goes off it’ll only take out dozens or hundreds of people, not millions.”

  “I’ve never disagreed,” he placated her. “I will be entirely willing to shift all of the downside Imperial Service headquarters and its economic impact to the new base—once it is built. An aim not aided by cost overruns before we even break ground, I must point out.” Hell, they were still building Gridgrad. Lack of infrastructure was an understatement.

  Cordelia wrinkled her nose in doubt. “Is this overrun likely to prove fatal?”

  “Not…really. I expect we’ll endure much worse before we’re done, unavoidably. And I’m fairly sure Plas-Dan realizes that as well as we do. It’s the sly calculation of this one that ticks me off.” He scowled.