Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - eARC

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Hello, Oliver,” he began in warm tone, and Jole settled back in his chair, relieved, to attend to his distant commander. “I’m sending you this message by way of a private heads-up. There will be an opportunity opening up soon on my end here that I think is in your weight class.

  “As you know, I passed my twice-twenty a few years back, but was persuaded to stay on at the helm of Ops by”—he waved a hand—“several people. My wife was not among them, I should add. It’s heartening that she thinks she wants me underfoot an extra sixteen hours a day, although that may only be because she’s not tried it lately.” His smile twisted at this not-quite-a-joke. “Which is to say, I will be mustering out in the near future, God and Gregor willing.

  “This gives me the task of scouting for my own replacement. The last three years have made it plain to anyone who didn’t already realize it that it was never your formidable mentor propping you up, although I’m sure you miss his comradeship. And God knows anyone who worked with Aral Vorkosigan for so long knows how to survive in a high-pressure and high-political-stakes environment. Chief of Ops has always needed both. I have other candidates with the military depth, but none to match your insider’s view of the capital. And I have other insiders, but none who are not Vor.” Another little wave of Desplains’s hand acknowledged the political slant of that comment.

  Jole wondered uncomfortably if Desplains realized how out-of-date Jole’s Vorbarr Sultana experience was. Never mind; Desplains was going on. Jole leaned forward, frowning.

  “With your agreement, I’d like to put you in the queue for Chief of Ops. I may tell you confidentially that you are presently at the head of that queue. Gregor has mentioned to me on the q. t. that there may be some administrative changes coming up on Sergyar. I suspect you may know more about that than I do. It could be an ideal time for you to make a change as well.

  “I might add that if I had dropped dead any time in the last two years, this might have been an order and not an invitation. In any case, please get back to me at your convenience. You can have a little time to think about it, of course, should you need it. Oh, and give my best to the Vicereine. I must say, I rather miss her nephew Ivan, speaking of the usefulness of high Vor insiders, although I’m glad to hear he seems to be coming along in his new career.

  “Desplains out.” He cut the com.

  Jole sat back and blew out his breath.

  A little time, in Ops-speak, might mean days, but hours would not be disdained. Certainly not weeks. Desplains didn’t need an answer instantly, but a prompt reply would be courteous.

  All right, admit it, he was stunned. Chief of Ops would be the crown of any twice-twenty-years man’s career. And this was an offer without the slightest tinge of Vor nepotism, favor, or privilege.

  His first coherent thought was that Aral, were he still alive, would have been pleased, proud, smug, and have urged him to take it up. Followed by a darker might-have-been—would Aral have followed him home, would he have finally retired himself? Would that have made any difference to the aneurysm or its medical outcome?

  His second was that Chief of Ops was a post that ate its holder’s personal life alive. Desplains had trailed a family when he’d started, true, but his children had been near-grown, and his wife had been his executive officer, master sergeant, and troop combined on the domestic side.

  If Jole went back to Barrayar for this, the three frozen possibilities would have to stay in cold storage on Sergyar. Any other choice fell just short of madness. The job wouldn’t last forever, but then, neither would he. And when Ops spit out his cooked remains a decade from now, who would he be then? Besides ten years older.

  I could do Desplains’s job. The certainty was sure, without false modesty or arrogance. He did not underestimate the task, but he didn’t underestimate himself, either.

  I could be a father. An entirely different kind of challenge, and he didn’t have thirty years of training and career experience with which to approach it. That was a whole new world, without maps or navigation aids.

  What he could not do was both at once. The choice was sharp-cut, like a blade.

  Cordelia…Barrayar had been the scene of her greatest joys, but also of her greatest horrors and most grinding pain. He could feel that all the way down to his bones. If she would not return there for the sake of her own family and grandchildren, she sure as hell wouldn’t climb back down into that gravity well for Jole. However much he delighted her, and she’d left him in no doubt that he did. She was a woman full of mysteries, but there was no mystery about this: she would no more return to Barrayar than she would walk barefoot through a fire.

  He reached for his comconsole to call her. Stopped.

  What would she, could she, possibly say but This has to be your decision, Oliver? He could hear her Betan alto in his head. He could hear the pain lacing her voice.

  He sat back.

  He had a little time, yet.

  Chapter Eleven

  This was not the day off that Jole had expected, but if he couldn’t flex in the face of tactical setbacks, he was in the wrong line of work. Cordelia had gone out on another fast-flying trip to Gridgrad to show her daughter-in-law the proposed site for the new Viceroy’s Palace—and garden—and have a consult with the young city architect brought in to manage the planning.

  “I know everyone is leaning on the boy for maximum economic efficiency, but we need to persuade him to leave room for parks and gardens,” Cordelia had informed Jole in her hurried morning comconsole call. “Nothing makes a city civil like the injection of some country, paradoxically. I know it all looks like country now, but that won’t last. You have to plan ahead.” She added after a reflective moment, “And parking. And a bubble-car system. With adequate plumbing. Because wherever people are, they always want to get somewhere else, and generally hit the lav on the way.”

  “With facilities for parents trailing little children,” Ekaterin’s voice put in from offsides, in a tone of muted passion. Sounds of young Vorkosigans having, apparently, a minor riot penetrated from farther rooms in the Palace. A muffled paternal bellow was either quelling the disorder or fomenting it.

  “Yes,” said Cordelia. “Some architects’ designs look very snazzy, but when you drive down to the details you find they seem to think people are born fully formed out of their own heads at age twenty-two, never to reproduce. And vanish silently away at age seventy, I could add.”

  “Should you have a more experienced designer?” Jole asked doubtfully.

  “Question is, could I get a more experienced designer, to which the answer was, alas, no.” She sighed, then cheered up. “But this one seems to learn fast. And I don’t have to make death threats to get him to listen, unlike some older Barrayaran types more set in their ways, so there’s that.”

  And she had departed in haste trailing, like a billowing banner, fretful staff frantically triaging schedule changes.

  This left Jole with a blank day to fill with something that would block his temptation to go back to the office and annoy Bobrik with kibitzing over his shoulder by comconsole. His apartment made a peaceful refuge, although, after about an hour spent perusing more science journals from the Uni, he found himself growing restless. For a man accustomed to the cramped facilities of Barrayaran warships, he could hardly call the place too small. Too…something. Not enough something? Not enough Cordelia. He buried his impulse to replay the message from Desplains for a third time—it wasn’t going to change—in another half hour of reading, at which point he found an excuse to escape.

  * * *

  The University of Kareenburg was as grandly and deceptively named as the Viceroy’s Palace, Jole reflected, as he parked and walked toward the motley collection of buildings clinging to a slope on what had used to be the outskirts of town. The school had been started less than two decades ago in, as usual, a collection of ex-military field shelters. Since then it had acquired three newish buildings in a blocky, utilitarian style, plus a clinic that had grown
into Kareenburg’s main hospital. Training medtechs locally was a high priority, along with other hands-on technical skills needed by the young colony from and for a population that could not, for the most part, afford to send their children offworld for education. The U. of K. lacked dormitories for backcountry students, who instead lived scattered among local households like soldiers quartered upon an occupied town. The field shelters still lingered, repurposed for the nth time to house departments unable to elbow their way into the newer buildings.

  The Department of Biology, being needed to help train aspiring medtechs—and soon, it was hoped, physicians—rated an entire second-floor corridor in one of the newer blocks. Jole flagged down a man dressed in Kayburg-casual trousers, shirtsleeves, and sandals, hurrying along carrying a lavatory plunger.

  “Pardon me, but could you tell me where to find—ah.” Not the janitor. Recognition kicked in from holos in the articles Jole had been reading. “Dr. Gamelin, I presume?”

  The man paused. “Yes, I’m Gamelin.” He squinted back in brief puzzlement, as if Jole’s was a face he knew but couldn’t quite place. If Jole had been in uniform instead of civvies, Gamelin might have hit it. “Can I help you?” He squinted harder. “Parent? Student…? Admissions is in the next building over.” His accent was Barrayaran, a hint of South Continent lingering in his voice.

  “Neither, at present.” Either, ever? There was yet another new train of thought in his crowded station. “Oliver Jole. Admiral, Sergyar Fleet.”

  “Ah.” Gamelin’s spine straightened, for whatever atavistic reason—Jole didn’t think he was an old Service man—and he switched the plunger over and offered an egalitarian handshake, as if between priests of two dissimilar faiths. “And what can the Department of Biology do for Sergyar Fleet today? Did the Vicereine send you?”

  “No, I’m here on my own time, today. Although the Vicereine may be indirectly responsible. I’ve been reading—”

  Jole was interrupted as a taut, tanned, middle-aged woman dressed in shorts and sandals dashed up. “You found it! Thanks!” She plucked the plunger unceremoniously from Gamelin’s hand. “Where?”

  “Dissection lab.”

  “Ha. I should have guessed.”

  Gamelin put in, “Admiral Jole, may I present our bilaterals expert, Dr. Dobryni.”

  The woman looked Jole up and down with rising eyebrows and a growing smile, and nodded. “You’re very bilateral, aren’t you? So pleased! Can’t stay.” Sandals slapping, she continued her gallop up the corridor and swung in at a doorway, calling back, “Welcome to the U! Don’t come in!” The door slammed behind her.

  With an effort, Jole returned his attention to the department chief. “I’ve been reading your departmental journal on Sergyaran native biology, and enjoying some of the articles very much.” Gamelin himself was one of the more lucid contributors, as well as being listed as supervising editor.

  Gamelin brightened right up. “Excellent! I didn’t think our journal had much reach beyond a few sister institutions, a small circle of local enthusiasts, and some obscure Nexus xenobiologists.”

  “I think I’d call myself an interested layperson,” Jole said. “Like the Vicereine.”

  “Oh, the Vicereine is a lot more than a layperson,” Gamelin assured him. “Fortunately. She really understands what we’re trying to do, here. Such an improvement over some of our prior Imperial administrators.” He grimaced in some unfond memory. “Not that she can’t be demanding, but at least her requests aren’t ludicrous.”

  “She claims her Betan Astronomical Survey training is very out-of-date.”

  Gamelin waved a negating hand. “She’s structurally very sound. As for the details, we all grow out-of-date practically as fast as we learn. And then we work very hard at helping others to become so, too.” A brief grin.

  “In fact, that was what I’d been wanting to ask about. I wondered if you had anyone doing more work on the biota in and around Lake Serena.”

  “Not at present,” said Gamelin. “Everyone we could spare has been dispatched to Gridgrad. Trying to get ahead of the builders, you know. No one wants a repeat of something like the worm plague, or worse.”

  “I can see that.” So much for his vague plan of finding the expert and turning him or her upside down to shake out the latest science.

  A man popped out of the stairwell, spotted Gamelin, and trotted up, waving his arms. “Ionnas! Julie stole my gene scanner for her damned students again! Make her give it back before they break it—again.”

  Gamelin sighed. “If we’re ever to teach them not to break our equipment, they need some equipment to practice on. You know that.”

  “Then give her your scanner!”

  “Not a chance.” Gamelin met the man’s glower without embarrassment, then seemed to relent. “But you can use mine this afternoon. I haven’t a prayer of getting to it myself. Meetings. Put it back when you’ve finished.”

  “Eh.” Mollified, the man made off, with a grudging “Thanks!” tossed over his shoulder.

  “Defend it from Julie!” Gamelin called after, which won a snigger as the man turned out of sight.

  “Equipment wars,” sighed Gamelin, turning back to Jole. “Do you have them in your line?”

  “Pretty much the same thing, yes,” allowed Jole, smiling.

  “It will be worse next week, when the Escobaran invasion arrives.”

  Jole blinked. “That sounds more like my patch. Shouldn’t I have had a memo?”

  Gamelin was nonplussed for only a moment. “Oh!” he laughed. “Not in force. The City University of Nuovo Valencia sends a party of grad students and related riffraff each year to do some work here. Which would be fine, but in order to save freight charges, they try as much as possible to equip themselves on this end. Makes for more-than-scientific competition.”

  “And scientific jealousy?”

  “Oh, hardly that!” said Gamelin fervently. “I’d welcome anyone.” He added after a moment of judicious thought, “Well, maybe not Cetagandans. Unless they brought their own equipment.” Another contemplative moment. “And left it. Like after their pullout from the Occupation. That could be all right.”

  “Would you like me to drop a hint at the consulate?”

  It was Gamelin’s turn to snigger, then pause. “Oh, wait. Coming from you, that wasn’t a joke.”

  “Only about half,” Jole admitted.

  Gamelin shook his head. “I came here to do basic survey science, myself, almost twenty years back. Housekeeping science, but I knew I was never going to be some brilliant hotshot. Do you know when I get to do any? Weekends. Maybe. This little department fully classifies, catalogs, and cross-references about two thousand new species a year.”

  “That…sounds impressive,” Jole hazarded.

  “Does it? At this rate, we should have Sergyar’s entire biome mapped in about, oh, roughly five thousand years.”

  “In the course of five thousand years,” said Jole, “I expect you’ll have a little more help.”

  “That’s certainly the hope.” He stared away, as if at some distant vision. “And then there’s Sergyaran paleontology. How did it all get this way? To say We’ve barely scratched the surface is an understatement. Our rock-hounds break down in tears, regularly. Overwhelmed.”

  “Do Sergyaran radials even fossilize?” wondered Jole. “It would seem like trying to fossilize jelly.”

  Gamelin threw his hands up, and exclaimed with barely suppressed anguish, “Who knows? Not us!” He glanced at his chrono. “I would love to show you around, Admiral, but I have a meeting with some students shortly. Meanwhile, what—oh, right, Lake Serena, you said.”

  “Yes, I’ve been out there several times lately. The underwater life is very curious stuff, some of it very beautiful, but much of it doesn’t match up with anything in the field guide.”

  “Yes, well, there’s a reason for that.” Gamelin looked briefly abstracted. “I think I can give you something to help. Follow me.”

&nb
sp; Gamelin led off down the corridor past a couple of busy-looking lab rooms to what proved, when he flung wide the door, to be a crowded equipment closet. He plunged into its depths to emerge a few minutes later. “Here!” He passed a large, heavily loaded plastic bag into Jole’s arms.

  Jole looked up, confused. “Hm?”

  “Collecting equipment. There’s a vid guide in there somewhere, should be, with all the how-to. We developed it last year for an advanced class of some Kayburg city school biology students. Some of them have come back to us with some really helpful prizes, too. Great kids.” Gamelin looked up happily. “For your next trip out to Lake Serena.”

  This was, Jole reflected, a very Sergyaran version of assistance. It reminded him of Cordelia, somehow, which made him smile back in turn. “I see.”

  Gamelin cocked his head. “That said, the Uni has been fielding the damnedest questions from the Kayburg public about Lake Serena, lately. Carbon dioxide inversion layer, really! Serena is much too shallow.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “So, um…is there some other reason for your interest in the area? That we ought to know about? On the q.t.? Because if there’s a problem, we’re sure to get thrown into the breach, and while public service is part of the university’s mandate, it’s a lot easier to supply if we get some advance warning.” Gamelin rocked on his heels, as if trying to look inviting and worthy of confidences.