Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - eARC

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  She led him up to her private office, closed the door, and cleared the small conference table. She then unlocked a tall cabinet stacked with wide, flat drawers. I haven’t had this open for over three years. She hesitated, then began pulling out sheet after sheet, some plastic flimsies but most real fiber-paper, all sizes from torn scraps to wide folios that half covered the table. Alex watched, then drifted up to tentatively finger them.

  “These are your Granda Aral’s drawings,” she told him.

  “I knew he drew pictures,” Alex offered. “He drew some of Helen and me once, I remember, when you were visiting for Winterfair.” That must have been on their last joint trip home, Cordelia calculated. “I didn’t know he drew so many.”

  “For a long time, he didn’t,” said Cordelia. “He told me once he started when he was very young—younger even than you. But those were all lost. And some in his teens—those were mostly lost, too, but he kept a few hidden away. He didn’t really take it up again, as a hobby, till after the regency. More after we came to Sergyar.”

  “Did he paint, too?”

  “A little. I tried once to interest him in vid imaging, but he seemed to want that direct tactile connection. Something he did with his own hands and eye and brain and nothing else.” Belonging to no one else? Aral had spent so much of his life as a wholly-owned servant of the Imperium, perhaps it was natural to want to keep some tiny reserve sequestered.

  Alex leaned his elbows on the table, staring more closely. “Why didn’t he show them to anybody? Or give them away? There’s so many. Didn’t anybody want them?”

  “He showed them to a few people. Me, Oliver, Simon sometimes. I’m sure quite a few people would have wanted them, but not…not for the drawings themselves. They’d have wanted them because the Lord Regent or the Admiral or the Count had made them, or worse, to sell for money.” She paused. “He said it would be like that bicycle-riding bear someone was parading around the district, once. It wasn’t that the bear was good at bicycling, it was just the novelty of a bear riding at all.”

  “They look pretty good to me.”

  “You’re…not wrong.” Even for age eleven.

  Alex sorted down through the stacks, handling the paper with reassuring care. “There’s lots of buildings. Is that Hassadar Square? Oh, look, here’s your Viceroy’s Palace! That’s good.”

  Cordelia looked over his shoulder. “Especially considering it hadn’t been built yet, yes.” She swallowed, and launched her pitch. “Your granda never went to war, you know. War came to him. And he learned to deal with it because he had to. If his older brother hadn’t been killed, if he’d never become the heir, if Mad Yuri’s war had never happened, I suspect he might have gone on to be…possibly not an artist, but I’d bet an architect. Probably one of those men who takes on vast public projects, as complicated and demanding as commanding an army, because all that Vorkosigan energy would have found its path somehow.” Like a river running in flood down from his own Dendarii mountains, bursting its banks. “Building Barrayar in another way.”

  Alex’s face had gone still. “But I am the heir.”

  “But living, now, in the Barrayar your granda remade, which is not like the one he inherited. You have more choices. You have all the choices you can imagine. It would have pleased him very much to know that was a gift he gave you. That your life didn’t need to be like his.” She hesitated. “Nor like your da’s, or his granda’s, or like anyone’s but your own. To the top of your bent. Whatever that bent turns out to be.”

  It was hard to tell how he processed that. The boy was almost as reserved as his mother. Miles’s mobile young face had revealed all his urgent soul, usually; this had spoiled her as a parent, Cordelia suspected. But Alex’s hand crept to the papers, and he said cautiously, “Can I have some of these?”

  “In due course, you will inherit all of them. I’m so glad to know you’re interested. But if you would like a few to take with you now, you could pick out the ones you like best and I could have them made up into a kind of scrapbook for you, to protect them along the way.” Archival-grade backing and what-not—someone on staff would have a clue.

  “I’d like that,” he said, in a voice so soft she had to bend her head to hear.

  “Then it shall be so. Take your time.” She retreated to her comconsole to give him room to explore unhurried. Watching him covertly over the vid display, she tried to guess if this had been a good idea or not. Probably so, because they had to break off for lunch before he’d finished. Curiously, he did not mention the project over the dining table, not that he could much get a word in once the whole clan was gathered.

  Surrounded by them all, she was reminded of the old parental curse—May you have six children just like you. Except that this curse seemed to have gone awry. Miles would have reveled at six children just like himself; he’d have known exactly what to do. Instead, he seemed to have received six children, none in the least like himself, and furthermore, each one different from all the others. As parental revenges went, this was actually much better.

  Back in her personal office, she took up her reader and started on the next report, trying to make herself as unobtrusive as possible while Alex continued his quiet survey. She kept her ears pricked for his occasional noises of surprise or interest, or his undervoiced commentary. They were close to the time she would have to break this off and go back across the garden, when he said, “Oh, here’s you, Granma! Why aren’t you wearing any clothes? Were you swimming?”

  Cordelia just kept herself from bolting up out of her chair, converting it into a casual approach. She should probably have locked that drawer, except there was no way to secure them individually, just the whole cabinet at once. “Artists are encouraged to draw nudes,” she said. “The human body is supposed to be the hardest thing to get really right. I posed for Aral when he wanted to practice.”

  “It looks pretty good. I mean, it looks like you. And here’s Admiral Jole, too. I suppose you’d have to practice drawing both men and women.”

  “That’s right.” The erotic edge to the portraits clearly escaped him. There were a few more down in that stack, she recalled, the tenor of which no one could mistake; she confiscated the pile under the pretext of picking it up to look through.

  “Are there any herms, then? There ought to be herms, too. And maybe quaddies. And those water people. And heavy-worlders.”

  “I think Aral lacked a live model. Consul Vermillion wasn’t here yet.” Would Vermillion have volunteered to pose if she’d hinted for it? Maybe so. Too late, as were so many things.

  The next sheet down had a sketch of her and Oliver together, clearly in bed. That would have been harder to explain. She plucked out a couple of her, Oliver, and a few other people unexceptionably dressed, and set them down to distract Alex while she whisked the remainder out of sight. He would inherit them someday—she could never bear to destroy them—but not yet.

  “Can I keep this one of you on the sailboat?”

  She glanced over at it. “That’s one of a pair.” The sketch of Oliver, shirtless at the tiller, peeked out underneath. “They ought to be kept together.” Indeed. “How about this one, instead?”

  “Are you in Mama’s garden here? All right.” He seemed satisfied with the substitution. She blew out a furtive breath of relief.

  If he’d been raised a Betan child, would she have had to hide any of them? Well…maybe a few, yeah. Aral had been in a puckish humor when he’d done some of the caricatures, and in a serious one for a few more, some from memory, some from imagination, and a few as an aid to imagination. Those had proved useful. She wasn’t sure whether she was suppressing a grin or tears, but she kept her face turned away from Alex till she could smooth it once more, and restore the stack to its cave of fragile memories. Let it rest there in the dark till the edges no longer cut.

  “No pictures of Granda, though,” Alex remarked.

  “That is unavoidably true. Except…in a strange way, they all are. A view of
him very few people ever had.”

  “Huh.” His brows drew down, not so much puzzled as contemplative.

  “Which is your favorite?” she asked, turning back to his selected treasures.

  To her surprise, he pointed not to one of the portraits, but to a large, elaborate, and immensely detailed architectural drawing of the imposing facades of Vorkosigan House.

  “Interesting. Why?” Was he homesick?

  His hands worked, as if groping for an unknown tool. “It’s got the most…everything.”

  She looked again. This was an unexpectedly recent piece, drawn here on Sergyar, presumably from some combination of memory and visual references. One would need a magnifying glass to take in all its features—if she recalled aright, Aral had used one in its composition—yet it didn’t feel in the least mechanical. Not Alex homesick, but someone else, perhaps?

  “I do believe you are right, kiddo.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Diverting Miles via the targeted application of war game sims seemed to Jole to go well that morning. He pulled Kaya off her leave to set up the show in one of the base tactics rooms, a skill-building task she seemed to resent not at all, which incidentally also assured she couldn’t be elbowed out of a front-row seat. On the theory that some opportunities should be less optional than others, he made sure to tap a few officers he judged needed to be waked up from sleepy habits in a military backwater that could become a frontwater on very short notice. The remaining slots filled in quickly as word got around, if only from a curiosity to meet Admiral Vorkosigan’s son.

  Thus Jole not only entertained his VIP guest, but escaped having to actually converse with him, until, breaking for lunch, Miles said, “So, show me that dodgy plascrete you and Mother were complaining about.”

  So, once again, Jole led a Vorkosigan on a trudge out to the mesas of stacked pallets, moldering gently in the tropical sun. The maze, he observed from the tell-tale bits of detritus scattered about in some nooks, seemed to have been attracting other denizens of the base looking for a private talk, tryst, or party. He made a mental note to make sure base security was keeping an eye on it. Yet another reason to shift the damned crap, if only he could figure out an economically favorable place or person to shift it to.

  To Jole’s faint alarm, Miles, clutching his cane, insisted on climbing a stack to look around. He seemed to have the same curiosity and instinct for the high ground as a cat, without a cat’s supple ability to land on its feet. Jole breathed a little easier when Miles sat down on the edge, dangling his legs and scooting into a comfortable position that put him just slightly higher than eye-to-eye with his host. Not exactly subtle, but Jole was willing to spot him the point. He leaned back on the stack opposite, crossed his arms, and waited.

  In a close simulation of casual, Miles began, “So, did this posthumous-children scheme of my mother’s come as a surprise to you? I mean, what with the dating and all.”

  So much for the plascrete as a conversational barrier, then. Or any other kind. “Yes,” Jole admitted. “I had no idea it was possible. Although we weren’t dating yet, when she arrived back from her Winterfair trip with the samples.” He hesitated. Where was Miles wanting to go with this? And did he really want to go along? “Ah—and you? Were you surprised?”

  Miles tilted his hand back and forth in a no-yes-no gesture. “I always knew she’d wanted a daughter. Not instead of me, mind you, it wasn’t like that. In addition. She seemed content to take out that maternal mania on assorted Barrayaran girls she mentored over the years. I thought she’d given up the idea decades ago. I knew about the samples—they went past in the stream when I was doing executor duties for Da—but I had a million other things to attend to and that one, at least, was her problem not mine. And then I didn’t think anything more about it, and she didn’t say anything more about it.” He frowned at this last.

  “She didn’t say anything to me, either, until after she’d ascertained their viability,” Jole offered. “That might have been what she was waiting for.” And if the samples had proved dead, would she have kept that grief locked silently in her own heart, never to be shared and thus halved? Sad but likely. It was his turn to frown.

  “The real surprise is Sergyar,” Miles went on. “I thought she’d be coming home. And doing—I don’t know what. Something. Grandmothering, maybe. The kids are a little shortchanged in that department, with Da gone, and Ekaterin’s mother long gone, and her da ensconced down in South Continent. Although I suppose there’s her Aunt and Uncle Vorthys, in town. And her brothers, and their wives and kids, and Nikki, and Alys and Simon, and…well, I guess they aren’t as lacking in relatives as I was. I had old Count Piotr. And cousin Ivan, sometimes.” His brows drew down as he reflected on this generational disparity.

  “I had the impression your district is Ekaterin’s patch, now,” said Jole mildly. “Are two countesses in one district anything like two women in one house?”

  “My mother’s not evicted, dammit,” said Miles. “Surely she doesn’t think she is—does she?” Genuine dismay flashed in his glance down at Jole. “That’s not what this is about, is it?”

  “I don’t think she feels that way, no,” said Jole. “I think it’s a more positive choice. She’s just getting back in touch with her old Betan Survey roots. She joined up to explore new worlds—so, Sergyar’s a new world—it’ll do.”

  Miles’s grin flickered. “Like Barrayar before it? Could be.”

  “You don’t mention your Betan relatives in that roster,” Jole observed curiously, shifting his back against his support-stack. “I know Cordelia keeps in some touch with her brother. And you have cousins there, yes?”

  Miles, taken aback, shrugged. “Three of ’em. Though I never really met them till I went there for my school year at age fifteen. And they were all rather different ages than me which, at fifteen, matters. I’ve given up trying to keep track of their partners and sprogs, although Mother gets bulletins on them all from her mother that she feels obliged to pass along.”

  Jole, the occasional victim of similar maternal reports on relatives he’d barely met and wouldn’t have recognized in the street, nodded understanding. Obituary column and all, as the extended family aged. It was only in recent years that he’d become able to recognize that as a clumsy expression of her sense of loss, and not a long-distance attempt to depress him. He’d grown better at writing back.

  Miles frowned. “Maybe you have to be the right age to imprint on your relatives. If you’re not actually around each other enough when you’re young and feckless together, you miss the ship. The most you can become after that is adult acquaintances. With maybe extra emergency docking privileges,” he conceded. “If I were somehow stranded on Beta, say. Or if any of them were stranded on Barrayar—I suppose that’s reciprocal.”

  Jole’s rural home district had been a place he couldn’t wait to escape, at age eighteen, and little about his rare visits back there had altered that view. It wasn’t as if his relationship with Aral or, later, with Aral and Cordelia had cut him off from his family much more than distance and his career had already done. And yet…to maintain the necessary political reticence, silences had always seemed safer than lies. And it was much easier to maintain silences when one didn’t engage in a conversation in the first place.

  Would his sons, if he chose to have them on Sergyar, end up enjoying much the same untroubled distance to Jole’s prole family back on Barrayar as Miles had with his Betan cousins? Even more so with their Vor nieces and nephews, especially if knowledge of their relationship was suppressed? But what about their half-sisters, much closer in time and space? Silence could divide the siblings from each other as surely as light-years. But no, if Jole stayed on Sergyar, he’d want to make household arrangements as close to Cordelia as she would permit, throwing their offspring together as well. They’d be the girls next door, perhaps.

  Which led to a fresh and more alarming reflection—given propinquity, Vorkosigan charisma, and the odds,
when they grew to be teenagers, would some of them want to date? Now, there was a hazard of convenient silence that hadn’t crossed Jole’s mind before. He swallowed a horrified laugh that he had no desire to explain to Miles. Cordelia had a point about starting as you meant to go on. The anonymous-egg ploy was looking less tenable all the time.

  Miles cleared his throat. Stared down at the dirt. Looked up. “So, ah—do you think you two will ever marry?”

  If she asked me, I’d say yes, Jole thought without hesitation, startling himself. Which made it different from anything else Cordelia might ask of him, how? She could roll him out like a pastry—he resisted the sexual innuendo with only a slight twitch of his lips. The woman didn’t know her own strength, fortunately. But all his prior yesses had been so fabulously rewarded…He managed, “We haven’t discussed it.”

  “Yet? Or ever?” He swung his heels in an absent rhythm against his sack-seat, a physical tic that ought to have looked juvenile, yet didn’t.

  Jole couldn’t figure out if Miles was more concerned for his mother’s future or his father’s past, in this line of…interrogation, yes. At least the former ImpSec operative didn’t have a hypospray of fast-penta on him at the moment, as far as Jole knew. He stifled an urge to move farther out of reach. “Not any time soon, certainly. She’s been very definite about wanting to keep her daughters well clear of certain Barrayaran legal and custody issues. I doubt she’d even consider it till her youngest daughter comes of age, by which time whatever…arrangements we end up with will have been in place for decades, and the question will be pretty moot.”

  Miles cocked his head. “Decades, huh? You thinking that long-term?”

  “She certainly has to be, to embark on all this.” He allowed, “Although decades do seem to be passing faster than they used to. Maybe more so for her.”

  Another twitch of a grin from Miles, who was not, after all, that much younger than Jole. He half-lidded his eyes, and ventured, “So…do you think you two would ever have a child together? By whatever technical intervention. Given how enchanted she seems with the idea of personally populating Sergyar. Possibly on the theory that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.”