Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - eARC

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Lon drooped rather like the flowers at ghem Soren’s elbow, drafted minion—the others, Cordelia discovered upon inquiry, had helped finish setting up the display and then gone off to explore the creek. A quick cross-check on her wristcom assured her that their ImpSec minder had them all in sight, so Cordelia turned her attention back to this earnest effort at cultural outreach.

  Diplomatically concealing his lack of enthusiasm, Oliver permitted them to be escorted within, though Cordelia’s ImpSec bodyguard went first. “Sight” offered a display of colored cards that reminded Cordelia of optical illusion demos, “touch” a like array of concealed textures that one felt without being able to see. For “sound” ghem Soren presented a row of chimes—no electronics allowed, she gathered. Would that be considered cheating? “Scent” was supplied by a queue of saturated sponges in little bowls, “taste” by apparently identical colorless liquids in, necessarily, tiny disposable plastic cups evidently scavenged from the medical tent—that last compromise plainly pained their host, who explained that the proper presentation involved dedicated hand-made porcelain vessels. To her relief, it turned out that she was not expected to drink the stuff, merely to dip in her tongue and let the flavors seep around her mouth. Ghem Soren was taken aback when Oliver made no errors in his sorting-out, but cheered up visibly when Cordelia did and he could gently correct her in, she gathered, a style copied from some long-ago Cetagandan kindergarten teacher. The kids probably would like this, she decided, and regarded ghem Soren more favorably. Alas, the piece of Cetagandan artwork that they were invited to contemplate at the end of all this perceptual fitness training remained as baffling as ever.

  “At least we didn’t have to lick it,” Oliver muttered to her ear as they exited again. “I’d have drawn the line at that.”

  She snorfled, covertly.

  Ghem Soren, engaged in one last follow-up bit of lecture, interrupted himself to stare in surprise at his left arm, where a grape-sized radial had stealthily attached itself. To Cordelia and Lon’s unified chorus of “Don’t slap it!” he slapped it.

  He did not emit anything so undignified as a yelp, but his mouth did open on a huff of hurting surprise.

  “Don’t scratch it, either!” Cordelia restrained his right hand, maternally, as it made to do just that. “The remains stick to everything like gum”—though the more usual description was snot—“and the acid keeps right on eating away into the skin underneath. Your choices are either to go to the creek and wash it off immediately, or go to the med tent, where they have a concoction to neutralize all that interesting biochemistry. On the whole, I recommend the med tent.”

  So authoritatively directed, the attaché jogged off, though not without pausing to give Lon a string of last-minute instructions on holding the fort till his return, which Lon, to Cordelia’s eye, took in with all the responsiveness of any other fifteen-year-old boy presented with an unwanted chore. Just like pushing pudding uphill. And then Oliver’s wristcom chimed with the news that they were finally ready for them at the music tent, if you could come over now, sir?

  With a call over her shoulder to Lon of, “And do water those plants you’re holding prisoner. Their lives depend on you, you know,” they headed for the next event.

  * * *

  The crowd at the temporarily repurposed music tent, Cordelia estimated, was just about that core two hundred or so of space officers, dates, and families who had started this whole thing off, back when. The picnic and outdoor atmosphere would at least keep the formalities from being too formal, she trusted. In the background, Blaise Gatti dodged around taking the official vids—she’d had to browbeat him a few times to train him to be unobtrusive about those duties, but the lesson seemed finally to have stuck.

  The cheery officer acting as birthday master of ceremonies was a lieutenant commander from Orbital Traffic Control, apparently just as much of an organizer out of uniform as in it. He guided the pair of them to seats on the dais behind a comfortingly defendable table, and launched into a suitable opening spiel to welcome the guest of honor, the military cadre, the Vicereine, and the Vicereine’s visiting family, who now occupied the whole of the front row, only squirming a little. She was surprised that Alex and Helen had returned for the boring bits—maybe she’d underestimated the draw of cake. Beside her, Oliver braced himself to be fêted with whatever Barrayaran military humor ruled the day.

  The first birthday offering, carted up to the table by a grinning lieutenant from the shuttle pilot pool, was a two-liter beer mug, frosty but not filled with beer—the contents were a clear faint green, and clinked with ice. Cordelia had never been sure whether those mugs were a joke, a challenge, or a sign of someone too lazy to reach for refills. The crowd applauded as Oliver dutifully lifted it to his lips and swallowed. His eyes widened, but he set it calmly back on the table and called back, “What, are we having an ice shortage out here today?” which won about the chuckle it merited.

  “What?” whispered Cordelia, to which he responded by shoving it a few centimeters her way in invitation to sample.

  “Frieda didn’t mix this one.”

  She tasted it, nearly choked on the lethal potency, and hastily shoved it back. “Your patch, I think.”

  “Are they trying to render me legless before we even start?”

  “You don’t know your reputation?”

  “Which one?”

  “You think no one ever noticed you knocking back drinks at Palace receptions? You’re widely believed to have the hardest head in the Sergyaran Service.”

  “It was generally hot. I was thirsty,” he muttered plaintively. He toasted the crowd and took another sip, sensibly ignoring the calls to chug it. “At least it beats Cetagandan art.”

  The next foray into military humor was the presentation of a fake campaign medal about the size of a saucer, hung on a colorful ribbon, “for surviving Admiral Jole’s inspections.” This Oliver received with bemused good will, though then a puckish glint came into his eyes and he capped the moment by turning around and re-presenting it to Cordelia, slipping the ribbon over her head. By the slightly stuffed looks that came over Miles’s and Ekaterin’s faces, they caught the personal subtext; she hoped no one else here did.

  “Is this anything like when the young ladies compete to get their fellows’ old dog tags off them?” she asked, resisting the urge to kiss him right there in front of them all.

  “You win,” he said simply.

  There followed a few obligatory retrospectives from some of his senior officers, occasionally dipping into roast but not, to her relief, into tastelessness. And then it was her turn to stand up and deliver her own short speech, to be followed, she understood, by the Serious Gift. She had to take care not to let any of the too-practiced stock phrases from most of the past three years slip out, not least because Oliver would recognize them—We come to praise Caesar, not to bury him, thankfully. Appreciation, not eulogy.

  Though if Oliver left for Vorbarr Sultana, it occurred to her, there would be a change-of-command ceremony entailed. Military ceremonies, like all ceremonies, tended to echo each other. Eulogies then, perhaps.

  Cordelia wondered what his officers had finally decided on for the gift. A subcommittee spearheaded by Kaya Vorinnis had tackled her in her office the other day for a short but intense exploration of the possibilities, and gone away looking thoughtful. They had given no hint of their budget, though considering the size of the group and its heavy loading with senior personnel, it probably wasn’t going to be like a typical impoverished-junior-officers whip-round.

  A stir came from the front of the tent, people making way. “Stand back, Admiral’s birthday present coming through…!” An aisle opened up, and down it came two officers hauling, to Cordelia’s intense surprise—was it the crystal canoe from Penney’s? No, not quite. It was longer and wider, and the stern was cut off square, suitable for attaching a propulsion unit. Shallow draft, flat bottom, perfect for detailed underwater viewing. Call it a crystal bateau, pe
rhaps. A large red ribbon was wrapped around its midsection, tied in a quite passable bow.

  Oliver’s mouth dropped open in astonishment; his face lit up, and it was only then that one realized how reserved it had been heretofore. “Woah!”

  “We got ’im,” chortled a happy voice from the mob. “Ha!” Laughter and applause at the success of their surprise.

  Oliver, stirring to get up and come down, turned to her. “Was this your doing?”

  “No!”

  He tilted his head in disbelief.

  “It wasn’t me. I did point them in Penney’s direction, but I thought they were going to go for, I don’t know, a gift certificate for a weekend out there or something.” In part because she’d hinted around, without ever being able to say it outright, that perhaps they had better pick something that was either immediately consumable, or could be packed up to take back by jumpship to Vorbarr Sultana. Someone must have researched further. And had a better idea.

  She followed him as he stepped eagerly down off the dais for a closer look, and touch, as if he didn’t quite believe his eyes. The lines of the craft were enchantingly elegant—it seemed to promise to slip over the water like a dragonfly.

  She asked the grinning—yes, engineering officer, “Was it expensive?”

  “Naw. We fabricated it ourselves. A vat of canopy plastic and a night in the shop with the big printer, easy.”

  Oliver, she was reminded, rode herd on a cadre of people who routinely repaired spaceships. She should not have underestimated them, or their resources, or their design skills, even though it appeared some of those resources were borrowed from Imperial supplies.

  She murmured to the officer, “If anyone questions the use of equipment or material, you can tell them the Vicereine authorized it.”

  His eyes twinkled. “Thank you, Your Excellency.”

  “Does it float?” Oliver asked, a bit breathlessly.

  “Yep, we had it out for field trials this morning,” another officer told him smugly, watching him run loving hands over the smooth thwarts. Instant infatuation, it appeared, wasn’t just for romance anymore. “It floats in any attitude you put it, including upside down, longitudinally, or full of water.”

  All right, any well-liked officer might get a birthday whip-round in his honor. But this had taken real time and thought, and a shrewd awareness that could not be plucked off the shelves in the base exchange. More—he’d invited plenty of his colleagues out on the water with him over the years, they all knew about that interest; she’d have guessed they would have presented him with a sailing hull, not something so, so on-top of his latest changes. Yeah. Oliver’s command style was not much like Aral’s, and he’d always imagined it as inferior therefore. But in this, she thought, they were alike; each had won loyalty by first giving it. How can he abandon this life?

  After some more of the attendees milling around and taking turns crowding up to get a better look at the Serious Gift, she quietly recommended to their emcee to move it forward or face a cake riot from the front row. Yeah, let them eat cake. He took the directive to heart, and shortly the group was transmuted into people standing around trying to balance their portions of carbohydrates, grease and sugar on the inevitable too-flimsy disposable plates. Or smearing same on their faces, depending on their ages and/or degree of inebriation. The base mess had supplied cake abundantly.

  She and Oliver recaptured their chairs, which came with the only usable table in the tent. With the thoroughness that distinguished him, Oliver ate his piece, alternating with sips from the giant drink, which must have been a horrifying taste combination. Cordelia took advantage and slipped her portion to the nearest frosting-smeared grandchild doing an unconvincing impersonation of a famine victim.

  “You don’t have to drink all that,” she advised Oliver, who was still valiantly sipping. “No hapless potted plants in here, but outside you’ll have an entire desert to slip it into, and no one the wiser.”

  “But they gave me the expensive stuff,” he protested, by which she concluded that the alcohol was already gaining on him. Although Oliver’s weirder frugal impulses while drunk weren’t only from his early prole upbringing—space duty reinforced parsimony. Like gilding the lily in reverse.

  Making a Viceregal decision, she took it away from him, which he did not protest, and no one else dared object to. At long last, he divested his uniform jacket and opened the round collar of his shirt, looking vastly more comfortable and, oddly, more himself thereby. And then, after a short conference to assure that the crystal bateau would be safely delivered to temporary storage back at the base—for which, of course! it appeared the techs had already made provision—it was time to decamp for the boot polo field.

  * * *

  “Have you ever played boot polo, Oliver?” Ekaterin asked in curiosity as they were ushered to a row of canvas seats under an awning, reserved for the honored guests. Lesser watchers had taken to ground sheets laid out on the slope overlooking the playing field.

  Jole shook his head. “Not me. I’m an officer.”

  She looked surprised. “Is it against regs, then?”

  He chuckled. “There are no regulations for boot polo. The game started back in the Time of Isolation as a camp and garrison pastime for bored soldiers. They made it up themselves for themselves out of what they had on hand, including the rules, such as they are—of which the first was no officers allowed. That’s part of why there’s no set number of players to a team, either, though in play they do try to keep the teams near-even.”

  The Admiral and Vicereine’s party had arrived in time for the deciding match of the day, between the surviving teams of the prior rounds. As a result, the sides were more varied than usual, with the winners of the base men’s, the ISWA women’s, and the Kayburg town sets pitted against each other. Upholding Kayburg’s honor was the team from the municipal guard, mixed in gender, but salted with a few Service veterans who had obviously provided expertise. The base men, in the red T-shirts, were considered stronger but tireder, the ISWA women in blue lighter but smarter, and the yellow-shirted Kayburg team featured a pair of players, a large guard sergeant and a skinny female secretary, who had shown a killer knack for hooking. The secretary, Jole understood, was the more vicious, with a fiendish skill at rolling opposing players through the fire-radial mounds, of which today’s field boasted four, all rather flattened by now.

  Cordelia leaned over to confide to Ekaterin, “Aral was the first Barrayaran to discover that underground species of radial, you know. On our opening hike here.”

  Ekaterin looked suitably impressed; Jole tried not to laugh. He’d heard that story.

  Miles escorted Taurie and Lizzie off for a look around; after a bit his voice floated back: “No, darling, you can’t pet the hexaped. It would bite your hand off, and then your Grandmama would execute it, which wouldn’t be fair to the poor beast, now would it?” A surly hiss underscored this.

  Jole craned his neck; Ekaterin turned anxiously in her seat. Down on the sidelines stood a large cage containing one of the region’s iconic native creatures. It was about the mass of a pig, though with longer legs ending in clawed feet: six-limbed, flat-faced and neckless, with a sharp and heavy parrotlike beak. Its rust-red fur, Jole considered, was about the only attractive part of it, assuming you ignored the smell.

  The mini-zoo expedition returned shortly, all hands still accounted for, Miles grinning. Jole watched him as he sat with an oof. “So why do we have a hexaped today? Did someone decide they needed a mascot?”

  “I’m told there are a number of local rules here for wildlife hazards on the playing field.”

  “This is true.”

  “Trouble is, every creature able to move has evidently fled far from your noisy occupation. So a hunting party went out last night and caught some, so as to be able to release one per game onto the field. Keeping it fair and even, y’see.”

  Jole made an amused face. “All right, the players are all armed with their sticks, but
what about the innocent bystanders?”

  “All the refs are carrying stunners. Though whether for obstreperous hexapeds or argumentative players, my informant didn’t quite make clear.”

  “And, ah…how has this worked out so far?”

  “Disappointingly, I was told. Almost all of them dashed straight through the crowd and ran off, except for one that went to ground in a hole in the creek bank and still hasn’t come out.”

  “I see.” Jole grinned and took a swig of his hard cider. A float-pallet load of cases had been bestowed on them a bit ago by one of his officers from B&L, whose sister-in-law owned an orchard and cidery north of New Hassadar. After a long start-up, this was the first year of production, but only enough for the extended family—commercial amounts were hoped for next year, when they would also have to start pasteurizing. The brew was smooth and tasty, he had to admit, if also cloudy and a peculiar color—full of vitamins and animals, certainly. The Vicereine, always a supporter of colonial enterprise, had accepted the offering with pleasure, and the B&L officer had gone off to comm his relatives and brag about it.

  The crowd stirred as the players filed onto the field and a ref carried out the wooden ball, about the size of a cantaloupe and brightly painted. The original balls had often been cannon balls, readily found lying about in rusting stacks in old forts, but wood and even solid plastic was preferred these days because players could get a better loft and more distance with them. The painting was a tradition that had started during the Occupation.