Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - eARC
Page 35
“If only she would start talking in complete sentences,” Cordelia added aside to Jole, her new worry. Language acquisition had been young Miles’s only early accomplishment, Jole understood, blasting through words to sentences to paragraphs with alarming speed in his drive to gain some control of his bewildering universe.
Aurelia was currently doing quite well at operating her adults to her satisfaction with a combination of body language, facial expressions, and weirdly strung-together vocabulary. Plus built-in siren, for emergencies. At length Cordelia, showing a trust Jole felt obliged to support, handed her over, and then it was his turn to be reduced to apparent idiocy in their strange transactional dance of communication. His performance today seemed to be up to her exacting standards, anyway.
At last the shuttle dropped toward their destination. Jole strapped Aurelia back into her seat for the landing, to her futile annoyance. The coastline was visible first, a forbidding line of red cliffs with a ruff of surf below. Then the harbor mouth disclosed itself, and the astonishing sheltered waters beyond.
The harbor wound its way inland through the surrounding hills for nearly twenty kilometers. Promontories and points alternated with deeply involuted coves to create a lavish length of shoreline. The site lay on the borderline between the sub-tropic and the temperate, moderated still further by the sea and the deep, translucent waters of the bay, almost a warm-water fjord. Jole had visited the place several times with Cordelia, and it still seemed a dream of clarity and light.
A hamlet-growing-to-village was sited about halfway in, taking advantage of an optimum combination of fresh water coming down from the low hills and a steep marine drop-off to place a quay. Port Nightingale’s small fusion plant produced a hundred-fold more power than the present thousand or so inhabitants could use, but Jole suspected it would be running to capacity in far less time than Cordelia projected. Flatter lands behind the first range of hills were already peppered with small farms and sapling orchards and vineyards.
Instead of the village shuttlepad, their vessel and its outrider aimed for a promontory thrusting out into the bay about two kilometers closer to the sea. A decade past, Cordelia had purchased it and its entire backing cove, all the way around, her one personal Sergyaran speculation. Jole could see why.
Cordelia had set her new home toward the mouth of the cove on the hillside facing roughly east, toward the sea. As the party disembarked and set up for the afternoon, Jole and she took a stroll around the building site. The rectangular foundation had been cut into the slope about fifty meters above the shoreline and, they discovered, plumbed since their last visit, the well drilled and septic system in place. No actual facilities yet, the necessities being supplied by a builders’ privy downslope, but one could see their promissory shapes. Cordelia was thrilled.
No builders present today. In the evolutionary struggle for local resources, they’d all gone off to work on the hamlet’s first clinic. She would get them back eventually, she supposed with a sigh. Today, she was full of her plans for an underwater steel net to be strung across the mouth of the cove to create a safe swimming and diving zone for future residents and guests. The colonists had scarcely begun to explore their new seas, but their wild array of interlocking ecosystems had already been discovered to include larger predators than any yet found on land.
“Have you decided where you want your section?” she asked Jole, as she gazed around the somewhat scrubby gray-green amphitheater embracing the cove.
“I’m thinking directly across. I like the view back up the bay and the sunsets. It will make a nice healthy walk around the cove to you, or a short kayak ride across, weather depending.” He wondered how much time his future kayak would spend parked in her future dock. Lots, he trusted. “Or a swim, if I’m feeling energetic.”
She grinned. “I like that picture.”
The eastward promontory itself, they’d agreed, they would save for the future.
They shared their picnic lunch with the small ImpSec crew, whose most diligent efforts had failed to discover anything remotely resembling a human hazard out here. Biological ones, well, everyone was still working on that. Afterward, while Aurelia and Armsman Rykov both took naps on blankets, Jole and Cordelia walked around the perimeter of the cove where a path had already been cut and beaten into the undergrowth, and climbed the promontory for its fabulous view up and down the bay. To the east, the harbor mouth gave a glimpse of an unimpeded horizon stretching across the rim of the world, sea and sky imperceptibly blending in a hazy line of blue and violet.
“That,” said Jole, catching his breath after the scramble to the top, “is one great big lake.”
Cordelia laughed softly.
“I wanted to tell you,” he confided almost shyly. “Gamelin tells me that if I pick up one more biochem course, and pull together all those field notes I’ve been sending him for the journal the past two years into a coherent paper, he wants to roll my bachelor’s and master’s into one, and shove me directly into his grad program.”
Even Jole had stopped pretending this is only a hobby some months ago. Cordelia had been entirely unsurprised.
She replied lightly, “A student who can already write and think, who could organize any sized field expedition to the most exotic locale, safely, with one hand tied behind his barely scarred back, who could probably run an academic department or an entire university in his sleep if he wanted to—”
“Field work,” Jole put in firmly. “I want field work. Outdoors.”
“Of course Gamelin is panting.” She laced her arm through his. “I predict your future students will adore you, Professor Jole, and sooner than you think. You even already know how to teach.”
“Well, sure. The peacetime military is almost nothing but teaching. Processing newbies all the time, bringing them up to speed. Getting people to do things they’ve never done before.” He added reflectively, “The wartime military too, only faster. Outsiders…don’t always recognize that function.” The good officers and noncoms modeled the military virtues, and sometimes a few more besides; the bad modeled rot that could linger for several short generations of personnel turnover. Jole wondered what model of officer he’d been, and how long his wake would last.
“Geophysically, the Sergyaran seas are mapped to the millimeter.”
“I know,” said Jole. “We did a lot of it from orbit.”
“Their biosphere needs someone to go take a closer look.”
“More than one someone. Five thousand years, Gamelin once guessed, and it took me a while to realize that wasn’t a joke. This bay alone could keep an explorer busy for half a lifetime.” And close to home—right out the researcher’s front door, perhaps. “Beyond the harbor mouth—well, a man would run out of breath long before he ran out of questions.” The extensive and intricate reeflike structures along the northerly coast of this very continent were already getting some attention, but practical needs were still drawing most resources to the land. “Finding funding for a proper research vessel could be a stretch.”
“Mm, I might know a couple of people who are adept at finding funding. Don’t give up on that idea too soon.”
“Hadn’t planned to. It’s a grand buffet, but no one could eat it all at once.”
Cordelia’s grin widened. “God I’ve missed the sound of scientific greed. You could almost be—”
“Betan?”
“I was going to say, Betan Survey. We lot were always, mm, not as good a fit back in the home tunnels as some.”
Her hand stole into his, and he gripped it back.
After a little, she said, “I know where you might find a navigator for that boat, for cheap. She’d probably work for foot rubs. And lab access.”
“It’s a deal,” he said, and they stood a while longer, looking to the horizon line where a new sun would rise tomorrow.
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