“Oh,” said Blaise. “Er.” After a distracted moment he added, “Shouldn’t it be called SHEATH?”
“Hah. You try to think of a name to go with that acronym.”
Ivy glanced at her chrono. “About the speech?”
Cordelia sighed. “I am so burned out on speaking. They deserve better. See if you can persuade Dr. Tatiana to find something good for them.” One of the Betan therapists who had stayed on. The Tatiana part was a professional name; the doctorate was real. She was one of Cordelia’s favorite Betan ex-pats, whom she frequently invited to Palace social events when she needed someone to enliven the party. Ivy nodded and made another note.
The secretary glanced at her panel and remarked, “The Red Creek murder-case appeals trial has been delayed another week.”
Some of the light seemed to drain out of the morning. Cordelia said, “Part of me is glad. Part of me wants to get it over with. I hope they finish it off on that level.”
Blaise perked up. “Is it likely to reach the Viceroy’s Office, do you think? That could be big news.”
By Sergyaran standards only, Cordelia reflected. She shrugged. “Most capital cases eventually do, as we’re the last stop for appeals. Petitions for pardon or commutation by that time, usually. Except for Vor charged with treason, which could go to Vorbarr Sultana, but we haven’t had any of those, thankfully. The Sergyaran courts do a pretty good job of sorting out the facts. I am so grateful for fast-penta. I can’t imagine how horrific these decisions must have been back when there was real uncertainty over whether the perpetrator had been correctly identified.” She added after a moment, “Fortunately, our criminal capital cases are few. Aral and I only had to deal with a couple a year. Far more Sergyarans manage to kill each other by accident than by intent. I suppose the numbers will inevitably change as the population grows.”
The Red Creek case was especially ugly. And stupid, as these things tended to be. A woman’s boyfriend had killed her in a domestic brawl, so far so crime-of-passion. The woman, Cordelia gathered from the reports she’d seen so far, had been in her own scattered way a piece of work herself. But then, in a panic, the man had also pursued her two small witnessing children through the house and murdered them as well, then tried to hide all the bodies by burning the place to the ground. His first trial had been local and short. The appeal didn’t look too hopeful for him, either.
Blaise said, cautiously, “Will that also be a The Viceroy’s Office declines to hear, then?”
“Oh, Aral and I always went over all the material the courts and any other source we could find could supply. First separately, then together. Watched the recordings of the penta-interrogations. Once, we even repeated an interrogation ourselves, to be certain.” Cordelia’s lips thinned at the unpleasant memory. “‘Declines to hear’ is just a shorthand for ‘We’re not going to reverse the court’s decision.’ We had some pretty intense debates sometimes, coming as we did from, so to speak, two very different legal traditions.
“The Betans would consider something like this a matter for nonvoluntary sociopath therapy. Up to and including neurological rewiring, if there were underlying physical deficits discovered. Of course, Beta has far fewer such cases to start with, as in”—Cordelia almost said our culture, but it hadn’t really been hers since the Pretender’s War, had it—“that culture, therapies would be supplied at a much earlier stage. Barrayaran legal theory, according to Aral, holds that humans have a natural right to revenge, but that leads to blood-feuds, so subjects cede their natural right to their overlords, who are beyond revenge, in exchange for justice administered on their behalf. Which derails the blood-feuds, but obliges the overlords in turn to actually supply the justice. He took that very seriously.”
“Who, uh, won these debates?” Blaise asked.
“‘Winning’ is a null concept, here. There was never any good prize. We were able to see our way to a few commutations. The rest were declined. Once, I was all set for a test case—I was going to send a convicted man to Beta Colony, paid for out of my own purse, for full-on nonvoluntary therapy. To demonstrate the feasibility of importing that system to Sergyar. Instead, he managed, with some difficulty, to commit suicide a couple of days before he was due to be shipped out. Irrationally terrified, or just being Barrayaran, it was hard to tell.” Was there a difference? “So I’m still looking for a test case.” She wasn’t sure the Red Creek matter was it, though. Or that I would/wouldn’t pull the trigger on this jerk myself was the right metric. “I’ve considered offering the next convicted person a choice, death or therapy, but that feels awfully like ducking out of my Imperially mandated responsibility.”
Blaise said slowly—slowly was good, in his case—“I suppose I had not thought about it from that vantage. What it must feel like to hold life or death in your hands.”
Cordelia drummed her fingers on her chair arm, frowning. “When I was about your age, I earned my first Betan Astronomical Survey ship command. For every blind wormhole jump my ship’s probe-pilot made, the final go-or-no-go decision was mine.” Jumping into death, or the splendor of scientific discovery? Most often, of course, jumping into nothing much, or just more jumps. No wonder she’d never found gambling for money to be interesting. “They were volunteers, of course. We all were, out there. It’s…something that comes up on the supervisory level of a lot of professions.” The military most of all, she supposed.
She added after a moment, thinking back to Blaise’s remark that had triggered this spate of reminiscence, “Nevertheless, this Office will not make theater out of lives.” Ah, wasn’t that very like something Aral had said, decades ago?
Blaise looked frustrated, but did not argue. Ivy glanced at him and tapped her chrono.
“Press report for the weekend,” he dutifully began. One of his jobs—his main job, from Cordelia’s point of view—was to watch the local civilian news feeds and filter up anything she needed-to-know. Better him than her, and it entirely suited his ferretlike attention span. ImpSec performed a similar task, behind the scenes, but their focus was different. “Top of the list are the Lake Serena rumors.”
Cordelia blinked. Now it was her turn for a cautious tone. “Lake Serena rumors?”
“From your repeated inspection trips out there with Admiral Jole, recently. There are several. First is that it is being planned as a new development site, perhaps for a military installation. It’s started a flurry of land speculation out in that sector—you can probably look for a spate of proposals submitted to the Office soon.”
“Two of them popped up on my comconsole this morning,” Ivy confirmed this. “I wondered where they were coming from.” She regarded Cordelia with alert interest.
We were just taking some time off! Cordelia converted this indignant protest into a leading, “Hm, and…?”
“Next, that some new hazard has been discovered out that way. Biological or volcanic. The Kareenburg development community has been denying that one as loudly as they can.”
“Ah, well, they would. I think we can leave them to get on with it. Anything else?”
“Oh, that Lake Serena has been discovered to have a carbon dioxide inversion zone, like that weird lake south of Mount Stewart.”
Cordelia had managed to get that one named Lake Lethal on the map, in hopes of discouraging settlers. An utterly fascinating place, scientifically speaking. Lethal was a deep lake with volcanic gas seepage under it. The weight of the water, above, acted like a cap on a soda water bottle, trapping the gas until, every fifty or a hundred years, some chain reaction of a disturbance released it all at once. The colorless, odorless, heavy gas then erupted from the water and spread through the low places nearby, asphyxiating any animal life that unluckily chanced to be present. It was especially dangerous in windless conditions.
“Good grief, Serena is much too shallow for that!”
“Do you want me to issue a denial to that effect?”
“Lord, no. The conspiracy theorists would go wild, and we’d n
ever hear the end of it. Let the science boffins at the university correct them. Or try to correct them.” Sergyar’s sole university was, well, not quite as primitive as Penney’s Shack One, but it certainly was trying hard to get big education out of tiny budgets. Cordelia slung it what support she could. “Dignified silence, that’s the ticket.”
Blaise, with a kicked-puppy look, stopped mentally writing a bulletin. “What was it all about, then? Is it secret?”
“Not at all. Admiral Jole very kindly…took me sailing. It’s something we used to enjoy with Aral, you know. Because a nice day off outdoors helps keep people sane and happy. So I can come back to a week of this”—a vague wave around took in the Viceroy’s Office as an entity as well as a building—“and not be driven as mad as Emperor Yuri. Think of it as…nautical therapy, or something.” We were dating, dammit! She wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or piqued that this didn’t seem to be part of the gossip.
Ivy shot her a curious look, but then it was time to break things up and go tend to the water-fight. Cordelia only wished it could be with real water, and not with words. More words.
Chapter Nine
Dinner at the terrace restaurant followed by a confidential conference at the Viceroy’s Palace had worked so well the prior week, they repeated it midweek. Worked again, Jole thought, swimming muzzily up out of his sex-stunned haze to find a warm, naked Cordelia tucked up under his arm. He lifted his head to find her eyes slitted open, silvery-gray in the night-gleam, not asleep but just as obviously not going anywhere in particular right now. He squinted past her hair, tickling his nose, at the bedside chrono, and made a faint disgruntled noise.
“Hm?” Cordelia inquired, still not moving.
“Should get up an’ go. Doan’ wanna.”
“Don’t, then.” She backed a little more firmly into him.
“Mm…” He sighed, thinking of his empty bed back in his base apartment, and how small and cold the place had grown of late. “Should.”
“See, there’s another advantage to a public relationship. You could stay here all night. Get more sleep. Be fresher for work in the morning.”
“Temptress. You know a man’s susceptibilities, don’t you.”
She smiled sleepily. “Only my men.”
He grinned into her hair and kissed the top of her head. “Lake Serena again this weekend?”
Her lips pursed in doubt. “It has been brought to my attention that maybe we ought to vary our pattern. Our repeated trips out there seem to have triggered a spate of speculation, and not the sort I would have thought. Apparently, nobody under thirty thinks anyone over fifty has sex, so the explanations, while inventive, are bound to lead people astray.”
He returned a disappointed mm. Just having a pattern seemed a nice change. He could imagine this one repeating for quite a long time before he became bored with it. Months at least. Maybe years. A regular schedule that no one had to fret about. Nevertheless…
“We’ll have to vary the pattern anyway. My upside rotation starts next week.” An utterly routine inspection tour of the wormhole stations guarding the two blank-or-might-as-well-be wormholes. This supervisory task had slipped from exciting to dull with repetition, but not nearly as dull as the station-keeping duty itself. The brief, artificial excitement of their sector commander’s personal attention was about the only validation the fellows manning the wormhole forts ever received, and while boring was good on a space station, considering the alternatives, there were morale issues to consider. And, once in a great while, a real problem to uncover, preemptively making sure no one literally died of boredom. These inspections were worthwhile on several levels; Jole had never resented them before.
It was Cordelia’s turn to make a disappointed noise. “Ah, that’s right.” She rolled over; Jole obligingly turned on his back and let her rearrange herself with her head on his shoulder, her arm draped possessively over his chest. “I suppose vid sex is right out. I can’t see how it would work with several light-hours of time delay, anyway.”
Jole sniggered. “No. Not that I wouldn’t love to see that, mind you.”
“You, ImpSec, anyone on the tightbeam repeater-route with the clearance to tap the link…”
“Exactly what I was thinking. Don’t want to share.” He gave her a hug with his woman-weighted arm. “At least…if anything happened to you while I was out there, this time I could order myself home.”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “Hm?”
“I was just thinking of that frantic mess during my second trade-fleet escort tour.” He had advanced to exec on the New Athens, a then-new ship and a plum posting, he’d thought. “We were out halfway past Earth, at about the farthest jump on our route, when the news of the Prime Minister’s heart attack came through. I could do nothing, stuck where I was. And no one to talk to. Oh, there was plenty of political gossip and speculation, and of course everyone knew I’d been on his staff for years, so people interrogated me, sure. That was excruciating, even with the few who realized he wasn’t just a figure to me, but a friend. No basis to ask for compassionate leave, no way to get home in much less time than the fleet itself was going to take…I was never closer to deserting.”
Cordelia sighed. “I’m sorry my bulletins were so terse. Things were utterly crazy in Vorbarr Sultana, what with Miles missing-presumed-dead, and Mark coming in from the cold, and all the medical anxieties…I won’t say it was worse than the Pretender’s War, but it gave me flashbacks.”
His hug tightened. “Your bulletins were lifesavers, from my point of view. I watched them over and over. Trying to read between the lines, then trying not to read between the lines…That last one, after his heart transplant—you looked so exhausted, but it was like the sun had come up in your face.” He smiled. “And the next one was from him, and then…it was all right.” All right for then, at least. But that unwanted preview of mortality and loss and helplessness had been part of what had turned his career toward Sergyar space, as soon as he could engineer it.
She’d known what he’d wanted to hear, she’d known what he’d needed to hear…her first private tightbeam had been sped on its way within a day of the disaster, before she’d even slept, as far as he’d been able to discern. For all the assurances, subtle and unsubtle, that he’d received from her before, that message and the ones that soon followed had finally driven home to him that she truly considered him not a Betanly tolerated caprice of her husband’s, but an equal partner, worthy of all consideration. He’d always been a little bit in love with her, as what men around Aral were not? It wasn’t that he was more in love with her after, either. Yet there had flowed in under his feet with those messages, almost unseen, a profound and unshakable trust which had given him a new place to stand, when they all met again. And from that had followed…well, the rest of his life, so far.
When I was alone and afraid, you comforted me. He turned up her face and kissed her properly for that, a mere decade-and-a-half late. She looked pleased, if bemused; he did not attempt to explain.
He was dressing before they returned to weekend plans. She rolled over, plucked her wristcom from the bedside table, called up her calendar, and frowned. “Ah, I was afraid of that. I have two afternoon meetings that will put a hole in anything out of town…booked ages ago. I must tell Ivy to guard my weekends better in future.”
He sat beside her with his own wristcom, and they compared calendars. The results were disheartening.
“Dinner and a conference here again, that night?” Cordelia suggested at last, pointing. “We could even have dinner here. In Ekaterin’s garden—that would be nice. As long as we don’t let anyone else know where to find us. At least we can leave room at Penney’s for his other customers.”
Cordelia had expressed some guilt when she’d learned that having Penney’s Place to themselves had been no accident, but a security compromise Jole had arranged. His argument that Penney didn’t suffer since he was paid for a full occupancy that he and Ma Penney didn’t actuall
y have to serve had only made a small dent in this.
“I won’t be able to stay very late. I have an early lift-off the next morning.”
She nodded understanding and blocked out the time, with a note to her kitchen staff. A mental review of his tomorrow-morning’s schedule was not much motivation, consolation, or help for tearing himself away, but with a heroic effort that he suspected wouldn’t garner much sympathy even if there were someone he could complain to, he decamped into the Kayburg night.
* * *
Oliver had been gone on his upside rotation for only half a week, and Cordelia wondered how it was that she felt bored. Bored and restless. Drumming her fingers on the black glass of the comconsole desk in her personal office, she stared out into the rainy night of the back garden. Low, colored lights among the plantings and walkways made oddly cheerful accents in the dark blur.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plenty to do. Once she’d worked through the top layer of the day’s crises, there was always another layer, further down and more detailed. And a third one below that. The best camouflage for work-avoidance was more work? She contemplated the paradox, and decided, in all fairness, that it was just task-avoidance. One particular task, albeit with subheadings. Drat it, as her delightful daughter-in-law would say. She’d been thinking about this for months, years. Decades, in a sense. There was no reason for it to suddenly seem hard, here at the point of final fruition.
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Page 17
