She called up her secured-tightbeam recording program and settled more firmly in her chair, straightening her shoulders and fixing a reassuring smile on her face.
“Hello, Gregor. This isn’t a crisis-call; I’m merely making it emperor’s-eyes-only because it contains personal elements, and also to be sure it gets to you promptly.” Because the next message out would go to Miles, and on the not-unlikely chance that her son and foster-son compared notes, Gregor should not be blindsided. “The first thing you should know is that I am planning to hand in my resignation as Vicereine of Sergyar within a year. Or so. So you’ll be wanting to keep your eyes open for a possible replacement. Or choice of replacements, since the list of those willing shall likely be a subset of those most able and suitable.” She paused the recording to mentally muster her own list of qualities most desirable in the person or persons who would be inheriting responsibility for her planet. People who wouldn’t screw up all the projects she’d started or had in progress—certainly nothing on Sergyar was finished. And yet, wasn’t part of turning over turning over just such choices of direction, as well? Starting with turning over to Gregor, which had first been done almost three decades ago when Aral had laid down the regency, to generally good effect, barring a few shakedown problems. Which she tried not to remember and hold against Gregor, maternally or otherwise. The grinding nightmare with that ugly plot of Vordrozda’s and Hessman’s had worked out all right in the end, after all. Not to mention the whole Hegen Hub near-disaster, argh. Both of which, possibly, might seem longer ago to Gregor than to her.
She shook her head ruefully, jotted down a written list of her bullet-points—thankfully not with real bullets these days—and drew lines through half of them. Then through a few more, till she had winnowed it to her top three concerns. There would be time later to discuss the details, after all. She restarted the recording and delivered them with the clipped efficiency she had honed through decades of reports. Then paused once more. Restarted.
“Which brings me to the reason for my resignation. My health continues excellent, by the way,” she added hastily, anticipating and with luck heading off any alarm her emperor might be feeling on that score. She could barely recall what all she had said to Gregor when sending the first message about Aral’s death, three years back. She could call it up from the files to refresh her memory, she supposed. If given a choice between that and sticking her hand in a campfire, she’d pick the fire, thanks. Focus, woman. “That being the case, I have decided now is the time to pursue a long-delayed wish of mine.”
In much the same terms as she’d first explained it to Oliver, she went over the history of the sequestered gametes, their legal status, their journey with her to Sergyar, and the techno-conception of Aurelia and her five still-frozen sisters. Six weeks old, Aurelia now was—Cordelia had visited the rep center again just last night—two weeks past the time she had promised herself to make this happy announcement. Historically, the standard for such news had been three months past conception, she understood. In part because so many early hopes could be dashed with early miscarriages, in part because—what had they called it?—quickening, that was it, was the first certain proof of progress, back in medieval times before reliable pregnancy tests. She still remembered that strange faint flutter in her lower belly with Miles, of, heavens, forty-four years ago now. For which quickening had been all too prescient a term. She smiled a little, then paused the recording to consider the place of Oliver’s potential sons in this report. Miles’s half-brothers, technically.
There were a great many people whose business this was not. If there was a short list of others, Gregor probably headed it, as usual. She sighed and started again.
“What follows is, for the moment, strictly confidential between me and you.” She explained about the leftover eggshells, and her bright idea of offering them to Oliver. She underlined the issue of Barrayaran special custody rights of fathers and sons, parallel with that of mothers and daughters. “Which makes this Miles’s legal business not at all, although I expect we shall apprise him in due course, just as a family courtesy. But too much is still uncertain about Oliver’s future choices, and their timing, for premature announcements in that direction.” And so there was one decision about her next message, made.
“And to close on a still-more-personal, if happy, note, I should probably mention that Oliver and I have started, er, dating.” Her lips curved up in memory of her debate with Oliver over the best terminology, but she wasn’t sure if she ought to share the joke with Gregor. Gregor harbored a sense of humor under his deep reserve somewhere, but the weight of the Imperium did a pretty good job of keeping it suppressed, poor boy. “Neither of us have any idea where this will be going in the long run, so there is no point in asking, but…it’s good to know we both can grow a little more alive again after all.” In the midst of death, reaching out for life. With all due defiance. Ekaterin might well offer some lovely metaphor about shoots struggling up from a burned-over place. Cordelia’s emotions certainly felt like that, tender and green and vulnerable. She hoped her parting smile looked happy and not just goofy. Not able to think of what else to add, she signed off.
She reran the message for review, but it all seemed sound; true and succinct. That last smile did indeed look a trifle goofy, but a replacement would probably just come out looking strained, which would be worse. Whatever else Gregor wanted to know, he could ask. She set the security code to the highest level, and sent it on its way. She pictured the data packet traveling from the Viceroy’s Palace to the orbital relay station, from there to the wormhole jump-point on the Komarr route, and onward, stitched from jump to jump at light speed, past Komarr, into the cul-de-sac route to Barrayar itself, to its governmental orbital communications station to the Imperial Residence to Gregor’s comconsole desk, in that sober, modern office he kept, also looking out over a garden. Would it be day or night when it arrived? She was too tired just now to work out the time differentials in her head.
And now for the next message on her short list. She was, she decided, glad for the practice on Gregor’s. She considered, and promptly rejected, some cheerful opening like Good news, Miles, you’re getting a little sister! For one thing, she suspected it would seem to him less good than startling. For another, any sibling relationship was going to be generationally skewed. Functionally, Miles would be more like a distant uncle, his children more like their Aunt Aurelia’s slightly older cousins. She wondered how often the two dislocated—in both time and space—parts of the family would even meet in person. Tied to his count’s duties in his ancestral district, Miles traveled off-world less and less now, and without the need to make the annual Viceroy’s Report, not to mention an Imperially-supplied jump-pinnace in which to travel, how often would Cordelia make the trek back to Barrayar? Well, time would tell, though as usual it could benefit from a dose of fast-penta. She started the next recording and launched herself into the void once more.
“Hello, Miles, and Ekaterin if you are listening. Miles should play this for you in any case, by the way. First of all, don’t be alarmed, the security code on this is just because the message is personal, not because it’s a crisis. My health is fine, by the way. But I will be resigning my position here on Sergyar within the year. The reason is…” She paused and backed up over the start of that last sentence. “First, a little history…” The story of the gametes was getting easier to tell with practice. It led up reasonably naturally to the Announcement of Aurelia, Cordelia fancied. Because it was pertinent to district business, Cordelia detailed her scheme of continuing to draw her Dowager’s Jointure for her girls’ support till they were grown, then cutting it off. “Such arrangements were not made with galactic-style lifespans in mind, after all. But given that I never received a tenth-mark of salary for all the expected—and unexpected—work I ever did as Lady and then Countess Vorkosigan, a pension seems a reasonable recompense. There’s something to spring on the Council of Counts, if you’re looking for a proj
ect, by the way. Salaries for their wives. I’ll bet that would set off some fascinating debates.” She half-suppressed a very dry grin, which she suspected came out looking vulpine.
Oliver’s embryos could remain off this table, for now. The Oliver and I are dating part could wait a little, as well. She was not, certainly, ashamed—Oliver was a pretty damned remarkable acquisition by any standard, in Cordelia’s opinion—she was just…shy, she supposed. Were vicereines allowed to be shy? She could better imagine discussing her renewed love life with Ekaterin than with Miles. Later.
She finished with a few brief, amusing anecdotes of the latest chaos on Chaos Colony, and closed.
Her tightbeam to Miles’s clone-brother Mark and his partner Kareen Koudelka was shorter, and oddly easier. Mark, certainly, was well up on the complexities of nonstandard family creation. She tried not to let any hint of And when are you two going to get started on some children? leak through, although she was not above hitting the sequester gametes for future contingencies, you could be glad you did pretty firmly. She was not sure just where in the empire or out of it Mark’s far-flung business enterprises had taken him and Kareen this week, but his reliable forwarding service would catch the message up to them.
That left her with Simon Illyan and Alys Vorpatril, among her and Aral’s oldest and closest friends on Barrayar. At least the same message, address, and security clearance would do for both recipients.
The resignation news, gametes-tale, and Aurelia-announcement were all much the same, more fluent and confident-sounding for the repetition, Cordelia fancied. She wasn’t sure how they’d construe the subtext. She’d suggested years ago to the pair that they weren’t too old to be parents, but time had slipped by since then, while Alys’s son Ivan had acquired his wife Tej and a start on Alys’s long-desired grandchildren. Simon, though, had been married to his job for decades. Did he even have any thwarted desire for genetic offspring? Cordelia had never quite been certain. She decided to let her worked example of how sit uncommented-upon. And if Oliver wanted to share his news-in-potential that should probably be Oliver’s choice; they were his friends, too.
Cordelia hit pause again. This was where her efficiency rose up to bite her, she supposed. She really wanted to burble to Alys about Oliver. She really did not want to burble to Simon about Oliver. Simon liked and valued Oliver at his true worth, but it could not be denied that the years of security tensions that Aral’s extracurricular relationship had trailed in its wake on Simon’s watch had left scars. Furthermore, Simon absolutely could be counted upon to note the slight jump in the vid message where Cordelia had paused to think about it all. She sighed in frustration.
She finally settled on, “And in other good news, Oliver and I have started dating. It’s been like finding water in the desert. For both of us, I gather.”
Of all the people on her short list, Alys and Simon were the most likely to understand just how much complexity that simplicity concealed. She left it at that.
* * *
This upside rotation, Jole at length decided, was the slowest eight weeks of his life, including the time he’d spent in hospital back in his twenties. Not that there wasn’t plenty to do, hitting every wormhole jump-point military station between Sergyar and Nowhere. Although there was a certain useful entertainment to be had by springing different emergency drills at each station en route, occasionally skipping one just to keep the opposition guessing.
Vorinnis trailed in his wake as secretary and aide, because all his usual office tasks followed him by tightbeam. As this counted on her records as space duty, she was remarkably perky about the rotation. She was also, he was pleased to discover, a useful surprise-drill co-conspirator.
“We’re not only testing readiness, or even just observing the mechanics and looking for ways to improve them,” he told her during one of these exercises. “At this level, I’m just as interested in how each senior officer handles his people. Especially when things go wrong. All part of the, hm, process of earmarking candidates for further promotion.”
“Isn’t that kind of hard on any officer who gets some duds in his personnel roster?” she inquired. “I mean, the screw-ups might not be his fault.”
“We try to weed out the duds early on and send them to less critical downside duties. Unfairly for Fyodor,” he reflected. “But any officer can be made to look good by fortunate staffing. Getting the most out of your people when you aren’t so lucky is a better test, really.” What had that ship of Aral’s been nicknamed, way back when? Vorkosigan’s Leper Colony, that was it. Granted, Aral’s lepers had been as likely to be political screw-ups as military ones, in those fraught days.
Her eyebrows twitched, considering this. “So, this earmarking. How do you…learn how to decide? If it’s not just perfect scores on the drills?”
“Practice,” he sighed. “Repeated observation. Aral seemed to do it by some sort of Vor instinct, like breathing, but I suppose he’d got all his practice in before I came along.” Jole’s process still felt conscious, but at least he worked through it a lot faster these days.
His communications with the Vicereine were few, brief, unprivate, and depressingly utilitarian. He did beg her to beam him another popular book on Sergyaran biology when he’d finished the first two that he’d brought along, and was surprised to be told that there weren’t any more. She scrounged up a more technical journal from the University, instead—also the only publication on the topic, it appeared. Its ten years—only ten years?—of back issues promised to keep him diverted for a while, at least.
The knowledge of those three frozen embryos in the Kareenburg clinic was an itch in the corner of his mind that he determinedly did not scratch. Except that, somehow, all the articles on reproductive biology in the back issues caught his attention first. The reproductive strategies of Sergyaran fauna—and flora, for that matter, when you could tell them apart—were weird. They did put what he was doing—thinking of doing—not-thinking of doing—into perspective, he supposed.
At last this rotation ran out of minutes, even subjectively lengthened ones. He’d been counting. He hadn’t proposed to linger upside—even he was due some days off after such stints, though he’d seldom taken them all. His plans were altered when he learned that the Vicereine was away at Gridgrad with Haines, wrestling the locals for infrastructure or, as Cordelia phrased it when he’d dropped in directly from orbit, squeezing stones from blood.
Apart from one brief handclasp and a speaking look, he was forced to share her the rest of the day with committees. It did catch him up with the Gridgrad base progress, at first hand rather than via the reports he’d still need to read later if only to compare-and-contrast. The suborbital shuttle hop back to Kareenburg was infested with Fyodor’s staff and her own; the first group they shed at the base, but the second accompanied them almost to the Vicereine’s Palace. She sent them all home firmly. It wasn’t till the bloody front door had closed behind them that he got his proper welcome-home kiss. He made it a good one, dancing her across the wide entry hall.
“Alone at last,” he murmured, and “Finally!” she huffed into his mouth.
“Dinner first?” she asked, drawing back to comb her fingers pleasurably through his hair. “Or a conference?”
“Conference.” He dotted tasty kisses across her forehead. “Have Rykov bring dinner on a tray.”
“I admire your efficiency, Admiral.”
He closed in for more-lingering seconds. Snaked a hand around her butt and pressed her hips inward, which made her grin through the kiss at the implicit, not to mention explicit, promise. He could feel her day’s tension start to unwind under his stroking hands. Alas that sweeping her off her feet and carrying her up the stairway was physically impractical, more likely to result in a trip to the emergency clinic than to the bedroom. They slow-danced toward the stairs, instead.
A happy, breathless young voice cried, “Grandma!”
Cordelia’s eyes widened as she stared over his shoulder. “O
h, crap,” she breathed; only Jole heard her. They flinched apart.
He turned, then had to brace her against the impact of two short bodies who’d dashed from the archway and flung their arms possessively around her waist. Leaving no room for him.
The shrieking sprog attack continued in a second wave. A shorter and a more-shorter child galloped in, to compete with their siblings for a turn at the matriarchal torso. A pair of toddlers followed, clearly not quite understanding what all the excitement was about, or who these tall grownups were, but determined not to be left out.
Jole had not seen the Vorkosigan offspring in person for three years, when the squad had been smaller and he had been grimly distracted, but from viewing some of Cordelia’s vid messages he had no trouble sorting them out. Alex and Helen, a dark-haired boy and an auburn-haired girl, now about eleven years old; twins only by the shared date that their replicators had been opened. Elizabeth, eight, and Taura, five, more naturally, or at least more traditionally, spaced. Selig and Simone, another set of not-twins of identical ages, two-ish; the pair, the last of the planned family as Jole understood it, had been started very shortly after Aral’s funeral. Their father Miles feeling the breath of mortality on his neck, perhaps, or so Cordelia had theorized. They all had eye colors ranging from gray to blue, genetically enough, their parents having gone with the natural roll of the dice on that issue, apparently. Jole’s mind darted to those frozen embryos downtown; he jerked it back.
“Where are your Mama and Da?” Cordelia asked the mob. “When did you get here?”
Helen took it upon herself to be spokes-sprog. “Couple of hours ago. Da said we were to be a surprise. Were you surprised, Granma?”
Cordelia, recovering quickly, rose to the challenge: “Like Winterfair in midsummer,” she told the girl, ruffling her hair fondly with one hand and her brother’s with the other. “And here, I take it, is Father Frost.”
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Page 18
