“It’s odd,” said Ekaterin. “The standard Barrayaran view of Betans is that they’re sex-obsessed, but when you go there, you discover they’re not.”
“Of course not. They don’t have to be,” said Cordelia.
Miles’s lips twisted up, but he did not pursue whatever objection he was entertaining to that.
Cordelia, frowning, said to him, “I’m sorry that you were disturbed by the slanders. You never said much…”
“It happened at school, mostly. Boys trying to get me going, when the mutie insults stopped working. I eventually taught them…not to. Ivan had it easier. He could just slug them. I couldn’t get him to slug them for me very often, except for the one time some twit accused Aunt Alys of sleeping with you. That…went off well. In a sense.” A vicious grin.
“Alys came in for a lot of criticism in her own right for not remarrying,” said Cordelia. “Still, at least that one credited me with good taste. I was flattered.”
“Grandfather once said to me, when I was upset about, God, I don’t even remember which one, ‘We’re Vorkosigans. If the charge isn’t at least murder or treason, it’s not worth rolling over in bed for.’ Then he thought a moment and changed it to, ‘Treason, anyway.’ And after another, ‘And sometimes not even then.’”
Cordelia chuckled darkly. “That was old Piotr. I can just hear him. That was pretty much Aral’s perspective, too. Probably where he got it from. The only one that really made him angry was the Butcher-of-Komarr slur. The rest just made him tired.”
“They made me angry,” Oliver muttered.
Miles glanced up at him. “Yeah, I suppose you were dropped right in it, during his prime ministership.”
“I wasn’t allowed to slug anyone, either.” After a glum moment of who-knew-what memories, Oliver added, “Very trying.”
In his era, there had been rumors about the prime minister’s handsome aide as well, in every imaginable combination of sexuality and/or dis/loyalty. Even, on the same principle of a stopped clock being right twice a day, a dark distorted imitation of the real story. Miles must have heard that one, too, and presumably dismissed it with the rest. Or given that Miles was mostly off-world by then, maybe not? Cordelia wasn’t sure how to ask. She glanced aside at Oliver, who showed no sign of wanting to seize the cue.
“It tailed off by the time I got to the Academy,” said Miles. “Well, mostly. Less of it, uglier when it popped up.”
“The regency was over by then. But it tailed off generally, over time,” said Cordelia. “Thankfully.”
Ekaterin said cautiously, “What about social reactions here? To the new children, too. Or do you care?”
“Not greatly, though I see no reason to invite harassment.” Cordelia shrugged. “Given Sergyar’s mixed population, that one is really hard to guess. In the Barrayaran Time of Isolation, widows still of fertile age were not only encouraged but pressured to remarry, to keep their contributions in the gene pool.”
A wry look crossed Ekaterin’s face. “Not just in the Time of Isolation, I’m sorry to say.”
Cordelia nodded, and continued, “Widows beyond childbearing age were not, presumably so they didn’t tie up a man ditto. They didn’t phrase it that way, of course, but that was the cumulative effect of all those weird social shibboleths, if you analyze them.”
“Mm,” said Miles, who, Cordelia guessed, had never before stopped to analyze them.
“We are not on Barrayar, it isn’t the Time of Isolation, and childbearing age is an exploded concept. A person can not only sequester gametes for decades, there’s the recombination of somatic cells at any age. Including posthumously, if someone thinks to freeze a tissue sample. One could in theory even draw eggs from a female infant, for that matter. Closer to home, there’s your clone-brother Mark.”
Miles made a random gesture of theoretical surrender at that last point. “True, but…won’t some people think Oliver is a bit, er, young for you?” The look on his face suggested that he was already imagining the jokes, and not being much amused in prospect.
“Thank you for not asking if I were too old for Oliver, at least,” said Cordelia tartly.
“Thank you twice,” Oliver observed from her side, his voice faintly amused. “I’ll be fifty shortly. You’re all invited to the birthday picnic, if you’re still here, by the way.”
Ekaterin said, “That sounds delightful.”
“I’m not sure about delightful, but it promises to be lively,” said Oliver ruefully. “A lot of the base families will be there. So there will be lots of other children.”
“Oh, good.”
Miles, outnumbered and edging toward capitulation, tried, “Though I suppose, if you do the math, it makes sense. Betan versus Barrayaran lifespans and all that.”
Ekaterin winced, but smiled valiantly.
Well, somebody had to say it. Cordelia turned to Oliver in a sudden resolve that had nothing to do with the amusement of tweaking Miles. Fiercely, she said, “Yes. If you only promise me one thing, Oliver, I want you to promise that you will outlive me.”
Oliver looked taken aback. “I’ll…try?” he hazarded. He rubbed his free hand across his mouth, and understanding grew in his eyes. The arm draped so tentatively across her shoulders tightened in silent support.
Miles took a minute to process that, but he got there eventually, Cordelia thought. “Oh,” he said. Ekaterin didn’t seem to have any trouble following at all; she gave her mother-in-law a somber, sororal nod.
* * *
The party broke up shortly thereafter, three members being very tired and the fourth…looking as though he had a lot to digest. At least Cordelia suffered no tag-alongs when she saw Oliver out. They shared an insufficient goodnight kiss.
He let out a pent breath. “Whew. That went…”
Well? Badly…?
“—more politically than I expected.”
“Miles is growing very countly these days.”
“I’m still not sure how he reacted, and I sat there and watched him.”
“At a guess…I think he’ll express any further doubts to our faces—although more likely to Ekaterin, poor girl—and present a solid front to outsiders.” Or so she fervently hoped.
“Me against my brother, my brother and me against the world?”
“That certainly sums up Miles and Mark in a nutshell. So he’s had the practice.”
“I’d say I couldn’t wait to see that,” he sighed, “but I really think I could.”
Cordelia snickered.
“Will I see you before tomorrow evening at the base?”
Where they would all depart for her jump-pinnace, and thence for the Prince Serg. “Afraid not. My staff has a long list of things for me to attend to before I escape them for one whole day, with only a mere three dozen tightbeam channels to reach me.” A day bracketed by two onboard nights, by whatever happy accident of efficient orbital calculations. Though considering that Oliver had used to schedule the most overworked man in Vorbarr Sultana, perhaps she should drop the accident from that.
He departed for his groundcar, and she turned back inside, thinking, So, that was the second wormhole jump survived. How many more, to navigate them all safely home?
Chapter Twelve
Cordelia rose in the night to pee, then found, to her familiar frustration, that she couldn’t get back to sleep. She stepped over to her private office to find a boring report to read. Spoiled for choice, she settled on something financial, and herself into the comfy chair. Half an hour into this, not bored enough yet, she looked up as a soft knock sounded on her door.
“You awake in there?” Miles’s voice called quietly.
“I am for you. Enter.”
He slid around the door. He was wearing an old T-shirt and loose ship-knit skivvies by way of pajamas, and, as he moved across the room to the chair she waved at, used his cane without any attempt to disguise his need for it. He sat with a small oof.
“You look…fried.” Face lined, eyes shadowed,
gray-flecked hair in disarray.
“Eh. Seizure.” He shrugged dismissively.
“Induced, or, er, natural?” His idiosyncratic seizure disorder still lingered from his episode of cryofreezing that had also bounced him out of his military career, over a decade ago. Almost a decade-and-a-half, now, wasn’t it? He could control it with a somewhat alarming stimulator cooked up by his ImpMil neurology team, which triggered the fits in a selected time and place, rather than allowing them to occur as a random and dangerous inconvenience. This worked—as long as he used the device in a timely fashion.
“Induced. I hate the hangover, but my levels were getting high, and I didn’t want to risk spoiling the trip out to the Serg.”
“I’m glad you’ve grown some sense.”
His lips tweaked. “Ekaterin insisted. Actually.”
“Sensible of you to marry her, then.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I thought you slept like a brick, after those.”
“They upwhack my brain sleep chemistry. Sometimes it’s out like a light, other times it’s insomnia central.”
“Ah. Welcome to my club.”
“Yeah, but I’m not, what is it, seventy-six?”
“Bang on. Very good.”
“You did have a birthday recently. I remember, because we sent vids of the kids.”
“Best present, that.”
He smiled a little, and tapped his cane against the floor. “While not sleeping, I got to thinking about our conversation earlier tonight.”
“Ah?” She set her reader aside and sat back, concealing her anxiety. Don’t lead the witness.
“Some of those old slanders back in Vorbarr Sultana.”
“That does not exactly narrow the field, love.”
He inclined his head. “I suppose not.” He took a breath. “In particular, the ones about Ges Vorrutyer. And Da. When they were younger.”
Huh. Not the one she’d just braced for, then. This was much older news than Oliver.
“Thing is, I didn’t get this one just from people who were obviously trying to wind me up.” A longer hesitation. “So…were they, er, lovers, or not? I mean, they were brothers-in-law.”
“This…isn’t something Aral ever saw fit to confirm or deny to you?”
He looked extremely uncomfortable. “I never asked.” And after a moment, “But he never volunteered a denial, either. He did sometimes. The Komarr massacre, for example. He never stopped being enraged about that one.”
“There was a hell of a lot there to be enraged about.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Cordelia sighed. “So…do you think I have either a right or a duty to tell you something Aral never saw fit to? Do you think you have a right to know?” It was not, she hoped he understood, a rhetorical question.
He flung his hands wide. “A right? Or a need? But I’d think if it wasn’t true, several people could have just said so. And if it is…there might be a couple of people I owe an apology to. You can’t slander the dead, they say.”
“Rubbish. Of course you can. You just can’t be successfully prosecuted for it in a court of law.”
His lips twisted in dry concession of the point.
“The short answer could be misleading,” she said. “The longer one…requires a little context.”
He leaned his head back in the chair. “I’m not in a hurry.”
“It doesn’t make a very restful bedtime story.”
“Not much from that era on Barrayar does.”
A laugh puffed through her lips. “Really.” She drew a longer breath. “I know you’re aware that after most of their family was slaughtered by Mad Emperor Yuri’s death squad—God, Aral would have been just about Alex’s age, wouldn’t he?—General Count Piotr the Emperor-Unmaker kept him pretty much bolted to his hip for the whole civil war. You can now understand why, I expect.”
Miles’s eyes flickered, as he perhaps pictured himself in Piotr’s place and Alex in Aral’s. His face went rather grim.
“After his resultant extraordinarily high-level military apprenticeship had ended with the Dismemberment, Aral was dumped out into that generation’s version of your officers’ academy. Still a half-formed institution at that time. Ges and Aral were both second cousins and friends at that stage, and probably neither of them anything a Betan would call sane. Even without the adolescence.”
“I…can’t actually argue with that.”
“Apparently, same-sex sexual experimentation by male youth was tolerated in that context—well, it was never illegal on Barrayar, just socially disapproved, which I’m not sure is better or worse, since there wouldn’t have been any legal protections, either—but anyway, still expected to be kept out of sight. Exactly what old Piotr thought he was about, to arrange Aral’s marriage to Ges’s sister, I cannot fathom. His own mother was a Vorrutyer, so maybe it seemed, I don’t know, an unexceptionably traditional family alliance. Or maybe he had some more complex scheme, trying to use the marriage to detach Ges. He—quite correctly—seems to have pegged young Ges as toxic, by that time. But I can’t imagine that Piotr expected to engineer the bloody disaster that he did.”
“Was there a secret duel? About her fidelity?”
“Two of them. Aral told me this himself, and I’ve no doubt it was true.”
Miles whistled. “Illegal as hell…”
“Wildly. But they seem to have led directly to her mysterious suicide.”
“Da told me once…” Miles hesitated. “Back that time when, in the court of capital gossip, I was rumored to have made away with Ekaterin’s first husband. God that was annoying. But anyway. He said that he was never totally certain that Piotr hadn’t murdered her. Fixing his mistake, as it were. What a hellish thing to suspect about your da. And never any way to be sure…He said he couldn’t ask.”
“Not talking to each other seems to have been a Vorkosigan family tradition.”
“I…kinda had to give Da that one.”
“Mm.” Cordelia drew breath in through her nose. “In any case, for two or three years after her death Aral and Ges conducted what sounds to have been an extremely lurid, alcohol-soaked, and blatantly public affair.” A match made in some special Barrayaran hell, between a proto-sadist and a man bent on self-destruction. Eh, maybe Miles didn’t need that many details. “I don’t gather it was aimed at Piotr, but he certainly would have been in the crossfire. The final breakup-fight drew blood. Aral pulled up, and put his career back together. Ges continued his descent. Although not, alas, militarily. His subsequent positions of authority…did the Imperial Service much harm.”
“Da told you all this?”
“Some, plus I put things together from other sources. It was amazing how many people thought I should be told all about it, when I first came to Barrayar, even though it had been two decades ago by then. Even Admiral Ges, in the twenty minutes before his, er, fortunate demise. The results invariably disappointed them.” Ges most of all, perhaps…she set her teeth and avoided smiling. “I should perhaps make clear that, as old flames go, my objections to Ges were to his personality, not his gender.”
Miles’s shrug conceded, Betan standards, sure. “So is it still a slander if it’s true?”
“The same set of facts…can be presented neutrally, can be spun up into hype, or can be deployed in a way that is damaging and hurtful, depending on the agenda of the person recounting them. Although I do think the fact that the episode was never a secret—at least, not to the generation that was there at the time—pulled its teeth significantly.”
“It bit me.” Miles scowled. “Da told me most everything about that bad period himself, except he left out Ges. I mean…I’m half-Betan, aren’t I? I wasn’t even a kid when we had that conversation, of course you wouldn’t tell a kid, but I was thirty.” He wrinkled his nose in a complicated species of dismay. “Instead, I was left to be…wrong.”
Cordelia rubbed her neck, which was beginning to ache. “That happens, when two people are so profoundly i
mportant to each other. Consider the possibility…that he cared just as desperately how you judged him, as you ever cared about how he judged you.”
“Hm.”
“Try this.” Cordelia bit her lip. “Think of the three most boneheaded, regrettable things you ever did.”
“Only three? I can think of more.”
“Overachievement is not needed for this exercise,” she said dryly. “The top three will do.”
“Still spoilt for choice, but…all right.” He settled back, rolling his cane in his hands, his lips thinning at some passing memory.
“So, how old will Selig and Simone need to be before you tell them all about it? Ten?”
“Of course not! That’s way too young for moral horrors.” He added after a moment, “Or any other horrors, if I can help it.”
“Twenty?”
“Twenty…is a very distracted age,” he ventured, obviously seeing where she was going with this and not much caring for the view.
“Thirty?”
“…maybe.” That shifty look, so familiar from his adolescence, flickered over his features.
“Forty?”
“Forty might do,” he conceded, wryly.
“Aral should have gone for thirty-nine, apparently.”
“Eh.” The pained grunt was a small noise, rather like the ones he made when he was getting up and down, these days.
“Turning it around, how old would you have to be to feel comfortable telling me those top three?”
He looked vaguely alarmed. “Two you know. The other one…is pretty obsolete by now.”
“I’m not asking you to confess, love. Just asking you to make an effort to see your da as human, not superhuman. That’s too high a pedestal to fall from.”
“I guess so. Huh.” He bent forward and rested his chin on his cane. “I know so. I do know.” A longer hesitation. “I wonder what I’m doing to drive my kids crazy?”
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Page 23
