Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (29 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Diverting Miles via the targeted application of war game sims seemed to Jole to go well that morning. He pulled Kaya off her leave to set up the show in one of the base tactics rooms, a skill-building task she seemed to resent not at all, which incidentally also assured she couldn’t be elbowed out of a front-row seat. On the theory that some opportunities should be less optional than others, he made sure to tap a few officers he judged needed to be waked up from sleepy habits in a military backwater that could become a frontwater on very short notice. The remaining slots filled in quickly as word got around, if only from a curiosity to meet Admiral Vorkosigan’s son.

Thus Jole not only entertained his VIP guest, but escaped having to actually converse with him, until, breaking for lunch, Miles said, “So, show me that dodgy plascrete you and Mother were complaining about.”

So, once again, Jole led a Vorkosigan on a trudge out to the mesas of stacked pallets, moldering gently in the tropical sun. The maze, he observed from the tell-tale bits of detritus scattered about in some nooks, seemed to have been attracting other denizens of the base looking for a private talk, tryst, or party. He made a mental note to make sure base security was keeping an eye on it. Yet another reason to shift the damned crap, if only he could figure out an economically favorable place or person to shift it to.

To Jole’s faint alarm, Miles, clutching his cane, insisted on climbing a stack to look around. He seemed to have the same curiosity and instinct for the high ground as a cat, without a cat’s supple ability to land on its feet. Jole breathed a little easier when Miles sat down on the edge, dangling his legs and scooting into a comfortable position that put him just slightly higher than eye-to-eye with his host. Not exactly subtle, but Jole was willing to spot him the point. He leaned back on the stack opposite, crossed his arms, and waited.

In a close simulation of casual, Miles began, “So, did this posthumous-children scheme of my mother’s come as a surprise to you? I mean, what with the dating and all.”

So much for the plascrete as a conversational barrier, then.
Or any other kind. “Yes,” Jole admitted. “I had no idea it was possible. Although we weren’t dating yet, when she arrived back from her Winterfair trip with the samples.” He hesitated. Where was Miles wanting to go with this? And did he really want to go along? “Ah—and you? Were you surprised?”

Miles tilted his hand back and forth in a no-yes-no gesture. “I always knew she’d wanted a daughter. Not
instead
of me, mind you, it wasn’t like that. In addition. She seemed content to take out that maternal mania on assorted Barrayaran girls she mentored over the years. I thought she’d given up the idea decades ago. I knew about the samples—they went past in the stream when I was doing executor duties for Da—but I had a million other things to attend to and that one, at least, was her problem not mine. And then I didn’t think anything more about it, and she didn’t
say
anything more about it.” He frowned at this last.

“She didn’t say anything to me, either, until after she’d ascertained their viability,” Jole offered. “That might have been what she was waiting for.” And if the samples had proved dead, would she have kept that grief locked silently in her own heart, never to be shared and thus halved? Sad but likely. It was his turn to frown.

“The real surprise is Sergyar,” Miles went on. “I thought she’d be coming home. And doing—I don’t know what. Something. Grandmothering, maybe. The kids are a little shortchanged in that department, with Da gone, and Ekaterin’s mother long gone, and her da ensconced down in South Continent. Although I suppose there’s her Aunt and Uncle Vorthys, in town. And her brothers, and their wives and kids, and Nikki, and Alys and Simon, and…well, I guess they aren’t as lacking in relatives as I was. I had old Count Piotr. And cousin Ivan, sometimes.” His brows drew down as he reflected on this generational disparity.

“I had the impression your district is Ekaterin’s patch, now,” said Jole mildly. “Are two countesses in one district anything like two women in one house?”

“My mother’s not
evicted
, dammit,” said Miles. “Surely she doesn’t think she is—does she?” Genuine dismay flashed in his glance down at Jole. “That’s not what this is about, is it?”

“I don’t think she feels that way, no,” said Jole. “I think it’s a more positive choice. She’s just getting back in touch with her old Betan Survey roots. She joined up to explore new worlds—so, Sergyar’s a new world—it’ll do.”

Miles’s grin flickered. “Like Barrayar before it? Could be.”

“You don’t mention your Betan relatives in that roster,” Jole observed curiously, shifting his back against his support-stack. “I know Cordelia keeps in some touch with her brother. And you have cousins there, yes?”

Miles, taken aback, shrugged. “Three of ’em. Though I never really met them till I went there for my school year at age fifteen. And they were all rather different ages than me which, at fifteen, matters. I’ve given up trying to keep track of their partners and sprogs, although Mother gets bulletins on them all from
her
mother that she feels obliged to pass along.”

Jole, the occasional victim of similar maternal reports on relatives he’d barely met and wouldn’t have recognized in the street, nodded understanding. Obituary column and all, as the extended family aged. It was only in recent years that he’d become able to recognize that as a clumsy expression of her sense of loss, and not a long-distance attempt to depress him. He’d grown better at writing back.

Miles frowned. “Maybe you have to be the right age to imprint on your relatives. If you’re not actually around each other enough when you’re young and feckless together, you miss the ship. The most you can become after that is adult acquaintances. With maybe extra emergency docking privileges,” he conceded. “If I were somehow stranded on Beta, say. Or if any of them were stranded on Barrayar—I suppose that’s reciprocal.”

Jole’s rural home district had been a place he couldn’t wait to escape, at age eighteen, and little about his rare visits back there had altered that view. It wasn’t as if his relationship with Aral or, later, with Aral and Cordelia had cut him off from his family much more than distance and his career had already done. And yet…to maintain the necessary political reticence, silences had always seemed safer than lies. And it was much easier to maintain silences when one didn’t engage in a conversation in the first place.

Would his sons, if he chose to have them on Sergyar, end up enjoying much the same untroubled distance to Jole’s prole family back on Barrayar as Miles had with his Betan cousins? Even more so with their Vor nieces and nephews, especially if knowledge of their relationship was suppressed? But what about their half-sisters, much closer in time and space? Silence could divide the siblings from each other as surely as light-years. But no, if Jole stayed on Sergyar, he’d want to make household arrangements as close to Cordelia as she would permit, throwing their offspring together as well. They’d be the girls next door, perhaps.

Which led to a fresh and more alarming reflection—given propinquity, Vorkosigan charisma, and the odds, when they grew to be teenagers, would some of them want to
date
? Now, there was a hazard of convenient silence that hadn’t crossed Jole’s mind before. He swallowed a horrified laugh that he had no desire to explain to Miles. Cordelia had a point about starting as you meant to go on. The anonymous-egg ploy was looking less tenable all the time.

Miles cleared his throat. Stared down at the dirt. Looked up. “So, ah—do you think you two will ever marry?”

If she asked me, I’d say yes
, Jole thought without hesitation, startling himself. Which made it different from anything else Cordelia might ask of him, how? She could roll him out like a pastry—he resisted the sexual innuendo with only a slight twitch of his lips. The woman didn’t know her own strength, fortunately. But all his prior
yesses
had been so fabulously rewarded…He managed, “We haven’t discussed it.”

“Yet? Or ever?” He swung his heels in an absent rhythm against his sack-seat, a physical tic that ought to have looked juvenile, yet didn’t.

Jole couldn’t figure out if Miles was more concerned for his mother’s future or his father’s past, in this line of…interrogation, yes. At least the former ImpSec operative didn’t have a hypospray of fast-penta on him at the moment, as far as Jole knew. He stifled an urge to move farther out of reach. “Not any time soon, certainly. She’s been very definite about wanting to keep her daughters well clear of certain Barrayaran legal and custody issues. I doubt she’d even consider it till her youngest daughter comes of age, by which time whatever…arrangements we end up with will have been in place for decades, and the question will be pretty moot.”

Miles cocked his head. “Decades, huh? You thinking that long-term?”

“
She
certainly has to be, to embark on all this.” He allowed, “Although decades do seem to be passing faster than they used to. Maybe more so for her.”

Another twitch of a grin from Miles, who was not, after all,
that
much younger than Jole. He half-lidded his eyes, and ventured, “So…do you think you two would ever have a child together? By whatever technical intervention. Given how enchanted she seems with the idea of personally populating Sergyar. Possibly on the theory that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.”

Jole blinked, blindsided by this new notion. His imagination had been filled with his three potential sons. Might there be a daughter, too, in some more distant someday? It was an oddly mind-melting vision. “I’d think those slots are filled by what she has on ice already. You don’t imagine I could talk her into more, surely?”

Miles snorted. “Have you ever heard the phrase, like shooting fish in a barrel?” A reminiscent look came over his face. “Except, actually, that turns out not to be as easy as it sounds. I tried it once, when I was a kid down at Vorkosigan Surleau.”

“With what?” Jole couldn’t help asking, diverted by this vision of the young Miles. Would his half-brothers be anything like him? Minus the soltoxin damage, thankfully.

“I started with an old bow and arrows I’d found in a shed, but the results weren’t too satisfactory. Refraction in the water, plus the bow was too big for me and I was pretty awkward—I’m not sure I could have hit a real target at that age. Plus the fish were slippery buggers. The stunner that I filched from one of the armsmen didn’t work all that well, either—the water absorbed the charge. The fish just sort of…grew confused. Swam very oddly. I was just set to try a third test run with a plasma arc stolen ditto when they caught up with me. Sadly. I’ll bet that would have been
spectacular
.”

Jole choked a laugh. “Or lethal!” Betan science crossed with Barrayaran militarism made an appalling hybrid at age, what, six or seven, maybe?

Miles’s lips tweaked back. “Certainly for the fish. But, yes, steam burns and barrel shrapnel for anyone within range, I’m sure. Which would have certainly included me, though in my defense, I had also secured a dustbin lid.” He mimed this shield with a sweep of his arm.

Was this a good opening to confess to his frozen sons? Jole, with an effort, pushed himself as far as, “Do you like being a da?” Because nothing said this impromptu grilling had to go in only one direction.

Miles leaned back atop his stack, as if surprised in turn. “It’s had its hair-tearing moments, but—yeah, so far I like it a lot. Although it’s still a bit scary if I stop to think about it, which happily I don’t often have time to. My scope for really screwing up seems hugely expanded. Thank God for Ekaterin.”

It occurred to Jole that Miles, too, must once have undergone something like Jole’s venture to the rep center. Or maybe he’d had some sort of at-home arrangement—Vorkosigan House’s basement-level infirmary, made top-grade during Aral’s regency, was presumably kept up-to-date. Perhaps his bride had helped out, rendering the enterprise less lonesome. He wasn’t about to ask.

“I can’t imagine going it alone as a parent,” Miles went on, “although come to think I suppose old Piotr was forced to, when Yuri’s War left him with only my da. Half-grown by then, but still. It seems to have been rough sailing for both of them. Disturbing to think that, by the time I came along, Piotr was said to have
mellowed
. Though it might have just been exhaustion.” The edge to his faint smile reminded Jole of knives. “They both did all right in the end, though. I guess people do, somehow.”

Cordelia’s mother had been a widowed parent, too, Jole recalled. He wondered why Miles didn’t trot her out as a counterexample as well. The Betan bereaved-family experience seemed to have been much smoother than the Barrayaran, and not only for the absence of a bloody civil war.
There’s Cordelia’s model
, he realized.
Her mother.
Consciously or unconsciously internalized? Either way, it had left her remarkably confident.

Miles’s expression grew more introspective. “My one regret was that I didn’t start my kids sooner. Couldn’t, I suppose, but…Lizzie and Taurie won’t remember Granda Aral, and of course Selig and Simone never had the chance to meet him at all. Well, he did come to look at the cryofreezer, soon after our marriage when Ekaterin and I had sequestered the six embryos, but that’s hardly the same thing.”

Jole tried to picture the scene. It must have fallen early in the joint Viceroy and Vicereine’s sojourn on Sergyar, during one of their trips home. He would have been left helping hold the fort here in what was now Bobrik’s seat. “How did he, er, seem to process it? All the technology?”

Miles wrinkled his nose. “Bemused. I guess. Pleased for us, really pleased, though with my mother standing right there he could hardly have expressed any doubts about the tech. For all that he had worked all his life to drag Barrayar up to galactic standards, medically and otherwise, I’m not sure he expected what that was really going to feel like to him personally. What it would mean to his House, to that central Vor…thing.” A ragged wave of Miles’s hands, as if futilely trying to encompass the complexity of his history. “He adored the kids when they finally arrived, of course.” He glanced away, over the sunlit tarmac. “I thought we’d have more time.”