Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Chapter Seventeen

Cordelia walked across the garden to the Viceregal offices at midmorning, after sending Oliver off to the base hospital to see his burn specialist and get his dressings changed, pick up some clothes from his apartment, and come back without any detours allowed to his office. She’d sent Rykov to drive him with strict instructions to see that he both got there, and got back. She wondered if she could persuade him to start keeping a few changes of clothes over here, for their mutual convenience. Speaking of public declarations of private matters.

He’d come in last night from the garden unsurprisingly exhausted—trust Miles to wear a tired person altogether out, and what had they been saying to each other?—had a cat wash, and fallen into bed with a groan. There, thanks to the wonders of military pharmaceuticals, he had slept, rather than tossing in the wakeful agony his burns would otherwise have incurred. His start this morning had been…slow. Not quite the walking dead—his sleepy smile had seemed too contented for that—but she hoped he would be moving less stiffly by the time he returned.

Blaise and Ivy had both had big days at the picnic yesterday, Blaise by way of work and Ivy having invited all of her family she could round up. A fine time without serious injuries had apparently been had by all. Despite everything they were ready as usual with the morning agenda.

“I have a preliminary edit of the official vids from the picnic for you to approve,” Blaise reported. “There are a lot of private vids of the, er, unfortunate incendiary incident circulating on the planetary net this morning. I think it might be wise to include our own, with a more controlled spin, so to speak.”

“Do we have our own?”

“Yes, I happened to be in the area taking location shots of the parade ground, and of the fireworks staging process. I got some great angles on the action!”

Cordelia hadn’t guessed him for a thwarted war correspondent. “I don’t think Oliver would be too thrilled.”

“Oh, Admiral Jole came off very well. My surveys show that the shots of him protecting your grandchildren are the most popular of any, this morning.”

“Yes, they’re quite fine,” Ivy chimed in. “I captured the best ones in a file to keep.”

Cordelia couldn’t help herself. “Let’s see.”

Indeed, Oliver with his shirt off being quick-witted and heroic did make for some fine images. Cordelia contemplated them.

“You’re married, Ivy,” she said at last.

“Hey, I can look.”

“Yeh. Copy me that file, eh?”

Ivy gave her a sunny smile. “Certainly, Vicereine.”

Blaise’s expression had grown a bit confused. The two older women looked at each other, and did not enlighten him.

Cordelia said to Blaise, “Include them, but focus on the fireworks crew, and what a fine job they did in safely controlling the crisis. Sergyar’s military preparedness, yes, it works! and so on.”

“None of the fire actually fell inside the staging area, though.”

“And thank heavens for it. Spin, Blaise.”

He grinned and made notes.

She added, “And when you have a moment, round up all the raw shots you can collect of the cloud of radials, before, during, and after, and send them off to Dr. Gamelin at the Uni. He was all over me last night—previously unobserved animal behavior, apparently. Very excited, he was. Some theory about why those species always go to ground in electrical storms, and if they can be used for predictions. He’s not a man to waste a good natural experiment, I gather.” Cordelia approved. The Escobaran grad students the professor had been towing had been more appalled, and had needed to be reassured that this was not an everyday event. Wait’ll they get to our temblors, Cordelia thought, and, The Sergyaran ecosystem. Not for sissies.

Although by far the most dangerous animal on the planet was an invasive species of chimpanzee. She might have to point that out.

She settled at her desk for the morning correspondence queue. About three down, her mood was dimmed by finding a follow-up message from Plas-Dan, being ingenuous about the nonreturn of their proposal, and prodding for a reply. Haven’t any of you people studied game theory? Defaulting on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, i.e., double-crossing your partner, only worked when the game consisted of one round. Life was not a set of discrete rounds in a game, but a continuous-flow process. Which they had no excuse for not understanding, because they had some procedures like that in their very own plant, no? Alas, she was dealing with management, not the engineers.

But they needed materials in Gridgrad…she permitted herself a small snarl, and set the message aside to fester a bit more. Though she really couldn’t hold it much longer.

A not-unwelcome interruption from Ivy, on the com and therefore signaled as refusable: “Vicereine? Attaché ghem Soren from the Cetagandan consulate is here to see you. No appointment, but he seems to feel it’s urgent.”

Well, maybe a little unwelcome. She had no idea what the fallout at his consulate had been from yesterday’s art debacle, as they’d been silent so far, but she supposed she needed to find out. “Send him in.”

Ghem Soren was washed up and in clean clothes, but looked decidedly underslept. His nose was swollen, and his bruised face missing his clan decal, curiously. He came to attention in front of her desk with the beaten air of miscreant soldier on discipline parade.

“Vicereine Vorkosigan. I am here to ask—no, beg—you to give me asylum on Sergyar.”

Cordelia blinked. She said cautiously, “Ah…why?”

“My consul is very angry with me. He is maintaining that he never gave me permission to set up my Discernment Garden, but in fact, he never forbade it. I am to be sent home on the next ship, where I will almost certainly be discharged from the diplomatic corps. There will be no future for me there except employment in my family’s business.” From his tone, he considered this a fate worse than, if not death, at least a serious hospitalization. “Nothing awaits me but disgrace!”

Cordelia, possessor of a longer view, made an effort of memory. When your young life offered its first disaster, naturally it loomed large. After you’d survived dozens, you basically just told the next one to take a number and get in line. In his current distracted state, she suspected ghem Soren would not appreciate this observation.

“Asylum seems an extreme step. You’d be renouncing your own citizenship, for one thing. Can’t you just apply for immigration status through normal channels?”

“I understand the legalities, Vicereine. But I’m being shipped out tonight. And I can’t afford to come back. My family would never give me the money.”

Were they poor ghem, clinging by their fingernails to their status like some poor Vor? Had they sacrificed to give their son his chance at helping reestablish the family’s place in the sun? “What does your family do?”

He reddened, and cleared his throat. Looked away. And mumbled, “My father and his brothers run a large plumbing supply company on Sigma Ceta.”

Cordelia took this in, revising her mental picture. It sounded more as if the older generation, making no headway in the standard roles apportioned to their class, had unified to say, Screw the ghem game, we’re going for the money. In which case Mikos was the throwback in the clutch, his role as a culture hero entirely self-appointed. She could understand the lack of appeal to him of going back to a rousing family chorus of We told you so.

“I did try another route first,” ghem Soren told her. “I asked Kaya Vorinnis to marry me, which would have given me a blood right to stay. But she said no.”

And I thought my morning couldn’t get any weirder…“And, ah, how emphatically did she say no?”

He cleared his throat again. “Very…very emphatically, Your Excellency.”

Good for you, Kaya. “Lieutenant Vorinnis seems very devoted to her career at this stage of her life.”

“She…indicated that, yes.”

Told you a refugee Cetagandan husband would be a bloody sheet-anchor to her promotion schedule, did she? And so he’d turned to the next woman in line to try to get her to solve his problems for him? You should be fixing your own life, kid, Cetagandan or not you’re thirty years old—

A chime from the comconsole desk, Ivy in the outer office passing through—what? Something more important than this, presumably. “Yes, Ivy?”

“Vid call for you, Vicereine—you’ll want to take this one. It’s Kareen Koudelka.”

Cordelia sat up, suddenly energized. My favorite almost-daughter-in-law, here? What was it with these surprise family visits this month, couldn’t anyone figure out how to send a tightbeam anymore, but this wasn’t a tightbeam—“Where’s she calling from?”

“Orbit. Commercial ship from Escobar, just arrived.”

“Put her thorough.” She swiveled her head to ghem Soren. “You…” can go back to Sigma Ceta? If she was ever going to be the evil queen around here that her detractors hypothesized, she really needed to upgrade her puppy-kicking skills. “—can wait in the outer office.”

He hunched out; as the door slid shut behind him, Kareen’s smiling face appeared over her vid plate, a decided improvement. Still as blond, blue-eyed, and all-girl’s-commando-team incisive as ever. Sometimes, Mark-love, the universe does make restitution to us. But he knew that.

“Kareen! Delighted to see you! Is Mark with you?”

“He’s following on.” Her grin widened. “He sent me ahead to find out where you want him to put your factory.”

Cordelia’s mouth opened in astonishment. “He’s found a competing bid? Where? I thought I’d turned every contact I had on both Komarr and Barrayar inside out, looking. He actually has something in view?”

“Better—in hand. It’s an Escobaran company, specializes in industrial construction.”

“Escobar! I hadn’t thought of trying—oh, my. Oh, this is going to make their consulate happy with us.”

“Good, because we’ll be wanting them to expedite the documentation. So, if that land offer at Gridgrad is still open, I have the company’s site engineer with me to do the prelim surveys.”

“Outstanding. How soon can they have things together?”

“Their designs are pre-fab. They build most of it in their own factories, then more-or-less drop the pieces from orbit. Snap them together like a set of blocks for really big kids. Once the site is leveled and plumbed, they could have the core structure in place in a week, and starting to run in two, depending on how fast they can source local raw materials.”

She’d meant how soon could they have the bid…“You can tell them they can count on every cooperation from this office. Getting anyone else to come through will be the usual struggle. But, oh my goodness, this could certainly blast open a bottleneck for us.”

Kareen nodded cheerfully.

It was a long shot, but…“You don’t suppose—find out if they can use a small mountain of plascrete mixer, can you?”

Her brows went up. “Why? Do you have a spare mountain of plascrete?”

“Not the ’crete, just the mixer. High-tech innovation for high-impact uses. Such as military shuttleports. Long story.”

Kareen frowned in new thought. “Not sure. It sounds like it may be a proprietary mix, in which case it might not be compatible with our stuff. Shoot me a copy of the tech specs, and I’ll run it past the engineers.”

Cordelia nodded, and sighed. She’d got the pony; it was perhaps unrealistic to expect it to come with the cherry on top as well. It looked more and more as if the final fate of that crap mixer was going to be as sandbags against future lava flows. “Will do. Send your man on down to Gridgrad and find my city planner—I’ll give you all his contact info in a moment. He’ll be so glad to see you. Him, rather. You are requested and required to come to the Viceroy’s Palace for dinner tonight. Miles and Ekaterin and the kids are all here, did you know?”

“Mark said something. Not sure where he got it from—it was either Miles or Ivan or Tante Alys.”

“You just caught them—they’ll be leaving again tomorrow. And there’s someone else…well, you’ve met Oliver Jole before.”

Kareen expression grew shrewdly interested. “I may have heard something about that, too. I’ll be interested to see how well family rumor matches fact.”

“Ah. So will I. From the other direction.”

“Wouldn’t miss it. Now I’ve got to dash—they’ll be unloading us shortly.”

“Give me a call when you get down to the civilian shuttleport. I’ll send Rykov for you.”

“Right. Love and kisses, Tante C. ’Bye.” Suiting actions to words, she blew a kiss and cut the com.

Cordelia let out a whoosh of breath. And sometimes, Barrayaran nepotism works for you. She sat back in a warm glow of creative revenge, already mentally composing an oh-so-polite go-to-hell memo for those Plas-Dan bastards. Oliver would be so pleased…

Her office door slid open; with careful trepidation, ghem Soren poked his head through. “Uh, Vicereine? My asylum…?”

He entered at her impatient gesture. She stared at him in a more benign mood than a few minutes ago. Perhaps…

Finally, she spoke. “Ever work in your family business?”

“Some. When I was young.”

“Are you willing to take work on Sergyar as a plumber? Because while we will certainly want artists in the future, we need plumbers right now.”

His eyes widened in a compound of dismay and hope. “Uh…yes?”

“All right!” She slapped her hand down on her comconsole desk, making him jump. “You pass the Vicereine Vorkosigan test for determination of purpose and flexibility of method. Sergyar wants you. This way.”

She breezed past him into the outer office and said, “Ivy, take this young man in hand and fix him up with the most innocuous grant of asylum you can make sound plausible.” Because she’d undoubtedly be dealing with his overlings tomorrow. It sounded as if his consulate was already on their back foot over this, though. Good. Because then she could hold off putting them there by trotting out bogus counteraccusations of deep-laid conspiracies involving bioweaponized attacks upon the Admiral of Sergyar Fleet and the Vicereine’s Own Family which, if she knew her people, someone was already floating out there in the rumor-net, right along with “Lake Serena is a carbon dioxide inversion zone and the government is concealing it!” And the dozens of other exotic fantasies that had so often made her morning briefing an exercise in the surreal.

Chaos Colony. We really don’t need to make it up…

She was reaching the end of the morning queue Ivy had rationed out for her, and beginning to imagine escaping the office on time, when a bustle in the outer chamber heralded yet another unscheduled visitor, blast. Her annoyance flipped to delight as Oliver’s voice resonated, and Ivy’s returned, “I’m sure she’s available to you, sir. Go right in.”

She was on her feet to seize a hello kiss by the time he’d closed the door behind him, though she thoughtfully forewent the hug. Somewhere in his morning’s travels he’d washed up and changed into a loose civilian shirt and old fatigue trousers, looking just as off-duty as he had been instructed. The medicinal scent of fresh burn ointment and new dressings clung to him, and he still moved stiffly, but his face was relaxed and his eyes were smiling.

“We’re getting a plascrete factory!” she told him, and excitedly detailed Kareen’s call as he found a straight chair, flipped it around, and sat athwart it. She perched on the edge of her desk within touching distance.

He grinned up at her. “You know, I’d expect a woman to get all swoony about, I don’t know, gifts of clothes and jewels.”

“Piffle, I’m a way more expensive date than that. You are warned. But better still, Kareen will be downside for dinner.”

“Oh, very fine. I’ve always enjoyed Kareen.”

“Everybody enjoys Kareen. It seems to be her personal superpower. Fortunately, she uses it for good.”

He crossed his arms on the chair back. “I have news as well. Following up on the arrests from yesterday—”

“Ack! I lost that in the shuffle this morning, and I said I’d—”

He held up a stemming hand. “Freddie Haines is getting a stern lecture, a mandatory trip through the self-defense course run by those bored commandoes out at the base, and a stunner permit.”

“Well…all right, that seems well balanced, but—”

“The late boot polo team is getting—Fyodor. I wasn’t sure if the angry father or the embarrassed commander was uppermost, but if I were them I’d be more frightened of the first.”

“Ah.” She smiled. It probably wasn’t her nice smile. A Red Queen smile, maybe.

“Consider the follow-up effectively delegated.”

She nodded, then said more hesitantly, “How, ah, did you get on with Miles last night? He didn’t say much this morning.”

That relaxed look returned. “You know the feeling of a clean, solid docking, space or sail, when it all clicks and you know you’ve brought your ship in safe? And you can finally stand down?”

“That good, huh?”

“I think so.” He shifted in his chair, stretched his back, only winced a little. “I told him about the boys. Which entailed telling him everything, in outline.”

The relief was unexpectedly profound. “Oh, thank you.”

His mouth softened as he studied her. “You carried that burden of silence, too. And never bent under it.”

She made a vague, fending wave. “Goes with the job, sometimes.”

He eyed her, seemed about to say something else, but then went on: “I wasn’t sure if I’d find myself talking to the Old Barrayaran Miles or the Galactic Miles, but fortunately last night he came down on his Betan side.”

“I had a spoke or two prepared to stick in his wheel if he started channeling old Piotr,” she confessed. Starting with that pair of great-something-grandmothers up her own family tree—had anyone ever mentioned them to him?

“Does he?”

“Now and then. This countship thing, it goes to their heads sometimes. Cultural reinforcement, you know.” She fell silent, waiting comfortably now. Soon, it came.

“When I stopped by my apartment, I sent a tightbeam to Desplains. Offering my thanks and regrets.”

“You’re very sure?” she said quietly.

A short nod. “I knew the moment I hit send. I’m not sure I can call it a weight off my shoulders, since none had yet been placed there. More of a sense of space, as if my world had unfolded, opened out, leaving me standing there all amazed. Very strange sensation. I don’t think it was the pain meds.” He studied her. “You don’t look altogether surprised. How could you know when I didn’t?”

“I didn’t, but I thought it was a fat clue when you went for the fertilizations and not just freezing gametes. It seemed to me you were making it harder for yourself to abandon the project. Perhaps not consciously.”

He considered this. “In another era, you could have been burned for a witch.”

“Oh, rubbish,” she said, pleased.

Unusually for Miles, the departure the next morning was not for a dedicated fast courier that awaited the Lord Auditor’s pleasure, but for a scheduled passenger ship that would undock on time. Ekaterin, marshalling the exodus, seemed more conscious of this fact than her husband, but in due course all the principals, support staff, and luggage were assembled in the general vicinity of the front portico to load into the convoy of groundcars. Getting to overhear Miles negotiating the personal weight allotments of the souvenir scientific rocks with his children had been the highlight of Cordelia’s day so far. Well, he could afford the fees.

Oliver had said his goodbyes at breakfast, and gone off to keep his next appointment with his burn colonel. Kareen had left to catch the earliest of the new three-flights-a-day shuttles to Gridgrad where, Cordelia was fairly sure, she would shortly have engineers following her around like entranced ducklings. Nothing had yet tackled Ivy to the ground and leapt through her comconsole to displace the Vicereine’s precious allotment of time for sendoffs. Life is good.

Miles stumped up to Cordelia on the front walkway, a little out of breath, and surveyed the scene. At least it was organized chaos. After a moment, he spoke.

“I know I had issues with being an only child, but really, Mother, nine siblings?”

“Don’t forget to count Mark,” she replied. “Although whether you should be defined as his brother or his parent is an arguable point.”

“Brother,” said Miles. “We definitely decided on brother. It’s all legal and everything.”

“So, you go from a lonely only to one of eleven. A bit late, but I did my best. Life is full of ambushes like that.”

“Not like that, ordinarily.”

She cocked an ironic eyebrow at him. “And when have you ever aspired to be ordinary?”

He shrugged, Point.

“Look on the bright side—situated as we are, you won’t be forced to share your toys.”

Ekaterin, going past with her arms full in time to catch this, threw in, “At least not until they’re much older.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Miles complained under his breath. He looked away, into the bright Sergyaran morning. “I keep wondering what Da would have thought of it all.”

“Dubious at the method, delighted with the results, I expect,” said Cordelia. “It’s a circular sort of hypothetical.” Or maybe a corkscrew. “If a thousand things had been different, if I could have dragged his head all the way out of the Time of Isolation instead of just half, if he’d never been lumbered with the regency, or the countship for that matter, if we could have been a quiet private family somewhere, if, if, if…Once you start making up might-have-beens, there’s no end to them.”

“Mm.” He shifted his weight on his cane, and she wondered if she should let him keep standing, or make him sit. But then he’d just have to clamber up again in a minute. Hands off, hands off. Or be bitten for her pains. Could his half-brothers possibly turn out to be as maniacally independent as he’d been, and should she warn Oliver? Too late.

“I like Oliver,” he said after a minute. “Always did. Although I didn’t actually know him nearly as well as I’d imagined. I, um…won’t mind getting to fix that, as our chances permit.”

“I would like that,” she said quietly, and he gave a quick chin-duck.

He added, “Just don’t abuse the poor sucker. You have him totally under your thumb, I trust you realize.” In the balance of his tone between being offended for his gender and smug for his mother, she fancied the smug was winning.

Ekaterin went past again, going the other way, and Miles’s glance followed her.

“You would know something about that, I think. Is it worth it?”

“Oh yes,” he breathed. “It’s plain he’d take a bullet for you in a heartbeat.”

“Which would be the stupidest waste of his talents I could imagine.” She grimaced. Let’s avoid that necessity, this time around. “I have much more interesting things in mind for him to do for me.”

“Can’t argue with that.” And, more quietly, “I hope you’ll be happy.”

“Oliver has a knack for happiness.” At least compared to the average Vorkosigan, if that juxtaposition of words wasn’t a contradiction in terms. It was perhaps the subtlest reason Aral had grown addicted to having him around. Given his early life, Aral had nearly feared happiness, as if daring to reach for it tempted some sadistic Barrayaran god. But he could safely enjoy it at one remove, delegating the task like a shrewd senior officer. This seemed too complicated a thing to explain on a doorstep. She said only, “What is love but delight in another human being? He delights me daily.”

A gruff nod. “That’s all right, then.”

Ekaterin hove to. “I’ll send you the final designs for the six municipal gardens and the new Palace grounds after I get back to my office and have a chance to run them through my programs there. Or rather, final for the basic layouts. I still have a lot of fiddling to do with the plant selections. I’m still weak on Sergyaran botany, especially in the new Gridgrad ecocline, and I don’t want to miss any opportunities to bring in as much local flora as I can.”

“Everyone’s still weak on Sergyaran botany,” Cordelia assured her. “We’re working on it, though.”

“I’ll probably have to make at least one more personal visit, before turning them over to local follow-up,” Ekaterin warned.

“Make it as soon as you like.” Cordelia embraced her. “And as often.”

“I’m afraid they’d have to clone me,” said Ekaterin ruefully.

Miles, clearly thinking of Mark, bit his tongue on whatever tart quip had mustered in his mouth. Indeed, he was growing into his new mature roles—when he remembered. Cordelia supposed it would be as pointless to beg him to slow down as it had ever been.

Doors slammed, voices called, hugs were exchanged all around, some of them startlingly sticky; this necessitated a last-moment foray for wipes. A certain thick and well-secured portfolio was taken under the personal supervision of the Heir. Persons short and tall were loaded, unloaded, rearranged, and loaded again.

“Goodbye!” Cordelia called. “Travel safe! And remember, tightbeams—they’re not just for emergencies, dammit!” She semaphored to Ekaterin. “Send me more pictures of the kids along with those plans!”

A last acknowledging wave, and the caravan pulled out. It grew a bit blurry, turning away into the street. She watched it out of sight, and a while longer.

O loves, take delight in one another.

While you can, take delight.