Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Epilogue

The day after the day after the joint formal openings of the Gridgrad shuttleport base, and the almost-finished, already-occupied Viceregal palace in what was rapidly becoming West Gridgrad’s city center, Jole and Cordelia took some time off together. It would have been the prior day but, as Cordelia sighed in one of her mantras, There’s Always Something.

The ceremonies had gone quite smoothly, entirely devoid of explosions or fires and with only the normal attrition of persons to the base infirmary for minor complaints or, much later in the day and thankfully off-duty, drunken accidents. General Haines had been puffed and pleased and almost over his lingering grudges against Sergyaran contractors.

Fyodor had been joined at last by Madame Haines, who’d proved dumpy and frumpy and quietly decisive. A hint of their more complex inner world was supplied only by the fact that Fyodor kept her hand locked through his arm whenever he had the excuse, as if to anchor her there, and that he could be spotted cordially massaging the back of her neck when he thought no one was looking.

Chief of Imperial Service Engineers General Otto shared the ceremonial platform, in one of his periodic rechecks of their progress. Cordelia, who had known him back in Vorbarr Sultana in both their younger days, had hailed his initial arrival last year with nearly the ecstatic squeals of a teen girl crushing on a musician. As Jole shortly figured out, it was Otto’s energy, efficiency and calm good sense that beguiled her, not his sex appeal. Although even that was not lacking, for a certain mature taste, though it was clear that for him physical was the first half of a compound word followed by plant. Hey, I can look. After watching him get things done, by hook or crook, Jole had come to see Cordelia’s point, and joined her fandom.

West Gridgrad actually looked more like a war zone than the base did just now, but things were coming along. Cordelia assured him that her daughter-in-law’s civic gardens were supposed to look like that at this stage; they had great bones, which everyone would see when they were draped in their living cloaks of green and gray-green, with a touch of Barrayaran red-brown here and there for contrast. Jole had to take her word.

Kareenburg was still complaining bitterly of its abandonment; even a strong series of temblors six months ago that had cracked pavements all over town had not quelled the chorus. Cordelia had gripped her hair but, since she was getting her way after all, refrained from tearing any out.

There had been, in the inevitable course of events, some quite imaginative slanders circulated about the Vicereine’s and the Admiral’s new private life. The contents had ranged from risible to enraging. Cordelia had ignored them. Jole had tried to. She wasn’t wrong. As the lack of angry, or indeed any, reaction failed to reward their detractors with the attention they desired, they moved on to other less-wise and more-profitable targets. Poor stupid sods, Cordelia had muttered, but made no move to rescue these sacrifices. She hadn’t always loved her Vorbarr Sultana experiences, but no one could say she hadn’t learned from them.

As their suborbital shuttle lifted off, Jole had to admit that his strongest emotion at leaving the new capital and all its local uproars in their wake was relief.

Cordelia glanced out the window at the ImpSec shuttle pacing them. “I don’t suppose ImpSec and I will ever be entirely shut of each other,” she sighed.

“No,” Jole agreed. “Even when you’re done being Vicereine”—he’d seen the calendar on her bathroom wall, days marked down with a broad red flow-pen—“you will never stop being Gregor’s foster-mother.”

“And therefore a potential handle on the Emperor, I know, I know.” She frowned. “Gregor knows how to stand his ground, if he has to.”

“But it would be cruel to make him.” Cordelia’s ImpSec coverage, however much it made her itch, shielded Jole’s heart as well, and at no added cost to the Imperium. Not to mention her property and her progeny. She might have his sympathy on this issue, but they both knew she’d never get his accord.

“Well—I just hope Allegre’s boys and girls can learn to like the backcountry.” Her eyes narrowed in calculation. “Maybe I can find some chores for them, in their down times.”

The small shuttle had been borrowed from the base, and was fast and utilitarian rather than luxurious. The seats had been rearranged into four groupings, one held by Jole and Cordelia, with Aurelia’s seat strapped in across, the other by Rykov, Ma Rykov, and the young nanny expensively imported from the Vorkosigan’s District, another armsman’s daughter who had grown up on Sergyar and had hankered to return. The third held a trio of Palace servants in charge of the picnic, and the fourth housed their secured supplies. Not exactly solitude, but in the ambient noise of the flight two people with their heads together could converse in reasonable privacy.

“I started my resignation process yesterday,” Jole told her.

She nodded, trying not to smile too much. “How long till your replacement arrives?”

“Two to six months, I was given to understand.” He’d found himself hoping for the lower figure. “And then I called Dr. Tan and told him to start Everard Xav.”

The grin this time escaped and took over her face. She squeezed his arm in silent enthusiasm. “He and Nile will be almost age-mates, then.” Aurelia’s next younger sister, now brewing blobbily in her replicator.

Jole’s third piece of news had to wait as Aurelia woke up and began burbling at her mother, who promptly rescued her from her seat, and Jole was treated to the always-fascinating sight of Cordelia playing with her daughter.

Aurelia had escaped from her uterine replicator some eighteen months ago, and promptly embarked on, as nearly as Jole could tell, a course of world domination. She’d certainly captured the government on the first day.

“You’re such a big, strong girl!” Cordelia told her. “So good! Such a sturdy baby!” Aurelia chortled back and with Cordelia’s aid began dance-marching on her mother’s lap. These observations had been repeated about five hundred times since her birth, by Jole’s count.

Cordelia had been fiercely protective at first, scarcely letting anyone else touch the baby and reducing the nanny to tears more than once. Jole had finally taken the poor girl aside and explained about Miles’s infancy. Undersized, bones nearly friable, subjected to endless medical procedures and in constant pain, frustrated by hampering pads and braces, he’d reportedly let the world know, but the world had not responded at all satisfactorily. It was easy to see how his medicalized start might have traumatized Miles; less obvious till now that it had also left Cordelia a trifle crazed. The nanny had caught on, and, slowly, Cordelia had started to relax as Aurelia plainly thrived. Maybe after Miles, a perfectly normal infant would seem like a super-baby to her. Jole hoped that by six repetitions she would get used to it.

“If only she would start talking in complete sentences,” Cordelia added aside to Jole, her new worry. Language acquisition had been young Miles’s only early accomplishment, Jole understood, blasting through words to sentences to paragraphs with alarming speed in his drive to gain some control of his bewildering universe.

Aurelia was currently doing quite well at operating her adults to her satisfaction with a combination of body language, facial expressions, and weirdly strung-together vocabulary. Plus built-in siren, for emergencies. At length Cordelia, showing a trust Jole felt obliged to support, handed her over, and then it was his turn to be reduced to apparent idiocy in their strange transactional dance of communication. His performance today seemed to be up to her exacting standards, anyway.

At last the shuttle dropped toward their destination. Jole strapped Aurelia back into her seat for the landing, to her futile annoyance. The coastline was visible first, a forbidding line of red cliffs with a ruff of surf below. Then the harbor mouth disclosed itself, and the astonishing sheltered waters beyond.

The harbor wound its way inland through the surrounding hills for nearly twenty kilometers. Promontories and points alternated with deeply involuted coves to create a lavish length of shoreline. The site lay on the borderline between the sub-tropic and the temperate, moderated still further by the sea and the deep, translucent waters of the bay, almost a warm-water fjord. Jole had visited the place several times with Cordelia, and it still seemed a dream of clarity and light.

A hamlet-growing-to-village was sited about halfway in, taking advantage of an optimum combination of fresh water coming down from the low hills and a steep marine drop-off to place a quay. Port Nightingale’s small fusion plant produced a hundred-fold more power than the present thousand or so inhabitants could use, but Jole suspected it would be running to capacity in far less time than Cordelia projected. Flatter lands behind the first range of hills were already peppered with small farms and sapling orchards and vineyards.

Instead of the village shuttlepad, their vessel and its outrider aimed for a promontory thrusting out into the bay about two kilometers closer to the sea. A decade past, Cordelia had purchased it and its entire backing cove, all the way around, her one personal Sergyaran speculation. Jole could see why.

Cordelia had set her new home toward the mouth of the cove on the hillside facing roughly east, toward the sea. As the party disembarked and set up for the afternoon, Jole and she took a stroll around the building site. The rectangular foundation had been cut into the slope about fifty meters above the shoreline and, they discovered, plumbed since their last visit, the well drilled and septic system in place. No actual facilities yet, the necessities being supplied by a builders’ privy downslope, but one could see their promissory shapes. Cordelia was thrilled.

No builders present today. In the evolutionary struggle for local resources, they’d all gone off to work on the hamlet’s first clinic. She would get them back eventually, she supposed with a sigh. Today, she was full of her plans for an underwater steel net to be strung across the mouth of the cove to create a safe swimming and diving zone for future residents and guests. The colonists had scarcely begun to explore their new seas, but their wild array of interlocking ecosystems had already been discovered to include larger predators than any yet found on land.

“Have you decided where you want your section?” she asked Jole, as she gazed around the somewhat scrubby gray-green amphitheater embracing the cove.

“I’m thinking directly across. I like the view back up the bay and the sunsets. It will make a nice healthy walk around the cove to you, or a short kayak ride across, weather depending.” He wondered how much time his future kayak would spend parked in her future dock. Lots, he trusted. “Or a swim, if I’m feeling energetic.”

She grinned. “I like that picture.”

The eastward promontory itself, they’d agreed, they would save for the future.

They shared their picnic lunch with the small ImpSec crew, whose most diligent efforts had failed to discover anything remotely resembling a human hazard out here. Biological ones, well, everyone was still working on that. Afterward, while Aurelia and Armsman Rykov both took naps on blankets, Jole and Cordelia walked around the perimeter of the cove where a path had already been cut and beaten into the undergrowth, and climbed the promontory for its fabulous view up and down the bay. To the east, the harbor mouth gave a glimpse of an unimpeded horizon stretching across the rim of the world, sea and sky imperceptibly blending in a hazy line of blue and violet.

“That,” said Jole, catching his breath after the scramble to the top, “is one great big lake.”

Cordelia laughed softly.

“I wanted to tell you,” he confided almost shyly. “Gamelin tells me that if I pick up one more biochem course, and pull together all those field notes I’ve been sending him for the journal the past two years into a coherent paper, he wants to roll my bachelor’s and master’s into one, and shove me directly into his grad program.”

Even Jole had stopped pretending this is only a hobby some months ago. Cordelia had been entirely unsurprised.

She replied lightly, “A student who can already write and think, who could organize any sized field expedition to the most exotic locale, safely, with one hand tied behind his barely scarred back, who could probably run an academic department or an entire university in his sleep if he wanted to—”

“Field work,” Jole put in firmly. “I want field work. Outdoors.”

“Of course Gamelin is panting.” She laced her arm through his. “I predict your future students will adore you, Professor Jole, and sooner than you think. You even already know how to teach.”

“Well, sure. The peacetime military is almost nothing but teaching. Processing newbies all the time, bringing them up to speed. Getting people to do things they’ve never done before.” He added reflectively, “The wartime military too, only faster. Outsiders…don’t always recognize that function.” The good officers and noncoms modeled the military virtues, and sometimes a few more besides; the bad modeled rot that could linger for several short generations of personnel turnover. Jole wondered what model of officer he’d been, and how long his wake would last.

“Geophysically, the Sergyaran seas are mapped to the millimeter.”

“I know,” said Jole. “We did a lot of it from orbit.”

“Their biosphere needs someone to go take a closer look.”

“More than one someone. Five thousand years, Gamelin once guessed, and it took me a while to realize that wasn’t a joke. This bay alone could keep an explorer busy for half a lifetime.” And close to home—right out the researcher’s front door, perhaps. “Beyond the harbor mouth—well, a man would run out of breath long before he ran out of questions.” The extensive and intricate reeflike structures along the northerly coast of this very continent were already getting some attention, but practical needs were still drawing most resources to the land. “Finding funding for a proper research vessel could be a stretch.”

“Mm, I might know a couple of people who are adept at finding funding. Don’t give up on that idea too soon.”

“Hadn’t planned to. It’s a grand buffet, but no one could eat it all at once.”

Cordelia’s grin widened. “God I’ve missed the sound of scientific greed. You could almost be—”

“Betan?”

“I was going to say, Betan Survey. We lot were always, mm, not as good a fit back in the home tunnels as some.”

Her hand stole into his, and he gripped it back.

After a little, she said, “I know where you might find a navigator for that boat, for cheap. She’d probably work for foot rubs. And lab access.”

“It’s a deal,” he said, and they stood a while longer, looking to the horizon line where a new sun would rise tomorrow.