Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Chapter Nine

Dinner at the terrace restaurant followed by a confidential conference at the Viceroy’s Palace had worked so well the prior week, they repeated it midweek. Worked again, Jole thought, swimming muzzily up out of his sex-stunned haze to find a warm, naked Cordelia tucked up under his arm. He lifted his head to find her eyes slitted open, silvery-gray in the night-gleam, not asleep but just as obviously not going anywhere in particular right now. He squinted past her hair, tickling his nose, at the bedside chrono, and made a faint disgruntled noise.

“Hm?” Cordelia inquired, still not moving.

“Should get up an’ go. Doan’ wanna.”

“Don’t, then.” She backed a little more firmly into him.

“Mm…” He sighed, thinking of his empty bed back in his base apartment, and how small and cold the place had grown of late. “Should.”

“See, there’s another advantage to a public relationship. You could stay here all night. Get more sleep. Be fresher for work in the morning.”

“Temptress. You know a man’s susceptibilities, don’t you.”

She smiled sleepily. “Only my men.”

He grinned into her hair and kissed the top of her head. “Lake Serena again this weekend?”

Her lips pursed in doubt. “It has been brought to my attention that maybe we ought to vary our pattern. Our repeated trips out there seem to have triggered a spate of speculation, and not the sort I would have thought. Apparently, nobody under thirty thinks anyone over fifty has sex, so the explanations, while inventive, are bound to lead people astray.”

He returned a disappointed mm. Just having a pattern seemed a nice change. He could imagine this one repeating for quite a long time before he became bored with it. Months at least. Maybe years. A regular schedule that no one had to fret about. Nevertheless…

“We’ll have to vary the pattern anyway. My upside rotation starts next week.” An utterly routine inspection tour of the wormhole stations guarding the two blank-or-might-as-well-be wormholes. This supervisory task had slipped from exciting to dull with repetition, but not nearly as dull as the station-keeping duty itself. The brief, artificial excitement of their sector commander’s personal attention was about the only validation the fellows manning the wormhole forts ever received, and while boring was good on a space station, considering the alternatives, there were morale issues to consider. And, once in a great while, a real problem to uncover, preemptively making sure no one literally died of boredom. These inspections were worthwhile on several levels; Jole had never resented them before.

It was Cordelia’s turn to make a disappointed noise. “Ah, that’s right.” She rolled over; Jole obligingly turned on his back and let her rearrange herself with her head on his shoulder, her arm draped possessively over his chest. “I suppose vid sex is right out. I can’t see how it would work with several light-hours of time delay, anyway.”

Jole sniggered. “No. Not that I wouldn’t love to see that, mind you.”

“You, ImpSec, anyone on the tightbeam repeater-route with the clearance to tap the link…”

“Exactly what I was thinking. Don’t want to share.” He gave her a hug with his woman-weighted arm. “At least…if anything happened to you while I was out there, this time I could order myself home.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Hm?”

“I was just thinking of that frantic mess during my second trade-fleet escort tour.” He had advanced to exec on the New Athens, a then-new ship and a plum posting, he’d thought. “We were out halfway past Earth, at about the farthest jump on our route, when the news of the Prime Minister’s heart attack came through. I could do nothing, stuck where I was. And no one to talk to. Oh, there was plenty of political gossip and speculation, and of course everyone knew I’d been on his staff for years, so people interrogated me, sure. That was excruciating, even with the few who realized he wasn’t just a figure to me, but a friend. No basis to ask for compassionate leave, no way to get home in much less time than the fleet itself was going to take…I was never closer to deserting.”

Cordelia sighed. “I’m sorry my bulletins were so terse. Things were utterly crazy in Vorbarr Sultana, what with Miles missing-presumed-dead, and Mark coming in from the cold, and all the medical anxieties…I won’t say it was worse than the Pretender’s War, but it gave me flashbacks.”

His hug tightened. “Your bulletins were lifesavers, from my point of view. I watched them over and over. Trying to read between the lines, then trying not to read between the lines…That last one, after his heart transplant—you looked so exhausted, but it was like the sun had come up in your face.” He smiled. “And the next one was from him, and then…it was all right.” All right for then, at least. But that unwanted preview of mortality and loss and helplessness had been part of what had turned his career toward Sergyar space, as soon as he could engineer it.

She’d known what he’d wanted to hear, she’d known what he’d needed to hear…her first private tightbeam had been sped on its way within a day of the disaster, before she’d even slept, as far as he’d been able to discern. For all the assurances, subtle and unsubtle, that he’d received from her before, that message and the ones that soon followed had finally driven home to him that she truly considered him not a Betanly tolerated caprice of her husband’s, but an equal partner, worthy of all consideration. He’d always been a little bit in love with her, as what men around Aral were not? It wasn’t that he was more in love with her after, either. Yet there had flowed in under his feet with those messages, almost unseen, a profound and unshakable trust which had given him a new place to stand, when they all met again. And from that had followed…well, the rest of his life, so far.

When I was alone and afraid, you comforted me. He turned up her face and kissed her properly for that, a mere decade-and-a-half late. She looked pleased, if bemused; he did not attempt to explain.

He was dressing before they returned to weekend plans. She rolled over, plucked her wristcom from the bedside table, called up her calendar, and frowned. “Ah, I was afraid of that. I have two afternoon meetings that will put a hole in anything out of town…booked ages ago. I must tell Ivy to guard my weekends better in future.”

He sat beside her with his own wristcom, and they compared calendars. The results were disheartening.

“Dinner and a conference here again, that night?” Cordelia suggested at last, pointing. “We could even have dinner here. In Ekaterin’s garden—that would be nice. As long as we don’t let anyone else know where to find us. At least we can leave room at Penney’s for his other customers.”

Cordelia had expressed some guilt when she’d learned that having Penney’s Place to themselves had been no accident, but a security compromise Jole had arranged. His argument that Penney didn’t suffer since he was paid for a full occupancy that he and Ma Penney didn’t actually have to serve had only made a small dent in this.

“I won’t be able to stay very late. I have an early lift-off the next morning.”

She nodded understanding and blocked out the time, with a note to her kitchen staff. A mental review of his tomorrow-morning’s schedule was not much motivation, consolation, or help for tearing himself away, but with a heroic effort that he suspected wouldn’t garner much sympathy even if there were someone he could complain to, he decamped into the Kayburg night.

Oliver had been gone on his upside rotation for only half a week, and Cordelia wondered how it was that she felt bored. Bored and restless. Drumming her fingers on the black glass of the comconsole desk in her personal office, she stared out into the rainy night of the back garden. Low, colored lights among the plantings and walkways made oddly cheerful accents in the dark blur.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plenty to do. Once she’d worked through the top layer of the day’s crises, there was always another layer, further down and more detailed. And a third one below that. The best camouflage for work-avoidance was more work? She contemplated the paradox, and decided, in all fairness, that it was just task-avoidance. One particular task, albeit with subheadings. Drat it, as her delightful daughter-in-law would say. She’d been thinking about this for months, years. Decades, in a sense. There was no reason for it to suddenly seem hard, here at the point of final fruition.

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 travelling 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 project, 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. “Oh, 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.”

Jole followed her glance to the archway, where a very short, slightly hunched, dark-haired man in his early forties, swinging a cane, strolled through accompanied by a tall, dark-haired woman of similar age. “We thought you’d like it!” Miles said heartily, although Ekaterin’s apologetic expression, unseen by him over his head, didn’t exactly endorse this assertion.

“Hello, Mother,” continued Miles, making for Cordelia. Any attempt at a familial hug of greeting was blocked by the rioting children, one now hanging off each of her arms. And nor did Cordelia, smiling rather tightly back, seem quite in the mood to return such a gesture.

Mood. Yeah, he could kiss their evening’s anticipated mood goodbye, Jole supposed. Forlorn hope, wasn’t that the term for a doomed struggle? As the blood slowly returned to his brain from warmer regions, it occurred to him what a surprise this surprise was. Was sometimes-Lord Auditor Vorkosigan making some secret inspection of behalf of his master Emperor Gregor? Miles couldn’t be engaged in a dangerous investigation on Sergyar, or he’d hardly have brought his family along. Unless he was dropping them here on his way to elsewhere. But if they’d traveled by official, even if unscheduled, government fast courier, Jole should damn well have heard about it from the moment the ship made Sergyar local space, and he hadn’t. Could the surprise be for him or his? He still had burning memories of that thrice-damned military theft ring they’d uncovered several years back. “Well, hello, Count Vorkosigan. Countess.” He managed a polite nod and smile. “I trust you had an uneventful journey. How did you travel?”

Ekaterin answered, “We came on the regular commercial passenger ship. For a welcome change, this isn’t for work, only for family, so it didn’t seem right to tap the Imperial Service for a lift.” Her smile at him felt more genuine than her spouse’s. “The children seemed to enjoy it very much more than being cooped up on a courier. They met rather a lot of interesting prospective colonists.”

“Interrogated them to within an inch of their lives,” Miles confirmed. “I should rent the team out to ImpSec, I think.”

“Oh, Da,” said Helen, and rolled her eyes. Alex’s mouth just tightened a fraction.

So, they’d reached the Oh-Da stage. A few years back, both elder twins had clearly thought their Da hung the moons. Puberty must be imminent.

Jole’s slightly malicious smile faded, as he considered what only the family meant to Cordelia, mother to a key Barrayaran count and foster-mother to an emperor. Could, for example, Emperor Gregor have sent Lord Auditor Vorkosigan to find out if the Vicereine of Sergyar had gone insane?

She’s not insane, Jole wanted to protest. Just Betan!

Now, there was a reflection to keep to himself.

“Is Nikki with you also?” he inquired politely of Ekaterin. Son of her first marriage, now almost…what, twenty? No, more.

She shook her head. “Too caught up with school to tag along, he said. I gather things are getting intense, since he graduates soon.”

“Already?” said Jole.

“Yes, I know.” She smiled wryly at him, swaying a little as the toddlers kneecapped her. She bent to hoist one up; the other clung to her trouser leg and stared in suspicion at Jole.

“Well. I would seem to be redundant to need here, this evening,” he excused himself. “Enjoy the family reunion, Cordelia.”

She cast him a strained smile and only a slight eye-widening of anguish. “We’ll have to reschedule our conference. I’ll try to call you later.” She dispatched Armsman Rykov, now hovering unobtrusively, for a car and driver to convey Jole back to the base. No one tried to urge him to stay.

Under the cover of escorting him out, she managed to get the door closed between them and her family.

“You didn’t seem all that surprised by this visitation,” he observed.

“No, only appalled.” She grimaced. “I didn’t think they’d just show up like that. I’m so sorry.”

He read this as a statement of fact rather than an apology; he nodded ruefully.

“I sent them all a vid message the first week you went upside, you see. Told Miles about his sisters. It was time.”

Jole did a quick time-speed-distance calculation in his head, allowing margin for shifting six kids, a wife, and an entourage. A rapid response in force, it would seem. “And, um…about his brothers?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. I did tell Gregor, in strict confidence.”

“Yet not Miles?”

“It’s not wholly my tale the way the girls are. Have I your permission to mention them? Or would you rather wait and tell him yourself, or what?”

He hesitated, sorely tempted to let her do the hard part. “I doubt you’ll have much chance for a private talk tonight with the kids cavorting about. Let’s wait a little.” He added after a moment, “It’s hard to see how one would explain the boys without explaining…more history than Aral saw fit to apprise him of.”

“If we had been open from the beginning,” she said rather fiercely, “this would be a non-problem right now.”

He touched a consoling finger to her lips. “There would doubtless have been other problems.”

Her smile twisted. “Conservation of tribulation?”

“There’s a law of nature for you.” Explaining to Miles how Jole had come to be the father of his three frozen half-brothers had seemed much less daunting when the damned fellow had been a string of wormhole jumps away. “Don’t let them exhaust you. You’ve had a long day.”

“You had a longer one.”

He could only shrug agreement. Yet half an hour ago, he hadn’t been a bit tired. As the Vicereine had so eloquently summed it up, crap.

Then the groundcar arrived, and he’d lost his chance even for a kiss goodnight. He squeezed her hand and retreated.