Chapter Two
Jole arrived twenty minutes early for his appointment with Dr. Tan at the rep center, and then couldn’t make himself step inside. He walked up and down the side street, instead.
Kareenburg actually had side streets now, some thirty-five or forty years, depending on how one counted it, after its founding. Barrayar’s first imprint on its new colony world had been a military base and shuttleport half-sheltered by a volcanic mountain that had blown out its side in some ancient cataclysm, standing sentinel with a string of sisters upon a wide plain. The pictures Jole had seen of earliest Kareenburg depicted a mud street lined with repurposed, and in some cases doubtless stolen, old military field shelters, as the base slowly upgraded from its first primitive incarnation. Like any up-sprung village serving a fortress on Old Earth or on Barrayar going back to the Time of Isolation, it had run heavily to such services as bars and brothels, but with the arrival of the first legitimate civilian colonists and a string of Imperial viceroys, government functions had slowly taken over the space, and the livelier aspects of the settlement had relocated. Historical redaction had cut in with amazing speed, and those grubby early days were well on their way to being rewritten mainly as a setting for romantic adventure stories.
The hottest local political argument at the moment, and for the last ten years, was the transfer of the capital to some more selectively chosen region of the continent or one of the five others, resisted fiercely by those with major speculative investments in the present site. The Vicereine had dozens of scientific surveys on her side in favor of relocation, but Jole suspected she might be fighting one of her few losing battles with inertia and human nature. In the meanwhile, the racket of new construction extended and entrenched the proto-city in all directions.
These ruminations brought Jole around again to the doors of what the sign proclaimed as Kareenburg Reproductive and Obstetrical Services. Kayross for short, the intimidating polysyllables tamed and made friendly by the nickname. The building was not one of the old field shelters, but instead purpose-built, in a utilitarian mode that spoke of constrained budgets, as a clinic—if not this clinic, which had taken over the premises more recently.
I can do this. I can do anything. Hadn’t Aral Vorkosigan taught him that? Jole took a breath and pushed inside.
…But, as he stepped into the queue at the reception counter, he was nonetheless glad he was wearing his anonymous casual civvies, and not his rank-heavy undress greens. Not that Imperial uniforms were an unusual sight on Kareenburg’s streets. There were several people in line ahead of him—another man, a woman, and a couple, whose heads all swung around to observe him in turn—and he wasn’t sure whether to be glad he had company, or to wish them all to oblivion. They were all sent to wait on uncomfortable-looking seats lining the side of the room, but when Jole stated his name, the receptionist jumped up, saying in a far-too-carrying voice, “Oh, yes, Admiral Jole! The Vicereine told us to expect you. Dr. Tan is right this way,” and ushered him through a door into a short corridor, which had the faint chemical-and-disinfectant smell of every med clinic he’d ever unhappily encountered. So maybe it was some visceral memory of old pain and injury that was making him edgy? No, probably not.
She led him first into a room containing several comconsole desks, half of them manned by intent staffers and displaying dauntingly dense data readouts, or gaudy tangles that he guessed were molecular maps. The various colors and cuts of lab coats might proclaim different functions, ranks, and responsibilities, just as Imperial uniforms and insignia did, but this wasn’t a code to which he had the key. And there were a lot more personal touches—plants, toys, holocubes, souvenirs. The clothing under the coats was anything but uniform, including a couple of young people wearing what were clearly Betan sarongs and sandals, though it was less clear if they were actually Betans. The coffee mugs, at least, were familiar.
The receptionist delivered him to the desk of a slight, dark-haired young man in a light blue coat that went to his knees, though he was wearing Sergyaran-style trousers and a shirt underneath.
“Dr. Tan, Admiral Jole is here.”
“Ah, excellent! Just a sec…” He flung up a finger and finished whatever he had been about at his comconsole, shut down the baffling display of vibrant light lines, then stood up to offer Jole a firm handshake and a smile. The receptionist flitted away.
Dr. Tan was tan, and very healthy-looking, though his features were hard to map to any particular Earth ancestry—unlike Barrayar’s population, lost and isolated for six hundred years and only rediscovered a century ago, the Betans had been using gene cleaning and rearranging for generations, which meant anyone’s ancestors could be anything. “How do you do, Admiral? Welcome to Kayross. I’m so glad you came in. Any friend of the Vicereine’s is a friend of ours, I assure you!”
Jole was a bit disoriented by that familiar Betan accent coming out of such an unfamiliar mouth, but he managed the handshake and suitable greetings. He tried not to let the accent sway him—he was here to make his own judgments…Or had he already decided, and all this going-through-the-motions was for what audience, exactly?
“Vicereine Vorkosigan said you would have questions, and that I was to answer them all. Would you care to start with a short tour?”
“Uh…yes, actually. Please. The only rep center I’ve ever been in wasn’t up and running yet.” That had been at a dedication ceremony in the Vorkosigan’s District capital of Hassadar, back on Barrayar, which then-Prime Minister Vorkosigan, and therefore his aide, had attended in public support of his wife’s manifold medical projects there.
Tan led him off to get suited up in some disposable paper garments, and then ushered him through the double doors at the end of the corridor. There, Jole found himself in a brightly lit clinical laboratory—busy lab benches cluttered with equipment under filtering vent hoods, a dozen absorbed techs bent over scanner stations. It reminded him a little of his tactics room, except that no one here seemed in the least bored. All the meticulously moving hands were smooth and gloved and steady.
The work stations on the first bench, featuring some especially rapt techs, were devoted to what Jole thought was the heart of the matter, fertilization. A couple of tightly temperature-controlled storage chambers held the culture dishes with early cell divisions. The lab stations on next bench over were devoted to what Dr. Tan dubbed quality control, gene scanning and repair. A second bank of warming cupboards continued the next stage of closely observed development, and then a last bench was devoted to implanting the ratified embryos and their placentas in the uterine replicators that would house them for the next nine months.
Through the next door, Tan relieved his guest of his crinkly paper overalls and hat, and guided him through a series of chambers devoted to the banks of replicators themselves, stacked five high. Panels of readouts monitored their progress. Pleasant music alternated with assorted natural sounds over speakers hidden somewhere. Individual jacks allowed soft, piped-in recordings of parental voices, speaking or reading. Jole found it creepily cheerful. Or cheerfully creepy, he wasn’t sure which. He reminded himself that all those arrayed containers held individual people’s—or couples’—most ardent hopes for the future. The next generation of Sergyarans. In fifteen years, all those disturbing biological blobs would be out on Kareenburg’s streets, wearing strange fashions, listening to annoying music, and disagreeing politically with their beleaguered parents. In twenty-five years, they’d be taking on tasks that he couldn’t presently imagine, though he guessed a few would be right back here working in this rep center, or its successor. Or offering up their own gametes for what the Vicereine dubbed the genetic lottery.
Could his own children be among them?
Why, yes, they could.
“Can conceptions—babies—ever get mixed up?” There were stories about such mishaps…Many of them passed along, Cordelia had pointed out, by people with irrational objections to the rep centers.
Dr. Tan smiled at him in a pained fashion. “Our techs are extremely conscientious, but to soothe the doubts of the, shall we say, biologically less educated, the genetics of any infant can be checked against that of its parents with a few cheek swabs and three minutes on the scanner at the time they take delivery. Or at any prior time, actually, amniocentesis being a trivial procedure with a replicator. The service is offered for free—or rather, included at no extra charge.” He added after a moment, “We get that question a lot, from you Barrayarans. The Vicereine once told me to point out that our error rate is provably statistically lower than that of the natural method, but the late Viceroy advised me that it might not be taken in good part.”
“I see,” said Jole. He tried to come up with a few more suitably technical questions that would redeem his Barrayaran IQ in this man’s eyes. Jole enjoyed Sergyar’s sprinkling of galactic immigrants, on the whole, but he had to admit that they could sometimes also be remarkably annoying. He managed not to blurt out his own history as a natural, un-gene-cleaned body birth, in attempted proof of what, he could not say.
The fact came up shortly, however, when Dr. Tan took him back out to another room off the reception area, and left him to get on with an unmanned station that took his medical history in exhaustive detail. Jole was able to speed up this tedious process by plugging in his military medical records, which, after checking over to remove anything still classified, he’d stored on his wristcom for the purpose last night. This program was used to dealing with the arcana of Barrayaran military records, fortunately—quite a few veterans from the base chose to muster out here, or to come back later. Had Cordelia supplied Aral’s? Yes, she must have, when she’d done her own. No one asked Jole for it, anyway, when Tan came back to rescue him.
“Any more questions? Are you ready for the next step?” Tan inquired jovially.
Jole searched his mouth with his tongue for an answer without finding one; in any case, Tan didn’t wait, but motioned his VIP visitor along after him. He dodged aside to pick up some objects Jole could not quite make out, then brought him to another closed, blank door, labeled Paternity Room, with a sliding slot bearing the words un/occupied. A magnetized flip label read Clean on one side and Do Not Disturb on the other, to which Tan flipped it.
“Here is your sample jar,” Tan announced, handing it across, “properly labeled as you see. The fluid inside will keep your semen alive and healthy until it can be processed. Check the label for accuracy, please.”
Jole squinted and found his name and numbers duly recorded on the side. “Right…correct, that is.”
“In the event of, so to speak, shyness, you will find a number of aids inside. I can also issue you a single-dose aphrodisiac nasal spray. We used to put them out in a basket, but they kept disappearing, so we had to go to rationing—my apologies.” Tan held out a small ampoule.
Somewhat hypnotized by now, Jole warily accepted it. Tan opened the door and ushered him inside.
“Take all the time you need. Come find me personally when you’re done,” Tan told him, his tones brightly encouraging. The door shut, leaving Jole alone in the quiet, dimly lit little room. He heard the slight scrape of the slot-label sliding to occupied.
The chamber contained a comfortable-looking armchair, a straight chair, and a narrow cot with a fitted sheet. A shelf offered a line-up of sex toys, most of which Jole had encountered less depressingly in other contexts, all with little paper ribbons around them proclaiming their sterilized state. The room also contained a holovid player—a quick check of the contents found a number of titles Jole recognized from barracks and shipboard life, plus a few that seemed highly unlikely to ever have played to that audience. Which made him wonder, just for a moment, what equivalents were passed around in the ISWA barracks, and if there were any of the women he dared to ask. Not Vorinnis, anyway. Maybe the colonel, if they ever got drunk enough together. The vid also offered an array of slide shows of beautiful young women, a few of beautiful young men, one of beautiful young herms, one of rather eye-grabbing beautiful young obese ladies, and others that became increasingly more otherly—this had been programmed by the galactic crew. A few more collections of images were downright repulsive, and a couple were simply incomprehensible, though Jole considered himself a traveled man. What none of them seemed, just at the moment, was arousing in any way. He shut the machine off.
I’ve been doing this since I was thirteen. It shouldn’t be hard. Which, in fact, it wasn’t—he’d never been more limp in his life.
He sat down on the edge of the cot, examined the instructions on the collection jar, and considered the nasal spray. It seemed like cheating, letting down the side, unbecoming to a manly, virile Imperial officer. Did he get any slack for being almost fifty?
This had to be the most un-erotic, not to mention unromantic, place he’d ever been in. What kind of bizarre irony was it, that it should also be the one to fulfill the main biological purpose of his ever having had a sexuality in the first place?
I could have done this when I was twenty…But he’d added thirty years of exposure to hard radiation, biological hazards, and chemical toxins atop them, here and there in his varied military career. God knew what insults his gonads had accumulated, starting with the space accident that had put him in hospital at ImpMil in his twenties. Jole also recalled, in an ancient untethered scrap of memory from his training days, some fellows who’d been working with experimental microwave weaponry making jokes about fathering only girls…Even if he were in the most traditional relationship imaginable, he’d still want to be doing it this way. Surely no preventable defects or diseases was the foremost birthday gift any father could give to his firstborn son…er, hypothetical child.
Hell with this. His own brain, his mind and memories, were surely stocked with all the images he could ever need.
He considered Aral. Surely there was a treasure-house of the most erotic memory imaginable. The range of things the man had been willing to try…And it would be weirdly appropriate, somehow. That beloved face laughed at him from the past, hugely amused at his present contretemps, but was too-quickly overlain with the cold, clay, empty version last viewed under glass in a chilled coffin, so wrong…and if he followed those worn thoughts down the spiral any farther, he’d end up weeping, not wanking. No.
Giving up, he broke the seal on the nasal spray and thrust it up each nostril in turn. The mist was cold and odorless, and appeared to do nothing. Now what?
Unbidden, a memory popped into his head of Cordelia, striding down an upstairs hallway of Vorkosigan House wearing only a towel, slung around her hips like a Betan sarong. Himself, tumbling out of a doorway in a panic. What emergency had it been, a fire alarm? Bomb threat…? He couldn’t recall. He did remember the towel, oh yes. She’d worn her bare skin like space armor. Some armsman or servant had, sadly, soon handed her another towel. Suppose, instead of adding a towel, one were taken away…? That…was suddenly more interesting.
It seemed wrong to star her so in his mind-theater, but dammit, it was her fault that he was in this position in the first place. She could just put up with it.
She wore the long, swinging red hair of Aral’s wife in the memory-scrap, though. Perhaps…he could picture her with it cut short. Short and curling. Yes, that felt better. And he could do without the Vorkosigan House fire drill of excited servants and armsmen, and, for that matter, without Vorkosigan House. This left his composite Cordelia standing in a blank whiteness. She raised her eyebrows at him, Surely you can do better than this, kiddo…
Yes, he could. He imagined his little sailboat, the first one he had owned on Sergyar, out on the local lake where he’d used to launch it. Out in the middle, far from any shore. Angled sunlight. Wind dead calm, because he had better things to wrestle with than the sails and tiller, just now. Cordelia sat on the forward bench and grinned at him, and unfolded the towel to sit upon. Oh, and no wristcoms on either of them. They’d left those ashore. Neither his office nor hers could reach them.
What else? She might like some chilled white wine; he handed her a glass, and she tilted it up. “Excellent,” she pronounced, and she was certainly a shrewd judge. She looked up at him, intensely amused. She tossed her towel, and a few others, down in the center of the boat, neatly lined up along the keel, because she had a keen appreciation of the rules of physics as applied to small boats, and most everything else. She plunked herself atop them in that downright way she had of moving, the despair of her Barrayaran social arbiter friend, Lady Alys. Cordelia stretched herself to the light like a cat, and her face was free of strain or grief. “Oliver,” she breathed, and the syllables of his name were warm in her mouth. She extended a sturdy arm above her bare torso, and her hand turned imperiously over. “Come here,” she commanded throatily…
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Jole emerged from the little room with his jar in his hand, lid screwed down tight. He blinked in the bright light, checked his fly, and trod off to find Dr. Tan. He didn’t feel drunk. His walk—he tested it against the lines of the cheap floor tiles—was perfectly straight. But he felt simultaneously disembodied, and wholly in his body, a walking contradiction. No wonder they have to ration that stuff.
Tan greeted him with a pleased “Ah!” when Jole located him again at his desk. He took the jar and set it down without ceremony.
“When, ah…can I find out if I made the grade?” Jole asked.
“I’ll put it in right away, and call you personally with the report…perhaps not today, but no later than tomorrow morning?”
Jole made sure the physician had his personal comcode.
“I expect it will be fine,” Tan assured whatever look was on his face—Jole tried for blander. “Three hundred million to four are pretty good odds, after all.” Tan hesitated. “About the leftovers—the clinic has a small but steady demand for high-grade high-achieving male gametes. You certainly meet all the criteria for physical health and intelligence and so on, despite your age. Would you care to donate the excess to our catalog? Anonymously, of course.” Tan blinked amiably. “I rather think your face would sell.”
Jole flinched. Well, Cordelia had warned him about this part of the conversation, in a way, hadn’t she? “My face is not that anonymous, on Sergyar. I…let’s get through the evaluation first, eh?”
“Very well. But do think about it, Admiral.” Tan abandoned his office to walk Jole all the way to the front door, a sign of something.
Jole stood once more in the sunlit side street, feeling as though he’d just been put through a wormhole jump. Backwards. He contemplated the prospect of his lightflyer uneasily. He should have asked Tan how long it took that mist-drug to clear the system, but he wasn’t going back inside now. He felt clearheaded, but that could be an illusion. Perhaps a walk around would help metabolize it, like other inebriants. He turned and made for the main street, a block off.
It occurred to him, belatedly, that Cordelia had several times mentioned that she was a replicator birth herself, back on high-tech Beta Colony. That meant that her father, then-Lieutenant Miles Mark Naismith of the Betan Astronomical Survey, had once been through an experience very like the one Jole had just endured. And her mother the female equivalent, Jole supposed, though the women’s version seemed more simply medical. More invasive, as he dimly understood it, but at least they didn’t have to dragoon their libidos into cooperation. Did that make it better, or worse? On the other hand, they’d got Cordelia out of the deal, in the end. That…had worked out well.
Anyway, Jole himself was still at the gathering-data stage, really. The final decision would not be made till tomorrow, or much farther in the future if he chose to have his sample frozen. He had not hit any point of no return yet.
He passed a young colonial family on the sidewalk; she pushed a stroller with a cranky toddler, he bore a chest pack holding a sleeping infant, its slack little hands limp on his shirt. Jole wondered briefly what was the point of avoiding carrying children around during the nine months of gestation, and then turning around and lugging them like this when they’d escaped into the wild and were even heavier, but it seemed something that humans liked to do, because they kept doing it. He tried to imagine himself in the young father’s place. Could that be his child? Grandchild, a dry part of his brain noted. Shut up.
He stepped aside around an elderly gentleman idly waiting for his dog to finish what dogs did at a lamppost. A dog. Maybe a dog would be simpler, saner…easier to explain. Many famous senior officers in history had sported famous pets/mounts/mistresses/plants…well, perhaps not plants. Although there was a certain cadre of fellows, after their twenty or twice-twenty years of service were up, who threw themselves into gardening. The more flamboyant live accessories seemed to be part of the mystique or public relations of command. Jole had always traveled lighter.
A few blocks of walking brought him out of Kareenburg’s central business area, and he found himself staring across the street to the so-called Viceroy’s Palace. The name was misleading—it was actually a low, rambling house. Surrounded, true, by a remarkable garden, gift of the Vicereine’s even more remarkable daughter-in-law, which was growing up lushly these days to lend color and privacy, or the illusion of it. The old, hand-painted sign still hung by the gate.
The original Viceroy’s Palace had been a relocated field shelter, much to the dismay of the first Viceroy. His unhappy successors had made do with several field shelters, stuck together in assorted arrays. These had at length been followed by a semi-fortified prefabricated dwelling of remarkable ugliness. The present Vicereine, in the first year of her and her husband’s reign, had ordered it knocked flat and the site cleared, and started over with a saner and far more elegant design. The barracks at the back of the premises, which had housed Count Vorkosigan’s personal armsmen during his tenure, were now converted to various Viceregal offices; the sole remaining armsman lived in the main house with a few other principal servants.
On impulse, Jole crossed the street and presented himself to the lone gate guard—another reduction from Aral’s day. The premises’ current security was thinner and much more discreet. Jole didn’t mind the second, but wasn’t so sure he approved of the first.
The gate guard, who knew him well, saluted. “Admiral Jole, sir.”
“Afternoon, Fox. Is Her Excellency home to visitors?”
“I’m sure she’s at home to you, sir. Go on in.”
Jole strolled on up the curving drive. He almost turned around again when he spotted the array of parked vehicles, many of them with diplomatic stickers from the assorted planetary consulates based in Kareenburg, that marked some kind of diplomatic meeting—ah, yes, the welcoming reception for the new Escobaran consul was this afternoon, wasn’t it. Jole had dumped the task of representing the Sergyaran military forces upon his downside base commander, to give the two men a chance to get acquainted in a less fraught setting before they had to sort out some inevitable contretemps involving, to choose an unfortunately unhypothetical example, off-duty soldiers with too much to drink and galactic tourists insufficiently briefed on the fine points of Barrayaran culture. Far better that they should first meet in the Vicereine’s garden than in a hospital or, worse, the Kareenburg municipal guard’s morgue. These elegant soirees had more than one practical function.
Perversely, being blocked from a chance to talk with Cordelia heightened his anxiety to do so. He continued on the walkway around the house, noting one security man in uniform and another pretending to weed, who made note of him with nods of greeting in turn, till the familiar murmur of voices and clink of glassware guided him to the patio and terrace that flowed out into the garden. Perhaps a hundred well-dressed people were scattered about, clutching little plates and talking. He hesitated on the fringe. Happily, Cordelia was in sight, wearing something light and flowing for the balmy afternoon, and her glance found him after only a moment. She immediately detached herself from the half-dozen people clustered around her and made her way to his side.
“Oliver,” she said warmly. “How did your visit to the rep center go?”
“Mission accomplished, ma’am,” he told her with a mock, but not mocking, salute. Her brows flicked up in pleased surprise. “I…we need to talk, but obviously not now.”
“This thing is winding down, actually. If you can hang on for about half an hour, I should be able to start getting rid of them. Or you could come back later.”
He had work on his schedule for this evening, unfortunately. “I’m not in uniform,” he said in doubt.
“Oh, let these paranoid galactics experience a nonthreatening Barrayaran officer for a change. It will widen their world-views.”
“That seems counterproductive, somehow. The whole point of having us all Imperially out here is to make our wormhole jump-points uninviting to the uninvited.”
She grinned. “You look fine. Go do the pretty. I know you know how.” She strolled away, and several persons with agendas hidden or otherwise bee-lined for her.
Jole felt himself falling with the ease of long practice back into diplomatic-aide mode. He did check in first with his base commander, General Haines, who was properly attired in full dress greens, looking suitably broad and wall-like. The tall boots would be hot and sweaty, Jole was sure.
“Ah, Oliver, you’re here!” said the general. “Didn’t think you could make it. Is there anything afoot?” And, hopefully, “Can I leave now?”
“No and no. I’m just dropping by.” He glanced around the party, which had reached a relaxed and tipsy stage. “What did you think of the new Escobaran consul?”
“Seems sensible enough, if young. At least he only has one sex, thank God.”
Jole followed Haines’s eye to the familiar, androgynous figure of the Betan consul, now chatting with the Vicereine. Consul Vermillion was a Betan hermaphrodite, one of that planet’s bioengineered, double-sexed…you couldn’t call them a species, nor a race…Jole settled on minority. If the herm’s assignment here had been intended as a cultural challenge to the local Barrayarans, it had fallen flat under the Vicereine’s amused eye. Quite a few of the consulate personnel in Kareenburg were young diplomats on the make; if they didn’t screw up on Sergyar, they had a shot at a more prestigious—and less forgiving—embassy posting in Vorbarr Sultana. The Vicereine had confided to Jole that she thought Consul Vermillion might very well be the next Betan ambassador to present portfolio to Emperor Gregor, a notion that made her eyes glint in an appealing but slightly alarming fashion.
A server paused to offer Jole a drink on a tray. “Your usual, sir?”
“Thank you, Frieda.” Jole took a sip. Fizzy water, ice, and whatever mixer was available in the bar to give it a camouflaging color—he had been trained not to drink alcohol in any place that might offer diplomatic ambush back in his days as aide to the Prime Minister, and the habit had stuck.
“Ah, your Vorinnis girl is around here somewhere—there she is.” General Haines nodded to a short figure in ISWA dress greens, which entailed skirts which were, Jole understood, not as uncomfortable in this heat as trousers and boots. She stood awkwardly on the other side of the garden gripping an untasted drink. “I had to explain to her that a last-minute personal invitation from the Vicereine did, actually, outrank her afternoon’s filing.”
“Good. They only met in passing the other day. Did you present her yet?”
“A while ago. She seemed a tad tongue-tied.”
“Well, Cordelia will get her over that in due course. See she gets home to base as well, please; I have an, uh…unscheduled conference scheduled with the Vicereine after this.”
Haines nodded, giving the girl a calculating glance. “How’s she working out for you?”
Jole shrugged. “All right so far. She’s keen, and it’s clear she picked up a little Vorbarr Sultana polish on her last rotation—or maybe that’s her Vor blood talking, there.” He hesitated, considering. “When it comes to divvying up resources and personnel, Sergyar command has always been third in line for everything.”
Haines sighed. “I’ve figured that out.”
“Komarr command always gets first pick, on the theory that they’ll be the hot seat if there is one, and Home Fleet is a close second. They arm-wrestle all the time over the best men. We get what’s left. What’s left, it turns out, are a lot of the best women. Send us more, I’d say.” He added after a prudent moment, “No, you can’t filch this one.”
Haines snorted, but gave up mentally filling his vacant org chart. Jole gave him a cordial nod and moved off, stalking-horse fashion, to give anyone who wanted a shot at him their chance. It was frequently the fastest way to find what he was looking for, provided that he was looking for trouble.
“Ah, Admiral Jole!” a voice hailed him. Jole fixed an affable smile on his face and turned.
The incumbent civilian mayor of Kareenburg and one of his councilman stirrup-riders approached him. Observing this, his two front-running opponents in the upcoming civic elections also closed in. They all gave each other wary, familiar nods.
“So glad to have caught you,” said Mayor Yerkes. “Tell me, is the rumor true that you plan to close the base next year?”
“Certainly not, sir,” said Jole. “I don’t know how these stories get started—do you?”
Yerkes ignored this slight conversational speed bump. “The activity among the civilian contractors must indicate something.”
“It’s no secret that His Imperial Majesty has granted permission to open a second base,” said Jole smoothly, thinking, Now that the General Staff has finally fought the appropriation through the Council of Counts. Possibly the closest most of them had come to a shooting war in Vorbarr Sultana for some years. “A single downside base has always been insufficient for defensive depth, not only in case of attack, but in the event of a natural disaster. The late Viceroy Vorkosigan had urged this expansion practically from the moment he set foot on Sergyar. You may be certain his widow will see his vision realized.”
“Yes, but where?” put in Madame Moreau.
“That issue is still being discussed.” Actually, it was down to a coin toss between Gridgrad or New Hassadar. Personally, Jole hankered for both, but he wasn’t going to get them—certainly not simultaneously. The choice of final site was still a secret closely held, to limit the burst of financial speculation that would inevitably follow its disclosure.
“You must know more.”
“I wouldn’t say that, ma’am.”
Mayor Yerkes gave him a look of amused frustration. Moreau and her co-challenger, Kuznetsov, just looked frustrated. In assorted ways, Kareenburg’s downside military base was still the largest economic entity in the area, though now being edged out by the expanding government offices and the busy civilian shuttleport acting as entrepôt for the steady stream of new colonists. In any case, after a few more probing questions, the trio coasted off to test their luck with Haines. A futile effort, but Jole couldn’t blame them for trying.
Lieutenant Vorinnis, who had spotted him just before he’d been surrounded by the anxious mayoral candidates, angled over to him. “Sir. General Haines said I should accompany him, sir…?”
“Quite right, Lieutenant.”
The girl visibly relaxed. Jole inquired lightly, “So, what did you think of the Vicereine, now you’ve had a chance to exchange a few more words?”
“She wasn’t as scary as I thought.” Though Vorinnis said this as if she were still unsure. “I know she’s a grandmother, but she doesn’t seem very…grandmotherish. As if she’s ignoring the categories.”
Jole smiled. “She’s always done that,” he conceded. “But you should have met her before…” Before half her light was extinguished.
“Not much chance of that, sir.”
“No, I suppose not.” He glanced out over the top of her dress beret. “Heads-up; we’re about to get Cetagandans.” She wheeled to follow his nod.
Despite his ghem-lord status, the Cetagandan consul in Kareenburg conformed to local, casual styles—shirt and trousers which, while doubtless comfortable, somehow managed to look about five times more expensive than what anyone else wore. His cultural attaché was unfortunately stuck, like Haines, in dress unsuitable for the sunny afternoon, dark with a heavy over-robe. Also ghem, he came complete with his clan’s formal face paint: blue and green swirls slashed with gold in an ornate pattern, giving him a vaguely subaqueous air. A lesser ghem in a lesser venue would usually make do these days with a small colored decal on the cheekbone, as, indeed, the consul himself had, appropriately to his garb. The overdressed attaché was either a nervous novice, or had been oddly unadvised by his superiors. The consul, who’d finally noted Jole’s arrival, spoke a word in his subordinate’s ear and guided him in Jole’s direction.
As the two ghem lords sidled around the other guests toward him, Jole ran a mental review of the current disposition of everything moving upside, but as of the morning report all was quiet and routine. The multi-jump wormhole link to the nearest of the Cetagandan Empire’s eight primary worlds, Rho Ceta, had its terminus on the route between Komarr and Sergyar, closer to the former; therefore in a position to cut the route and the Barrayaran Empire off from Sergyar and everything that lay beyond it on that side. Which was why Komarr command held the jump-points militarily for several empty systems in, handing off about three-fourths of the way to the Rho Cetan command doing the same for their side.
The last overtly hostile move in force that the Cetagandans had made in that quarter had been over forty years ago, in the second year of Aral’s regency for the young Emperor Gregor. On the heels of Vordarian’s Pretendership—an attempted palace coup on Barrayar that had nearly brought down Aral’s shaky new government—Cetaganda had sought to wrest away conquered Komarr and newly discovered Sergyar from Barrayaran hands. The attack force never made it through the chain of jump-points doggedly held by the Barrayaran Admiral Kanzian, soon backed in turn by reinforcements led by Aral himself. Aral had then returned home to an awkward combination of a hero’s welcome and a local uprising on Komarr.
According to Aral, it had been the Cetagandan plan for all three events to occur simultaneously. Such a pile-up might have overwhelmed even him, but the Pretendership had ended abruptly many months before anyone could have predicted, and the restive Komarrans, whose agenda hadn’t actually included exchanging a Barrayaran occupation for a Cetagandan one despite their willingness to accept aid, had been divided and laggard. So Aral had been able to take on his crises one at a time instead of all together. It had made for a hellish few years, Jole gathered. But Cetaganda hadn’t tried again through that route.
And Aral and Cordelia’s private tragedy of their soltoxin-crippled young son Miles had been running along in constant counterpoint with all of that, Jole realized anew. His own prospect of parenthood made this a less distanced and more disturbing thought.
“Ah, Admiral Jole, how good to see you here,” said the Cetagandan consul, a minor lord by the name of ghem Navitt. “May I take this opportunity to present to you our new cultural attaché, Mikos ghem Soren?”
Jole exchanged greetings with the young consulate officer, who eyed his casual civilian dress in faint doubt, delicately conveyed by some slant of posture. Jole introduced Lieutenant Vorinnis in turn, who regarded the tall ghem lord with the stiff dubiousness of a cat told off to make friends with a dog. Ghem Soren’s precisely gradated half-bow in return was almost as dubious. The Cetagandan military service also had a women’s auxiliary, with long-running traditions of its own, but they were almost all commoners, un-gene-modified Cetagandans.
The Vor were a warrior caste, historically. The ghem were that as well, but had a more complex social genesis, as half-commoner half-haut in-betweeners—better than the one but never good enough to be the other. This endogenous inferiority complex tended to make the ghem touchingly twitchy about status. The Vor as a class had their own traumas, in Jole’s opinion mostly self-inflicted, but covert fears of genetic mediocrity were not usually among them.
The face paint and Cetagandan gene-mods would have made ghem Soren’s age hard for a Barrayaran eye to judge, but Jole had the advantage of an ImpSec dossier forwarded last week, standard evaluation for all such postings. The attaché was thirty, young for his position among the long-lived Cetagandans. On the make? Silly question. If he was a ghem lord and breathing, he was ambitious.
“Welcome to Sergyar, Lord ghem Soren. I trust you will find it an enjoyable posting.”
“Thank you, sir. My only regret is that I was assigned too late to meet the legendary Admiral Vorkosigan.”
Jole nodded shortly. “It was a privilege to know him.”
“Your Emperor must sorely miss him, and his strategic expertise.”
And hadn’t Jole had this probing conversation a hundred times before, with assorted galactic observers in the wake of Aral’s death. “Missing him, truly, but not his expertise. He was a great teacher as well as a great man, and fostered many younger Barrayarans in his vision and skills. He was my professional mentor for over twenty years, so I can testify to this from personal experience.” Decode that, you Cetagandan puppy. There are damn few officers in the Service more steeped in Aral’s training than me, and I’m sitting guard on your wormhole outlet, right. Don’t even think of trying anything. Jole went on smoothly, “And, of course, I still enjoy the benefit of Vicereine Vorkosigan’s wide experience and wisdom. We work together very closely. You may find your tour here on Sergyar under her aegis to be edifying in many unexpected ways.”
“I shall hope so, sir.” Ghem Soren glanced around. “Her garden is nearly worthy of the work of our ghem ladies.”
It’s better, ghem-boy, and you know it. The Cetagandans made art as much an arena of genetic competition as sport—or war. “So kind of you to say so. It is certainly one of her delights. By all means, tell her just that. It will amuse her no end.” Jole extended a faux-helpful finger. “Ah—I’m afraid your face paint is running, my lord. The heat here is not kind to formal attire. You may wish to duck into the lav and adjust it before she sees it, though of course the Vicereine would never say a word…”
The young ghem, to Jole’s amusement, flinched and raised a hand to his gaudy face. Vorinnis’s eyes widened just slightly, though she suppressed any other expression. The consul, spying the Vicereine across the garden temporarily unsurrounded, more adroitly closed out the conversation with a few stock diplomatic phrases, and towed his newbie subordinate away.
Vorinnis remarked, “I’d never met a ghem-lord face-to-face before, not in full colors. Though I saw a few on the streets in Vorbarr Sultana, around the embassy quarter.”
Jole smiled. “Small, helpful criticisms delivered in a tone of sweet concern usually serve to counter the worst of their inbred obnoxiousness.”
“Saw that, sir.”
He added, after a moment’s reflection, “If no such happy opportunity presents itself, praising the superiority of the haut, which no ghem will ever be, can be made to serve almost as well.”
They both watched obliquely as ghem Soren sidled discreetly into the garden’s guest lav, a kiosk whose mundane function was camouflaged by a well-placed riot of plants and vines. Vorinnis’s lip curled slightly. “Would mentioning Barrayaran victories over the ghem also work?”
“If done subtly. Subtlety counts. In Admiral Vorkosigan’s train, of course, we never had to say it out loud.”
“Can’t get much more subtle than that, I guess.”
“It certainly worked, in its day.” Though we’ll have to find something else from now on.
Vor women were not historically warriors, despite a thousand songs and tales of young women disguising themselves as boys and following their brothers/lovers/husbands/vengeful hearts into battle. Some of the stories were even true, uncovered in the hospital or morgue tents of the day. The end of the Time of Isolation and the introduction of galactic-style induction physicals had put paid to that era. But Vor women were more usually praised as the mothers of warriors.
Not that this didn’t sometimes entail war as well, as left-at-home Vor ladies were compelled to heroically defend the keep, or tragically fail to. There had been a famous Countess Vorinnis from the heart of the Bloody Centuries who’d mocked her besiegers, who were holding her children hostage, by standing on the battlements, flipping up her skirts, and bending over to shout down through her spread knees for them to do their worst, as they could see she could get more children where those had come from! The siege had failed and the children had survived, but Jole couldn’t help reflecting that the family dynamics of that generation must have been boggling to witness, from a safe distance. One of these days, he would have to ask the present Vorinnis if she was a direct descendant.
The party herd was finally thinning out. Yes! Everyone leave, dammit! I want the Vicereine now! Jole sent Vorinnis back to Haines, sipped another fake cocktail, and tried not to jitter while waiting for his chance.