Chapter Three
The diplomatic reception seemed to drag on unduly, but at last Cordelia was able to hand over the task of gently expelling the more inebriated lesser guests to her personal assistants, and the cleanup to her very competent house staff, and motion Oliver after her. When he’d appeared so unexpectedly, hesitating on the walkway, he’d looked as tall and cool as ever, but a faint panicked light in his blue eyes had put her oddly in mind of a cat that had just had an inadvertent ride in a dryer. She led off into the garden to her favorite private nook, made a visual check for displaced diplomats, and flung herself down on the comfortable chaise, kicking off her shoes and letting out her breath with a whoosh. “Glad that’s over. Oh, my feet.”
Smiling, Oliver seated himself in the nearby wicker chair. “I remember how Aral used to rub them for you, after these ordeals.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, resting for a moment in a memory that didn’t hurt too much. She looked up in sudden hope, but he didn’t follow this observation with, say, an offer to do the same. She sat up, crossed her legs, and rubbed her own feet, instead.
She continued, “I saw you making the rounds—thanks. How was your hit count, this party? Should we search your pockets for hotel room keys, love notes on napkins, or ladies’ underwear?” In his days as Aral’s handsome aide, the receptacles of his uniform had been a source of several interesting surprises after similar events, even when he’d sworn that no one had come close enough to touch him.
“It was only mystery lingerie the once,” he protested in amused indignation. But added after a moment’s reflection, “All right, twice, but it was in a bar on Tau Ceti and we were all drunk. Both a permanent puzzle—you’d think they’d at least have thought to write their comcode on the crotch or something. Did they expect me to search for them like Cinderella?” He mimed holding up a pair of slender undies, with a look of canine hope.
Cordelia emitted a peal of laughter. It felt good. “Or send ImpSec to do it for you.”
“ImpSec actually did get handed anything I couldn’t certainly identify. I sometimes imagined I might uncover a glamorous Cetagandan spy hatching a dastardly plot, but it never turned out to be that interesting.”
Cordelia rubbed the grin from her mouth. “Oh, well.” She sat back again. “So, how did you get along with Dr. Tan?”
He shrugged. “He was very civil. And enthusiastic. And appallingly Betan.”
“Was that a good point or a bad point?”
“Just a point, I think. It was…a stranger experience than I’d expected.” He seemed about to say more, but then shook his head and visibly changed tacks. “I left him with what he persisted in calling my sample. As if my gonads were a bakery case. The next step, if my gametes don’t all turn out to be croakers…well, the next step is coming up very quickly.”
“Do you know what it will be?”
“More or less. That is, I know the question, but not the answer. I have to decide whether to freeze my sample now, and push everything off for later, or go ahead with the fertilizations. Which leads to the next decision in turn, which is whether to freeze all the zygotes—embryos?—whichever, or start one of them. Or more than one, I suppose.”
“Miles, when he was contemplating this technology for my future grandchildren, wanted to start twelve at once and do them all in one efficient batch. Like growing his own platoon, I gather. I offered to take turns with Ekaterin holding his head under water till he had a better idea, but as it turned out, she didn’t need my help. Wonderful girl, my daughter-in-law. I still don’t know what he did to deserve her.”
Oliver chuckled. “From what I’ve seen of Miles, I can just picture that. But no, no Jole platoons. Or squads, even.”
“You could hire help. I’m certainly planning to.”
“I’ll have to, presumably. I don’t see how else…You’re not starting all six of your girls at once, are you?”
“No, no! Though I have been studying up on optimum family age distributions. As nearly as I can tell, there isn’t one. Or there are several, depending on what one wants.”
“When will you decide?”
“I already have, at least step one. I told Tan to go ahead with all six fertilizations. That’s in process—done, actually. Another few days to finish the cross-checks against genetic defects, and effect any necessary repairs, and then five will go into the freezer and the sixth into the oven, so to speak. And nine months from now, Aurelia will be…my problem.” Her lips curved up. “It’s a little frightening, but really, she can’t possibly be more of a challenge than Miles was.”
Oliver nodded in wry acknowledgment of this. “The more I learn about your first year on Barrayar, the more amazed I am that you stayed.”
“I’d burnt my Betan bridges pretty thoroughly at the time, right after the Escobar war. But yes. In less than, what, the course of eighteen months, I’d met Aral—here, right on this planet, which I’d discovered, and which would be a Betan daughter colony right now if your fellows hadn’t got here a year earlier—helped him put down a military mutiny, escaped, got sent right back into the war against Barrayar, been a POW, went home, left home—fled it, I suppose. Found Aral, married him, both of us planning nothing more strenuous than to be retired in the backcountry and raise a pack of kids. And I very stupidly plunged into my one and only pregnancy. Then Emperor Ezar tossed him—both of us—into the damned regency. Then the first assassination attempt—did I ever tell you about that one? Sonic grenade, missed. And the second—which didn’t—the soltoxin gas grenade disaster. Then the emergency C-section, and Miles plunked into a scrounged uterine replicator by an utterly inexperienced surgeon—I swear that man was more scared than I was—and then the Pretender’s War, and all that mess. We finally decanted Miles in the spring, so damaged, poor tyke, and of course old Count Piotr went off like another grenade in that horrible fight about it with Aral, which ended with them not speaking for the next five years, and…and that was my first year on Barrayar, yes. No wonder I was exhausted.” She leaned her head back against the cushion and exhaled noisily. “But that was my secret evil selfish plan, when I came to Aral. We were going to have six kids together. It would have been terribly antisocial on Beta, with its strict population controls. He was always…Aral always knew, of course. That that had been my dream, shattered by events. And regretted that he couldn’t—give me what I’d given up so much to obtain. That was why we froze the gametes, when we had a breather.”
“He’d always planned to give you more children, then.”
“Say rather, hoped. We’d both pretty much given up on planning, by then. It never worked out.” She blinked. “Still didn’t. And yet…here we are. Forty years late. But here, by damn.” She scrubbed a hand through her unruly hair. “So what do you want? Really want, not just think is most prudent. Or worse, think is what I want.”
“I think…” Oliver hesitated once more, then went on, “I think I want to place my genetic bet, as you put it. Go ahead with the assemblage and the fertilizations, all of them.”
“Stake your claim on the future?”
“Or at least get past to the next stage of fretting. I’m already tired of this one. Or if it turns out not to work—” He broke off that sentence partway.
Did he mean to say, Be done with it? “You still wouldn’t be done with choosing. Since you’d have the option of purchasing some other enucleated eggshells. Or there are a couple of alternate techniques for assembling zygotes, a bit trickier.”
He rubbed a hand over his brow. “Hadn’t thought of that. This keeps getting more tangled.”
“Not indefinitely. If nothing else, the arrival of actual children replaces theory with practice. And time to fret with…lack of time to breathe, sometimes.”
“The voice of experience?”
“A database of one does not give me infinite expertise, alas. A fact that ought to give me pause, but I’m done waiting for this.”
Light footsteps; Frieda poked her head around the shrubbery. “Do you need anything, milady? Sir?”
Cordelia considered. “A real drink, I think. Not the apple juice and water. Glass of the white, if it’s not all put away by now. Oliver?”
“My usual, thank you, Frieda.” The servant nodded and went off. At Cordelia’s raised brows he added, “Still on duty tonight. Or I’d like nothing better than to sit here with you and get sotted till midnight. Unfortunately, that only gives the illusion of solving one’s problems.”
She said apologetically, “Didn’t mean to give you a problem, Oliver. Meant to give you a gift.”
He snorted. “You knew precisely what you were doing.”
She scratched her neck and grimaced. “Which actually does bring me to the next thing. If you tell Tan to go ahead with the fertilizations, next thing you do, before you so much as set foot in a shuttle again for your next upside rotation, is sit down and do the next-of-kin directive. Or destruction directive. Tan will give you the right forms—the clinic keeps them on file for every zygote in their possession.”
“The…what directive?”
“Zygotes are different legal entities than gametes. Gametes are property, part of your own body that happens to no longer be in it. Zygotes are a lawsuit waiting to happen. Inheritance issues, you know. From the moment of fertilization, even if you choose to freeze them all but especially if you choose to start one in a replicator, somebody needs to know where your kids, or potential kids, will end up if you go up in a ball of light, or, or slip in the shower, or whatever.”
Oliver frowned. “That’s right. You told me once that your own father died in a shuttle accident. Not an example chosen at random, Cordelia?”
She shrugged. “I still ride shuttles.”
“I…um. No, I hadn’t got that far in my thinking, I confess. Whom did you select? Miles, I expect?”
“By default, yes. But also by design. I’m not totally happy with it—if I’d wanted my girls to be raised on Barrayar, I’d be doing this there, not here. I should add—if you were to fail to make a proper directive, their default guardian would be whoever is your next-of-kin. Which is who?”
He looked rather taken aback. “My mother, I suppose. Or my eldest brother.”
“Can you picture them raising your orphaned children?”
“Mine? Maybe. At a stretch. Aral’s…” His face twisted up in a hard-to-interpret grimace. “If I’d had a traditional Barrayaran marriage, with children, I suppose I must have—well, wait, no. There might have been my hypothetical wife’s family to fall back on. Um.”
Cordelia rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Let me ask you another question, then. Where do—did you—think your career is going in the next ten years? Where are you going?”
His brows flicked up. He said in a cautious voice, “Do I take from all this that you mean to retire on Sergyar? Stay here as a permanent colonist?”
“It is my planet…You understand, all of this is new thinking, since my life was cleaved in half three years ago. Before…before, I’d planned to go back to Barrayar, to the Vorkosigan’s District with Aral when he retired at last, to a medically supported, galactic-style very old age. His father, leathery old bastard that he was, lived into his late nineties with less help. Somehow in my head I thought Aral, with his new heart and all, would certainly do better. A hundred and ten at least. And then, one goddamn burst intracranial artery later, I was twenty-six years ahead of myself.” She shrugged sharply. “Plans. Never any good.”
His hand went out to her, but fell back. “Yeah.”
He was quiet for a long time; Frieda came back, distributed the drinks, and left them again, glancing curiously over her shoulder.
“My twice-twenty years is coming up in a decade,” he began again at last. “I’d never planned to go for a three-times-twenty. I was going to start to think about my retirement, my second career, whatever, in, oh, another six or seven years, maybe. Where I would be, then…well, I’m in the Service. It’s not all up to me. As you have just pointed out, even being alive tomorrow is not up to me.”
She looked away. “Aral once spoke of offering you a job in his district, after we went home. Actually, your pick of several. He had plans, you see.”
“Ah.” Oliver took a swallow of his non-drink. “I expect I could have gone for that.” He continued after a moment, “I’ve no strong personal ties on Barrayar. My family and I were close enough before I left for the Academy at age eighteen, but since then we’ve all grown further and further apart. My home town was always enough for them. It…wasn’t, for me. My father died—you remember—just before I was assigned to Sergyar. My mother has lived with my sister for years. My district has developed—last time I was back, everything I remembered fondly from my childhood was changed, built over. Gone. Sergyar…is starting to look pretty good to me, really.” His clear glance flicked up to her. “Would you be willing to stand godmother to me in this? Because…at least they’d be with their half-siblings. Slightly more than half-siblings.”
“Entirely willing,” she assured him. “Note that the center’ll want a few more in-case-of options, in descending order of choice, so your family needn’t be excluded altogether.”
“Can one revise the directive, later?”
“Oh, yes. They suggest you review it yearly.”
“Hm. Sensible enough.”
She sipped more wine, put down her glass on the little table, drummed her fingers on the chaise arm. “If you were to—if you ever decide to—muster out on Sergyar, would you be willing to make that reciprocal?”
His eyes flashed up at her, startled. “What, before Miles?”
“Before Barrayar, at least.”
His lips pursed. “But…you’d be dead. I can’t—that’s not—I have trouble imagining that.” Except, by the troubled look on his face, he was. He blinked suddenly. “Wait. You’re not just talking frozen embryos here, are you.”
“Not after next week, no.”
He blew out his breath. “That is possibly the most terrifying responsibility anyone has ever offered me. Not excepting ship command or being the last man standing between the Prime Minister and anything coming at him.” He blinked some more. “Pretty damned flattering, Cordelia. Are you in your right mind?”
She smiled crookedly. “Who knows? That’s a hypothetical for now, note.”
“Noted. But still…” He didn’t say still what.
He did glance at his chrono, and scowled. “Blast. I have to get moving. I still have to go back to base and change. Who knew when I signed up for the space service that I would spend so much time arm-wrestling with contractors? Concrete by the kiloton. But my shuttles have to have somewhere to land.” He drained his drink and stood looking down at her, somewhat limply draped on the chaise. “Cordelia…” He hesitated.
“Hm?”
He seemed to swallow. Blurted, “Would you like to go sailing again sometime?”
She sat up, surprised. Aral had taught him to sail, back in his twenties, and to enjoy the sport. She had actually preferred sailing with Oliver, as she’d been less likely to end up having an unscheduled swim due to a certain person’s addiction to pushing his envelopes. The memory made her catch her breath, and blink rapidly. “I haven’t been out on the water since…forever. I’d love it. I think I could clear my schedule, yes.” She paused, confused. “Wait. Didn’t you say you’d sold your boat last year?”
“I’ll find something. If you can pry out the time.”
“For this, I’ll pry it out with a chisel. Sounds delightful. Excellent, in fact.” She wallowed around on the chaise and held out her hand. “Help me up,” she commanded.
A funny look crossed his face, but he leaned over, grabbed her hand, and civilly heaved. She found her feet, and her shoes, and walked him back to the house, where they parted company. You that way; we this way. But not for long, she reflected comfortably.
* * *
It was another three days before Jole had time to catch up with the Vicereine. He lured her out to the base with an offer of dinner at the officers’ mess, no special treat, and a chance to avoid Komarrans bearing pitches, which evidently was. At any rate, as he led her across the back shuttle runway toward the base’s far side, both of them squinting in the slanting sun, she was still going on about it.
“Anything that would affect my patch?” he inquired of this complaint, as they trudged across the edge of the tarmac. In the distance, the mountain’s gouged-out side wavered in the reflected heat.
“Not directly. It’s the usual—they want to institute extra planetary voting shares for persons making special material or investment contributions to the advancement of the colony, just like at home in their domes. Persons, coincidentally, who mostly would happen to be themselves. My counter-suggestion that we just grant everyone ten inalienable voting shares by moving the decimal point over was nixed by my advisors on the grounds that I would be perceived as mocking them. Which I would be. I would prefer to derail any move on a referendum before it gets rolling, though.”
“Surely allowing a referendum would be safe. Everyone who is not them would vote against it, right?”
“Possibly not. Enough optimistic people might be swayed by the statistically unlikely idea that they could be among the few to benefit to go along with it. Face it, one doesn’t up stakes and travel out to Sergyar to take on the work involved here without a certain innate optimism.” She amended as they strolled along, “Except for the Old Russian speakers, who are naturally gloomy at all times, as nearly as I can tell.”
Jole’s lips curled up. “I think I can promise you that the subjects of your nascent local democracy experiments will not pursue you onto my Imperial base.”
“You lie, but I don’t care…” She stared, nonplussed, as they arrived at their destination and stopped.
“And what do you see here, Cordelia?” Jole gestured broadly around at the two-meter-high stacks of sacks confronting them. The stacks sat in turn on pallets arrayed out for dozens of meters in all directions, like a large-scale model of some geological feature, badlands dotted with mesas and channeled by ravines, except more regular. Zigzagging semi-randomly, Jole led her to the center of the maze.
“Many, many bags of stuff. Not belonging to me, I point out prudently.”
“Delivered by the contractor months early—that should have been our first clue—”
“A contractor, early? Really? Already your tale begins to resemble some drunken hallucination.”
He nodded glumly. “Although I haven’t started drinking yet. It was to be the plas mixer for the new runways on the second base, at—is it decided yet?”
“Gridgrad.” She wrinkled her nose. “The residents may want to give that village a new name after this hits, but that, happily, will not be my problem. Unless they try to name it after Aral and make me come out and give another damned speech.”
A good near-equatorial location, like Kareenburg, to the net energy benefit of shuttles striking for orbit. Jole was satisfied. At least with that aspect. The fact that the site was a tenth of the way around the planet…“And yet we are far from Gridgrad. Both in terms of time and distance. The earliest projection for starting the dig on the runway foundation was at least another year. Year and a half, realistically.”
“And yet, I am failing to see the problem. The matrix mix would have had to be hauled from here to there sometime, yes?” She poked doubtfully at a bulging bag. “Unless someone starts a new materials manufacturing plant at Gridgrad awfully soon, which is not a proposal that has yet crossed my desk. Though I expect one will, in due course.”
Jole shook his head. “The latest high-tech materials innovation, this. Very strong when set, yet resilient under repeated massive impacts, such as landing shuttles. Allowing the engineers to use half the volume and weight, and therefore cost, even at a higher price per ton. Per thousand-ton, for this sort of application.”
She raised her brows at him, in standard Cordelia-challenge. “It’s plascrete. Lasts for centuries, right? And it’s not as if you’re suffering for storage space. You have square kilometers of empty base, if you want them, Imperially reserved for future barracks and runways. Though I should probably warn you, some Kareenburg developers are already starting to eye them covetously.”
“Lasts only after it’s mixed and set.” Jole made another broad gesture. “The terms you are missing are ‘latest,’ ‘high-tech,’ and ‘innovation.’ The ingredients of the old-style plascrete are indeed remarkably durable. This crap, however, while lovely when fresh, undergoes chemical deterioration if not mixed with its activator and placed by its best-by date. Which is less than a year from now. How long the manufacturer had this sitting around in their yard is anyone’s guess, but it’s been a while.”
“Plascrete with planned obsolescence,” she said, in a tone of wry admiration. “Who knew?”
“Not, unfortunately, the quartermaster officer who let it onto the base last week. Rattled, perhaps, by all the delivery vehicles blocking the main gate, he signed off on the loads without running them past the engineers. The first problem being, of course, that it was not supposed to be delivered here at all, but rather, at Gridgrad-to-be-disclosed.”
“So they not only shift their dodgy stock, they duck a stiff extra delivery expense. Nice.”
“And the base accounting department, who also didn’t check with the engineers, but only came out and counted the sacks to be sure they matched the invoice, was seized with a burst of unprecedented efficiency and paid the bill.”
“A recoverable glitch, surely. The misdelivery address alone should put you on solid legal ground. Make them come and take it back, and recoup your credit. Aral would have.”
“Aral would have threatened to make them eat it—and made them believe him.” Jole paused in brief retrospective envy of a command style that had always seemed beyond his touch, or at least his acting abilities. Aral’s trick had been that it was no trick. “I already have. Well, not the eat-it part. They claim that such a move would bankrupt their business—leaving them unable to deliver next year. And no other vendor to replace them, not for those volumes. I sent one of my more forensically inclined procurement fellows to check out that assertion, and he claims that it’s true.”
Cordelia’s brow wrinkled. “Those fellows—Plas-Dan, isn’t it?—you’d think they’d know better than to piss in the bucket they’re trying to drink from.”
Jole grinned at Aral’s old plaint about politics. Not one of his public utterances, to Jole’s regret. “You would, yet here we are. And—civilian colonists. Belonging, therefore, to you—Your Excellency. A word in your private ear, as it were.” His thoughts veered a bit—her private ears nestled coyly in her wild hair, when he studied them from this distance. Different somehow from when she’d worn her hair long, weighted down by its own mass or aristocratically bound back and adorned with live flowers.
Her face twisted up in expressive dismay. “Dammit, I knew you lied.…Do you want me to look into Plas-Dan, see if I can turn up some better handle on them?”
“It’s worth a go. Without endangering next year’s supply of plascrete, if you please.”
“Right-oh…” She scowled around at their fortress of moldering solitude. “Is this why you brought me out here, sort of a do-it-yourself cone-of-silence without the cone-of-silence alerting everyone that we were talking secrets? Not that it wasn’t a pleasant-enough walk.”
The afternoon was warmer than the one of her garden party, the air even brighter, as the sun slanted gold. Did her feet hurt, after him making her march out to the far backside of the base? He glanced at her shoes, which seemed sensible enough. For about the eleventh time since then, he regretted not volunteering to rub her toes when they had been so invitingly bared to him, but he had still been off-balance from his trip to the rep center, and what would she have thought of so arrogant an offer, anyway? That had been Aral’s place.
“Yes…no. Not only that,” he admitted. Not that at all. Was Plas-Dan merely convenient camouflage, the first he could grab off the shelf? Although setting Cordelia on them did seem the next logical step. “I had an unrelated personal addendum.”
She leaned against the stack, crossed her arms under her breasts, and smiled at him. “You always have claim on my ear for those.”
He took a breath. “After we talked the other day, I went ahead and ordered Tan to complete the fertilizations.”
“Congratulations! You’re almost a father, then. I’m guessing you went with freezing the zygotes, till you work through your career decisions, though?”
“Yes, in fact. Anyway, that’s what I told Tan when he called with the update this morning. It wasn’t that. It was…one of the four didn’t make it, Tan said. Normal attrition for this stage, he said.”
She hesitated, then gave a conceding nod. “I’d started out with twenty eggs, brought from Barrayar. Half of them failed, for one subtle reason or another. Biology at that micro-level is trickier than most people realize. And more cruel.”
And his added one more to that loss. Will you always be ahead of me, Cordelia? “Yes, Tan was very willing to explain all the details, boiled down for the layperson, I gather. Molecular biology never having been my forte. It wasn’t the mechanics. It was…”
She waited, still leaning relaxed against the shadowed sack-wall but, he thought, keenly alert. In your own time, Mister Jole.
He stared down at his regulation shoes. “Two weeks ago, none of this was even part of my mental furniture in any way. One week ago, I was simply…unnerved, I guess. Boggled. But that quartet of shadow-sons took root in my mind so fast. I was thinking, only the one. And then we’d see. Then two, because there’s this assumption that a boy ought to have a brother, although I’m not so sure mine appreciated me. And then, but what if…How can I be, already by today, how could I be…” He trailed off, not so much tongue-tied as baffled by his own churning thoughts.
“Mourning for a lost dream-child?”
He nodded. “Something like that.” It wasn’t what he’d expected of himself. When he’d blurted to Tan to begin, some part of his mind had been arguing—hoping?—that they might all fail, and then this test would be over. Resetting his life to zero. Ending the suspense. Soonest begun, soonest done. But then, when he’d been handed a part of that dark wish…had he any right to call it grief? He glanced up at her. “And no one on this world I could talk with about it except you. Which is really why we are out here. To tell you the truth.” Finally.
She sucked on her lower lip, and scuffed her shod toe in the red dirt. “You know, Oliver…I wonder if you aren’t being ambushed by your own habits a bit, here. None of this is anything illegal, or immoral, or scandalous, or anything but good for the future of Sergyar. Or likely to bring an Imperial government crashing down. That painstaking discretion is all from the past, now, along with the reasons for it. You went down to the rep center and bought a donated egg or three. Lots of people do. You can talk about it with anyone, really.”
“Easier said than done, and you know why.”
“If you’re wincing at the thought of criticism from people with their heads still stuck in the Time of Isolation, or more fundamental places—even though the T-oh-I was over before any of them were born—well…if you want to play What would Aral do? you know he’d have said Publish and be damned, or choicer words.” She blinked thoughtfully. “Grant you, that attitude always terrified his younger advisors, once he finally got old enough to have younger advisors. The older men, who remembered what he’d been like raging around Vorbarr Sultana in that bad patch in his twenties after his first wife died so brutally…would have been unsurprised at anything. But of course, the youngsters didn’t talk to the old sticks if they could possibly avoid it, so they mostly never had their illusions shattered.” He wondered if she was thinking of her son Miles. She looked up, her gray eyes urgent and earnest. “Oliver, you are all right. This is all right. This is the new Sergyar, not the old Barrayar. No one is going to try to assassinate anyone over it in a fit of vicarious outrage, really.”
“And yet even you say, anonymously donated egg.”
Her smile slid sideways. “Well…no reason to go actively hunting for trouble, either, eh?”
He had to laugh a little.
“Try it,” she challenged, absurdly forthright as usual. “Next time you’re all gossiping around the water cooler, or whatever you fellows do on base or upside. For my fiftieth birthday, I’ve decided to have a son, or whatever. All right, maybe the younger lads won’t understand, but most of the older officers are parents themselves. You may find out you’ve joined a club you never knew existed. Ask them for advice—that’ll win them over in a hurry.”
That last was a convincing argument, to be sure. But he managed, austerely, “Soldiers of the Imperium do not gossip. We just exchange mission-critical information.”
She snickered. “Right. All your fellows gossip like washerwomen.”
He grinned back, his heart lightened, though he could not say exactly how. “Except with more bragging and lies, pretty much, yeah.”
He became aware that he was standing very close to her, in the cool-warm shade of the concealing sack-walls, his arm out propping him almost over her. When at this rare range it always vaguely surprised him to rediscover that, though a tallish woman, she was shorter than himself. The air was very quiet, not even the distant boom or whine of one of the orbital shuttles taking off or landing. They might have been a hundred kilometers away from anyone, out in the rugged volcanic hills somewhere. Picnicking, perhaps. Now, there was an idea for a weekend retreat…
The scents trapped on the still air teased his senses—light sweat, her hair, the perfume of her soap, the dry dust of the plascrete. He became conscious of her lips, as she regarded him with a quizzical half smile, face tipped up, and that she had gone quite still, and what did that mean? He also became aware that a certain witless part of his body was earnestly suggesting that backing up the Vicereine to a wall of plascrete sacks and doing her standing would be a delightful addition to both their afternoons.
Hell you say. I’m not putting you in charge of anything to do with the Vicereine ever.
How long did that bloody Betan nasal spray last, anyway?
He shook himself out of his temporary hypnosis and took an abrupt step backward. Did she just catch her breath? He had to, though he trusted he concealed it. “Well!” he said brightly. “Supper, Your Excellency?”
She did not, immediately, push off from the wall. Her chin tucked. Her smile didn’t thin, exactly, it just became a little stiffer—the nice smile she used for the holovids, not for him. “If you say so, Oliver. Lead on.”
He almost offered her his arm, but hesitated too long; she was already striding off. He followed.
I have to find a boat. Somehow.
* * *
As they walked back toward the building housing the officers’ mess, Cordelia suppressed a scowl. She had been very nearly certain Oliver had been about to kiss her. And she had been very nearly certain that she would like it. She had before, on certain special occasions…
Don’t be stupid, woman. You know he prefers men. She’d known that for decades.
Do I? In that case, why hadn’t he found himself one, in the past three years? Not in those first few shell-shocked months, no. But she knew that he collected passes from both sexes—and the rare visiting herm—she’d seen that both back in their Vorbarr Sultana period, and since he’d been assigned to Sergyar Command. Oliver had been awkward at ducking them in his first days, absorbed in learning his new tasks as the overworked aide to one of the most high-powered men on the planet, and then there had followed that amusing period when he’d been so caught up in Aral that barely anyone else seemed to register. But in time, he’d become as deft at giving off silent don’t try me vibes as any virtuously faithful Vor matron. As had she, she supposed, but given that she was Aral’s wife, very few men who weren’t obviously insane had ever bothered her with unwanted advances. Although her own social obliviousness had doubtless also helped smooth things over. Any whose futile hopes she could not depress herself, she could send ImpSec to hand on a clue to. Word like that got around.
Which suggested that she, too, might be out of practice at this sort of thing, except that she had never been in practice in the first place. She’d been thirty-three years old, a Betan Astronomical Survey commander, in a situation as unconducive to romance as any she could imagine, when Aral had, ha, fallen in love on her—her lips curved up again at the memory of Oliver’s extremely apt turn of phrase, melting her urge to scowl—and her life had never been the same again.
She considered Oliver’s confidence—the real one, not the Plas-Dan smokescreen. He was, she realized belatedly, trying to process a sort of technological miscarriage, without the words or even the concepts for it. No way to package the experience for himself at all. Would it help if she suggested he name the lost zygote? Volunteer to aid him in burning a Barrayaran death-offering? Or would that be too intrusive? Offensive? Or just incomprehensible? No, not that—she had not mistaken the bewildered pain in his voice. Maybe just being his good listener was enough. The one friend he could talk to. Damn. I meant to give you a gift of joy, not…this.
The base officers’ mess was divided into two sections, an efficient cafeteria downstairs for the people in a hurry, and a somewhat less utilitarian dining room upstairs, with wide windows looking out over the shuttleport. The food all came out of the same kitchen, merely being plated and served more nicely up here. She and Aral had eaten many working meals with the military staff in this mess, when colony concerns had taken them onto the base, usually in one of the smaller private rooms off either end of the main one. Today Oliver simply guided her to a table by the windows. Heads turned as they passed. The service was instantly attentive, certainly. Happily, the enlisted server was one of the older hands, undaunted by his Admiral and the Vicereine.
Discussions of what were, Cordelia suspected, only going to be the first of several thousand other practical issues involving the impact of the new base carried them through the salad and the main course. Oliver was clearly amused by her not-at-all secret hope that the boost to the Gridgrad settlement by this huge infusion of military money and construction people would shift the center of colonization away from Kareenburg’s why-for-the-love-of-logic semi-desert ecosystem—not to mention the active tectonic boundary and not-actually-dead volcanoes—to the much more salubrious, well-watered, and geologically stable zone around Gridgrad.
“This place was never picked for a colony site in the first place,” she argued. “It was picked because the caves in what is now Mount Thera made a dandy cache to hide an invasion fleet’s worth of supplies from people like, well, passing Betan Astronomical Survey vessels, while the old war party scraped together that insanely stupid Escobar conquest scheme. Grant you, the caves did work exactly as hoped, I’ll give old Emperor Ezar’s bloodthirsty cutthroats that much credit.”
Oliver held up his hands palm-out in nondisagreement—he’d heard this rant from her before. A motion by the table that was not their server bearing dessert caught her eye, and she stopped in mid-spate to look around. Oliver’s aide, Lieutenant Vorinnis, presented herself, and Cordelia’s heart caught with the fear that it might be some crisis, soothed when the girl offered a hesitant, even hangdog, salute.
“Admiral Jole, sir. Good evening, Your Excellency.” A respectful motion in Cordelia’s direction that was neither salute nor bow nor curtsey—more of a bob. “My apologies for interrupting”—a glance at their empty plates indicated hope that she was not too ill-timed—“but I received this…this thing, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I showed it to Colonel Martin, but she didn’t know either, so she said I should ask you, sir, because you’d probably know all about this kind of stuff. And someone said they saw you come up here, and—well, here.”
She thrust out her hand, holding a stiff, colored-paper envelope in a style Cordelia recognized, but hadn’t expected to see in this place. Oliver, too, recognized it, his brows rising as he took it for closer examination. “Well, well. What have we here, Lieutenant?”
“I think it says it’s an invitation to a party at the Cetagandan consulate. Although the wording’s a little…oblique. From Lord ghem Soren. Supposedly.” She said this in a voice of gruff suspicion.
“Well, that it is. Addressed to you personally, I see, no mistake there. Hand-calligraphed, too, as is right and proper for a rising young ghem. Someone made him practice, once. Assuming he didn’t panic and pay someone more expert to do the task for him, which would be considered terribly déclassé if he were caught at it. Paper hand-made, good touch, though doubtless purchased.” He ran the card extracted from within delicately under his nose, and sniffed.
Cordelia sat back, beginning to be amused. “What else can you determine?”
“Cinnamon, rose, and gardenia, I think. Not terribly subtle, but perhaps he was making allowances for the recipient, which suggests a certain effort at diplomatic courtesy. Or perhaps even straightforwardness, perish the thought. See what you make of it, Cordelia.” He handed the card and its envelope across to her.
“A fellow shouldn’t be drenching letters in perfume, should he?” asked Vorinnis uneasily. “Or are all their consulate invitations like that?”
“You’ve heard of the language of flowers, Lieutenant?” asked Cordelia.
The girl’s rather straight and thick eyebrows lowered. “Wasn’t that some Time of Isolation custom? Different flowers would have different meanings. Red roses for love, white lilies for grief, that sort of cra—thing?”
“That’s right,” said Oliver. “Well, Cetagandan ghem culture, when it’s at home, doesn’t just stop at flowers. Objects, artistic choices and their juxtapositions, flowers—naturally—scents, you name it. All convey coded messages.”
“Should I take this to Base Security, then? I wondered.”
“Ah—coded social messages, usually,” Oliver clarified. “The things the ghem say with plasma cannons tend to be more direct. I’m sure it pains their sense of aesthetics.”
“Oh. Aesthetics,” said Vorinnis. Her tone conveyed uncoded dubiousness.
Oliver went on, “So the elements you need to observe to deconstruct this will be the choices of paper, ink, the particular style of the calligraphy, wording—extra points for obscure poetic references—the method of delivery—which was what, by the way?”
“I think somebody handed it in at the gate, and it went by base mail after that.”
“I see.”
The girl craned her neck at the paper still in Cordelia’s hand. “So what does it say? Convey.”
“Well, to start with, it is in the correct form, which indicates some baseline of respect, personal or professional,” Oliver began.
“Or a basic ability to follow the instructions in an etiquette manual,” Cordelia put in. “Which is not a point against the boy, mind you.”
She handed it back across, and Oliver turned it over once more. He said, “The paper itself is relatively neutral, the colors of envelope and card blend pleasingly enough, so there is no covert hostility. Calligraphy style is formal, not familiar, but not official. The scents, however…heh.”
“What?” Vorinnis did not quite wail.
Cordelia put in, “Cinnamon for warmth, which is supposed to give a hint how to construe the other odors blended in. Roses—for once, even the Cetagandans follow the old Earth traditions—love, lust, or friendship, depending on the color of the rose.”
“How can you tell the color of a rose from its scent?” said Vorinnis.
“Cetagandans can,” said Oliver. “So can a lot of other people, with a little training. It’s not a superpower.”
“And—oh, dear, I forget gardenia. Oliver? Help us out.”
“Hope,” he intoned, blue eyes crinkling just a tiny bit, though he kept his face perfectly straight. “Lord ghem Soren is asking you for a date, Lieutenant. He hopes you will accept.” He handed the papers back to the girl.
She accepted them, her face scrunching up in unfeigned bewilderment. “Good grief, why?”
Cordelia’s brow wrinkled at this. It didn’t sound as though it boded well for either the ghem lord or the Vor lieutenant. She wasn’t sure whether to wince or sit back and watch the show. For now, she sat back.
“Well, the ghem are very competitive,” said Oliver. “I know very little of this one yet, but as a general rule you may guess that he either wants to show you up, or show you off.”
Vorinnis’s face stayed scrunched. “I’m not sure I follow that, sir.”
Oliver rubbed his lips, meditatively. “Alternatively, I observe that a cultural attaché is often an unofficial spy. What slicker way to keep tabs on the competition’s boss than to date his secretary?”
Vorinnis drew herself up in offense. “Sir! I would never!”
“I didn’t suggest that you would, Lieutenant.”
“That could cut both ways, of course,” Cordelia put in. “Is there any disinformation you want to feed the Cetagandan consulate this week, Oliver?”
The lieutenant grew less stiff, considering this wrinkle.
“Not especially. You?”
“Not offhand. I’d have to think about it.”
“But what should I do about this, sir?” said Vorinnis, waving her…prospective love letter? Bait? Cetagandans, not to mention run-of-the-mill, un-gene-modified humans, could also lie with flowers, after all.
“We are not at war with Cetaganda, nor even, at the moment, in an especially tense diplomatic phase.”
Not by Oliver’s standards, certainly, Cordelia reflected.
“I’d say you are free to accept or decline as you wish, Lieutenant.”
“Although should you wish to decline in an especially cutting fashion, I’m sure Admiral Jole can direct you to some useful reference materials,” Cordelia put in.
“Oh, there’s an entire manual for military support staff to diplomatic outposts in the Cetagandan Empire, to which I call your attention just as general background reading, Lieutenant. Although I don’t recommend trying that route unless one is expert. Shows far too flattering an interest, you see.” He added after a moment, “Also, it’s very long and detailed.”
“Have you read it, sir?”
“I had to nearly memorize the damned thing, when I became aide to the Prime Minister. It ended up being relevant much sooner than I’d anticipated. Hegen Hub War, after all.”
“I see, sir.” Vorinnis was getting a very thoughtful look, under her lowering brows. “So you’re saying this could be, um…career development? Know your enemy?”
“Admiral Vorkosigan’s motto might as well have been Know Everything. No one could, but in his train, it wasn’t for lack of trying. I’ve brought the obvious cautions to your attention, and I expect you understand them. I think you can manage the rest.”
“Sir. Uh, thank you, sir. Ma’am. For your time.” She returned an uncertain, if faintly bucked-up, smile, and a parting salute, and trailed away, turning her letter over once more.
Cordelia removed her hand from her mouth as soon as she could decently contain her grin. “Oliver, you were encouraging that poor girl.”
“Hey, that’s my job as a mentor. Alternatively, I might have been having mercy on that poor sod of a ghem lord.”
“I am not at all sure that aiming a Vorinnis at him qualifies as a merciful gesture.”
“Well, presumably, we will find out. At least, I hope she debriefs to me, later.”
“I want all the gossip if she does. Oh, my.”
“Should we meet by the town fountain with scrub brushes?”
“I’ll bring my dirty laundry if you’ll bring yours.”
He made an amused face. “I am not following that metaphor out any farther, thanks.” Fortunately, the arrival of dessert relieved him of the necessity. But he glanced up toward where the girl had gone, and his slight smile became a slight snicker.
“Share the joke?” prodded Cordelia.
“Her redolent letter just reminded me of an Aral-story. Oh, God, should I tell this one? I may be the only living witness.”
“And if you drop dead, it’ll vanish out of the historical record? Tell, Oliver.” It couldn’t be one of the hard ones, if it was making him smirk like that.
“Tell you, maybe. I can’t imagine sharing it with Vorinnis. Or anyone else, really.” He swallowed a bite of sherbet. “Right, so…in the aftermath of the Hegen Hub war, we spent a good deal of time stuck up in Vervain orbit. While young Gregor was downside wooing the Vervani to such good effect, Aral and I were sorting through the details—beating out the six-way cease-and-desist-fire and peace agreements. There was this one obnoxious Cetagandan envoy who seemed to imagine they could still jerk us around even though they had just lost. They would send all these hand-calligraphed notes, very formal and faux-respectful, which of course some poor sod then had to transcribe—”
“That sod being yourself?”
“Frequently, yes. For the, ah, hotter ones, at least. So we had a spate of these, each one smellier than the last—up to twelve scents at once, we had to send them down to the lab for chemical analysis to be sure, sometimes—most of which, if interpreted in the correct order, which for some reason he didn’t think we could do, worked out to assorted deadly insults. Aral was getting more and more impatient with this ghem ass, and as I was trying to decode the most recent, he finally said, ‘Just give me the damned thing,’ twitched it out of my hands, and took it into the lav. Where he proceeded to amend it with, er, his own personal scent mark.”
Cordelia muffled a cackle with her napkin, turning it into a dainty choke. “I see.” And she could, oh, she just could. Pissed off, indeed.
“‘They shouldn’t have any difficulty interpreting this reply,’ he said. And stuffed it back into its envelope as-was and had me hand-carry it back to the Cetagandan flagship. The envoy’s expression as he figured it out was one of the joys of my young life to date. I could just see his face drain, even under all the paint.”
“Oh, my. And then what happened?”
“Envoy didn’t say a word. But evidently, Aral was right about them taking the point. That twit vanished out of the delegation, and our next missive was much more conciliatory. And, er, odorless.”
“You’re right, I never heard this one.”
“Oh, that exchange so didn’t go into the official records. On either side, as far as I know. I thought it was perfect, although I suppose you had to have been there for all the aggravating lead-up to really understand the full impact. It did bring home to me that Aral was a man who would do anything for Barrayar. Without limit.”
“That…is true.”
“Aral wasn’t the least ashamed of the gesture—it certainly worked to put the wind up the Cetas—but I do think he was a little ashamed of losing his temper, later.”
“Ah, yes. He had a thing about that.” Aral-stories, Cordelia thought. Slowly, that massive, complex presence was being reduced to Aral-stories. “I hate having to give public speeches about him,” she sighed. “Each neat little squared-up box of words, with all the messy bits cut off because they don’t fit, seems to make him smaller and simpler. Turning the man that was into the icon that they want.”
“Maybe the icon that they need?”
She shook her head. “I think they’d be better off to get used to dealing with the truth, myself.”
He grimaced. “There were a lot of silences that seemed a burden to me at the time…”
She nodded understanding of what he was not saying.
“—but damn if I’m not glad I don’t have to give those speeches.”
“Aye.”