Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (13 page)

He made a little throwaway gesture. “Well…to tell you the truth…you.”

Her brows rose. “What have I done?”

“Nothing.”

“Huh? Should I have?” Her mental review of tasks she might have left unaddressed was derailed by his firm headshake.

“Not at all.”

She stared at him, nonplussed. He twisted uncomfortably in his wooden chair. She drank more tea. He drank more tea.

He rose to throw another log onto the fire, sat, and started again: “You haven’t found anyone, after. I mean, on the personal side. For yourself. Lately, I mean. I know not earlier, you don’t have to explain that to me.”

I haven’t what?
It took her a moment to unravel this one. He meant a…lover, partner, bed-friend, spouse? Something in that general direction, anyway. “Oh. Good heavens, no. Never even thought about it. It’s just not…never made it to my to-do list, no. And where would I find
time
?”

“There is that.” He gave a conceding head-duck.

She blinked at him. “Yourself?”

“What? No!” He hesitated. “That is to say…not. Not been looking.”

She frowned. “Would you like to?”

“I’d thought not. At first, you know.” She nodded. He went on, “But lately…I’ve been thinking. New thoughts. You know.”

She didn’t know, but she was willing to try to catch up. After all, this was
Oliver
, whose happiness she certainly valued, possibly more than anyone’s outside her own family. She ran a quick mental review, but she couldn’t think of anyone that she’d noticed, young officers or diplomatic fellows or any worthy-enough man he’d be likely to run across in Kareenburg, who’d been doing the old flag-down-Oliver dance around him. Lately. Not that she’d been noticing a whole lot, lately. “That sounds good. That sounds like…recovery, actually.”
The real kind
.

The head-tilt this time suggested this was a fresh thought, and not an entirely comfortable one. “Eh…maybe.” His stare at her was becoming beseeching.

Sorry, my telepathy is on the fritz today, kiddo
. Wait. Could it be that he feared she would think less of him for this desire to move on?

“Have you found someone who looks likely? Oliver, I think that would be a fine thing for you. But you don’t have to ask me for
permission
, you know!” She sat up straight, considering. “And certainly, Aral—and if you have any such silly qualms, I’m telling you flat out right now—Aral would have wanted you to find happiness, too. He always did.”

Among the many secret doubts Barrayar’s Great Man had confided to her over the years, as he’d confided to no one else—because after a certain point of history, nobody’d wanted to let him down off the bloody pedestal they’d erected under him and allow him to be so scarily human as to admit doubts—was a fear that their intense and abiding relationship might have been impeding Oliver in some way, professionally or personally. That Aral had diverted him from some more proper or better destiny. Well, better, anyway. Almost anything would have been more proper, by Barrayaran standards.
And many others
, she admitted ruefully. Betans generally wouldn’t have blinked at the gender thing, but the age and rank disparity would have made them choke sand. She’d been pretty alarmed herself, at first.

A not-disagreeing head-jerk from Oliver; good, she wouldn’t have to pound that bit of sense into him. But it was followed by another ambiguous hand wave that indicated she hadn’t got to whatever was eating him even yet. There were many less entertaining ways to beguile a rainy hour than to play guessing games with Oliver about his emotions—and what
was
it about Barrayaran males that made them so, so, so…
Barrayaran
about such things?—but it would make it a lot easier if he would just be more
frank
.

So what was he trying to say? That he’d spotted a potential heartthrob, but it wasn’t going well? How could it possibly not go well? Unless he’d set his eye on someone especially difficult, and he’d certainly experienced at least one life-model about how to manage the difficult. This was baffling.

She sat back, crossed her arms, pursed her lips, and studied him. His chin came up in unconscious response to the challenge, and what a fine chin it had always been. “You know, it occurs to me—belatedly—have you actually had any
practice
at seducing people?”

His eyes widened, then narrowed back down. “Certainly! I’m hardly asexual, Cordelia!”

“I didn’t suggest that! You have to be one of the least asexual people I’ve ever met. Much to the puzzlement, I have no doubt, of those who have flung themselves so futilely at you over the years, poor sods. And odds.” Definitely both odds and sods. “But I was thinking, rather—as opposed to just triaging people trying to seduce
you
?”

His mouth opened indignantly. Then closed. Then pressed closed. Then opened a cautious mite to murmur, “That’s…an alternate view. I suppose it might, ah—did it look like that to you?”

“I saw one success, many misfires, and for the rest of the time, you were out of range on your trade-fleet convoy tours. Where I gather you were not needlessly monogamous?”

“Uh, no, but…I don’t think I’m
picky
, but there were also many work considerations. Especially after I acquired my captaincy.”

He would have been very conscientious about those, likely. And the shifting fleet duty did not lend itself to anything long term. “So—what is it that you’d
like
to have?”

He sat back and crossed his own arms. And rather bit out: “Vorkosigans. Apparently. Although it seems too narrow a taste to be evolutionarily likely.”

She sighed.
I miss Aral bitterly, too
. “Can’t fault you for that one. But what is it you would like that you can
have
? Or can you say?”

“I seem surprisingly unable to articulate it, today.”

She waved a hand. “Well, then, let’s try tackling the problem from the other end for a bit. Try imagining your ideal partner. Or fling, even. A fellow, I presume? Age, physical type, emotional style, anything? Name, rank, serial number…? I mean—this could be mission-critical information, you know.”

He was beginning to be balefully amused by her, judging by the expression on his face, but he just shook his head as if in disbelief. Although he added, “You know…after Aral, I did think it was men, but I’d had girlfriends before that. Not many, but there were one or two I’d imagined might be my end-game. Other things happened instead. And then there was that herm. Remarkable person in its own right, Captain Thorne, but do you know—the best thing about that fling was that for one whole week, I could
stop worrying about my damned categories
.” He blinked and frowned, as if this were a sudden new realization.

“Do you think you’re really bi, then? Like Aral?”

“I…it would make more sense than a kink for herms. It’s not as if I went out looking for more, after that.”

She tried another tack. “So…who was your first crush?”

This surprised a bark of laughter from him. “My
what
?”

“You mentioned kinks. Most people who have them, I mean really have them hardwired into their psyches, not just mild preferences, can identify their roots way back before puberty.”

He made a hair-clutching gesture, though he was still laughing. “Oh, God. This is turning into another one of those
Betan
conversations, isn’t it? Although I have to say, the herm was not so bad, as Betans went. Had the most
endless
fund of bizarre questions about Barrayar and Barrayarans, though.”

“But I want to
help
you, Oliver! If I can,” she amended. She couldn’t help adding aside, “Although I really want to hear more about that herm, sometime.”

“You just like salacious gossip.”

She smiled sunnily at being so profoundly understood. “Yes, but there are so very few people I can have it
with
.”

“I see.” He swallowed his tilted grin, and more tea.

“First crush,” she reminded him firmly.

“Aren’t there dogs with grips on a subject like this? Terriers, wasn’t it? What makes you think a man can even
remember
back that”—a slight hitch in his breath, a sudden weird look crossing his face—“far…”

“Do tell,” she prodded, settling back and preparing to be entertained.

“Mugged in Memory Lane. How did you know? Yes. Back in my district primary school, when all the other boys in my classes were giggling in excruciating puppy love over the pretty girl in the third row, I always suffered—and I use that word with some precision—the most devastating crushes on my
teachers
.” And added under his breath, “God, Oliver—who knew…?”

“Ah!” said Cordelia, feeling pleased. “I think I know about that one! An authority kink, Oliver. Or possibly a power kink.”
Good grief, no wonder he went for Aral
. “That…makes all kinds of sense, in retrospect.”

“To you, maybe.”

“Male or female teachers?”

“Uh…both. Actually. Now I think on it. Which I haven’t done. For years.” He gave her an accusing look, as if it were her fault.

“Well, many kinks are orthogonal to gender. You do realize there are more than three categories, all on one axis, for human sexual preferences, don’t you? I think you may just be suffering from a shortage of categories.”

“And here I thought I was plagued with too damned many. More than one
axis
? How do your Betans chart that—with imaginary numbers?”

“Probably. I mean, I don’t know that much about the professional sexuality therapists, but I do know they use some pretty complicated math. Anyway, I quite see that it gives you a built-in structural problem, as you rise in age and rank. At least with the kind of social and age pyramids Barrayar is running at present. You have fewer and fewer potentials in the shrinking pool of authorities above you. And if you aren’t moved by subordinates…?”

He shook his head quite firmly, though whether in agreement or disbelief she wasn’t just sure.

“Then that pretty much leaves you with the uninteresting, the unavailable, and the unappetizing. I mean, just passing the current General Staff, Council of Counts, and Council of Ministers under mental review, for example. Not to mention their dowager dragons.” She made a face, thinking of some of the more repellent derelicts of time in that opinionated crew.

His eyes crinkled in amused horror, evidently envisioning some of the same strong personalities. “Nightmarish! I agree with you there.”

She waved a didactic finger, growing firmer in her hypothesis and pleased with her own insight. She hadn’t lost her touch, eh? “There is nothing
whatsoever
wrong with you, Oliver. You just happen to find yourself in a target-poor environment at the moment, is all.”

“And yet the range is so short.”

“What?”

He set down his cup firmly on the plank tabletop. He then stood up, walked around the table to her side, grasped her chin, turned her face up, and bent to kiss her.

“
Blurf
…?” said Cordelia, her eyes springing wide. At this distance, he was blurred and double, and anyway, as he deepened the kiss his blue eyes closed. She felt her own lids squeezing shut in response, as her lips parted. He tasted like sun and rain and tea and Oliver. He tasted really
good
…

When they broke for breath after a minute…or two…or three, he murmured, “Ah, so
this
is how Aral diverted all those Betan data-spates.”

“I won’t say you’re wrong,” she muttered back into his smile, and then there followed a few moments of reshuffling that somehow ended up with her on his lap, the rickety chair creaking ominously under its doubled load, and a better angle for exploration that did not risk doing anything bad to his back.

A few…some…more minutes of this, and her eye was drawn as if by magnetism to the tidy bed, made up just a couple of meters away. Oliver followed her glance.

“There happens to be a bed here, I see,” Cordelia remarked.

“I see it, too. Noticed it first thing when we came in. Because an Imperial officer should always be observant.”

“It would probably be more comfortable than this chair. Which is making strange squeaky noises.” As was she, Cordelia supposed. “Not very wide, I admit.”

“Wider than the bottom of the boat, though.”

“Than what?”

“Never mind…”

The personnel transfer between vessels was accomplished without mishap, as Cordelia would have expected under Oliver’s command. The old bed also made squeaky noises, as they settled on its edge, but did not wobble so precariously.

On his next breath-break, Oliver hesitated and said, “God, I am so out of practice. Shouldn’t there be, like…three dates or something? For proper respect? Used to be. They keep changing the rules all the time. Damned kids.”

Cordelia blinked blurrily. “There was the docking bay welcome. And the garden party. And dinner at the officers’ mess. And sailing makes four, actually. Yeah, we’re good. More than good.”

“Ah. Very true.” Brightening, he closed in once more.

“And besides, all my ImpSec duennas are a hundred kilometers away in Kareenburg. How often does that happen?”

“Never waste,” wheezed Oliver, his mouth trailing down her neck, “a tactical opportunity.”

“Damn straight.”

But just before they abandoned the vertical for a better axis, Cordelia held up her hand and tapped her wristcom. Oliver gave her a dismayed look, but she shook her head.

“Rykov? Vorkosigan here. I’m diverting all my incoming calls to your wristcom.” She waved out the recode on the little holographic display. “Got it?”

“Yes, milady,” Rykov’s surprised voice came back.

“If anyone below the level of
Volcano
wants me, tell them I will be in conference with Admiral Jole for, for some unspecified period of time. No interruptions, please.”

“Right, milady. Understood.”

She wondered if he did. An observant man, Rykov, like all of Aral’s old sworn liegemen, but, like his brothers-in-arms, deeply discreet. They might need to have a long gossip later. Much later.

“Vorkosigan out,” Cordelia gasped, as Oliver did something shivery to her ear with his endlessly talented lips. The kiss that followed this up was as delicious as ever.