Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (6 page)

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
.”