Lois Bujold - Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

“What, um…what does your son Miles think of this? Or his clone-brother Mark, for that matter?”

“I haven’t discussed it with them yet. Nor do I intend to, till after the fact. I won’t say, Not Miles’s business , but I will say, Not his decision .”

“Did you—or Aral—ever tell him about us? Does he know? I was never quite sure. That is, if he knew and accepted me, or if he just didn’t know.”

And the grueling state funeral, which had been the last time Oliver and her sons had crossed paths in person, had been no place to bring it up. “Ha. No. Speaking of exploding heads, Aral always spared Miles that. I never much agreed with that choice, but I have to admit it was simpler.”

He nodded relieved acceptance.

She regarded him a moment, and added, deliberately, “Aral was always so very proud of you. I hope you know that.”

His breath caught, and he looked away. Swallowed. Nodded shortly. It took him another few breaths, but he recovered his train of thought: “When you started to tell me about this, I thought perhaps you were going to ask me to stand as godfather or something—what’s that Betan term, co-parent?”

“A co-parent is legally, and usually genetically, the same as a parent—a godfather is more like the orphan’s legal guardian in the event of parental death. And yes, I’m going to have to give thought to my new will. Fortunately, I have access to the best lawyers on the planet. And so will you, in the event.”

“Aral Kosigan Jole…?” he muttered, as if he hadn’t heard this, though she knew he had.

“No one would blink,” she assured him. “Or Oliver Jole, Junior, or anything you like.”

“How could I…explain their mother? Or their lack of a mother?”

“Anonymously donated eggs purchased from the gamete bank, perfectly standard. Which isn’t even untrue. You hit fifty, and suddenly decided to have a child for your midlife crisis instead of a shiny red lightflyer, whatever.”

He swiped a hand through his tarnished gold hair, and laughed uncertainly. “I am beginning to think you are my midlife crisis, Cordelia.”

She shrugged, amused. “Shall I apologize?”

“Never.” The best smile tugged up his lips, despite his dismay.

No—they hadn’t seen enough of each other these past three years, had they. They’d merely swept past each other often. She and Oliver had both been running like hell for their work and other duties, frequently on different planets, or on opposite ends of a gravity well, and the last thing the widowed Vicereine, under intense scrutiny in her new solo position, possessed was any personal privacy. She envied Aral his cool former command of his privacy, in retrospect. And how his cloak of loyalties had stretched to cover them all.

She dug a card out of her pocket, scribbled a note on the back, and handed it across. “This is the doctor to see, if you decide to stop in at the rep center and leave a donation. My key Betan man, Dr. Tan. He’s been fully apprised. In your own time, Mister Jole.”

Jole took it gingerly, and read it closely. “I see.” His long fingers placed it in his shirt pocket with care, and touched it again as if to make sure. “This is an astounding gift. I would never have thought of it.”

“So I concluded.” She scrubbed her lips with her napkin. “Well, think about it now.”

“I doubt I’ll be able to think about anything else.” His smile tilted. “Thank you for not dropping this on me in the middle of a working day, by the way.”

She cast him a ghost of a salute.

His eyes grew warmer, intent upon her. “Huh…This makes it the second time that my life has been turned upside-down and sent in directions I’d never even imagined by a Vorkosigan. I might have known.”

“The first being, ah, when Aral fell in love with you?”

“Say, fell in love on me. It was like being hit by a falling building. Not a building falling over—a building falling from the sky.”

She grinned back. “I am familiar with the sensation.” She regarded him in reminded curiosity. “Aral talked to me about nearly everything—I was his only safe repository for that part of himself, till you came along—but he was always a bit cagey about how you two got started. The empire was at peace, Miles was safely locked up in the Academy, political tensions were at an all-time low—not that that lasted—I go off to visit my mother on Beta Colony leaving him in no worse straits than another of his unrequited silent crushes. I come back to find you two up and running and poor Illyan having a meltdown—it was like talking him in off a ledge.” Aral’s utterly loyal security chief had never come closer to, if not weeping with relief, at least cracking an expression, to find in her not an outraged spouse, but an unruffled ally. I knew Aral was bisexual when I married him. And he knew I was Betan. Melodrama was never an option, Illyan. “The only surprise was how you two ever got past all your Barrayaran inhibitions in the first place.”

A flash of old amusement crossed Jole’s always-expressive face. “Well—I’m afraid you’d think it was all more Barrayaran than Betan. It doubtless involved a lot less talking , which I cannot regret. The standard for declassification is still fifty years, isn’t it? That sounds about right to me.”

Cordelia snickered. “Never mind, then.”

Jole cocked his head in turn. “Did he have that many, er, silent crushes? Before me?”

“I ought to make you trade”—Jole made his own never mind, then , gesture, and Cordelia smiled—“but I’ll have pity. No, for all that the capital was awash with handsome officers, he more appreciated them as a man would a good sunset or a fine horse, abstractly. Intelligent officers, he recruited whenever he could, and if they happened to intersect the first set, well and good. Officers of extraordinary character—were always thinner on the ground. All three in one package—”

Jole made another fending gesture, which Cordelia brushed aside. “Oh, behave. The first time he ever saw you it was to pin that medal on you, wasn’t it? He’d already studied the reports of the orbital accident, in detail—he always did, for those honors—and all your prior records. If nothing else, you’d just saved the Emperor the trouble of replacing about a hundred very expensively trained men.” No wonder that Aral had recruited Jole as nearly on the spot as the paperwork and his physicians permitted. The other recruitment had come rather later.

Jole grimaced. “That always felt strange, to be cited for a set of actions I could barely remember. The hypoxia was cutting in badly by then. Not to mention the blood loss, I suppose. Or so my ImpMil physicians suggested, later. I could only think—but what if I had to do it again, and couldn’t remember how ?” His lips twisted up in belated amusement. “God, I was young, wasn’t I?”

“You were as old as you’d ever been. As were we all, I suppose.” After a moment, she added curiously, “Had you thought you were monosexual, before Aral?”

He shrugged. “If one doesn’t count experiments at age fourteen. I’d dated women, as much as my career up till then permitted, which wasn’t much. But things never quite clicked. After Aral, I thought I knew why.” He glanced up through those lashes at her. “I was quite terrified of you, at first. Thought my head was going to end up in a sack.”

“Yes, it took some time to talk you down, too.”

“And I found out what the Countess’s famous Betan conversations were all about. I’d never thought of myself as a naïve backcountry boy, till then.”

Cordelia chuckled. “On Beta Colony, we’d have had earrings for it. We could have bought them in any jewelry shop.”