Lois Bujold - Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

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 .