“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?”