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 being 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.”
Her smile slid sideways. “Well…no reason to go actively hunting for trouble, either, eh?”
He had to laugh a little.
“Try it,” she challenged, absurdly forthright as usual. “Next time you’re all gossiping around the water cooler, or whatever you fellows do on base or upside. For my fiftieth birthday, I’ve decided to have a son, or whatever. All right, maybe the younger lads won’t understand, but most of the older officers are parents themselves. You may find out you’ve joined a club you never knew existed. Ask them for advice—that’ll win them over in a hurry.”
That last was a convincing argument, to be sure. But he managed, austerely, “Soldiers of the Imperium do not gossip. We just exchange mission-critical information.”
She snickered. “Right. All your fellows gossip like washerwomen.”
He grinned back, his heart lightened, though he could not say exactly how. “Except with more bragging and lies, pretty much, yeah.”
He became aware that he was standing very close to her, in the cool-warm shade of the concealing sack-walls, his arm out propping him almost over her. When at this rare range it always vaguely surprised him to rediscover that, though a tallish woman, she was shorter than himself. The air was very quiet, not even the distant boom or whine of one of the orbital shuttles taking off or landing. They might have been a hundred kilometers away from anyone, out in the rugged volcanic hills somewhere. Picnicking, perhaps. Now, there was an idea for a weekend retreat…
The scents trapped on the still air teased his senses—light sweat, her hair, the perfume of her soap, the dry dust of the plascrete. He became conscious of her lips, as she regarded him with a quizzical half smile, face tipped up, and that she had gone quite still, and what did that mean? He also became aware that a certain witless part of his body was earnestly suggesting that backing up the Vicereine to a wall of plascrete sacks and doing her standing would be a delightful addition to both their afternoons.
Hell you say. I’m not putting you in charge of anything to do with the Vicereine ever.
How long did that bloody Betan nasal spray last, anyway?
He shook himself out of his temporary hypnosis and took an abrupt step backward. Did she just catch her breath? He had to, though he trusted he concealed it. “Well!” he said brightly. “Supper, Your Excellency?”
She did not, immediately, push off from the wall. Her chin tucked. Her smile didn’t thin, exactly, it just became a little stiffer—the nice smile she used for the holovids, not for him. “If you say so, Oliver. Lead on.”