“For natural conceptions, probably. Low sperm count, lots of cellular damage accumulated over his lifetime. But—technology. You only need one good gamete, if you can sort it.”
“Huh.”
“For reasons more political than either biological or technological, we never went back to that bank. But Aral made sure in his will that the samples’ ownership was mine absolutely, after his death. On this trip home for Winterfair and the annual Viceroy’s Report, I pulled them all. And brought them back to Sergyar with me. Those were what was in that freezer case I was—well, sitting on more like a mother hen than you knew.”
Oliver sat up, abruptly interested. “Posthumous children for Aral? Can you?”
“That’s what I needed the top Betan experts to determine. As it turns out, the answer is yes.”
“Huh! Now that Miles is Count Vorkosigan in his own right, with a son of his own, I suppose another son—brother?—would not present an inheritance issue…Uh—would they be legitimate, under Barrayaran law?”
Her elder son Miles, Cordelia reflected ruefully, was only eight years younger than Jole. “I actually plan to sidestep all those issues by conceiving only daughters. This takes advantage of one of the peculiarities of Barrayaran inheritance law in that they will all be, without question, mine alone. They will bear the very prole surname of Naismith. No claim on the Vorkosigan’s District or Vorkosigan estates. Nor vice versa.”
Oliver pursed his lips, frowning. “Aral…would have wanted to support them. To say the least.”
“I have been, and will be, setting aside the rather comfortable widow’s jointure due me as Dowager Countess Vorkosigan for that purpose. Since I have both my salary as Vicereine, at least for a while longer, and my own personal investments, mostly here on Sergyar, to support a private household quite adequately.”
“A while?” said Jole at once, pouncing upon a key point and looking alarmed. As she might have known he would.
“I never planned to remain as Vicereine till I died in harness,” she said gently. As Aral did, she did not say aloud. “I’m a Betan. I expect to live to a hundred and twenty or more. I have fed about as much of my life to Barrayar as I wish to. It’s time…” She drained her wineglass; Jole politely poured her more. “They say that a person should not make major life decisions or changes for at least a year after bereavement, due to having their brains scrambled, to the truth of which I can testify, except I’d make it two years.”
Jole nodded bleak agreement.
“I’ve been thinking about this from the night we buried him at Vorkosigan Surleau.” The night she’d cut all her waist-length hair, which Aral had always loved, nearly to the roots to lay in the burning brazier. Because the usual sacrificial lock had seemed absurdly inadequate. Not one of her fellow mourners had said a word in protest, nor asked one in question. She’d never worn it longer than its current finger-length, thereafter. “It will be three years next month. I think…this is what I truly want, and if I’m going to, it’s time. Betan or no, I am not getting any younger.”
“A person would take you for fifty,” offered Jole. His own age, very nearly. He actually meant it; he wasn’t just flattering her. Barrayarans.
“Only a Barrayaran. A galactic would know better.” She considered seventy-six. It…made no sense. Except that sometime in the past three years, she had switched from counting her years not up from birth, but back from death—a grab-bag of time not growing, but shrinking, use it or lose it.
The server arrived with their vat-chicken-and-strawberry salads and fancy breads, giving her a moment to muster her next push. Jole, to his credit, had not asked, Why are you telling me all this? but had taken it in as a simple—well, maybe not that simple—confidence from a friend. And by no means an unwelcome one. She took another sip of wine. Then a gulp of wine. She set down her glass.
“We didn’t have a large number of eggs to work with, once the substandard ones were filtered out. I took my share of damage over the years, too. But I think I can get as many as six girls, altogether.”
Jole huffed a laugh. “Well, Sergyar needs women.”
“And men. There were also a very few ova which might still be healthy as…I suppose you could say, enucleated eggshells. They will carry my mitochondrial DNA, anyway. And such enucleated ova are exactly what are used to host the same-sex IVF crosses.”
Jole stopped in mid-chew and stared at her, blue eyes going wide. His quickness of mind had always been one of his more endearing traits, she reflected.
“If you like—and you can take as long as you need to think about it—I would donate to you some of those enucleated eggs, and genetic material from Aral, and you could…you and Aral could have a son or sons of your own. I mention sons for legal, not biological reasons. With an X chromosome from Aral and a Y chromosome from yourself, the offspring would be unassailably legally yours. With no damned bloody lethal Vor hung on the front of their names, either.”
Jole swallowed his belated bite with the aid of a large gulp of his own wine. “This…sounds insane. At first blush.”
He was blushing a trifle, actually. Interesting. On him, of course, it looked good. But then, it always had. All the way down, as she recalled, and suppressed a smile. “On Beta Colony, it would be routine. Or Escobar, or Earth, or any of the advanced planets.” The normal planets, as Cordelia thought of them. “Or even Komarr, for heaven’s sake. This biotech trick was worked out centuries ago.”
“Yes, but not for us, not for…” He hesitated.
Not for Barrayar, did he mean to say? Or…not for me?
Instead he said, “So is this waste not, want not?”
“Just want.”
“How many…how many such eggs?”
“Four. Which does not guarantee four live births, I hope you realize. Or, in fact, any. But it’s four genetic lottery tickets, anyway.”
“How long have you been thinking about this, um…extraordinary offer?” He was still staring at her wide-eyed. “Did you already have it in mind when you docked, the other day?”
“No, only since my conference with Dr. Tan, three days ago. We were discussing what to do with the leftovers, which was the one question I’d never anticipated. He suggested I donate the eggshells to the clinic, which could use them, and if this doesn’t interest you, I probably will. But then I had a better idea.” She’d hardly slept that night, thinking about it. And then she’d given up on running in circles inside her head trying to second-guess herself, and just invited Oliver to lunch.
“I’d never thought—I’d given up all thought—of ever having children, you know,” he said. “There was my career, there was Aral, there was…what we three had. Which was more than I’d ever dreamed of having.”
“Yes. I’d thought you insufficiently imaginative.” She took a fortifying crunch of chicken salad. “Not to mention insufficiently greedy in the extreme.”
“How could I ever take care of…” he began, then cut himself off.
“Plenty of time to think about the practical details,” Cordelia assured him. “I just wanted to put the idea into your head.”
Oliver made a hair-clutching gesture, not quite jesting. “And explode it? You always did have that little sadistic streak, Cordelia.”
“Now, Oliver. Assertive, perhaps. As you may recall.”
From the way he choked on his next swallow of wine, he did. Good. But the next words out of his mouth were, unexpectedly, “Everard Piotr Jole?”