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.”
“Ha. Remind me to tell you about the Betan herm merchanter I once met when I was out on my third escort tour. Without your tutoring, I’d have missed…well, an extraordinary week.” He looked, for just a second, salaciously cheerful in his apparently fond memory. It wasn’t a look she’d surprised on him for quite some time. It was no mystery why they’d both been getting through on zombie-pilot, these past three years; but she wondered when it had become a habit.
“I’m glad you were over your, er, shyness by the time you came to us again on Sergyar.”
“The extra years and the captaincy under my belt probably helped.”
“Something had, certainly.” She bent her head, ambiguously but amiably. Silence fell between them, not unduly strained.
He twisted the stem of his wineglass; looked up at her directly. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it. Or simple.”
“It never has before; I have no idea why it should start now.”
His laugh was low, but real.
They lingered only a little longer, reverting to talking shop—Chaos Colony made sure that they never ran out of shop—and then rose together. He did not offer his arm, although he might have done so here unexceptionably enough, and she did not walk too close. He helped her into her groundcar, brought round to the front; as it pulled away she twisted and studied him through the canopy, striding off to his own vehicle. He did wheel and give her a bemused little wave as her car turned into the street. His hand, falling again, touched his breast pocket in passing.
Cordelia was conscious of a twinge of frustration on Oliver’s behalf, mostly because he never seemed to muster it for himself. Dammit, if there was ever a man who deserved to be loved…But if he’d made any connections since Aral’s death, he hadn’t confided them to her, not that he was under any obligation to do so. Her attempts at Barrayaran-style matchmaking had been extremely hit-or-miss over her lifetime, or she’d be tempted to try to help him somehow. But Oliver was…complicated. Which was why I broached this to him in the first place, she reminded herself.
His tall, solitary figure was lost to her sight as her car rounded the next corner.
Chapter Two
Jole arrived twenty minutes early for his appointment with Dr. Tan at the rep center, and then couldn’t make himself step inside. He walked up and down the side street, instead.
Kareenburg actually had side streets now, some thirty-five or forty years, depending on how one counted it, after its founding. Barrayar’s first imprint on its new colony world had been a military base and shuttleport half-sheltered by a volcanic mountain that had blown out its side in some ancient cataclysm, standing sentinel with a string of sisters upon a wide plain. The pictures Jole had seen of earliest Kareenburg depicted a mud street lined with repurposed, and in some cases doubtless stolen, old military field shelters, as the base slowly upgraded from its first primitive incarnation. Like any up-sprung village serving a fortress on Old Earth or on Barrayar going back to the Time of Isolation, it had run heavily to such services as bars and brothels, but with the arrival of the first legitimate civilian colonists and a string of Imperial viceroys, government functions had slowly taken over the space, and the livelier aspects of the settlement had relocated. Historical redaction had cut in with amazing speed, and those grubby early days were well on their way to being rewritten mainly as a setting for romantic adventure stories.
The hottest local political argument at the moment, and for the last ten years, was the transfer of the capital to some more selectively chosen region of the continent or one of the five others, resisted fiercely by those with major speculative investments in the present site. The Vicereine had dozens of scientific surveys on her side in favor of relocation, but Jole suspected she might be fighting one of her few losing battles with inertia and human nature. In the meanwhile, the racket of new construction extended and entrenched the proto-city in all directions.
These ruminations brought Jole around again to the doors of what the sign proclaimed as Kareenburg Reproductive and Obstetrical Services. Kayross for short, the intimidating polysyllables tamed and made friendly by the nickname. The building was not one of the old field shelters, but instead purpose-built, in a utilitarian mode that spoke of constrained budgets, as a clinic—if not this clinic, which had taken over the premises more recently.
I can do this. I can do anything. Hadn’t Aral Vorkosigan taught him that? Jole took a breath and pushed inside.
…But, as he stepped into the queue at the reception counter, he was nonetheless glad he was wearing his anonymous casual civvies, and not his rank-heavy undress greens. Not that Imperial uniforms were an unusual sight on Kareenburg’s streets. There were several people in line ahead of him—another man, a woman, and a couple, whose heads all swung around to observe him in turn—and he wasn’t sure whether to be glad he had company, or to wish them all to oblivion. They were all sent to wait on uncomfortable-looking seats lining the side of the room, but when Jole stated his name, the receptionist jumped up, saying in a far-too-carrying voice, “Oh, yes, Admiral Jole! The Vicereine told us to expect you. Dr. Tan is right this way,” and ushered him through a door into a short corridor, which had the faint chemical-and-disinfectant smell of every med clinic he’d ever unhappily encountered. So maybe it was some visceral memory of old pain and injury that was making him edgy? No, probably not.
She led him first into a room containing several comconsole desks, half of them manned by intent staffers and displaying dauntingly dense data readouts, or gaudy tangles that he guessed were molecular maps. The various colors and cuts of lab coats might proclaim different functions, ranks, and responsibilities, just as Imperial uniforms and insignia did, but this wasn’t a code to which he had the key. And there were a lot more personal touches—plants, toys, holocubes, souvenirs. The clothing under the coats was anything but uniform, including a couple of young people wearing what were clearly Betan sarongs and sandals, though it was less clear if they were actually Betans. The coffee mugs, at least, were familiar.
The receptionist delivered him to the desk of a slight, dark-haired young man in a light blue coat that went to his knees, though he was wearing Sergyaran-style trousers and a shirt underneath.
“Dr. Tan, Admiral Jole is here.”
“Ah, excellent! Just a sec…” He flung up a finger and finished whatever he had been about at his comconsole, shut down the baffling display of vibrant light lines, then stood up to offer Jole a firm handshake and a smile. The receptionist flitted away.
Dr. Tan was tan, and very healthy-looking, though his features were hard to map to any particular Earth ancestry—unlike Barrayar’s population, lost and isolated for six hundred years and only rediscovered a century ago, the Betans had been using gene cleaning and rearranging for generations, which meant anyone’s ancestors could be anything. “How do you do, Admiral? Welcome to Kayross. I’m so glad you came in. Any friend of the Vicereine’s is a friend of ours, I assure you!”