Gentleman Jole & The Red Queen: The Actual Review

[lannamichaels]

Or, not a real review, just basic stuff, and then the snippets I sent myself in e-mail to keep. I have had a no good, very bad, horrible day, and I gotta say, the back half of the book is pretty soothing in a way. The front part is All Aral/Jole Retcon, All The Time, and that's just terrible. Once it gets beyond that, I could pretend that Cordelia and Jole were simply old friends who decided to try to give it a go a few years after Aral died. And if that had been the book, it would have been perfectly fine. I wouldn't have nominated it for any awards or anything, but just some nice forgettable comfort fic, which some days is just exactly what you need.

Unfortunately, that was not this book.

And, frankly, the title of this book is so awesome. I feel a bit let down just on that part :P

Anyway, general stuff:
-I am still nowhere closer to having a "feel" for Cordelia's voice and being able to write her :(
-my opinion on Miles/Ekaterin has not changed in the least.

And now, since I kept reading after the second chapter only for things to use for other stuff, mostly-contextless snippets, with no citations. Some with comments, some not. This is not all the notable background things in the book, just the ones that caught my attention For Purposes.

• Jole is 3 years older than Gregor
  Vorinnis, pacing him, inquired, “Were you there, sir, when she brought back the Pretender’s head?”
  “I was eight, Lieutenant.”
  


• I'm not convinced Cordelia can wave a magic wand and make children of Aral Vorkosigan, born to him and his legally-married wife whom he never divorced (I kicked something around with Petya and eventually decided against including, where Barrayar had the concept of posthumous divorce, for solving Vorrish and related problems), with his permission given before his death, into not being Vorkosigans and with no claim on anything Vorkosigan. But, hey, good for you for trying, Cordelia. And, also, raising them on Sergyar, with limited trips to Barrayar, the social-aspect of Vor won't be in play, probably. Being Vorkosigans without being Vor! Piotr is rolling around in his grave so much, I approve.
  
  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 considered wryly, 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.”
  
  


• This is same as above. And also, I was a little unclear, based on the discussions with Miles later, on if, even if Jole doesn't use Aral's samples, by using Cordelia's, they are still Miles's half-siblings. When it was mentioned half-siblings later on, I really couldn't tell if it was meant to be on Aral's side or Cordelia's side. I *assume* it's meant Aral's side, with the samples from Cordelia not conveying sibling-ness? Idk.
  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.”
  
  
• Aral didn't discuss taking up with jole with Cordelia before doing it, and did it while Cordelia was on another planet.
  
  That is the exact text of what my e-mail to myself was before the quote in the previous entry. I stand by that. What a great start to a wonderful equal co-spousing arrangement!
  


• This one has time of isolation lasting 600 years. I think in previous book, it was 300? 600 makes more sense.
  unlike Barrayar’s population, lost and isolated for six hundred years and only rediscovered a century
  
  


• What the Cetagandan thing during the Regency was:
  The multi-jump wormhole link to the nearest of the Cetagandan Empire’s eight primary worlds, Rho Ceta, had its terminus on the route between Komarr and Sergyar, closer to the former; therefore in a position to cut the route and the Barrayaran Empire off from Sergyar and everything that lay beyond it on that side. Which was why Komarr command held the jump-points militarily for several empty systems in, handing off about three-fourths of the way to the Rho Cetan command doing the same for their side.
  
  The last overtly hostile move in force that the Cetagandans had made in that quarter had been over forty years ago, in the second year of Aral’s regency for the young Emperor Gregor. On the heels of Vordarian’s Pretendership-an attempted palace coup on Barrayar that had nearly brought down Aral’s shaky new government-Cetaganda had sought to wrest away conquered Komarr and newly discovered Sergyar from Barrayaran hands. The attack force never made it through the chain of jump-points doggedly held by the Barrayaran Admiral Kanzian, soon backed in turn by reinforcements led by Aral himself. Aral had then returned home to an awkward combination of a hero’s welcome and a local uprising on Komarr.
  
  According to Aral, it had been the Cetagandan plan for all three events to occur simultaneously. Such a pile-up might have overwhelmed even him, but the Pretendership had ended abruptly many months before anyone could have predicted, and the restive Komarrans, whose agenda hadn’t actually included exchanging a Barrayaran occupation for a Cetagandan one despite their willingness to accept aid, had been divided and laggard. So Aral had been able to take on his crises one at a time instead of all together. It had made for a hellish few years, Jole gathered. But Cetaganda hadn’t tried again through that route.
  
  


• Vorinnis district capital: Ouest Higgat. I wondered if my ebook was corrupted but a quick google around seems to indicate that if my ebook was bad, so were other ones.


• The nature of his work was a subtler problem. By oath, he owed the Emperor his time, his energy, his best efforts, and, if necessary, his life, all on an instant’s notice.
  


• Miles & family.
  
  Jole had not seen the Vorkosigan offspring in person for three years, when the squad had been smaller and he had been grimly distracted, but from viewing some of Cordelia’s vid messages he had no trouble sorting them out. Alex and Helen, a dark-haired boy and an auburn-haired girl, now about eleven years old; twins only by the shared date that their replicators had been opened. Elizabeth, eight, and Taura, five, more naturally, or at least more traditionally, spaced. Selig and Simone, another set of not-twins of identical ages, two-ish; the pair, the last of the planned family as Jole understood it, had been started very shortly after Aral’s funeral.
  
  


• CORDELIA, YOU WERE THERE. YOU WERE WITNESS TO IT. *never over it*
  
  Ekaterin still looked concerned. Given her natural reserve bordering on shyness, this wasn’t a surprise. Not for the first time, Cordelia wondered how such a woman had managed to marry a man so far outside her comfort zone.
  
  
• Some awesome wisdom from Piotr.
  “Grandfather once said to me, when I was upset about, God, I don’t even remember which one, ‘We’re Vorkosigans. If the charge isn’t at least murder or treason, it’s not worth rolling over in bed for.’ Then he thought a moment and changed it to, ‘Treason, anyway.’ And after another, ‘And sometimes not even then.’”
  
  Cordelia chuckled darkly. “That was old Piotr. I can just hear him. That was pretty much Aral’s perspective, too. Probably where he got it from. The only one that really made him angry was the Butcher-of-Komarr slur. The rest just made him tired.”
  
  


• Oh, hey, Miles finally finds some things out!
  
  “Some of those old slanders back in Vorbarr Sultana.”
  
  “That does not exactly narrow the field, love.”
  
  He inclined his head. “I suppose not.” He took a breath. “In particular, the ones about Ges Vorrutyer. And Da. When they were younger.”
  
  Huh. Not the one she’d just braced for, then. This was much older news than Oliver.
  
  “Thing is, I didn’t get this one just from people who were obviously trying to wind me up.” A longer hesitation. “So…were they, er, lovers, or not? I mean, they were brothers-in-law.”
  
  “This…isn’t something Aral ever saw fit to confirm or deny to you?”
  
  He looked extremely uncomfortable. “I never asked.” And after a moment, “But he never volunteered a denial, either. He did sometimes. The Komarr massacre, for example. He never stopped being enraged about that one.”
  
  “There was a hell of a lot there to be enraged about.”
  
  “Oh, yeah.”
  
  Cordelia sighed. “So…do you think I have either a right or a duty to tell you something Aral never saw fit to? Do you think you have a right to know?” It was not, she hoped he understood, a rhetorical question.
  
  He flung his hands wide. “A right? Or a need? But I’d think if it wasn’t true, several people could have just said so. And if it is…there might be a couple of people I owe an apology to. You can’t slander the dead, they say.”
  
  “Rubbish. Of course you can. You just can’t be successfully prosecuted for it in a court of law.”
  
  His lips twisted in dry concession of the point.
  
  “The short answer could be misleading,” she said. “The longer one…requires a little context.”
  
  He leaned his head back in the chair. “I’m not in a hurry.”
  
  “It doesn’t make a very restful bedtime story.”
  
  “Not much from that era on Barrayar does.”
  
  A laugh puffed through her lips. “Really.” She drew a longer breath. “I know you’re aware that after most of their family was slaughtered by Mad Emperor Yuri’s death squad-God, Aral would have been just about Alex’s age, wouldn’t he?-General Count Piotr the Emperor-Unmaker kept him pretty much bolted to his hip for the whole civil war. You can now understand why, I expect.”
  
  Miles’s eyes flickered, as he perhaps pictured himself in Piotr’s place and Alex in Aral’s. His face went rather grim.
  
  “After his resultant extraordinarily high-level military apprenticeship had ended with the Dismemberment, Aral was dumped out into that generation’s version of your officers’ academy. Still a half-formed institution at that time. Ges and Aral were both second cousins and friends at that stage, and probably neither of them anything a Betan would call sane. Even without the adolescence.”
  
  “I…can’t actually argue with that.”
  
  “Apparently, same-sex sexual experimentation by male youth was tolerated in that context-well, it was never illegal on Barrayar, just socially disapproved, which I’m not sure is better or worse, since there wouldn’t have been any legal protections, either-but anyway, still expected to be kept out of sight. Exactly what old Piotr thought he was about, to arrange Aral’s marriage to Ges’s sister, I cannot fathom. His own mother was a Vorrutyer, so maybe it seemed, I don’t know, an unexceptionably traditional family alliance. Or maybe he had some more complex scheme, trying to use the marriage to detach Ges. He-quite correctly-seems to have pegged young Ges as toxic, by that time. But I can’t imagine that Piotr expected to engineer the bloody disaster that he did.”
  
  “Was there a secret duel? About her fidelity?”
  
  “Two of them. Aral told me this himself, and I’ve no doubt it was true.”
  
  Miles whistled. “Illegal as hell…”
  
  “Wildly. But they seem to have led directly to her mysterious suicide.”
  
  “Da told me once…” Miles hesitated. “Back that time when, in the court of capital gossip, I was rumored to have made away with Ekaterin’s first husband. God that was annoying. But anyway. He said that he was never totally certain that Piotr hadn’t murdered her. Fixing his mistake, as it were. What a hellish thing to suspect about your da. And never any way to be sure…He said he couldn’t ask.”
  
  “Not talking to each other seems to have been a Vorkosigan family tradition.”
  
  “I…kinda had to give Da that one.”
  
  “Mm.” Cordelia drew breath in through her nose. “In any case, for two or three years after her death Aral and Ges conducted what sounds to have been an extremely lurid, alcohol-soaked, and blatantly public affair.” A match made in some special Barrayaran hell, between a proto-sadist and a man bent on self-destruction. Eh, maybe Miles didn’t need that many details. “I don’t gather it was aimed at Piotr, but he certainly would have been in the crossfire. The final breakup-fight drew blood. Aral pulled up, and put his career back together. Ges continued his descent. Although not, alas, militarily. His subsequent positions of authority…did the Imperial Service much harm.”
  
  “Da told you all this?”
  
  “Some, plus I put things together from other sources. It was amazing how many people thought I should be told all about it, when I first came to Barrayar, even though it had been two decades ago by then. Even Admiral Ges, in the twenty minutes before his, er, fortunate demise. The results invariably disappointed them.” Ges most of all, perhaps…she set her teeth and avoided smiling. “I should perhaps make clear that, as old flames go, my objections to Ges were to his personality, not his gender.”
  
  Miles’s shrug conceded, Betan standards, sure. “So is it still a slander if it’s true?”
  
  “The same set of facts…can be presented neutrally, can be spun up into hype, or can be deployed in a way that is damaging and hurtful, depending on the agenda of the person recounting them. Although I do think the fact that the episode was never a secret-at least, not to the generation that was there at the time-pulled its teeth significantly.”
  
  “It bit me.” Miles scowled. “Da told me most everything about that bad period himself, except he left out Ges. I mean…I’m half-Betan, aren’t I? I wasn’t even a kid when we had that conversation, of course you wouldn’t tell a kid, but I was thirty.” He wrinkled his nose in a complicated species of dismay. “Instead, I was left to be…wrong.”
  
  


• how The Vor Game looked from the outside:
  
  And a hellish few hours the battle had been, but not nearly as hellish as the strained weeks leading up to it.
  
  The official version was that young Emperor Gregor had secretly left the economics conference that he’d been attending with his Prime Minister on Komarr to go on an urgent personal diplomatic mission to the Hegen Hub, to try to pull its disparate polities together in the face of an imminent Cetagandan invasion of the planet Vervain. Since the Vervain system bordered the Hegen Hub, the expectation was that the Cetagandans would hopscotch the planet itself to seize the Hub and its vital multiple wormhole-nexus connections; and, if their momentum proved sufficient, perhaps move on to snap up the Pol system as well, which would have brought them right to the Barrayaran empire’s Komarran doorstep.
  
  A hastily recruited double of Gregor had been sent back to Barrayar on the pretext of illness, to cover for the Emperor’s sudden absence. Another layer of supposed deception was that the Emperor had disappeared from Komarr, kidnapped or worse. This was supported by a frantic, if tightly closed-mouthed, ImpSec sweep of the domes and the system for the missing man. To this day, the confusion about which of the tales was true had been carefully maintained in the face of all commentary, well fogged. Every possible permutation had its variously fanatical supporters as the questions slowly segued from current events into history.
  
  Jole and Cordelia were among the few who knew that the real answer was all of the above, and not necessarily in the order one would imagine. Evidently musing along similar lines, Cordelia pressed Jole’s arm and murmured, “I am so thankful that Aral had you with him, when I had to escort that poor boy we had playing emperor back to Barrayar. I had never seen Aral so mutely terrified as when we thought we’d lost Gregor, just when it had all seemed completed, Barrayar safely delivered to its future.”
  
  “Not even during the Pretendership?”
  
  “Not the same thing at all, no. And not just because he’d been twenty years younger then, I don’t think. This was a qualitatively different crisis, somehow. For a while there, he feared he might be looking down the throat of the third civil war on Barrayar in his lifetime, and it almost broke his heart. Finding himself facing Cetagandans instead was practically a joy, by contrast.”
  
  That was almost too true to be funny. Fortunately, Aral’s usual stern and decisive facade had never cracked in public. Even Jole had only been treated to the occasional alarming flash of Aral’s doubts, like vivid filaments of lava seen through a surface one had thought safe stone. He’d done all he could to support the man, whether in his roles as aide, confidante, or lover, not that there’d been much time, energy, or attention left over for that last. Apparently, it had been enough, because they’d all won through alive somehow.
  
  But when they’d received the confirmation that Gregor was at last coming aboard, Aral had smiled, snapped out the necessary orders, walked to his cabin, locked the door, sat down on his bunk with his face buried in his hands, and wept for the relief of it. Not for long; there’d been a wormhole to defend, coming right up. The maniacally cheerful edge with which the aging admiral had approached this task had been a big morale boost to the men, many of whom had never faced live fire before. That its source was far, far more complicated than a native enthusiasm for war was not something Jole had been able to explain to people, then or later. Except, perhaps, to Cordelia, who already understood. He covered the present Cordelia’s hand with his own, and pressed it in an unmoored gratitude.
  
  


• Honestly, I cannot decide if my response to this is "oh, come on, canon, let them have a victory, or "hmmm". Eh, mostly on the side of What Is Even The Point Of The Haut If They're All Powerful... eh, whatever. I'm ambivalent on this one and probably throwing it out from my personal canon.
  But then Miles bit his lip, his face scrunching down in some decision. Making it, he looked up. “There’s a thing coming along that Gregor’s been sitting on, which I should probably apprise you two of. Has to do with that goldmine of old Occupation data that was uncovered when they found that buried lab bunker. And why some of it hasn’t been declassified yet, despite the howls from the academic community. Duv Galeni’s been overseeing the work on it for ages, and even he agrees with Gregor. Though he’d love to publish-he’s actually written the book, which is sitting in his ImpSec secure files waiting for the go-ahead. He let me read the first draft.”
  
  Jole had the utmost respect for Commodore Galeni, one of the more overworked men in Vorbarr Sultana, simultaneously holding down the ImpSec Komarran Affairs chief’s desk because of his background as a Komarran, and, because of his background as a trained historian, given oversight of the examination of an enormous cache of abandoned Cetagandan military and other data, left behind at the century-past pullout and not found until seven years ago. Jole wondered if his own high classification status would allow him to put himself forward as a peer reviewer for Galeni’s manuscript…
  
  Miles was going on: “Anyway, he’s solved certain mysteries about the last days of the war and the pullout from the Occupation that we didn’t even know were mysteries, although, when the clues are laid out, you wonder how we missed them. I have some theories on that, too. The ghem only used lightweight chemical warfare on Barrayar, back then, and almost no biologicals, even when they were losing ground.”
  
  The people they’d been used on might have a different opinion of that “light” classification, Jole reflected, but this was more-or-less true. “Because the haut wouldn’t let them use the good stuff, I’ve always understood. Which is part of how an apparently effete, apparently unmilitary genetic aristocracy keeps control of their own warrior class. Apparently.”
  
  Miles’s grin flickered at the string of ironic apparentlys. He’d had more direct experience of the haut than even Jole had, and was quite alive to the depths those elegant, deceptive surfaces hid.
  
  “A cabal in the ghem junta running the Occupation had an operational plan for stepping up the game, it turns out, after their nasty foray into nuclears backfired so thoroughly. Seems that wasn’t their last-ditch effort after all. The existence of the abandoned bunker itself was actually a fat clue, once you step back and squint-they wouldn’t have packed that much wealth and data into it if they hadn’t imagined they’d be coming back to collect it. Plus Galeni was also given some unique contemporaneous eyewitness testimony by Moira ghem Estif, though it was typically haut-oblique-even he took a while to decode her pointers.
  
  “The real pullout plan called for the use of stolen haut bioweapons-some kind of virulent plague, as I understand it, rekeyed to Barrayaran genetics. Picture it. Pull all your people out, release this hell-brew, seal the wormholes behind you and let it work in tidy isolation. A planet-sized culture dish. Come back in a year or two to a neatly depopulated landscape freed of that pesky native crowd who kept irrationally refusing to be culturally uplifted, and move in. There would be galactic outcry, sure, but-too bad, so sad, too late.”
  
  “How close to operational did this plan get?” asked Jole, chilled.
  
  “They’d got as far as actually stealing the base material and trying to set up a crew of biochemists-with at least one suborned haut among them-for the modifications and replication. They were figuring on getting away with a fait accompli. But then their central Imperial-in other words, haut-government caught up with them. Remember all those famous executions when the junta returned to Eta Ceta? Everyone thought the ghem were being punished for losing, for losing the war, for losing face. Which made a handy dual duty for the exercise. But there was a second lesson for stroppy ghem embedded under the more public one.”
  
  Cordelia blew out her breath. Jole’s brows couldn’t climb any higher. He observed slowly, “That…certainly puts a different spin on all our military self-congratulations for throwing the ghem off our world, back then.”
  
  “Oh, yes.”
  
  “No wonder Gregor’s been delaying this,” said Cordelia. “It must feel like brooding a bomb.”
  
  “Yes, he keeps wondering and waiting for the right diplomatic time to let it hatch. Most useful or least destructive moment, whichever. Given haut lifespans, all the principals aren’t dead even yet. So is it history, or is it politics? I keep thinking such secrets should be out on the table, and then…I think some more.”
  
  “So, Ekaterin is right,” murmured Cordelia. “We continue to exist at the discretion of the haut.”
  
  “Yeah, that’s the problem,” said Miles. “Anybody got a solution?”
  
  “Out of my own head? No,” said his mother. “Except to continue to improve our broad scientific and bio expertise, and not just at the top. Which is a process that has to start at the primary school education level.” She sighed. “When everything is a priority, nothing is, but at least that one underlies all others. Thus, you would think people could agree on it, but. People.”
  
  “It seems the haut aren’t interested in real estate alone-ah.” Miles broke off, as the herd of his children and their escorts appeared around the corner, finding their way back to the parental home base.
  
  


• Oh, hey, Cordelia's side of the family gets their own "mentioned but without names, because we must never have names" moment.
  “You don’t mention your Betan relatives in that roster,” Jole observed curiously, shifting his back against his support-stack. “I know Cordelia keeps in some touch with her brother. And you have cousins there, yes?”
  
  Miles, taken aback, shrugged. “Three of ’em. Though I never really met them till I went there for my school year at age fifteen. And they were all rather different ages than me which, at fifteen, matters. I’ve given up trying to keep track of their partners and sprogs, although Mother gets bulletins on them all from her mother that she feels obliged to pass along.”
  
  


• Ha, I think I called this, too., unless it had previously made an appearance. *checks her notes from the blueprints* nope, I referred to it as non-canonical. I win :P
  
  Or maybe he’d had some sort of at-home arrangement-Vorkosigan House’s basement-level infirmary, made top-grade during Aral’s regency, was presumably kept up-to-date.
  
  


• THEY 3D-PRINTED HIM A BOAT FOR HIS BIRTHDAY. Ah, just goes to show that Science Marches Onward. XD (I mean this in the nicest way possible, it's cool to see the development of "what's possible in Barrayar" reflecting "what's possible in the outside world", note the laptops and etc.)
  She asked the grinning-yes, engineering officer, “Was it expensive?”
  
  “Naw. We fabricated it ourselves. A vat of canopy plastic and a night in the shop with the big printer, easy.”
  
  Oliver, she was reminded, rode herd on a cadre of people who routinely repaired spaceships. She should not have underestimated them, or their resources, or their design skills, even though it appeared some of those resources were borrowed from Imperial supplies.
  
  She murmured to the officer, “If anyone questions the use of equipment or material, you can tell them the Vicereine authorized it.”
  
  His eyes twinkled. “Thank you, Your Excellency.”
  
  “Does it float?” Oliver asked, a bit breathlessly.
  
  “Yep, we had it out for field trials this morning,” another officer told him smugly, watching him run loving hands over the smooth thwarts. Instant infatuation, it appeared, wasn’t just for romance anymore. “It floats in any attitude you put it, including upside down, longitudinally, or full of water.”
  
  


• Boot polo: lol, obviously a game that is a simulacrum of barrayaran war has 3 sides. That is for sure The Right And Proper Way to do it.


• LOL.
  Where to begin? Somewhere, anywhere, just start and it will all unravel. “You did know your father was bisexual, yes?”
  
  A slight eyebrow lift. “My awareness of that has shifted over the years. I have a pretty good handle on it now. I think.”
  
  “Well”-Jole took a breath-“so am I.”
  
  A much longer silence. Miles’s voice came again, carefully ironic: “So, how long has my mother had this questionable fetish for bisexual Barrayaran admirals? I don’t think even the Betans have earrings for that one.”
  
  


• Highlighting this one for "Aral collected me first", which, congrats, got to have a context to make it seem less creepy than it otherwise would. Also, hey, Miles finding out about more things!
  “Is she trying to collect the whole set, or what?”
  
  “I don’t know if there are any more. She’s surely collected me.” More cider. More electrolyte. More cider. More oxygen.
  
  “Aral collected me first.”
  
  More stillness. Miles’s under-reaction was a bit worrying. Hard to read. Perhaps it was one of his old professional skills? But then he came out with, “How long ago?”
  
  “What would you guess?” Because it never hurt to cross-check, or maybe it was just morbid curiosity.
  
  Miles angled his chin up. “During the prime ministership, had to be. That was…risky. Did Illyan-no, of course Illyan knew. Who else? Besides not-me.”
  
  “Quite a few people, really. It was all more discreet than secret. But you weren’t there much, during that period.”
  
  “You were very self-effacing when I was.” Miles frowned. “Which I totally failed to notice. Huh. Logical, I guess.”
  
  “Give yourself credit, half the time you were home you were on some very serious medical leaves. That does tend to concentrate the attention upon the self.”
  
  Miles lifted his glass in toast to him. Ambiguously. “So when did my mother first collect you?”
  
  “How much detail do you want?”
  
  “Not…much. Just enough to understand.”
  
  “Shortly after I followed Aral to Sergyar. It started as a birthday present for him, that first year.”
  
  “Ah, yeah, that’s probably enough.” He drained his glass. “The Betans do have earrings for that one, you know.”
  
  “Your mother pointed this out to us. Many times.”
  
  “I’ll bet. Twenty years. Hell. That’s not a dalliance, that’s a damned marriage. You do realize that, Oliver?”
  
  “By the end, I think we all did. Till death do us…” He broke off. Cleared his suddenly tight throat with another swig. His bottle was running low.
  
  “And you went through that whole state funeral circus without ever letting on. Ran command on the cortege convoy…ye gods.” It was Miles’s turn to stop short. “At his funeral, I barely noticed you. I’m…sorry.”
  
  “We were all walking around in shock. If there was ever a better occasion for charity, I can’t think of it. For oneself as well.”
  
  Miles nodded jerkily. “So, I gather this thing has continued to date? Triped become biped?”
  
  “No, in fact. There was a three-year hiatus. As we…lost our ways for a time. We’ve renewed on entirely new terms.”
  
  “I see. I guess.” His brow wrinkled. “Although I don’t see why you should have stopped.”
  
  “Grief does odd things to a person. And both our jobs were demanding. And…maybe we both needed time to become our new selves, before we could start over. It’s hard to explain. It makes sense to us, anyway.”
  
  


• LOL. Petya had been all quiet and mollified mostly, but then it got to this and he sat bolt upright and started shouting HOW DARE YOU. *shoves him back* Although, wow, yeah, Jole, what a way to claim Aral as the other dad :P But, hey, maybe Xav is a popular name?
  
  “And then I called Dr. Tan and told him to start Everard Xav.”
  
  

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