Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen Read Free Page B

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 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.”
    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