Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold Page A

exercise?”
    “Mm, maybe,” said Haines, judging by his narrowed eyes, drawn by this vision.
    “Kayburg Guard would have to be notified anyway,” Jole pointed out. “Given that the boys and girls will want to bring dates. Call it joint maneuvers. If you imply you’re considering downtown Kayburg as an alternate venue, they’ll fall all over themselves to help you set up out in the country instead.”
    Haines chuckled. “I like the way you think sometimes, Oliver. Remind me not to get crosswise to you in a debate.” He took a ruminative bite of stew, and added, “And families. Haul out the wives and families to the picnic, for ballast.”
    “Good thinking.”
    “You could bring a date.”
    The party idea took on a sudden new charm. “I could ask Vicereine Vorkosigan.”
    Haines pursed his lips judiciously. “Not what I would call a date, but that would set a tone, for sure.”
    It might at that, although possibly not the sedate one Haines was clearly hankering for. But then, Haines didn’t know Cordelia very well.
    “It wouldn’t settle any bets, though,” Haines added a bit morosely.
    Jole didn’t bother to pretend not to understand. “What, betting whether I’d show up with a woman or a man?” His tone grew a trifle biting. “I see a way we could collude to clean up on that one. I could ask Consul Vermillion, and we could wax them all.”
    Haines held up a contrite hand. “No business of mine, except that people ask me. As if I’d know!”
    “I…did not realize that,” Jole conceded. Although he didn’t see how he had anything to apologize for. Because I don’t have anything in the first place?
    Pared to its essentials, the Barrayaran officer corps favored heterosexual marital stability in its senior members mainly to cut down on the potential for ambient personal dramas slopping over into work, as they tended to do. But any nonstandard-issue personal life that supplied one’s superior officers with zero drama would do just as well, in Jole’s view. And it was a view he’d let be known, certainly. With an emphasis on the zero-drama part, because he’d thought that could stand to be underscored.
    “I may be sorry I asked, but what are the current rumors about my personal life?” Or lack of one .
    Haines shrugged. “They call you the dog who does nothing in the nighttime.”
    “Come again?”
    “Don’t look at me! I was told it’s a literary reference. Which probably accounts for it making no damn sense.” Haines scowled in retrospective suspicion. “A touch Cetagandan, if you ask me.”
    “I see.” Well, that could have been worse. The trouble with giving rumor nothing to chew on was that it freed it to make up anything . “Welcome to the fishbowl, Admiral Jole. Though it’s not as bad here as at Komarr Command. Or Home Fleet, God help ’em.” He’d aspired to Komarr Command once, the hot seat of the empire. And just where, in his last few years, had what had once been a driving youthful ambition drained away? Could it be that he was… content , here on Sergyar?
    “That is happily true,” Haines agreed.
    Jole considered the general. Fyodor was pretty level-headed, an experienced father, and a good sample of an average officer. And he knew how to be closed-mouthed. As a test subject, as Cordelia would no doubt put it, he could be nearly ideal. Jole tried the sentence once, secretly inside his mouth, for practice. And then quelled his doubts—his panic?—and let it fly: “Actually, for my fiftieth birthday, I was thinking of having a son.”
    Haines’s eyebrows went up, but he did not, for example, fall off his not-very-comfortable cafeteria chair or have any other such overreaction. “Don’t you have a few preliminaries to get through first? Or have you managed to smuggle them past all your interested observers?”
    “Not as many as one would think. The Vicereine”— yes, hide behind Cordelia’s skirts —“has been pitching the virtues of that new rep center