khedron

Yesterday I wasn’t feeling great so I called out of work and spent a big chunk of the day reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, the final work in the Vorkosigan Saga.

In this installment, we swing back around to where it all started: with Cordelia. Now the Dowager Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan, Vicereine of Sergyar, she is 76 years old, and three years widowed. But because she is Betan, and because she is Cordelia, she’s thinking of what to do with the next phase of her life–after all, she can expect to live to be at least 100.

Due to the galactic reproductive technology that she has spent a lot of time and energy establishing on Barrayar, Cordelia decides to finally pursue a lifelong dream of hers: having daughters. It turns out that she can have six daughters with Aral even three years after he died. But the plot really kicks off here when she figures out she can do something even more science fictionish: she can fill some of her enucleated ova with X-chromosomal DNA from Aral and give them to Admiral Oliver Jole, who had been the semi-secret third in their marriage for many years, so that Jole can have sons with Aral.

Jole, being a native Barrayaran man and also very wrapped up in his work in the three years since Aral died, had not really considered that becoming a parent was still in the cards for him. He was, after all, single, and just about to turn fifty, and lives on a military base in tiny single-military-officer housing. But Cordelia’s gift of Aral’s gametes sets him on a path of thinking about all sorts of major life changes he could make, like retiring, or becoming a parent, or getting together with Cordelia without Aral being there, or getting really into Sergyaran marine biology.

The book has several other plotlines but they are basically there to help shape the main one, which is the romance between Jole and Cordelia: two older, very busy, very competent Imperial officials with a lot to balance if they want to squeak out a personal life, both in terms of work and in terms of their previous personal lives (which, given Barrayar’s still ultimately feudal system of governance, doesn’t have as clear-cut a dividing line as you might think for a high-tech space future). We get to see Miles, now 43 years old and Count Vorkosigan in his own right, have to deal maturely with learning a lot about his parents’ sex lives while also running after a squad of his own kids. We also learn a fair amount about the colonization process on Sergyar, which for most of the second half of the series has kind of just been sitting in the background in order to ensure Aral and Cordelia don’t crush everybody else’s ability to have plotlines by sheer force of personality.

This book is rather short on actual political intrigue, which is so unusual that basically everybody starts looking for it where it doesn’t exist. Conspiracy is much more believable and palatable to the general cast of characters of these books than old people romance, apparently, but mainly the book really is just a sweet old people romance plus a healthy helping of typical Bujold competence porn. One of the key plot events is Admiral Jole’s fiftieth birthday party, which he didn’t really want to have, but which his subordinates basically insisted on as an excuse to have a really big party and invite everybody in Kareenburg. The party isn’t attacked by terrorists or anything–just a cloud of mosquito-like local pests and a drunk polo team. It is still, somehow, the most traditionally action-packed scene in this book that is still very much military sci-fi. It’s just that when you’re old, I guess, the part of the military you end up in is the one where you argue with plascrete contractors and aren’t allowed to shoot them.

Overall, it is a charming if somewhat fanficcy end to a series that I have very much enjoyed over the past year and a half. It’s been fun watching all of these characters grow up and grow old, and it’s nice that they all get their happy endings.