"I should have figured he'd be hearing something about this before I had a chance to land and deliver my report," Miles sighs when he reads this message, sitting next to Linya in their cabin. "How do you feel about an interview with Illyan?"

"Assuming that it's - civil and he isn't going into it absolutely certain that I'm some unconventional sort of spy, that sounds all right."

"Oh, he's definitely not going to pre-judge," Miles assures her. "I mean - that's not to say you have a high chance of convincing him to be absolutely certain you aren't some kind of spy, not in a single conversation, not without fast-penta. But he'll at least be willing to acknowledge that the balance of evidence suggests you aren't, and act accordingly."

"Never before have I had more than a vague philosophical reason to be glad of the immunity to the stuff. If I weren't immune I imagine refusing to accept a dose on the grounds that it would be... let's go with 'upsetting'... would look fantastically suspicious."

He shakes his head. "Not fantastically, no. It's not something most people would rush to volunteer for, however compelling the reason. Even if you could, it's entirely understandable that you'd rather not."

"I suppose maybe I managed to accumulate the wrong impression by reading too much fiction. In any story with a mystery element you can bet whoever has an objection to fast-penta has something to hide."

"Not the most healthy of implications, if you ask me. I have conducted a murder investigation before, and my conclusion is that whether or not someone objects to fast-penta doesn't give you anything like the final word in guilt."

"You have? When? Why?"

"A few years ago - a woman came down from the hills seeking justice for her murdered baby daughter; my father sent me as his Voice to sort it out. She thought it was her husband - turned out it was her mother. Nasty business. We're trying to wipe out the old custom of infanticide for birth defects, but it's hard going, sometimes."

"That... sounds rough on the marriage, if the fellow's wife thought he'd murdered their child. What does the trying to wipe out the custom look like, besides prosecuting the killers?"

"Prosecuting the killers is complicated enough by itself - there's a reason Harra walked all the way to Vorkosigan Surleau from Silvy Vale to demand the Count's attention on her case. To prosecute the killers you need someone within reach who's willing to prosecute the killers, and someone who's willing to ask them to, and you don't often get both. Not in some of those little villages. Getting the trappings of modern civilization out there - transportation, education, computation - helps too, but not everyone can be convinced to accept them."

"What's the rationale for not accepting transportation and education and computation?"

"It's a big leap to make. A kind of culture shock, I suppose you could call it. These people didn't grow up with this sort of thing - it's still new to them, still strange, often nobody's been able to coherently explain why they'd want all these mysterious objects that they don't understand how to use or make or maintain, and the hillfolk are classically stubborn. We've made progress since my grandfather's day, God knows, but there's some distance left to go."

"If someone offered me objects that worked by literal magic, incomprehensible in principle, irreproducible, and unprecedented, that did things I couldn't do as well without, I'd be annoyed at the incomprehensibility, but I'd still take the magic artifacts."

"I wasn't saying I don't believe you, I'm just saying it's a hard mindset for me to understand even if I analogize to the nearest equivalent."

"Yeah. I'm, um, a little defensive of my district's hillfolk. Local target of many a joke about incest or illiteracy - I forgot to mention, they often haven't even used pens and ink. That's getting better these days, too, I'm happy to say."

"Me too."

"I tend to do most of my serious thinking in writing. I'm not sure what I'd do if I couldn't even read. I can't remember that early into my childhood."

"Huh," says Miles. "Why in writing?"

"I react differently to things that are outside of my head. I don't think it strictly has to be writing, I suppose, I could do the same thing with an audio recorder - but something about experiencing it as though it could have been about someone else, instead of from inside my skull, makes it clearer and less slippery."

"Hmm," he says. "I'm not sure I'd get any meaningful benefit from writing it all down. When I really need to do a lot of thinking, it's often under a lot of time pressure anyway - case in point, the recent funeral - and the writing part would only slow me down. My best problem-solving always seems to happen on my feet at full speed, whether literally or metaphorically."

"I don't think badly on my feet - the writing is more for general maintenance and sometimes emotional management and long-term algorithm invention and tweaking, than it is for emergencies."

Miles shrugs.

"I have a fair amount of conscious control over how my brain functions, when I put the time in to work on it."

"Huh."

"It's very useful for being able to compose myself in tense or emotional situations."

"That does sound handy."

After the final jump, as they make their approach to Barrayar, Miles is only a tiny bit nervous. He decants his written report to Illyan onto a cipher disk, wipes it from the courier vessel's system, double-checks that all his luggage is properly packed, and then flomps onto the cabin's bed to wait out the last hour or so.

Linya sits beside him and pets him. In Russian, she says, "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine," he replies in the same language, snuggling up. "Waiting is one of my least favourite activities. I'll live."

"You probably have time to braid my hair another four or five times, if you want."

"Ooh. What an excellent plan." He sits up.

Linya giggles and calls up the most recent project - French herringbone! whee! - with her pen and puts it where he can see it over her shoulder.

Ooh. Goals. Miles does love a nice moderately impossible goal.

"...Good afternoon, sir," says Miles. "This is my wife, Lady haut Linyabel Miriat Vorkosigan—" an on-the-spot arrangement of her unprecedented combination of titles, which he feels rolls nicely off the tongue. "Linya, this is Captain Simon Illyan."

"Hello," says Linya politely.

"Congratulations," Illyan says, somewhat dryly. "I would love to hear just how this happy event came to occur. Perhaps you'd like to send your luggage to Vorkosigan House and come into my office for a... chat. On reflection, I'm not going to promise a quick one."

"I have no objections on my own behalf," says Miles. "By the way, did you know fast-penta doesn't work on haut women?"

"Mm," says Illyan.

"As an immunity, not an allergy, so if you care to test it I will not be liable to expire."

"I wasn't intending to try it without your permission, and I see no reason to change that plan now that you've told me it wouldn't work," he says. "But thank you for the clarification, Lady Vorkosigan. And what are your feelings on coming to my office to discuss your recent marriage?"

"I don't object."

Linya has never seen anything that offensively ugly in her life. She stares at it.

"I apologize most sincerely for the architecture," he says as he escorts them inside. No one tries to stop them or administer any intrusive security measures, although they definitely pass through at least two separate scanners as they enter the building.

Linya is unarmed, and the only thing of electronic interest on her is the pen. She sticks close to Miles.

"In the course of my running errands for the then-Handmaiden, now-Empress, the haut Lisbet, I encountered Miles during a series of unusual events I imagine will be fully described in his report, though I will redundantly summarize them if you like. I was already more or less poised to be ejected from my constellation in favor of exogamous marriage most probably to a ghem-lord, though normally this would have waited a decade or two. This came up in conversation between myself and Miles, and I found him more appealing than an arbitrary ghem-lord or continuing to cool my heels in ornamental uselessness in a constellation apartment, and he found me more appealing than... most anything, as far as I can tell... so when he was sufficiently impressive to earn various rewards from the Cetagandan Empire, I asked Lisbet to arrange that I be one of them. She did."

"I would be fascinated to hear your redundant summary," he says.

"It involved a matter embarrassing to certain parties among the haut, and ideally would not spread willy-nilly as social gossip."

"Of course," he says agreeably. "Believe me, I'm familiar with the principle."

Miles gazes at his wife with transparent adoration.

"I see," murmurs Illyan. It's possible that he may be slightly amused.

Linya smiles down at her little Barraryaran.

"Lieutenant Vorkosigan, I believe I originally requested a written report...?"

"Yes, sir," he agrees, and he produces his cipher disk and hands it over. "I... really do think I didn't do anything you wouldn't have asked me to, if you'd been there." With a glance up at his wife, he adds, "Obvious exception aside."

"Unfortunately," he says, tucking the report away in his desk for later perusal, "I suspect I'm going to agree."

"If it turns out one way or another that the results of my presence here are intolerable, I will not make a fuss should Miles elect to send me to any reasonably civilized planet. But he seems optimistic."

"What a refreshingly practical attitude you have," Illyan says dryly. "'Optimistic' might not be the word I'd use to describe him. 'Inhumanly stubborn and driven to overcome all opposition' seems more to the point."

"Ideally I'd like to minimize the amount of opposition we encounter in the first place," Miles puts in, faintly indignant at Illyan's unsolicited accuracy.

"Via whatever psychological mechanism, he appears to strongly anticipate success," Linya says.

"Invariably," Illyan agrees. "Well, this has turned out to be a much shorter story than I anticipated."

"There was hardly time for it to get much longer, considering how infrequently it was possible for me to extract him from his social engagements and conduct conversations."

"I was disinclined to underestimate Lord Vorkosigan's ingenuity in escaping undesired social engagements for his own purposes," says Illyan.

"Yeah," says Miles, "I'd hope you know better than to underestimate my ingenuity by now, sir. If you're done making fun of me, can we go now?"

He spreads his hands in a gesture of agreeable dismissal.

Well then. Linya gets up.

"Ah - sure. If it's safe."

"I judge it a high likelihood, especially since we sent our luggage ahead and Illyan didn't suggest, for example, including a note to explain why there were thirty more articles than I left with."

"But you have not, say, told them?"

"No. I hate composing vid messages and avoid it wherever possible. Real-time communication is so much more - alive."

"Hmm." Well, they're his parents. They are, in fact, parents at all; she's hardly one to talk. Her designer might not find out that she's left Cetaganda for months yet.

"Anyway. I stand by my prediction that Mother's going to like you."

"I hope you're right."

"I often am!"

"He is... less transparent to me than Mother," sighs Miles. "I'm really not sure what he's going to think of you, which makes it very hard to give you any tips in advance, you see."

"Mmm. Is there a shortlist of possibilities...?"

"Not exactly, no." He looks up at her, then away, trying to marshal his thoughts. "More like a long list of impossibilities. My father is a good man. I know he's not going to - disown me, try to have you deported, do anything physically dangerous... what I don't know is what he will do. Maybe he'll fire off a round or two of sarcasm and retreat in good order, like Illyan. But I don't think so; that's less his style. I... fear that he might see you as an irrevocable bad decision on my part, or a threat to my safety, or to Barrayar's. That he might try—and certainly fail—to convince me I should pack you off to Beta Colony as soon as possible. Or to somewhere more remote. But that doesn't seem quite right either. And thus we come back," his free hand makes a horizontal circling motion, "to 'I don't know'."

"You are very categorically dismissing the possibility that I was a bad decision on your part," she points out.

"Yes," he says. "Should I not? Do you disagree?"

"You were a good decision on my part, and I'm certainly willing to give this," she gestures generally at Barrayar around them, "a sincere try, because it seems it likely will suit the goals I had in mind to begin with and because I like you very much, but I feel quite sure that if a couple of months ago you'd written out a list of characteristics for your ideal Lady Vorkosigan you would not have described me, and some of the items on that list might turn out to be relevant."

"I... tend not to put much stock in ideals," says Miles. "That kind, anyway. It's not possible to define perfection into existence. What would I look for in the ideal Lady Vorkosigan? Well, I admit I wouldn't have predicted the haut part, but - as you can perhaps tell from the fact that I married you - I'm rather enamoured of the whole package. I would stand in a circle of inexplicably dyed foodstuffs and swear to be your spouse and helpmeet, forsaking all others, united in love, giving aid where needed and accepting it where given, et cetera et cetera I always forget the bit at the end, for as long as we both shall live. And any external complainers can take a wormhole jump to hell." He pauses, then adds, "I promise to leave that last amendment out of the actual ceremony, if and when. Unless you think it'll add flair."

"It will be purely an unspoken addendum, then," he assures her. "If and when."

"All right. I'm not going to hold you to any of this if there are, I don't know, traditional pitchforks and torches outside your house this time tomorrow carried by people who demand my summary export. But it's nice to know where your thoughts are on the matter."

"Okay," he says, and kisses her hand.

Linya thinks Miles is terribly cute.

"By far my most natural state is to be honest and direct, so it is convenient that it will help with all these people. Do warn me if we come across anyone with whom I ought to be untrustworthy and sneaky."

He laughs. "Will do."

"I'll help however I can," volunteers Miles. "Aid where needed, eh?"

"Yes. I appreciate it very much. I imagine that if I were wandering Beta Colony alone, instead, I could get some form of official help, but my only previous brush with Betan bureaucracy did not leave me too favorably impressed. You are much friendlier."

"Friendlier than Betan bureaucracy, that's me." He sketches a little bow in her direction, impressively managing not to break stride in the process.

"To be dubiously fair to the fellow I interacted with the one time I bubbled up to the embassy to inquire if they could carry me off if I needed to be carried off, I did make the mistake of telling him that I was eight."

"Oh dear," says Miles. "Yeah. A little too honest and direct, maybe. Could've used, uh - twelve-year-old me, God, that would've been a scene." He giggles. "I bet I could've got you offplanet through some sleight of hand or other, but I won't swear I could've done it without starting any wars."

"I definitely don't care to start any wars," she says, shaking her head. "I can be useful, I think, but probably not enough to offset an entire war, at least not with high confidence and on a short time frame. Anyway, when I was eight I didn't want to leave right then. The constellation was a fine place to grow up, I just didn't want to stay forever or take the traditional way out. And I wasn't sure I'd be able to find a third option at all, since everyone invested in making sure it was one of the two is about as smart as I am and they're considerably better connected and more numerous. I hedged my bets a little at least in terms of what sort of education I collected and in the end I had Lisbet's help."

"Yeah. Much tidier this way."

"I hope so."

"Well, 'tidier than interplanetary war' is not a high bar to clear."

"Yes. I would like it to be tidier by a considerably greater margin."

"Me too."

"Are you going to need to change rooms, or is the one you already live in suitable for two people?" she wonders.

"Ah..." He considers this question. "Well. It's bigger than our cabin on the courier ship - speaking of low bars. I suppose we can take the General's—my grandfather's—old suite, assuming Father materializes no objections."

"The ship cabin was all right for two weeks, but I was very deliberately not unpacking."

"Yeah. There's plenty of room in the house, I just haven't been using very much of it."

Linya looks around at Vorbarr Sultana around them. "I looked up pictures of this city ahead of time, but - I already explained why pictures never look right. I like the look of it in person."

"I'm glad," he says. "Both that you like it and that your opinion of Barrayaran architecture hasn't been permanently soured by Cockroach Central—ahem—ImpSec HQ. I've heard Illyan's been after Gregor to get him a new building, but there's no room in the budget, not when the one they have works perfectly well and just happens to look like the enormous concrete dropping of some kind of mythical Bad Taste Dragon."

"It would probably look more cheerful if arbitrary neighborhood children were supplied with ladders and invited to spraypaint it however they pleased," Linya points out. "I doubt that would cost very much, although possibly the ImpSec personnel would object to having arbitrary neighborhood children swarming the place for security reasons."

"Yeah. Plus I'm sure someone would object on the grounds that the pressed gargoyles might give the neighbourhood children nightmares," he snorts.

"Perhaps the gargoyles could be hastily spackled over first."

"I'll suggest it if it comes up in conversation with the appropriate people," giggles Miles.

"Progress could probably also be made with - awnings, drapery, mosaics, less amateur sorts of paint-based decoration. Or just put the entire building in a force bubble and then at least onlookers won't have to behold it."

"The force bubble will appeal even less than tearing the place down and rebuilding it from scratch, because at least rebuilding it from scratch is a one-time cost. I'd lead with the neighbourhood children idea as a joke, then make comparatively appealing followup suggestions - some kind of design contest for architecture students, maybe. How To Cover Up The Ugliest Building In Vorbarr Sultana."

"There aren't even windows to have to work around. Any large flat art project suitable for the outdoors could be installed without drastic changes."

"The lack of windows may, alas, be one of Illyan's complaints. But at least if they have it painted over, those of us on the outside of the building will be much happier about it."

"Yes, I don't know enough about architecture in general or the structure of the building to say if windows could be added. Does he want windows to look out of or to open to the air?"

"I couldn't tell you. Although I suspect they would not be opened to the air very frequently, ImpSec being ImpSec."

"Because there are non-window-based ways to produce either an accurate picture of the outdoors, or scenery to be less offensively institutional for the eyes."

"True. Although it's possible some of them might be more expensive, less appealing, or both."

"It seems odd that there's been no attempt to mitigate the place's... itselfness. I would almost think that someone was deliberately blocking attempts, perhaps to make the thing sufficiently intrusively unappealing as to increase the chances of a complete replacement. It probably would take longer for it to be replaced if it were covered with mosaics on the outside and the interior offices had screens with scenery on them on the walls."

"Eh, that or people have more important things on their minds. Or, to look at it from another angle, are stubbornly holding out on prettifying it any because it would just turn out to be a waste if and when someone finally tore the damn thing down."

"Mosaics or frescoes or what have you could be put on separate facades and relocated, hypothetically."

"Ooh. An excellent point."

"And then there would be several large walls of freestanding art projects somewhere else and the entire thing could be titled 'the shell of ImpSec, Architectural Hermit Crab'."

...He cracks up.

"There was a girl in my building in the constellation, a few years younger than me, she usually did my hair because I'd let her try things she didn't have down perfectly yet and no one else would - and she kept hermit crabs, well, heavily engineered little crustaceans that behaved in hermit-crab-like ways with containers that she made and decorated."

"That's... adorable, in a kitten-tree sort of way."

"Kitten tree?"

"Ah - I believe it was at the Bioestheties Exhibition - one of the most memorable sights I saw in the course of my official duties on Eta Ceta was a tree that sprouted kittens in leafy little pods. Very pretty, very cute, very unexpected, faintly unsettling. Very Cetagandan, all in all."

"Oh, a literal - kitten tree. I wonder how that project was first conceived. I wonder if it was set up so the kittens would grow into adult cats after being picked or if it stunted them."

"I hope they were meant to become adult cats one day. Stunting them seems needlessly cruel, for some reason. Although not as bad as keeping them on the tree forever. In fact, a tree that produced eventually-adult cats seems almost preferable to the usual way of producing more cats - you're nearly guaranteed not to have a problem with feral populations establishing themselves, assuming the cats thereby produced are, er, seedless. So to speak."

"I know that there are commercially available permanent-puppies - although it's cosmetic; I think they develop adult personalities insofar as dogs have personalities - but I'm not sure if I've ever seen a permanent kitten, perhaps simply because people are disinclined to walk them. I'd be astonished if the kitten tree produced non-seedless creatures, anyway, that would be the sort of thing that would get one marked down at a Bioestheties competition. Smacks of lack of control over the product."

"Oh? You wouldn't be able to argue for, I don't know, greater authenticity of the resulting kittens?"

"No one really cares about that. Well, no one who'd be judging a Bioestheties Exhibition does."

"Ha."

"Which means it's sort of odd that they'd just be kittens and not winged kittens or amphibious kittens or at least permanently-miniature ones. It's a little strange that they were recognizably cats at all and not, say, a fictitious alien creature from the designer's favorite science fiction series, but I suppose they didn't want the project to look dated later."

"...Winged kittens? Is this a hypothetical or has someone actually produced some? Do they fly? I can't decide which option unsettles me more - a winged cat that can't fly seems tragic; a winged cat that can fly sounds like an ecological nightmare."

"I haven't seen winged cats in particular. I have seen a winged rabbit - with added antlers for some reason - which glided fairly competently if it started from a height, and could get rather more airtime when it leapt than an unimproved rabbit, and a winged shrew, which could in fact fly properly. Any of these creatures would probably be engineered to sufficiently picky eating that it wouldn't attack wild fauna, anyway. There was a tremendous fad for making winged things about a decade before I was born and some of them are still around. At one time it was suggested that haut could be made to have wings, and fly with them too, but this, along with revising our eye designs to avoid the blind spot and other dramatic anatomical changes, was ruled out on the grounds that we weren't at the point where we wanted to sacrifice the theoretical ability to reproduce without design intervention with - there's really no polite word for humans without engineering done, is there."

"Uh, assuming 'normal' is insufficiently descriptive or otherwise ruled out..."

"There are plenty of ways to be other than normal besides being engineered," she says. "How about - heirloom? It's technically supposed to refer to produce, old strains of it that haven't been tweaked away from how they were variously lengthy periods of time ago. Expensive tomatoes and so on. It's complimentary, if you don't mind being grouped with tomatoes."

"I think I can live with positive tomato-related connotations."

"Anyway, there are several things people have proposed adding to the haut genome that would sacrifice our ability to even theoretically have random-assembly children with non-haut, although in practice no one does random-assembly, even haut-wives. And none of these changes have been made to the haut, though there have been ba made with the rearranged retinal anatomy to see if it works as a speculative project in case this constraint is ever deemed obsolete - I'm not sure if wings ever saw live testing."

"Random assembly. One way to put it, I suppose."

"Should I think of a tomato-related complimentary word for that too?"

"There are some Barrayarans who might fuss about that, but I'm very much not one of them. I was a replicator birth myself, if you hadn't heard."

"I had. So I didn't think it was likely to be a dealbreaker."

"Well, your prediction is confirmed."

"Good."

"This is indeed it. Where did you find pictures of my house?"

"A History of the Vor. In Russian."

"It had several Vorkosigan Houses, actually."

"Really? Did they manage to dig up a picture of the one in Vorkosigan Vashnoi before—ah—it was destroyed?"

"They found architectural blueprints, but there wasn't a photo of that one."

"I own Vorkosigan Vashnoi," he mentions. "Directly, I mean. Grandfather left it to me specifically, God knows why. Some kind of obscure statement."

"...I have no idea what kind of statement that might serve to make."

Linya inclines her head in acknowledgment of Pym and memorizes his name. She is tempted to check on her keyboard to make sure that it has again been transported safely, but she follows Miles without giving in to this distraction; she can look at it later.

Once again, Miles is called upon to navigate. Vorkosigan House is not quite as mazelike as ImpSec HQ, but it definitely has its quirks.

Linya plucks her pen from its resting place and draws herself a little map as they walk. She doesn't break stride, but she does slow down a little; it is not externally obvious whether this is to make cartography easier or because she's nervous about meeting the Countess.

"Ooh, that's well thought of," says Miles when she starts drawing the map. "Maybe you won't get lost here as often as most people."

"Is that a common problem?"

"Yeah. New Armsmen, new servants, new anybody."

"Perhaps there should be a stack of flimsies at the door with maps."

He laughs. "Maybe. I don't know, it's not really that people get lost frequently per se, it's just that nearly everyone gets lost at least once or twice. I could easily imagine all the newcomers deciding the maps were overkill, only to regret that judgment sometime after midnight when they take a wrong turn on the way to the lav."

"No one could say they had not been warned, though."

"Well, now, that just makes setting out the maps seem cruel."

"Perhaps they should be pinned to the walls at intervals. With 'you are here' marked."

He giggles. "Will that be your contribution? It's sort of a tradition, for every new Lady or Countess Vorkosigan to add something or change something about the house - my mother put in a lift tube."

"I think I'd want to mull that one over longer. I didn't know I was actually entitled to remodel something when I suggested the maps."

"There's nothing stopping you from making more than one change, of course - well, not in principle. In practice, of course everything has to run by my parents, who might squawk a bit if you suggested a force dome over the whole house or, I don't know, a kitten orchard."

"Your house is not ugly enough for me to suggest force-doming it, and I do not have any particular interest in overseeing a kitten orchard."

"Well, that's a promising start."

"Something in the garden department is a possibility, but I think it would probably wind up being strictly composed of plants."

"No rush, anyway. Get to know the house before deciding what you want to do to it, that seems logical."

"Mm-hm." Map map. Follow follow.

They arrive at the library soon enough. Shelves of real print books stand in tidy old-fashioned rows, interrupted by the occasional cozy-looking alcove in which to read them. The overwhelming majority are printed in the Barrayaran variant of the Cyrillic alphabet that saw common use for all four of the planet's languages during the Time of Isolation. A comconsole perches near the empty fireplace at the far end of the room, looking faintly out of place, a newcomer uncertain of its welcome even after however many years it has lived here. Miles paces into the room, scouting for parents.

"I am not technically exiled, nor presently seeking refuge from anything in particular," says Linya. "It's nice to meet you."

"Likewise," says Miles's mother. "So we've ruled out exile and refugee. That leaves Family, or Other. Which do you prefer?"

"Having no experience whatever with families, I feel unqualified to answer beyond the part where I am, in fact, married to your son."

"I think that makes it family by default, but I'm not sure of all the intricacies here."

"We don't plan to stop being married, if that's what you're driving at," interjects Miles. "I'm in this for the long haul."

"I admit, I hadn't pictured you marrying so young. But I'm hardly going to object, as long as it's happily—?"

"Positively ecstatic."

Her gaze turns to Linya again.

Linya smiles.

"It seems like it would be prudent. On several occasions Miles has suggested that I apply to you for your perspective on this or that."

"Perfect. Do come and sit down," she invites.

Miles kisses Linya's hand and marches off to deal with the luggage.

"I have not seen enough individual examples of oaths to have detailed questions - though the idea of a second marriage ceremony in accordance with groat-related local traditions has been floated."

"It has yet to definitively do either. I think I would want to look at the text of the promises involved rather than hearing them recounted in a fragmentary and editorialized fashion from memory, before deciding whether to recite them."

"I'm sure I can dig you up a written copy from somewhere. What fragmentary and editorialized snippets did he give you?"

"He forgot one of the pieces entirely and added a bit directed at hypothetical objectors. Included were phrases such as 'spouse and helpmeet', 'forsaking all others', 'united in love', 'giving aid where needed and accepting it where given'."

"I can just imagine what he had to say to the hypothetical objectors," murmurs Cordelia.

"It was not conciliatory."

"He isn't, when something gets under his skin. Vorkosigan stubbornness."

"Speaking of which - he was not able to give me much in the way of advice beyond being honest and direct, for when I meet your husband. Miles was confident that you would like me, and - less so about him."

"I think," says Cordelia, "Miles was missing some relevant information. Aral is hardly in a position to complain about his son falling in love with a... quasi-enemy. Even if the Cetagandans are arguably less quasi- than the Betans, at least Barrayar isn't actively pursuing a war with anyone at the moment, and Miles didn't propose to you while you were his - very honourably treated, I must emphasize - illegally captured prisoner."

"So you don't think it will be a problem?"

"He might make some unhappy noises, but a few gentle reminders should set him straight. I will be happy to provide them."

"Thank you."

"Welcome to the family. Ah - what should I call you? I'm not sure what all the formalities are, let alone which ones I should be using. Or if I should be using any at all."

"Linyabel is fine. Funnily enough, if I had married a ghem-lord I would have been officially trading in the 'haut' for a 'ghem' taking the same role in my full name - but since I didn't, I believe I'm technically entitled to keep it under a certain reading of precedent. Miles introduced me to his supervisor as 'Lady haut Linyabel Miriat Vorkosigan', but I'm not in the least attached to the formality for everyday."

"Linyabel it is, then. And you can call me Cordelia."

"Cordelia. Thank you."

"Whatever for?"

"General explanatory behavior. And telling me what to call you. I received a rundown of how to refer to miscellaneous Vor, but it has seemed incomplete - for one thing, I conducted the entire interview with Miles's non-Vor supervisor while avoiding addressing him by anything at all, because I didn't know if I was supposed to refer to a military hierarchy to which I do not belong and with which I have no formal status; and wasn't sure of other titles; and for another the etiquette seems sufficiently unfriendly that I suspect I'm missing a wrinkle. Within the stratification I'm used to there is literally no one I can't call by first name under at least some circumstances, all the way up to Emperor Fletchir."

"It's correct to address Simon as Captain Illyan," she says. "But you probably can't get away with 'Simon' anytime soon. The unfriendliness is a semi-deliberate feature, I think. There's sort of an unwritten code to when you do and don't get to move to first names - they're very big on unwritten codes around here, either handed down verbally or transmitted by sheer social osmosis. Speaking of Emperors, though - I must assume somebody's let poor Gregor know about you by now, but I wonder if I shouldn't preemptively invite him for a chat. Before he's so swamped by Imperial notions that he forgets to be happy for Miles."

"I don't object to meeting - Emperor Gregor, sooner or later as determined by people who know more about him than I do."

"I'll make inquiries."

"Thank you. Do you have any advice to supplement Miles's admonition that I be 'honest and direct'?"

"Hmm... I'd say, try not to fall into the Barrayaran trap of considering the Emperor a title with a person attached, instead of the other way around. I think sometimes he thinks that way himself, but it isn't true. Emperor of Barrayar is a job he has, not something he dangles from on a string, and not the whole sum of his identity. I'm sorry, I'm not sure I'm explaining myself very well. But - Emperor Gregor is an office. Gregor is a smart young man with a strong sense of duty and a shortage of true friends. I can't say how well he'll take to you when I hardly know you myself, but it can't hurt to keep in mind that the possibility space is wider than the distance between allowing you to stay on the planet and... not."

"Understood. If I do wind up being asked to depart the planet I do not plan to make a terrific fuss about it as long as I can head for any reasonably civilized destination with most of my belongings, but certainly I would like a warmer reception."

"Do you realize that if you're asked to depart the planet, Miles is as likely as not to want to go with you?"

"It has occurred to me that it would certainly enter his mind. I have not formed a prediction as to how long it would stay there, but the way you bring it up leads me to suspect that it would do so long enough to have him actually accompany me."

"He would. And I suspect Gregor is sharp enough to guess the same. So no, I don't think you're going to be banished."

"Then I suppose it is doubly important that my settling in go smoothly."

"Hmm?"

"I would like to stay here, but after reasonably civilized - that is, not Jackson's Whole or, or Athos or something, not that I'd be allowed on Athos - my criterion for places I wished to be was not Cetaganda. If Miles were not particularly attached to me, it would not be very important if I were met with general disapproval, deemed more trouble than I was worth, and summarily packed off to Beta or Earth or Escobar or any of a dozen other planets. Since Miles is particularly attached to me, and since I do not particularly wish to deprive Barrayar of the only one of him it has and him of the only Barrayar he has, it is worth a more significant investment of effort to ensure that I am not met with general disapproval - since I will not leave if this is reasonably avoidable and since the consequences if I do are worse than they might otherwise have been. Now if only I knew where to apply that effort, and how, in any detail."

"I strongly advise you to collaborate with Gregor on any and all political efforts - getting people to accept you and so on. It's not just that he's Emperor; it's that he's very good at it." This with some degree of modest maternal pride, although Linya may reasonably be forgiven for not detecting the fine details there.

"I will bear that in mind."

"And how are you enjoying being married to Miles?"

"I like it so far."

"Certainly beats the alternative."

...She smiles. "Does he? Did he do the one you're wearing now?"

"Yes. Several times over in the last hour or so before we left the ship."

"For practice, or because he wasn't satisfied with it the first few times?"

"A combination of the two; he hadn't tried this kind before today. He's been surprisingly enthusiastic about learning to do complicated braids."

"Miles likes a challenge."

"I'm seeing that. Um -" What else, what else, she is reasonably sure that people are not supposed to know things about their children's sex lives so what else. "He likes it when I sing, and play the keyboard - he told me there's a piano here?"

"There is. And you're welcome to play it. I'll have to have somebody track it down, though - we don't use it often and it lives under a sheet in some dusty back corner somewhere."

"So you won't mind if I retune it to well temperament?"

"Go ahead."

"Is there tuning equipment with it or will I need to acquire some? I left my grand piano behind with its accessories and didn't know until I'd already done so that I was going to have access to another instead of just my keyboard."

"I'm sure there's tuning equipment somewhere. Whether you'll be able to find it is a different question. Maybe Miles can lead an expedition to the attics."

"Okay." And that seems to be the piano exhausted as a topic. Um. "He said he'd teach me to fly a lightflyer."

"Did he? Well, I hope you have fun. Please don't let him disable any safety systems... though I doubt he'll do that with you aboard. And he might have outgrown the practice by now anyway."

"Is there some purpose to disabling the safety systems?"

"Thrill-rides. The safety systems interfere."

"Ah. Yes, I will be sure to object if he tries that. At least my first few times out, anyway."

"I don't really expect it to be a problem, but I thought I'd mention it."

"Any other risk-seeking behavior I should be advised about?"

"He seeks risks," she says dryly. "In general. Although I'm sure you couldn't get him to admit it. It's not for the sake of the risk, anyway, most of the time... I think he just has a tendency to get caught up in his bright ideas and neglect to worry about trivialities like the consequences of failure. Whether it's pulling exciting stunts in a lightflyer or whatever mythical feat he accomplished on Eta Ceta. There was some sort of mythical feat involved, wasn't there?"

"I am entirely uncertain about your relationship to local classification procedures, but I'm sure no one on Eta Ceta would thank me for producing a detailed description. I can tell you that he earned me in a more or less plausible manner, for all that I had to put in a request in order for the relevant derring-do to bear fruit."

"I'm perfectly willing to leave it at 'mythical feat' for now. If the details are embarrassing or politically sensitive somehow, I don't need 'em. I admit, the fact that he earned you made me a little nervous when I first heard it... why did you marry my son?"

"I'm not sure if the answer you're looking for is more along the lines of 'he's cute' or a complete description of my history as a malcontent."

"If those are both reasons, then I'm looking for both of them."

"And what's 'this'?"

"I call it my pen." She plucks it from her necklace, gestures it on and in drawing mode, and draws a streak of white light through the air. "It can do most anything a comconsole can, except play audio without a peripheral." She woggles it again, defines a plane, and gets a flat desktop; calls up a blank text file and gestures letters into it at a rapid clip.

"Ooh. I want one," says Cordelia.

"Then you can have one, as soon as I've secured what I need to make consumer-version prototypes. What's your opinion on the form factor? Miles wants his to look like an old-fashioned pen, but I'm not sure I can do a nib-shaped end that works like these ends do."

"The jewelry aesthetic is fine by me. I might want something a little more, hmm, obviously technological - but I wouldn't complain if I got one that looked like yours."

"I could make a clear stripe in the part that's black on mine, exposing some of the more appealing-looking internals," suggests Linya, fetching up her design-in-progress, deexploding it, and then drawing in a partial casing around the wand of electronics, with an absent swirl coiling from one cabochon to the other. "Like this?"

"Very nice. I like your style," approves Cordelia.

"Thank you." Linya annotates this design idea and then shoos it and puts her pen back in its collar.

"So besides the pen, what sorts of things do you see yourself working on?"

"I'm probably not in a good position to try to directly involve myself in any local social programs, much as it dismays me to find that illiteracy and lack of plumbing and so on remain problems in this century. I might, however, be able to accumulate large quantities of money via consumer electronics and the software and give it to people who are not so conspicuously Cetagandan, who are doing useful work. Or find things offplanet that I can interfere in more directly, if I'm willing to make business trips - that will probably depend on what I find my day to day life here to be like, especially if Miles is away for his own work often. One thing I'm interested in that I didn't have much affordance to study on Eta Ceta is medicine - I know human genetics and the allied fields, but nothing that does much for anyone who has already gotten as far as starting to exist, I'm afraid. Cryorevival and life extension in general are of particular interest to me, there, and I'm also curious if the effectively abandoned science-fiction idea of rendering minds on hardware substrates rather than wetware is feasible."

"I definitely like your style," she says, smiling.

"Thank you."

"And I think I can see why Miles is so charmed."

"I do take some satisfaction from the fact that he seemed to like me even before I took down my force-screen."

"Did he? I'm not surprised. Granted, I'm also not surprised that he liked you after you took down your force-screen."

"He liked me a lot after I took down my force-screen," says Linya wryly. "It was actually the first time I'd gotten a reaction like that - I'd seen people reacting to other haut-ladies, but not me. Everyone who'd seen me before then was either another haut or a ba."

"You're very striking," says Cordelia. "But you have much more to recommend you than a pretty face, that much is clear."

"Thank you."

"Yes. Please don't disable safety devices on lightflyers while I am in them."

"I know everything," she says. "It's a mother's job."

"And I'm going to retune the piano, whenever tuning equipment can be turned up, and she wants a pen, too."

"Everyone's going to want pens. Pens are amazing. You're amazing."

Linya is not sure if "right in front of his mother" counts as "private", so she does not scoop him up, but she does beam.

"Yes."

Then he will show her the rooms! It's a somewhat longer journey, up to the fifth floor. Their luggage is all lined up in a cozy sitting room, where a slight sprinkling of dust here and there suggests the floor was hastily cleaned while all the dust covers were being removed from the furniture. Beyond that, more coziness awaits - bedroom, bathroom, closets, an office or study with a huge oaken desk. More than enough space for all of Linya's things.

"I suppose I'd better unpack. Unless there is someone else I should meet as soon as possible who is also immediately to hand."

"No - Father's in Hassadar, tending to District business. He'll be back... sometime in the next few days, probably."

"Does he know I exist?"

"Yes."

"Good. I imagine I'm surprising, but I would rather not come around a corner and startle him."

"No," he agrees, "that would be a bad plan. Luckily he is forewarned."

"I asked your mother about how he's likely to react and she made what I assume was a reference to how the two of them met. Is unconventional bridal acquisition a family trait?"

"Um? I don't know, is it?"

"Unless I misunderstood something, she implied that she was your father's 'honorably treated captured prisoner' when he proposed."

He blinks. "Well, that's not something I ever heard before... I can believe it, though. I guess they did meet when Barrayar was sort of at war, and I remember something about Mother discovering Sergyar, and Father being somehow involved... anyway, I don't know any other Vorkosigan bridal acquisition stories. But probably lots of them are boring, the Vor go in for arranged marriages fairly frequently, especially as you look back into the Time of Isolation. I guess we're starting a new tradition, Father and I. Unconventionally acquired brides. From other planets."

"I think to top our story, future generations of Vorkosigans will have to discover, and then marry, sapient aliens."

...Miles cracks up.

She grins and scoops him up. Nobody is looking! She's allowed!

He giggles helplessly into her shoulder.

"How do other residents of this household apply to the no-scooping-you-up-in-front-of-people rule?"

"Um... in front of Mother is fine, in front of the servants and armsmen I'd rather you didn't make it a habit but I'll survive the occasional indiscretion, in front of Father..." For some reason, he recalls the time he creatively interpreted an order to stay off his broken-and-mending legs by sliding down the banister of the main stairs and unexpectedly landed in his father's arms. "...is also fine," he concludes.

"Okay. I wonder if the constant temptation will wear off. You're very scoopable."

He giggles some more, hugging her.

Snuggle.