"Good to know. Any advance information on his opinion about me, or is he reserving some combination of judgment and comment?"

"He's reserving both."

"Okay. Thanks for letting me know."

"You're welcome. How's the pen project coming along?"

"Beautifully. Tsipis is fantastic, he's handling all of the things I wasn't yet sure how to manage myself with what appears to be flawless competence, it's speeding my timetable up quite a bit because I don't have to stop and personally investigate the local economy and its customs. I can just write software and draw schematics."

"Good. He's really taken a shine to you."

"It's mutual. It would be hard for his enthusiasm not to be contagious even if I didn't have a vested interest, I think."

"It's charming."

"Whoever hired him was very clever."

"That would be Aral, I believe."

"Well, then perhaps I will compliment him on his hiring choices, if the circumstances of the conversation seem amenable."

"Feel free."

"Oh, and thank you for the referral to Alys. I didn't spot you after I got home last night to mention it then, but I appreciate it."

"She was a great help to me when I first arrived on Barrayar. Still is, for that matter."

"She is apparently very well suited to the task of making sure I still don't have to care about what I wear except to the extent that I don't think orange and pink go together."

"Yes she is. She does me similar favours when I have to dress up."

"I had acquaintances who tended to do the same thing back on Eta Ceta. And who did my hair. So that's both tasks replaced, at least until Miles goes off somewhere and I go back to styles I can do myself." (Miles has, today, conquered an angled Dutch braid which goes over her shoulder.)

"I'm sure we can find you a hairdresser if you want one."

"It's not necessary. I like that Miles does the fancy ones, but if he's routinely called away courier-ing things I'll just simplify. I'm no longer surrounded by people who are constantly evaluating whether my genotype contains sufficiently prosocial tendencies or whether I'm well-acculturated or what have you and don't need to maintain the corresponding standard anymore."

"I think there's a certain amount of undue fuss about appearances in most cultures, but if you say the haut take it to a whole different level, I'll believe you."

"What we're wearing simultaneously advertises aesthetics and acculturation, both of which are of immense importance. Someone whose outfit falls short of whatever the going standard is has either got defective ability to tell what looks nice, or," Linya raises a hand, "sub-par interest in investing effort into meeting the standards set collectively by their constellation or the haut race in general, which is certainly a tendency that should be shown the door as soon as possible. One does not keep over a million people all heavily engineered for competence and theoretical self-sufficiency all acting in concert by encouraging them to start their own cultural offshoots. There've been dozens of promising improvements shot down because they were shown to 'reduce neuroplasticity', but the actual reports on the experimental ba in question didn't show anything nearly that general, I think." Pause. "Stop me if I'm boring you."

"No, I'm fascinated," she says. "'Reduce neuroplasticity' being a subtle excuse for... what? Staying away from changes that might lead to maverick haut?"

"Neuroplasticity is here code for - a disposition to turn into the same sort of human as one grows up around. So, yes - although at the same time they don't want to entirely quash creativity or originality, so they're constrained noticeably in anti-maverick efforts."

"I see. It seems damn strange to me," she says. "Well... maybe not that strange. They can be a little unfriendly to outliers on Beta Colony, too. They just don't go as far as trying to eliminate them before birth."

"Is Beta not the haven of tolerance and civilization that I'd heard it was? Should some other planet top my list of 'if relocating from Barrayar, send care of thus and such'?"

"Hmm... I'd put it this way," she says thoughtfully. "They have a system, and when the system works, it works very, very well. But when it fails, it can fail pretty badly in some pretty awful ways. It failed me once."

"Are you inclined to share the details?"

"I'm glad you got away."

"Me too," she says dryly; and more seriously, "Thank you."

"What do you know about the Barrayaran invasion of Komarr?"

"An overview. It was considered relevant to my general education, but it had a lot of competition for time. I assume you're about to describe the Solstice Massacre - I know that it occurred and that the Count's name was one of those germane to it but have no particularly credible way to distinguish fact from rumor."

"Aral was very proud of his Komarr invasion plan because, up until that point, it had been completely bloodless. Not a single shot fired, as far as I know. And then his Political Officer decided, on his own initiative, to go behind Aral's back and kill all those people. After Aral had given his personal word that they were to be spared. Aral had him executed on the spot. Unfortunately, the galactic propagandists either failed to pick up on or deliberately omitted some of those crucial details, and all that made it to the wider audience was that a lot of people had been killed on his watch. You still hear the title 'Butcher of Komarr' occasionally. I strongly recommend that you never use the phrase in his hearing. It causes him pain."

"I will avoid it," agrees Linya.

"Thank you."

"If you think of any other - warnings like that one I would appreciate them. And for that matter if you come up with other questions about the history and aesthetic of the haut project I'm certainly your best resource to hand."

"I imagine I'd be fascinated to hear just about anything you could tell me, but I hardly know where to start asking."

"Oh, off the top of my head - about fifty percent of us are bisexual. In early days there was close enough to consensus in favor of trying to make all haut heterosexual for reasons which apparently seemed obvious enough to them that they didn't write their justifications down. They managed ninety-five percent of that and could not quite pin down the remaining factors, and the tiny percentage of would-be non-heterosexuals were lonely and highly irritated and successfully pushed for the policy we have now."

"...What can they have been thinking?" she wonders.

"Symmetry, maybe? I really couldn't tell you for sure."

"Seems a hell of a long way to go for aesthetics."

"There is almost no limit to what haut will do for aesthetics. But fortunately as a group they find a lot of genuinely problematic things unattractive, so I do not find myself a single-purpose organism."

"Single-purpose...?"

"Well, dual-purpose, I suppose. If you look at how most haut actually spend their time it looks like art and genetics for women, art and politics for men. Plus some games designed almost entirely to be time-sinks for competitive geniuses. But because it would be pathetic - or possibly insufficiently challenging to the designers' aspirations - to make any haut who fell short of the highest standards in other potentials, I can also run more or less as fast as the fastest non-haut of my height without having to practice, even though no one ever expects me to; and I'm immune to fast-penta, even though under the prescribed course of my life this would never have come up; and I do not get tension headaches or dental cavities or suffer from any of hundreds of other standard human ailments because that would make me a less cleverly developed art project. The idea is to make as few compromises as possible. If I can be a musician and able to learn languages in two weeks of concerted study apiece and have an immune system that refuses to acknowledge that the common cold exists, and I can also have the entire laundry list of other unambiguous or close enough improvements, it would be unthinkable to leave any out. Only when tradeoffs that they can't work around or compensate for materialize do the priorities of haut projected time expenditure even come up."

"I see," she murmurs. "It's interesting that the haut seem to parallel the Vor that way - the men run the governments; the women run the bloodlines. But the haut seem to do it more openly. On Barrayar it's another one of those unwritten codes."

"It is absolutely open among the haut. Occasionally a man will study genetics and maybe even assist on a project, or his political activities will be informed by his female friends or love-poems, but by and large it's very divided."

"...And a love-poem is...?"

"Oh - haut don't marry amongst themselves, but there are relationships, and the most common category of setups has the partners referred to as one another's 'love-poems'. As in, the person one would write a love poem about."

"Aha. I suppose it makes sense that a group like the haut would separate romance from reproduction... but it still seems strange to me."

"It's not unheard-of for someone to design a child that's principally her and her love-poem's genes. But it's equally not-unheard-of to do the same with one's friends, and in either case if whoever one answers to - the constellation contract-arrangers or the planetary consort or the Empress herself, depending on how high up one is in the hierarchy at the time one attempts this - if she finds that one is designing for sentiment rather than improvement then one risks losing considerable creative control. It is very common to make minor cosmetic changes for sentimental reasons. My designer gave me her best friend's eyes, for instance."

"Creative control... and here I thought Beta Colony was strict with its child licenses. At least they only control quantity of offspring and quality of parents. I'm not personally drawn to the idea of designing a child, but if I decided to, I can't imagine letting anyone but my husband have substantial input into the process."

"Yes, oddly enough creative control is one of the most sought-after things for haut-ladies, and the only way to get a complete clear pass to do whatever you like - short of becoming the Empress - is to marry out, which is the least sought-after thing. Though whether complete creative control with drastically fewer materials is a true improvement on that axis is I suppose genuinely debatable. Typically the husbands aren't geneticists, so it's assumed that they choose quantity and timing and sex and maybe make cosmetic requests but are otherwise non-participants... That's if they're ghem. I haven't had this conversation with Miles yet."

"Geneticist or no, I expect him to have opinions, but I'm afraid I have no good way to predict them."

"Well, neither of us are in a hurry to start, so there will be time to discuss it. Technically by the terms of the award ceremony cum marriage he's entitled to do as he likes, which would be absolute scandal on Cetaganda, but this is not Cetaganda."

"This is not Cetaganda," she agrees. "The parameters of scandal are very different here."

"Yes. I'm sure there are plenty of uniquely Barryaran ways to introduce dismay into the mood of the population to compensate."

"Miles seems to manage it just by existing."

"So at least there's someone experienced around."

"Yes. And I'm sure he'll be happy to let you benefit from that experience."

"Aid where needed," murmurs Linya.

"Indeed."

Linya scoops him up to hug. "That's good."

"I'm dither-inducing. Grand."

"There are complicated circumstances at work," he says. "I'll take dithering over, say, pulling me aside to tell me I'm an idiot who should mail you back pronto. Which he seems not at all inclined to do."

"Good. Frankly I have no idea what my status would be if I were sent back instead of to some other planet entirely, and anyway I would miss you." She nuzzles the top of his head. Because is he is cute and scoopable.

"I love that you braid my hair, you know."

"I love that you let me braid your hair." He stretches up and pecks her on the cheek, then sighs. "I should probably bugger off before Da gets up the courage to come talk to you; I can't imagine that having me in your lap at the time would make it less awkward."

"All right, I suppose that makes sense." Kiss.

And Linya waits. She's a little too distracted to program; she goes over to where her keyboard stand is set up and plays little snatches of this and that.

"Lady Vorkosigan," he answers, equally politely. "I, ah... wanted to assure you that you are welcome in my home."

"Thank you. It's a lovely house," she adds.

"I'm rather charmed by the maze aspect - perhaps I would be less so if I had not drawn myself a map - and I like that it has a piano."

"You're the first person I've ever heard describe themselves as charmed by that. But I'm hardly going to complain. You play the piano, then? Has Cordelia located it for you?"

"Yes. And I retuned it."

"Well... well, I hope it brings you some enjoyment," he says.

"It has. My keyboard's perfectly nice, but a real, good piano is inimitable."

He smiles again, hesitant but genuine.

"I sing too," she offers. "But I've been spending more of my time teaching myself the local Greek dialect and programming and taking economics lessons from Tsipis, who is helping me arrange to market a little gadget I invented - did Cordelia tell you about my pen?"

"She mentioned some sort of technological project...?"

"This is my prototype, after a fashion - the consumer version will be different in a few ways," she says, tugging her pen free from her necklace. She woggles it and draws a line of light through the air. "It's almost like a portable comconsole."

"Interesting," he says. "I can see how that would be convenient."

"Mm-hm." She puts it back on her necklace and the light winks out when she lets go of it. "Do you want one?"

"I very well might."

"Miles asked first, but he is going to have to wait since he wants one that will require complicated optics finagling."

"Eh?"

"He wants it to look like an old-fashioned pen, nib and everything, instead of having the round ends," she says, tapping one of the cabochons. "I don't know how to do that yet."

"I might wait around for one of those myself," the Count muses. "The aesthetic is very appealing."

"It's definitely going to take a while, but Tsipis is being so helpful that I can probably find time to figure it out sooner than I was imagining a couple of weeks ago - Cordelia said you hired him?"

"Yes. A decision I have never regretted."

"Yes, he's fantastic," agrees Linya. And, more shyly: "So is Miles."

"He is. I don't know how much of the story you have..."

"Not much. What, in fact, happened?"

"Vast swathes of it are variously classified; Cordelia has been referring to 'whatever it is that earned Miles a haut-wife' as the 'mythical feat' and I am reasonably sure I should not be deciding on my own recognizance who it is and is not classified to. But it was suitably mythical and featlike."

"Of course it was; Miles did it," he snorts. "He's very much the type."

"Clearly. So Lisbet put in a word for me about seeing that he got - how was it that Lord Vorpatril put it - a grab bag of prizes."

"Lisbet—? The new Empress?"

"Yes."

"You know her personally, then?"

"I was running errands for her in the course of the mythical feat. That's how I met Miles."

"Aha."

"I hope I don't cause undue problems just by being here, being Lady Vorkosigan, etcetera. I no longer expect that Miles is likely to change his mind and ship me to Beta, though, or I'd reassure you that this would be doable with no fuss, as I told Captain Illyan."

"Practical of you... but yes. We're a stubborn bunch, we Vorkosigans. I would expect him to take you offplanet rather than send you, if it came to that. Which I would definitely prefer it didn't."

"I have developed the same expectation."

"Not very subtle about it, is he?"

"No. He is extremely attached to me. He is very cute about it."

Aral grins again.

"We've been talking a little about having a Barrayaran ceremony, too," she adds. "With the groats, and everything."

He nods. "Well, you have my blessing for it."

"Thank you."