You just missed a party of space pirates, says Bar.

"Nifty. What kind of space pirates?"

Grizzled ones. With magnetic grappling hooks. What can I get for you today?

"Oh, let's do something with caffeine in it, I've had a bit of a tiring day."

Zowafruit energy drink? One appears.

"Awesome, thanks." She picks it up and takes a swig. "Awesome."

I'm so glad you like it.

"Of course I do. Your taste is impeccable as always."

Emily hears it and turns around. "Oh! Hello!"

"...Hi! Do you by any chance know where I am?"

"This is Milliways, a dimension-hopping bar that hijacks doors that normally go other places. The first drink's free, and the bar herself is sentient and fantastic at recommending drink orders."

"What a nice and succinct explanation of a completely baffling phenomenon." He steps in, looking around. "I'm Ivan Vorpatril, what's your name?"

"Emily Xavier. I'm from Earth, Nineteen Eighty-Six. Whence come you?"

"Oh, yes, I suppose that should be part of introductions in a dimension-hopping bar, shouldn't it, how did I neglect to - Barrayar, 2999. Delighted to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too! I don't meet many people from that far in the future around here, mostly it's the early twenty-first century."

"Well, Barrayar is less futuristic than most of the galaxy, we were cut off by a collapsed wormhole for a few centuries and have in living memory gone from inventing gunpowder to acquiring a space fleet."

"Wow, that sucks. My world has rapidly increased in technological level lately, but that's because you can buy advanced stuff from the bar and take it home so your father's science friend can reverse-engineer it."

"Sounds like a nice gig. Anything I should be bringing home to 2999 to freak out ImpSec and excite scientists all over the imperium?"

"I wouldn't know. I've been sticking to stuff closer to my own year, and after the twenty-first century there seem to be all kinds of technological trees. You could ask Bar, she communicates with napkins."

"I mostly brought home medical technology. It's excellent, Papa can walk again."

"Oh, what's wrong with your cousin?"

"His parents were poisoned while his mother was pregnant with him. Very brittle bones. He's getting them replaced in batches, but he has bizarre allergies so this is more complicated than it should be."

"Oh gosh, that's awful. Good thing you've got the technology to replace them, we still can't quite do that."

"It's a miserable enough process that he might wish he had an excuse to skip it, goodness knows he puts it off long enough, but yes."

"So were you really going to a grocery store or was that just part of the line?"

"Oh, I was going to the grocery store. Out of groats and cheese and wine and -" He pulls a long skinny object with glass ends out of his pocket, wiggles it, looks at the resulting floating words, and finishes, "Bacon."

"Bar sells things other than drinks. Bar sells things you can't normally get, this drink is made of a fruit that doesn't exist in my universe," she raises her glass and takes a sip, smiling at him over the rim.

"What's that?"

"Oh, I'm a senior in college right now. Pre-med. And you?"

"Imperial Service. Lieutenant, Ops. I'm in the last couple months of an assignment to the embassy on Earth, actually. It's in London, I think London is old enough that you have it already."

"...Yes, we have London. London is already old when I'm from."

"It's a nice city! Have you been?"

"Yeah, my father got his doctorate at Oxford and they ask him to talk about a thing sometimes and I usually get to come along."

"Oxford! Still exists," says Ivan, holding up one index finger authoritatively. "M'cousin's wife kept going there for lectures on things I can't pronounce. She was on the planet for unrelated reasons, gone now."

"That's great. It's a great place. Very beautiful. What kind of lectures?"

"Unpronounceable ones. She's a - engineer programmer neurologist musician polymath sort. Let's see -" He woggles his device, apparently scrolling through message records. "On Nonrecreational Applications for Dream Implants and Allied Technologies, I can pronounce that!"

"Okay, I have no idea what that means, I'm going to blame the fact that you're from more than a thousand years in the future."

"There's a brain implant people get to partake in more immersive stories than just holos, right? ...Maybe you don't have those yet. I don't remember how old they are. But they exist. So this is about things to do with those that are less fun. For some reason."

"Oh, that makes sense. I bet that would make studying things easier, if you didn't have to bring in a real one of everything or rely on pictures."

"I don't think they're widely enough adopted to base educational systems on them anywhere. Maybe some planets. That's probably not Linyabel's interest, anyway."

"Well, whatever it is, I'm sure it's productive."

"Probably. What kind of medicine do you want to do?"

"I haven't decided for sure. Probably a pediatrician or some kind of surgeon."

"If you are a pediatrician," says Ivan with mock solemnity, "do not laugh at little boys who come in with dirt all over them and bumps on their heads and laugh at them when they explain that their escape tunnel to get away from Cetagandan invaders - I think it was Cetagandan invaders - collapsed on them because their cousin did inadequate surveying before ordering said tunnel dug."

"What?"

"I was nine, m'cousin made me and his friend Elena dig an escape tunnel to escape from I think it was fictitious Cetagandan invaders - well, it wasn't real invaders of any kind, at least - and it fell on my head."

"Wow. That reminds me of the time when I was seven when my best friend decided we ought to set her dad's hat on fire. I'll spare you the details, but it involved about a gallon of gasoline, an explosion, left a hole in the yard, and we didn't manage to kill the hat."

"That sounds like a heck of a hat. I hope the ground's the only thing you left a hole in?"

"Yeah, everyone was fine. It's more of a helmet, really, Edie was convinced it was evil."

"Is it in terrible taste? Bad color palette?"

"She was convinced he stopped having thoughts when he wore it."

"What an odd thing to think."

"Well. We were seven."

"This can excuse many oddities. I think I still believed in Father Frost when I was seven."

"I'm going to assume that's Barrayaran Santa Claus. Or 2999 Santa Claus."

"I think he's a Barrayaran thing, although we may have inherited him from one or another of the colonist sources, probably Russia. Is Santa Claus a fellow who small children believe to be responsible for their winter holiday presents?"

"Yep, that's him."

"Then yes. I believed he existed until I was seven, and then I received Winterfair socks and realized this was a very human injustice."

"Pfffft."

"More recently, I only narrowly escaped dressing up as him for a pageant whose originally intended sole cast member over the age of eight fell ill. He got better in plenty of time and his sister did not have to paste a beard on me."

"I have never come close to having to dress up as Santa Claus, I'll tell you that."

"Really? Santa Claus is not a pretty twentysomething girl?"

"Nope. Bearded old man with a jolly red suit and a tummy like a bowl of jelly."

"Father Frost is as often seen in shades of blue."

"Well, they don't seem to be quite the same character, even if they share a certain spiritual kinship." She looks him over. "You don't quite seem to suit the role of an old man either."

"I'm not quite twenty-six," he smiles. "The beard would have been rather overworked."

"The poor dear. Such a tragic fate, so narrowly avoided."

"The fellow who did wind up taking the part was only thirty himself but still."

"Ah well. At least you escaped unscathed."

"I am unharmed. By that." Perhaps unconsciously, he picks at a fairly fresh-looking scar on his knuckle. Actually, he's got several of those.

"Ooh, are you alright?"

"Hm? Oh, I'm fine. It's a long story."

"Did I mention Milliways freezes time in your world of origin while you're inside?"

Ivan snorts. "Well, the short version of the long story is that I was kidnapped and locked in a seawall and viciously attacked the walls, doing them no damage whatsoever and opening a few holes in my hands."

"Oh, dear. That's terrible, I'm so sorry."

"I'm all right. Got to medical in fairly short order, th'bastard who did it got a nerve disruptor to the - hm, I don't actually know where he got it to, but somewhere appropriately central - other innocent and dubiously innocent parties to the matter are all also all right."

"Well. That's good, anyway."

"Quite. And we stopped a plot to destroy the Imperium while we were at it."

"Ooh, nice. I can't say I've ever thwarted something so dramatic myself, but my father helped save the world once."

"And you only have the one, so extra points, what was wrong with the world?"

"Does the Cuban Missile Crisis still mean anything to future people?"

"...Nnnno? If it were not for context I could not even be confident that Cuba is an Earth location."

"Okay, well, this was back when nuclear weapons were a new thing, and the only reason the United States and Russia weren't at war was because no one trusted anyone else not to use them, so everyone was terrified that someone was going to start firing nuclear missiles and then everyone was going to start firing nuclear missiles. So, naturally, people started posturing about how good their nuclear missiles were and how they could totally hit the other guy with them so the other guy knew not to mess with them. And this is part of Earth Standard History, apparently, but in my world much of the really stupid stuff was because of the machinations of this one guy who wanted nuclear winter, and the grand finale was going to be at Cuba, but my father and his best friend who is also my best friend's father and a bunch of their other friends stopped him."

"Good for the good guys," applauds Ivan. "Why would anyone want nuclear winter? I mean, it does global cooling if you're doing a long-term terraforming project but Earth is already inhabited."

"Really, really terrible science. I don't know why he thought mutants were caused by the advent of nuclear physics, but he thought that it would make us stronger while it was busy killing off everyone else."

"Oh, right, most universes don't have them--in my world, some people are born with weird powers--or develop them at puberty, whatever. We're called mutants."

"Oh, we have mutants."

"That. Sure was a tone of voice. Care to share with the class?"

"I - look, you look completely normal, I didn't know - I am actually very progressive by Barrayaran standards for whatever that's worth?"

"I mean, I"m not one of the ones with nifty hair colors or blue skin or something, I just do this," she says, wiggling her fingers. A handful of loose change floats out of her shirt pocket and in front of her hand.

Ivan makes an undignified eeping noise.

"Magnetism. I can fly, too, when I'm on a planet."

"...That's not the kind of mutants we have."

"Well, lots of us do other things. My father's a telepath. But yeah, I am aware that most things that can be described as 'mutant' are...not that. Like, you know, blue eyes or lactose tolerance."

"...That's also not the thing people are usually referring to at home when they say 'mutant', it's more, flippers for arms, six eyes, entire body a mirror image with the heart on the right side and all, sixteen toes."

"Does that happen? I know random malignant mutations happen, but I've never heard of a physical change that dramatic that wasn't accompanied by awesome powers."

"It happens. And no awesome powers, fairy tales aside. It used to happen a lot on Barrayar. Less now, but out in the sticks a baby with a cleft palate or funny-looking ears is - is in trouble. They haven't necessarily come around to the idea that galactic medicine can fix the whatever, and before we had the galactic medicine it was all just infanticide. M'cousin has a teratogenic health problem - completely clean gene scan, nothing fiddled with that, but his mother was poisoned while he was a fetus and he looks like a mutant and gets shit for it. Most of the reason I'm so progressive by Barrayaran standards."

"That is terrible."

"Which part?"

"Mostly the infanticide, but all of it! ...Except you being progressive by Barrayaran standards, not that."

"Well, yes. And then the flip side of m'cousin's situation is his wife's. She's absolutely healthy. And heavily genetically engineered. Doesn't help that her planet tried to conquer ours a few decades ago; adds up to she has to go out with a bodyguard on Barrayar."

"Well, 'they tried to conquer us' is...better than some reasons. What's she engineered for?"

"Everything. I haven't seen her pick up anything heavier than her husband or anything, mind, she's normally a very intellectual sort, but to hear her jabber about the work she's doing on their kid-to-be and the compromises she's making to be sure he winds up half his da - apparently the idea of the haut, the whole bunch of genetically engineered people she's from, is, let me see if I can remember this straight - you're supposed to be able to drop half a dozen haut five-year-olds on a half-terraformed planet intending to leave them alone for thirty years only to find that after twenty-five they've all survived and invented space travel and came to see what was taking you so long?"

"Okay, I'm impressed. Not that being my kind of mutant doesn't have all sorts of advantages, but you generally only get one or two apiece."

"Well, she doesn't have - magnet powers, so, yeah, there's that. Miles isn't letting her overengineer the kid. She has to justify anything she wants to do as a 'quality of life' intervention."

"I'm on the higher end of powers awesomeness, some of them are really hard to control and some of them are dangerous if you can't control them and there's overlap."

Ivan shudders. Just a little.

"Technology helps. My friend Scott is in the overlap and he has this visor that prevents his plasma eye beams from hurting anything."

"...I don't think that is even how genetics works in my world."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I'm pretty sure that if you could get plasma eye beams - for that matter, if you could get magnet powers, although that's less of a stretch - from fiddling with genes, the haut or some wildly unethical experimenter on Jackson's Whole would have figured it by now and I would have had to sit through a training course on How The Barrayaran Military Expects Officers To Handle People With Plasma Eye Beams."

She cracks up.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know that's not funny to you, it's just, the mental image..."

"I mean, it would be like plasma arcs, mostly, I imagine? I bet it would be like plasma arcs except you can't stop them from aiming at you by interfering with their arms, so."

"In all seriousness, it's not the magnetists or the plasma-people you need to watch out for, it's the telepaths. We are very, very lucky that the three strongest telepaths alive are fantastically ethical people."

"...Lucky you, yes. God, ImpSec wouldn't sleep for a month, by the end of figuring out how to deal with that they'd be hallucinating that their building is beautiful and well-architected..."

"It's not, I'm guessing."

"Oh, no."

"I'm a lot more casual about this than most people, one of them is my father, one is my best friend, and we're still-good-but-not-as-good friends with the third."

"That sounds convenient."

"It really is! It is not, in fact, a coincidence that all three are so moral--except inasmuch as it is a coincidence that the adult one managed to be a major figure in the lives of the other two growing up. Telepathic Ethics Are Not A Joke, that's Papa."

"Good for your papa."

"Yeah. I am very, very aware of what a lucky person I am."

"Do you have anything that - anything except the magnet powers, or can I basically just imagine you are a storybook wizard?"

"Me personally?"

"You personally, being the one I'm talking to. ...I do not think I am ready to meet someone with plasma eye beams today."

"I do not have plasma eye beams. My internal organs are a little bit weird, but not in a way that's ever likely to become relevant unless I make fantastically improbable life choices."

"...Okay."

"Most of the actual visible changes are pretty awesome. I know multiple people with fully-functioning wings, and my aunt looks like she was carved from lapis lazuli."

"These people should not ever consider visiting Barrayar."

"They don't find Milliways, so it was already pretty unlikely. But noted."

"Oh, is 'finding Milliways' a - trait?"

"Eh--sort of? If it's never happened to you, it might or it might not ever, some people find it once, some people find it pretty regularly. If it happens to you reasonably often it probably won't just stop, but there's no guarantee."

"Huh." He sips his pink thing.

"I only get Milliways when I'm opening a door with magnetism, for some reason. No idea why."

"Huh. I couldn't begin to guess why that would be."

"Nor I! The ways of Milliways doors are mysterious and unfathomable. Even Bar doesn't have a clue," she adds, patting the bar.

"Yep."

"Ooh, I hadn't even thought about that! I've never gotten Milliways while far enough away from home to be relying in import shops."

"Mostly I miss real meat. It's outrageously expensive on Earth and I've never gotten used to the vat kind."

"You can absolutely get real meat here. Well, not real real I suppose, it's never been a dead animal, but I can't tell the difference."

"I mean, the pink thing she gave you has never been whatever it is pink things are usually made of. ...Hey, bar, can I try the vat stuff to see what it's like?"

Of course. Do you have a preference for the inspirational dish?

"Not pork. Or shellfish. Or anything else not kosher."

"Kosher. I'm Jewish. Do spacefuture people not have Judaism anymore or is that just Barrayar too?"

"So we have some religious dietary restrictions, the most well-known of which is that we're not supposed to eat pork."

"I don't know if it does, but since I've never eaten real pork it wouldn't be a good choice for comparing to the vat variety. Besides, I shouldn't like to get attached in case it turns out to be awesome."

"Eh, it's meat. It's a perfectly nice meat but I'd usually rather have beef."

"Besides, better safe than sorry. I don't know that pork that's never been a pig isn't kosher, but I don't know that it is either. And it would be a little hard to check, too, given that it would involve trying to explain Milliways to a rabbi without proof."

"I imagine that could be awkward. I'm probably not going to tell anyone I was here."

"I had to tell some people, because I brought home technology to reverse-engineer, but one of the perks of so many of one's nearest and dearest being telepaths is that it makes it much easier for them to believe your more fantastical truths."

"That's - probably easier than trying to construct an explanation, yep."

"It really is. You haven't really understood how how inadequate language is until you've been discussing something with your telepathic best friend for hours and then you need to try to tell someone not a telepath how something smells."

...Ivan giggles.

"I don't know how your language does, but late twentieth century English does not have a comprehensive vocabulary for dealing with odor."

"Neither does any language I know enough of to comment on."

"I wonder why."

"Sort of hard to separate features of smells, isn't it? Except by comparison to specific things. If something's bready, I can just say that."

"I suppose. But then, maybe it's hard to separate them because we don't have the words for it. I'd say that something bready smelled more like something musky than like something sweet, wouldn't you?"

"No, actually, I'd group bread closer to sweet."

"Maybe it depends on the kind of bread. Or the kind of musk. Alas, due to the language barrier, we shall never know."

"Alas!"

"So how are you liking Earth, while you're there? We haven't irreparably poisoned the atmosphere, I hope."

"It's quite breathable, no one has to live in arcologies. It's got an amazing moon. Noplace else has quite so nice a moon."

"It's a lovely moon. Perfectly suited for late night strolls."

"I hear the eclipses are something else, but haven't had any in the hemisphere since I've been on the planet. It's gorgeous just doing standard moon operating procedure, though."

"It really is. I've never seen a solar eclipse, but the lunar ones are awesome too."

"Most moons aren't the right size to do those things very neatly. It's one of Earth's more famous features. Top three."

"What are the other two?"

"Birthplace of humanity, cultural center of the galaxy. There's richer planets, I think Tau Ceti and Escobar compete on population, but Earth has the good novelists and musicians and so on."

"Oh, I thought you meant like physical features. Birthplace of humanity, bit obvious."

"Physical features it's the moon first, and second I guess the biodiversity - there are planets with native life but it tends to be inconvenient, fragile relative to terraforming, and not usually as well-developed as Earth's, and nobody puts all the kinds of beetles without missing any on a new place they're terraforming."

"Oh, that makes sense. Now I'm imagining some poor terraformer crying over the difficulty presented by all these blasted beetles."

"There are really too many! I don't know a whole lot about terraforming but I imagine they must skimp on the plants, too."

"I don't think anyone's going to cry over leaving behind poison ivy."

"I've never even heard of that, and based on the name I imagine you are right."

"It produces chemicals that itch for weeks if you touch them. There's an urban legend about a guy who--never mind, it's not delicate."

"Is there a sign? Please do not be indelicate in this bar?" asks Ivan, looking around.

"No, but in my experience men don't like stories involving nasty chemicals and a man's sensitive bits."

"This is true," Ivan admits, "but not for reasons of delicacy."

"I feel like there's an innuendo there about the delicacy of the relevant area but the specifics are escaping me."

Ivan thinks for a moment. "I can't come up with anything," he sighs.

"Tragic. Such a perfect opening, and neither of us enough of a cunning linguist to take advantage."

...sporfle. "That - only sort of works, I think the bar is translating, but it comes close enough. So to speak."

"I hope there's no one who's going to take offense at you hearing such things from strange girls."

"I am currently quite lacking in anyone who might fear attempts on my virtue, myself included."

"Ooh."

"And how about yours, do you have virtue-guarding dragons and a moat or anything?"

"Nothing of the sort. I'm unattached at the moment, and anyone else who thinks it's their business shall find themselves entirely disregarded."

"How much?" Emily asks, fishing for her purse (with her hands).

"No kidding." She fishes out the right bills and puts them on the bar.

They are replaced with a key.

"Shall we?"

"We shall!" He scoops up the key, reads the room number Bar supplies, locates the stairs, and offers Emily his arm.

She takes it, beaming at him.

And they do.