"I was actually envisioning keratin, like if I'd decided to grow horns or spines only more so. And with Swiss-cheese holes in it to cut the mass, because the idea is to get distance while contributing as little to the gravity problem as possible. And I could pretty freely shape it. Think tower, not sphere - as long as it can't significantly deform without violating the indestructibility clause it will not bend or break. It wouldn't be significant next to a black hole, I think."

"Okay, enormous keratin spike. Hmm. I'm having a sort of darkly comical mental image of you growing yourself a horn-tower and having the other end lose its footing on the black hole, sending you whanging around until the center of mass of you-plus-giant-horn was settled as close to the black hole as possible... but it would probably still work eventually even if it might take some experimentation to get right."

"I think so. So yeah. A creative demon is probably not going to be inconvenienced on a scale of, say, years, by being dumped into a sun or black hole. Probably you just definitely shouldn't summon any more daeva until you're sure dismissal works, and be exquisitely careful about bindings especially until some natural experiment or other demonstrates the further feasibility of dismissal-through-death."

"Or just not summon any more demons, since the one we have is working out so well."

"If you like. I can't be multiple places at once, though."

"What a shocking flaw."

"I know, right? Although if I can be dismissed and resummoned I can pop around the galaxy much faster than someone restricted to mortal transportation, provided there's a sufficiently well-handled schedule."

"I can't imagine how that might come in handy, but, noted."

"Well, for instance, right now I'm looking at a few days in this here ship, not doing much. If you were planning to resummon me at the other end I could spend those five days someplace else doing usefuls for somebody else. Please don't let's be too proprietary about my skills, here."

"Presently the population of people who can summon you is limited to one and the population of people available to act as liaison between you and this universe is also limited to one, and it's the same one," says Miles. "Under those conditions it makes the most sense for me to go wherever you go and vice versa. I would like to be very careful in deciding who gets to know how much about where you came from and what you can do and how to get more of you, and you seem to agree that that's a good idea, so it seems unlikely that we're going to get a vast sprawling network of Cam-summoners scheduled for months in advance with to-the-day precision anytime soon."

"Who said anything about soon? I'm immortal, remember?"

"...Right, when I said I can't imagine how that might come in handy, I was thinking in terms of immediate benefit," says Miles.

"Aha. No, couldn't do much immediately, since telling somebody on another planet 'would you like to borrow my magical demon for a few days' would also take a while, even if you had somebody in mind."

"Yeah, exactly."

"I will, I should probably notify you you, take it somewhat amiss to be claimed for a specific political unit on the sole grounds that this political unit's inhabitants were the ones who stumbled on a valid summoning circle. The grounds that I lucked out in the safety-conscious summoner department and that publicizing this sort of thing is, believe me I know, awkward, are perfectly reasonable but don't hold up forever."

"I'm not going to claim you on behalf of Barrayar, but... how shall I put this. There are people in this universe who, had I the choice between sucking Barrayar into a black hole and teaching that person how to summon daeva, I would have to think about it. Many of those people are concentrated in specific political units."

"I am a reasonable person. I will not run around disclosing the secrets of daeva summoning to people completely indiscriminately. Especially not while I'm so unfamiliar with the tech level, because that really changes things up, especially with respect to demons. I just wanted to be clear that I do not prefer to be an Imperial asset, however charming its head of state - and miscellaneous other representatives who were all carefully selected for being able to take the news."

"Yeah, noted," says Miles.

"Now I'm curious just what political unit you are imagining having stumbled on me or somebody like me instead."

"Jackson's Whole is definitely the most prominent nightmare. I wouldn't be thrilled if the Cetagandans had daeva, but I have hope that their interest in planetary conquest might be waning, whereas Jackson's Whole is an eternal cesspit."

"In what way? Remember, I haven't been here that long."

"All right... I'm not very well versed in Jacksonian history, so take this as more legend than fact, but: imagine that a bunch of criminal consortiums all find it convenient to have a base of operations outside the purview of any existing government, so they set up shop on a planet that's basically livable but not idyllic enough for anyone else to have scooped it up yet. Let the resulting society crystallize over the period of, I don't know, fifty years? And all the heads of the various gangs start calling themselves Barons, and you end up with a planet where legal and illegal are defined purely in terms of what you can get away with, and political, monetary, and military power are close to identical. Anytime someone wants something done or made or experimented on and finds regulations getting in their way, they can go to Jackson's Whole and pay somebody to do it, whatever it is. I'm, uh, not too fond of the place."

"Right. Yes, let's not have daeva summoning instructions appear there."

"I'm so glad we agree."

"I am the very model of a reasonable demon."