"No."

"Then your educators were remiss. It is dangerous to draw on the floor. You might accidentally summon an unbound demon. But it's okay, I'm a nice unbound demon. You want anything before I go home?"

"...Are you speaking rhetorically or do you actually expect the existence of demons to be common knowledge? It isn't," he says.

"Really," he says. "In what year? On what planet?"

"It's 2998," he says. "And we are on Escobar. And likely to be interrupted by a confused and alarmed intelligence agent if we don't get out of his hotel room in the next half an hour."

"Okay... And to the best of your knowledge demons didn't use to be common knowledge?"

"To the best of my knowledge, they didn't," he agrees. "And I grew up on Earth and I liked history; I have more cause than most people to be confident about what was and wasn't common knowledge in 2159."

"Okay. You have managed to summon me to an alternate universe. That's interesting."

"Yeah, I'll say..." He looks at the circle on the floor. "How would I go about defacing that past functionality? Or would that send you back? I don't especially want Barrayaran Imperial Security to get their hands on an active demon-summoning diagram, if it's so dangerous. But I do still want to leave behind some token of my presence."

"Oh, this one's used up, circles only work once," says Cam, inspecting the design. "If you think they'd copy it I can fill in the design so it's just solid for you, since you're on a time limit. Why are these security folks after you?"

"It's a long story; I'll tell you when I'm reasonably assured of uninterrupted privacy," he says. "They'll definitely take holos of it, and it's unlikely but conceivable that someone will decide to reproduce it on some other floor. Fill it in how?"

"I can put 'em under a coat, or I can cut them off and then there's a pair of wings to dispose of."

"We could leave the wings for ImpSec to puzzle over," he suggests. "If you don't mind, I mean."

"I don't know why you have it in for these people, but I can always make a new set," says Cam.

"Then let's do that. And I will do my best to take you somewhere we can have a private conversation."

"Right. Here goes." Cam materializes sharp wires around the base of his wings, and yanks. Flumph. "Tail too, d'you think?"

"Might as well."

The tail goes too. Cam waits a few seconds for his back to heal, then unpeels the gauze that caught the blood before it got on his jeans. "And this is more grotesque than confusing, what have we got in the way of waste disposal in 2998?"

"Waste chute leading to disintegrator," he says, pointing at its aperture.

Toss.

"Let's be on our way, then. I bet you won't have much trouble magicking up a nice unobtrusive tunic."

"Shall I copy the design of yours and just change the color and fit, or what?"

"Yeah, if that's easiest."

Cam manifests a similar tunic, except in gray. "I can cheat a little on knowing what I'm doing but I do need something to go on, I am not relevantly psychic about thirtieth century fashion trends."

"Noted. This way," he says, and leads Cam out the room and down the hall and into a lift tube that floats them down to ground level.

"Interesting contraption, this."

Cam stumbles, but gets back up again in short order. "So what is your name?"

"I'm not sure if I should be telling it to a magical demon from another universe. What if you steal my soul?"

"Make one up, then, I don't care, unless you'd rather I get your attention by naming you after a fictional dwarf or something. I'm Cam, by the way."

"Well, now I have to know what you'd come up with."

"First thing to come to mind is 'Gimli'. I have no idea if Lord of the Rings has stood the test of time for that long."

"Maybe not for everyone. I recognize it. I read a lot of old books..." They reach a side door, and leave by it. "My name is Mark."

"Good to meet you, Mark. And the danger with demons isn't actually soul-stealing. That's just a rumor."

"What is the danger, then? That you might conjure someone a hat made of antimatter?"

"We can't actually do antimatter, but that doesn't substantially limit potential destructive power. An angel or a fairy could kill you too, of course, but they don't have the range or scale a demon does."

"Do you have any restrictions on what you can conjure besides 'not antimatter' and 'half a clue what you're doing'? And what do angels and fairies do?"

"Could you make a cat embryo that goes on to grow up smart? Have you studied the cutoff point?"

"I haven't, but the people who distribute pet kittens to their fellow demons have; anything I make in advance of the stage of development where it has a brain can get itself a fully functional brain the long way around. For cats, anyway. If you make a human body it's so far below the level of intelligence it'd need to function that you can't even get it to carry a baby to term, some people have tried. I haven't studied this extensively, I think it might be a hormone thing, human hormones react to mental states that a made body just plain cannot have. So Hell is not full of grotesquely obtained human babies, which is good, that would fuck up the balance of our zero-scarcity anarchy pretty thoroughly."

"And you don't have uterine replicators, I take it."

"Nnno, and I don't think I will tell any of my fellow demons about them, either."

Mark snorts. "Good plan. Of course, the humans where you're from might like to know about them..."

"Yeah, but demons pick up information, you know. I'd have to think about it."

He shrugs. "None of my business. They're damned useful, but any useful thing can be used for things you might wish it couldn't."

"Yeah. So where are we going?"

"Away. Not back to my hotel room; he knows where that is. I'd be tempted to ask you to whip up a jumpship, if I had a pilot and if I could think of anywhere we could go in the next couple of hours to pull a jumpship out of thin air without anyone noticing... eh. I'll just find us a nice quiet corner for now. Probably in yet a third hotel."

"I mean, I can make spaceships that I know how to fly, but they do not 'jump', describe to me 'jumping'."

"Transiting wormholes. Jump pilots need a lot of delicate neural circuitry whose installation is one of the highest-paid jobs in the wormhole nexus in order to interface with their ships to accomplish a jump, and on top of that they need to have the right kind of brain to begin with. I don't think you can make either of us into a jump pilot. We could hire one, if we had a jumpship, but that would involve more direct interaction with people than I'd like."

"Huh. Okay then. And you want to avoid people because the security folks who are about to be very puzzled by my former extremities are looking for you...?"

"That's one reason, yeah."

"And I don't count as direct interaction with people because, what, I'm a demon? Hate to break it to you, Mark, but demons are people."

Snort. "You sure?"

"Very. If the revelation is too shocking I can wander off and leave you be, although I would like a way to look you up in case I ever wish to be sent home."

"Nah," he says. "There's room for exceptions. And if we became separated somehow, the fastest way to look me up would probably be to travel to Barrayar, convince my brother you urgently needed to talk to me, and get him to find me for you. Which could take up to several months, depending where each of us is at the time and how fast you convince Miles."

"You're not in even remotely close touch with your brother and he's still the fastest way to find you?"

"He has access to the ImpSec reports. It's not fast but it beats the hell out of wandering the wormhole nexus trying to find me by yourself, unless you have more magic you haven't told me about."

"I'd have access to the ImpSec reports, too, probably, if I knew just a tiny bit more about how they're organized. But I couldn't necessarily do much with them."

"And you couldn't pass the word down the line for the closest agent to try to get in touch with me. Well, you could if you were very clever and didn't mind falsifying official communications. Don't falsify official communications, please. It'd be more of a headache than I want to give 'em."

"Noted."

"Swanky," comments Cam in the lift tube. "So what is it that you do besides leave little mysteries for your pursuers?"

"Not a whole lot."

"Doodling on the floor and such takes up most of your time?"

"By time the thing I do most is probably read."

"Reading's a lot less depressing than you're making it sound, in my experience."

"It's not the reading that's depressing."

"You're being cryptic," Cam observes.

"No, I said that at total random, it's a tic I have."

"I have a poorly calibrated sense of what counts as cryptic."

"Grand. This will be fun."

"Sorry."

"Eh, if you don't want to be cryptic then accidental crypticism just means a few extra layers of increasingly precise question-asking before I learn things. If you wanted to be cryptic I'd probably flip you off and wander around to eavesdrop and browse bookstores until I knew what I wanted to do next."

"Cool. So pretend that I'm from - mm, history's obviously diverged considerably - pretend I am from 1990, and give me the executive summary of things that have happened as pertinent to the modern-day layout of this-and-that?"

"And of course I expect wordcount-conscious emphasis on the important parts. I'm immortal, not patient."

"I need slightly more to go on than 'holo'. A brand name should do." But he does conjure up an instance of his own computer and start taking notes.

"Let me see... I think the last decent map cube of the wormhole nexus I saw for sale was AstroCart. Now there's a company that is aware of its niche. Although they also offer system, planetary, and subplanetary maps."

Cam hands Mark a cube. "Please do not attempt to abuse my ignorance about what things there are to conjure, by the way."

"Mm?"

"As in, if you ask me for a make and model of something and I hand you a mystery object shaped like a Platonic solid and then it turns out I didn't really want you to have that sort of object and only didn't recognize what it was supposed to be, I will not be best pleased."

Notetaking, notetaking. "Nice planet, Earth," he murmurs.

"It's not bad. I liked London. Anyway. Jackson's Whole has an interesting founding story, maybe even more interesting than Barrayar's; it was settled by a group of loosely cooperative criminal syndicates who wanted a base of operations outside the jurisdiction of any existing legal system. After a few centuries, they developed something resembling a legal system of their own, but it's not much more sophisticated than 'whoever has the money makes the rules'. They do honour their deals almost all the time, but you can't rely on notions of common decency or interplanetary law there. Neither one has much sway."

"Interesting..."

"So. Six hundred years after Barrayar lost touch with the rest of the galaxy, it was rediscovered at the end of a five-jump route from Komarr." He indicates that connection. "It was nnnot the happiest reunion. For one thing, just as the Barrayarans were starting to get used to their new situation, the Cetagandans decided to conquer them."

"The joys of human nature."

"Right?" he agrees, grinning. "So they came in through Rho Ceta," he points out this route, "bribing the Komarrans with trade-related promises, I think. And of course it worked; all the Barrayarans had was swords and horses and primitive projectile weapons and the Cetagandans had atomics. But it didn't work nearly as well as they hoped. Through a combination of galactic aid, genius commanders, and raw bloody stubbornness, the Barrayarans threw them out after twenty years of occupation. And immediately conquered Komarr, because what else are you going to fucking do?"

"Naturally."

"Family history time: my brother's father, Aral Vorkosigan, planned and commanded the invasion of Komarr. It was a beautiful job, to start with. The Komarrans started at a major disadvantage, because their planet doesn't have breathable atmosphere; they all live in sealed arcologies. So, credibly threaten to crack the domes, and they fold like a bad hand of cards. It was almost that simple, except, of course, politics. One of the Barrayarans decided that a bloodless conquest didn't sit well with him, and he rounded up and murdered two hundred high-ranking Komarrans. When Aral found out, he killed the man in a rage, unfortunately making it difficult for outside parties to verify whether or not he'd been acting on secret orders, and Aral's name was permanently smeared, particularly on Komarr itself. I'm personally pretty sure he had nothing to do with it, because he's not a shortsighted bloodthirsty fucking idiot."

"But the court of public opinion had another view on the subject?"

"Yeah." He shrugs. "Anyway. Time passed. Barrayar discovered Sergyar, and the connection to Escobar through it, and decided to try this conquering thing again. I strongly suspect Aral wanted no part of that, although I don't have direct confirmation; what I do know is that he met his future wife on Sergyar, when she was part of a Betan Astronomical Survey expedition that happened to find the planet while the Barrayarans were setting up there. He took her prisoner. No one's quite sure how they ended up engaged. I'll ask, if I ever meet them. The invasion plans proceeded, Barrayar poured a fleet through Sergyar, and the Escobarans wiped the floor with them thanks to a timely delivery of cutting-edge Betan shielding technology that reflects plasma blasts instead of absorbing them. Sergyar got its name from the Barrayaran Crown Prince who died in that battle."

Notetaking, notetaking.

"My favourite part of that whole episode is the Betan newsvid I dug up where Cordelia - my brother's mother - comes home from the war, looking like utter hell, and it's very, very obvious that nobody told her she'd be making a speech with the President of Beta Colony the second she stepped off the shuttle, and she has a minor breakdown and rips off the medal they give her and flings it into the gathered crowd, and when the President's bodyguards try to restrain her she ends up accidentally kicking him somewhere one is normally discouraged from kicking one's President."

"A very dramatic failure on the part of whoever was supposed to be handling her."

"It sounds it. Very narratively satisfying."

"What a storied history your relatives have."

"You can say that again. Anyway. I was... constrained, by factors outside my control, but at the first available opportunity I shot Galen and left Miles in possession of his own life again. Miles is the one who named me Mark, when I took him aside for a personal conversation after capturing him. He was very insistent on calling me his brother. It's the legal default on Beta Colony to consider clones siblings; Barrayar has no precedent, because as far as I know I'm the first clone of a Barrayaran. And Barrayaran Imperial Security is watching me because I am technically a threat to the Imperium on multiple levels. Miles actually had to save me from Barrayaran assassination teams shortly after I killed Galen, although I gather he's gone to the top and pled my case since, because I haven't had to dodge any more assassins."

"How nice of him."

"I'm definitely grateful."

"And now you are wandering around evading and trolling your supervision."

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Okay. I hope that works out for you, but I would like to start thinking about what I'm going to do with my time unbound in a mortal world, even if it's not the mortal world I'm accustomed to, and it probably doesn't look like wandering around aimlessly, periodically trolling people. I'd appreciate a native guide who knows I'm a demon and demonstrably doesn't care to go to the media about it, but can probably do without, if native-guiding me is incompatible with your wandering-troll plans."

"I'm not married to the life of a wandering troll. Being your native guide seems likely to be interesting. Depends what sort of shit you plan on getting up to, I guess."

"Oh, I don't know yet... I've always wanted to terraform a planet, there a market for that?"

"Plenty. Komarr, Barrayar, and Sergyar could all use help in that area, but of course you'd have to visit the Imperium to do that, and having me as your native guide would be a little complic—ooh." He breaks off mid-word and sits still for a few seconds, eyes lit with speculation.

"What?"

"Commercial jumpship, probably, unless we can find a fast courier to charter. I'm just going to go ahead and assume that if I spend a lot of money on this you will pay me back with the obscene profits generated by your insta-cloning business. You'd need connections, but I can arrange connections. And we'd need to avoid pissing anyone off too badly. Some of those people hold serious grudges. It's doable, though."

"I'm indestructible, but you aren't, and if you die, if normal rules apply despite the alternate universe thing, I get sent home. Also, if the normal rules apply despite the alternate universe thing, when you die you become a daeva. Probably we should have some human somewhere who knows how to resummon me and try to summon you in the event of an emergency."

"I nominate Miles. If you don't mind the rest of his family, the Emperor of Barrayar, and the Chief of ImpSec also finding out how to resummon you. I assume that's something that can be done safely?"

"Teaching somebody how to summon daeva in general requires a fairly prolonged safety lecture. Teaching somebody how to summon specific individual daeva who do not require bindings in order to conduct themselves harmlessly is much simpler. One circle for me, three potential circles for you."

"Get 'em drawn out and I'll send a message to Miles, then. An advantage of making it Miles is that I can send him coded messages that I know only he will be able to unlock."

"What format do you want them in?"

"Depends how complicated they are. If it's something that can be transmitted with purely verbal instructions, I'd rather you just tell me; it makes the message shorter. If that would get intractable, any standard image format on a data disk will do, or you can draw them on flimsies and I can take holos."

"Nah, for unbound specified-individual circles it's just literally a circle with 'I summon the demon Campbell Mark Swan' written around it. It's bindings that get complicated. You might be an angel or a fairy instead - or maybe it won't work at all, because alternate universe - but otherwise the format's the same. The would-be summoner should finish enclosing the circle last, and it must be completed on a floor, in any drawing material, with enough room for us to appear - if you're doing bindings it's polite to leave still more room than that because we couldn't leave until attached to a task but that's not an issue here."

"All right. Now to hope this room has as good a comconsole as I expected it to..." He goes over to a medium-sized desk against one wall, sits at it, and makes a satisfied sound.

"Portable computing devices exist, but they're unpopular for privacy reasons," he explains.

"Cryptanalysis won?" surmises Cam.

"A mostly flat surface someplace with gravity exceeding ten percent of a gee and not tilted more than twelve degrees in any radius, markings pointing up."

"—'where floor is defined as,' thank you, 'any flat surface within twelve degrees of perpendicular to more than 0.1G gravity, facing up. Around each circle write, respectively: I summon the demon Campbell Mark Swan, I summon the demon Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, I summon the fairy Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, I summon the angel Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. Critical safety measure: write the words before completing the circle. No, I am not going to explain further. If I'm not dead at the time, there will be no effect'—right?"

"Well, if you dismiss me then the circle for me will work. Unless it does not do that for alternate universe reasons."

He shrugs. "Close enough. All right. Now I just have to pick a keyphrase."

"I don't think I can help you there."

"If you could, it wouldn't be a very secure method."

Cam snorts and starts organizing the notes he took during the history lesson.

"Yes please."

"And how much more expensive and complicated is it to offer a jump pilot a free ship in exchange for one-way passage?"

Cam peers over his shoulder.

"I don't know who this person is well enough to be thrilled with the prospect of deceiving them. If we're going to throw lots of money at somebody, why one of his ships instead of some other that's available for hire?"

"Because ships available for hire to take you anywhere in the galaxy you damn well please are rare. Some might even be outside my generous budget. And the Dendarii Free Mercenaries are verifiably trustworthy, an advantage not to be discounted when chartering someone to fly you to Jackson's Whole."

"Okay. Can you give me a general idea how many clones are in the pipeline at any given time, is there liable to be one we can save if we leave now and not if we leave in eight days?"

"More than a dozen and less than a hundred, at any given time, with a replicator-to-operating-table turnaround of just over ten years. It's not likely that another week would make the difference, but it's possible. And it'd be more like another week and a half, adding in transit time; the Ariel is significantly faster than a commercial passenger ship."

"And if you are caught impersonating your brother, for instance because your brother is known to be elsewhere, known not to consort with demons, etcetera...?"

He shrugs.

"...right, so I favor asking nicely and non-impersonating-ly and throwing money at the Ariel. I will let you manage my finances while I'm outcompeting the hell out of the clone business and skim some off the top to pay yourself back."

"Suits me fine."

"What is your opinion on how much I should advertise and to whom about how I'm making the duplicates?"

"My instinct is to keep as much as possible as secret as possible, just because information once released cannot be recalled. And I'm sure I don't have to paint you a picture of what would happen if some Jacksonian got their hands on the notion that you are one of a number of summonable creatures and started trying to get more."

"Yeah. I mean, I generally favor knowledge of the summonability of the creatures, but it does need to be handled carefully... Also might want to wait until we know a few more things about how it interacts with alternate universe shenanigans. I could be a one-off. I suppose it's also possible that there has always been more than one mortal world attached to the concordant ones, no summoners show up as daeva because there have been none, and your non-summoners are appearing too far away from the other dead people in Limbo to have interacted with the clump we're aware of. Okay. So, secret process, even jargon would give too much away, secret secret secret."

"I find it somewhat less than likely that I am the first person in history to write the word 'demon' near a circle on a horizontal surface."

"Well, in my world it was known to only a few people for a long time and didn't become common knowledge till 2008. Maybe you skipped the 'become common knowledge' part."

He shrugs. "Maybe we'll find out. Do demons sleep?"

"Can. Can also stay up, especially with the help of coffee."

"I'm contemplating whether to go back to my own hotel room for the night or not, while we're waiting for the Ariel. We could go topside and wait in an orbital transfer station, but it would take a nibble out of the budget for no especially good cause. I don't want you wandering Escobar unattended, but I can't sleep in the presence of people."

"What might happen if I wander Escobar unattended?"

"Probably nothing. Potentially you do something that you don't know is going to be attention-getting until you do it, and end up with more attention than I want either of us to have."

"I think I can entertain myself wandering on public thoroughfares for eight hours drinking coffee without alarming anyone, but maybe I'm overestimating the universal commonality of human cultures. What counts as 'in the presence of', anyway?"

"Same room, or observable by."

"If you feel very strongly that I cannot entertain myself for eight hours wandering public thoroughfares without alarming anyone, recommend me some local books and I can sit in the bathroom for eight hours reading?"

"I don't like to risk it when there's another option. Sure, you can sit in the bathroom and read. Here." He calls up a list of books available for public access from a local library on the comconsole. "I have no idea what kind of books you like, besides the one."

"I read pretty omnivorously these days but have a longstanding soft spot for old Anglophone literature - old relative to my usual year, ancient relative to this one, I guess. But I was hoping for recommendations that would be more traveloguey and informative."

"I'm sure they have both. I have no personal recommendations that qualify as traveloguey, and if you were interested in old Anglophone literature in the twentieth to twenty-second centuries I expect you've already read Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes."

"Yeah. I guess I'll browse this thing here, unless you want to go to sleep right now in which case I'll just go over my terraforming notes or something."

"Browse away."

Cam browses. "I prefer to acquire my books in largish batches," he says, "so stop me whenever you want me to get out of your way for the night."

Mark shrugs and goes to play with the map cube.

Cam browses. Eventually, he has enough books to last him a while and makes them on a format compatible with his computer and holes up in the bathroom for the night so Mark can sleep.

Cam emerges. He's got a coffee cup but otherwise doesn't seem to have been much affected. "The market for terraforming is huge," he remarks. "I'm going to be very busy."

"Maybe I'll get my brother a freshly renovated planet for Winterfair. If you don't mind doing an extra one on the side."

"As long as it's not too far out of my way, sure, why not. It shouldn't take me more than a few weeks to do basics on any rock that starts with adequate gravity."

"We'll see. No point staying on the planet any longer; let's go up to the orbital transfer station and wait for Bel. Maybe it'll be early."

Captain Thorne,

I will pay you fifty thousand Betan dollars for a one-way ride to Jackson's Whole, myself and one other passenger, departing immediately.

If interested, meet me in the public concourse of the orbital transfer station. I will recognize you.

And Thorne appears in the public concourse after the Ariel has docked, looking intrigued, accompanied by an ensign who's apparently there to watch its back.

Cam is subtly trying to figure out what gender Thorne is.

"Guess again," Mark says cheerfully.

"You're the clone," says Thorne. "I don't think I ever caught your name. You want to hire the Ariel? You and your friend?"

"Yes."

"Hate to tell you this, but the Ariel's a touch recognizable to some people on Jackson's Whole. As would be you. I came by to see what the message was about and to recommend you somebody else's ship."

"Hm. How would you like—no, on second thought, how would you like to discuss alternate options in private? Aboard the Ariel, say. I trust anyone Miles trusts. They are," he adds, "interesting alternate options."

Mark grins.

"I'm Cam, by the way," mentions Cam as Thorne leads them to its ship.

"Captain Bel Thorne. Charmed. How'd you fall in with this one?"

"Fortuitous coincidence."

"Is that what you'd call it."

"Yes."

"Nice ship," Mark mentions, as they board.

"It's the sort of story that is best known as few people as possible, so if anyone is watching us, please indicate to them that they should stop," says Mark. "You can decide who to tell after you hear it."

"Nobody's monitoring us."

"All right. How would you like a new ship?" inquires Mark. "Cam has the ability to generate any sufficiently well-defined object made of matter, essentially for free. All we really need is a pilot - beyond our means to produce on such short notice. I'd also be interested to know who Miles pissed off on Jackson's Whole. But unless the answer is 'literally everyone', I don't think I'll be dissuaded."

"Ryoval, mostly. If you avoid him and his agents you might be okay. ...New ship, huh? Any kind?"

"Any real kind or obvious, physically-possible deviation from same," says Cam. "I can't make you the - oh, all my science fiction references are going to fall totally flat, aren't they. Well, I cannot make you science fiction references."

(Mark giggles.)

"Very much so," says Mark. "Thank you."

"Absolute pleasure doing business with you. Backup pilot's sleep shift will be over in a couple hours, that's enough time to get away from the dock where we can appear my new toy. I still haven't caught your name...?"

"And before I spend the fuel on the hike out to the middle of nowhere, a little demo of the instant-shipyard-just-add-nothing?"

"What kind of fuel do you take? I'll cover it."

Mark follows along.

And Cam tops off the Ariel's fuel supply.

Mark is practically bouncing. He did not know he was going to be this pleased about getting underway here.

Thorne decides on the way what kind of ship it wants. It's fast, it's compatible with the backup pilot's implants, it's sleek and shiny, and it takes a very compact type of fuel that Cam can easily make enough of to last years.

"I am if anything even less sure where you should start. Who's the fellow you have to avoid because Miles pissed him off?"

"Baron Ryoval. Political organization there, such as it is, divides into Houses ruled by Barons. Each House has one or more particular specialties or niches; Ryoval's is prostitution and custom-engineered bio-slaves. House Bharaputra does biologicals more generally; they're the primary supplier for the clone-transplant business. House Fell does weapons; Baron Fell is getting on in years, and might be our most eager customer if we can find him a trustworthy surgeon - the last clone he had commissioned was assassinated before the operation, so he is understandably cautious. I suspect I might know what Miles did to piss off Ryoval, actually; rumour has it that something catastrophic happened to the collection of tissue samples he uses to generate his wares, a few years back. Now that I know he's annoyed with Admiral Naismith about something, that rumour smells of a Miles-accident."

"When we show up and the pilot leaves with the shiny new ship, what are our options for finding places to park ourselves?"

"Cute. Why are you the baron instead of me, though? You can presumably go by a pseudonym that isn't preceded by a title."

"'Baron Holmes' gives me an identity that is related to neither Miles Vorkosigan nor Miles Naismith - an obviously assumed identity, but an implicitly permanent and unique one. A mere pseudonym would invite speculation that I was one or the other of them, almost certainly Naismith, undercover for reasons of his own. It is not healthy to be mistaken for someone Ry Ryoval has a grudge against, and it would be unfair to Miles to parade myself around as Mark Vorkosigan. And you don't have a hundredth of the background knowledge and cultural understanding you'd need to competently negotiate with other barons; the title would be wasted on you."

"I'm mostly wondering if being a baron is the sort of thing that tends to get you assassination attempts, which I can cope with better than you. If that's fine by you, eh, go for it."

"Of course it will," he says with a shrug. "Hm, come to think, I could use a personal nerve-disruptor shield net. A cleverly disguised one, especially. If you can produce one in my size; I don't think they come that way naturally and I'm not sure how much clever engineering work you can elide over."

"I should be able to resize one; I will need more information to camouflage it."

"It's a very expensive full-body garment that defends the wearer against a certain common type of lethal or permanently disabling weapon," he says. "They can be made to fit under other clothing, but it's usually pretty easy to tell who's wearing one, if you know what signs to look for. You might have an easier time than usual coming up with a shield net and set of clothes that worked well together. And it wouldn't cost much to produce a second set with no hood for when I want to appear marginally more trusting."

"If I'm doing elaborate fashion design I'm gonna need a picture."

"And what would you need to produce one of those...?"

"Sufficient information to single out a specific picture by non-contrived means, 'contrived' including things like 'the most recent one taken' or anything like that."

"Mm. Not sure I can deliver. You could make one in your size and stare at it to your heart's content," he suggests as an alternative.

"Yeah, sure." And Cam makes one and looks it over.

"Now, how do these work? If the wires are this thick because the substance isn't sufficiently ductile, I can get it a lot thinner, maybe weave it into some normal fabric; if it needs to be shaped exactly like this all I'm thinking is heavy denim and leather."

Mark shrugs. "I'm not an engineer. I know that they exist, I know that they work, I know how to spot them, and that's as much as I know. I'm sure there are manuals somewhere, but I couldn't specify one."

"Wormhole jumps are mildly unsettling for most people," says Mark. "Might want to be sitting down. If you're unlucky enough to get jumpsick, might want to have something to throw up in and somewhere to lie down afterward. If the jump feels like it lasts longer than a couple of seconds, or you get sensory aftereffects besides nausea, you might have jump pilot potential and we should look into finding a trustworthy neurosurgeon once we're rich enough to afford one."

"Noted. It'd be mildly interesting if it turned out to be able to get me sick. Do you get sick and need something to throw up in?"

"I'll be fine."

"Trippy in a way that suggests pilot potential? Impressive special effects?"

"Seeing music. Very pretty. I may experiment with trying to play it later."

"Yeah, that sounds pilotish."

"Excellent. I'll be able to secure my freedom of movement."

"Yes. Much more convenient than the alternative."

"Mm-hm. How long does it take to learn to fly a ship through the visible music?"

"Variable. Minimum of a few months, I think."

"Okay. So that is for after setting up the business with the clones but probably before getting going on terraforming. I am going to be on the lookout for a trustworthy or at least thoroughly buyable human assistant as a backup or secondary summoner so I can cut transit time, though. The music is pretty but it's not worth days in ships every time I want to go somewhere, so once the urgent stuff is handled I think I'll prefer to get around via scheduled dismissal and resummoning."

"The lead time you get from sending a message versus making the trip yourself, if you're a pilot with a very fast ship, is minimal enough that you'd have to have a very predictable schedule before the other method would be worth much."

"Yes, but I think I'm willing to trade some rigidity for the time savings. Clones first, then I find a nice pilot school and on whatever passes for weekends in the thirtieth century I go work on terraforming or whatever in places my trusty human assistant has found for me. I might find multiple trusty human assistants, since you're going to be baroning it up and will only need me when somebody wants a new body."

"You'll get much less value out of having me as your interface to humanity anywhere but Jackson's Whole," he concedes. "Weekends largely persist. But if I'm going to be Baron of a House whose entire source of revenue consists of you to start with, I'd like you to stick around long enough for me to find alternate sources."

"It doesn't take very long to make a body," Cam says. "If they're currently growing them and there are rarely more than a hundred at a time, the demand's not huge - I guess we can expect more customers by undercutting the price, but they'll bottleneck at the brain surgeons. How long do you want to tie me to one unpleasant-sounding planet after that's sewn up?"

"Long enough. So that I can maintain a presence for you to come back to every time someone wants a clone made. I won't have a good estimate until I've put some thought into how I will maintain that presence."

"Okay. Well, get back to me when you've put in the thought."

"I will."

"Sure. I'm not naming it for a Tempest reference, though. I think I'll call it the Gretchen." And once Cam has a name of the ship model, he produces a towing mechanism and an instance of the ship.

"...I'm only guessing that's a Faust reference because I like old books and I have suspicions about your sense of humour," says Mark, "so it passes, but in general I don't want to encourage sly nods demonward. Takes all the fun out of it, I know."

"Maybe I'll make future references to demonic literature. Next ship can be the Atriama."

"And who or what is Atriama?"

"Atriama is the eponymous protagonist from a - I think the nearest analogue is a ballet, but it's aerial."

"Sounds pretty."

"It is. It's funny, summoners back home acknowledge that demons must value culture and media, since that's usually the first thing they try to pay us with, but I don't think a summoner has ever asked me for a recording of Atriama. Or any other demon-created anything."

"I wouldn't mind one."

"What format d'you want?"

He shrugs. "Can you convert it to a holovid I could watch on a standard comconsole...?"

"Eh - it's only been recorded in two dimensions, do holos work like that? If so then yes."

"It'll display, yeah. It won't look as good as three, but oh well."

"Oh well." Cam hands him a holo.

"Thanks. Might as well transfer to our new ship, now. I'm a competent enough manual pilot to dock at a station without hitting anything."

"So," says Mark, "to start with, I think I'm going to claim a three-month lead time on a clone order. Short enough to hopelessly outmatch the competition, long enough to be vaguely plausible as something other than magic and to give me time to find you and drag you back here to fulfill unexpected orders if you're somewhere else when I get one. I will demand tissue samples or accurate gene sequences from customers, and we'd better actually use the provided material as the basis for growing the new body, even if you can do it another way. We should probably also whip up a convincing-looking medical lab somewhere on this ship, even though I fully intend never to let anyone access it. If someone does break in, and doesn't find any evidence of clone-growing facilities, we'll be facing some uncomfortable questions."

"By 'actually use' what do you mean? And where do you propose to get a template for a plausible-looking facility?"

"I mean suppose that someone sends us a carefully edited gene sequence, and you conjure a direct clone of So-and-So that does not incorporate the changes. They'll be pissed off that we didn't follow spec and confused as to how that is even a possible error to make, if we never had access to an unedited gene sample of So-and-so. As for the facility, eh, can't be that hard to make something up. For our purposes all it really needs to be is a lot of funny-looking equipment and somewhere for you to conjure bodies."

"Okay. I should be able to grow an extrapolation from a supplied sequence and conjure up something incomprehensible-looking with tanks and tubes and funny-colored liquids and things that go beep."

"You have the general idea," he says, smiling. "The biggest remaining question I have is whether or not I want to show up with a ready-made clone of Baron Fell. He might be more affronted at the implied theft of a genetic sample than impressed by the demonstration of our ability. But if we don't, that's a three-month lead time spent twiddling our thumbs without a demonstrated product. Maybe I'll show him a disposable clone-body of me. Hah, I think I will. So we show up, I make my pitch, I unveil the product, I offer him the chance to be our very first customer, and then if he bites - when he bites - House Holmes opens for business. Mm?"

"I see no obvious problems. Do you want yours to spec or just made naively?"

"Naive genetic clone, please. It'll turn out taller than me, but I don't actually know by how much."

"Drank too much coffee and stunted your growth? All right. Say when. Do I need to put tanks of effervescent this-and-that in a room on the Gretchen or are we skipping that?"

"Produce fake lab, then produce clone in fake lab, I think."

"Right. I will go pick a room to sacrifice to the fake lab cause and whip up your demo."

"Thanks. Oh, and I think when I make my pitch to Baron Fell it'll be a private meeting, just the two of us. The less of you we show to anyone, the less chance there is for someone to decide stealing you would be a sound business model, and the less chance of you accidentally revealing you're not from this universe. Sound sensible?"

"Makes sense. I'm not known for my poker face."

"All right. I think we may be set."

The fake lab looks, well, kind of like it was made by a guy from 2159 - there are nods to modern sensibilities that he's been able to absorb in his short time in the future but there's too much glass and metal, not enough plastic. It will probably pass at a glance to someone who isn't expecting it to be dated-looking. He has at least not put any paper anywhere. Cam is, possibly purely for his own entertainment, wearing a labcoat. Several of the pieces of equipment are so thoroughly sealed as to have no way to open them and get at the contents.

"This'll pass," Mark judges. "The aesthetic's weird but that makes it more plausible that you're some kind of crazed genius with unprecedented accomplishments."

"Oh, am I playing a crazed genius, as opposed to your techy lackey or something?"

"You're playing my lackey who doesn't get out much and is one of an undisclosed but extremely small number of people capable of doing this thing. Actually, I'd be pleased if we could find another demon or two as trustworthy as you to apply to the problem, just so it doesn't seem like you're the only one... but that's for the longer term, when you're zipping around terraforming things."

"I know some demons who are reasonably decent people - as trustworthy as me is a high bar but I know some I'd trust unbound if and only if they could go home regularly. Which we have yet to test."

"And will not be testing for a good long while, unless you know someone who annoys you enough that you'd risk stranding them here forever but not enough that you'd worry about them causing havoc that way."

"Nobody fits the bill, alas."

"A shame."

"Yeah. Unfortunately, most people, if you pull them from their homes and then do not, for whatever reason, send them back, they're going to think you weren't trying, and the next obvious thing to do is kill you and see if that helps."

"And I would of necessity not even be around to laugh at them when that didn't work either."

"Quite. Although I don't think I want to assume that you necessarily can't get rid of me through dying even if you can't get rid of me the usual way. Obviously some of the standard rules apply. I didn't appear for thirty seconds surrounded by inexplicable birdsong and only able to conjure objects in navy blue without having attempted to answer a summons while you were fixing scrambled eggs. You drew on the floor, I felt a summons, I took it, that part's all very bog-standard, the only weird thing we've verified so far is where I am."

"But being unable to get rid of you the usual way would at least suggest that other ways might also fail. Eh. No need to go testing it. No need to go testing either of 'em anytime soon, given that it might also be possible to send you home but not bring you back, in which case I would be in a little bit of trouble."

"Yes, I'd definitely like to stay for long enough to do the clones thing, learn to pilot a jumpship, and see if I can make a wormhole."

"That should be fun."

"I think so too!"

"So. I'd better have a clone ready to show off after I get my meeting with Fell. How easy to sustain are these things?"

"Not exactly hard, just potentially messy. If we have to keep it around long enough that I wind up feeding it, it will require a diaper or whatever the futuristic equivalent is. I can put it on a liquid diet and make do with a catheter, I suppose, that's a little lower-maintenance. I'm also inclined to restrain it so it doesn't wander around poking things. It's not likely to figure out how to walk per se but it might manage to move around some anyway."

"I'd been under the impression they wouldn't have enough higher brain functions to do even that. Eh well. Any problem with just putting it in a nice tidy coma?"

"If that won't interfere with the brain surgery, nah, that's easy, we can do that with all of them. I will want to know the coma-inducing state of the art."

"Try the ship's library. I notice you gave it one."

"Yeah, will do. Aaaand the other question is do you want it appeared in clothes."

"Clothes would be a little pointless. Maybe a hospital gown."