dye

[isthisart]

The next time Linya and Ekaterin meet up (for impromptu bonsai skellytum pruning lessons, lunch, and an attempt to teach Ekaterin the simplest version of a complicated haut card game) Linya says, while shuffling for a second example round:

"Miles and I are planning to get married again, Barrayaran ceremony groats and all, and I wondered if you'd be my Second."

Comments

[isthisart]

"I missed you too." Squeeze. "I don't suppose at some point they move you into something with day-job hours?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ha," he says without humour. "Afraid not, no. Not anytime soon, that's for damn sure..."

[isthisart]

"Alas." Nuzzle.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles flomps his head on her shoulder again and stays that way.

[isthisart]

Linya is not going to kick him out of her lap anytime soon. Snuggle.

[thisvorlunatic]

Snuggle, snuggle, listless snuggle—

He lifts his head.

"It's been, God, how long since we got married? More than a year, isn't it?"

[isthisart]

"One standard and a bit, yes. You were away on the anniversary of the first wedding as counted in both standard and Barrayaran years but we could do something for the date rolling around again on Eta Ceta if you like and you're still here in two weeks."

[thisvorlunatic]

He kisses her cheek. "Sorry, I can't really promise anything."

Which leads him to flomp his head on her shoulder again, and sigh, and then slide out of her lap and start pacing back and forth.

"Illyan still hasn't issued you a clearance level that would let me talk to you about - about anything I do when I'm offplanet. It's absurd. Well, no it's not, I know perfectly well why he feels the way he does and it's perfectly logical from someone whose job description is 'most paranoid person on three planets'. It's just I feel like it should be obvious to anyone who's known you longer than a day that you're not a bloody Cetagandan plant, and it's a, a personally offensive decision to keep barring you from the kind of clearance they give out to people like, oh, Mother."

[isthisart]

"Well, I don't disagree - I don't think I knew she had much clearance to speak of; if she knows more about your comings and goings than I she's very good at not letting on."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I strongly suspect that Mother knows some things even I don't," says Miles. "But moving on - I - "

He sighs and turns and paces some more.

"Ugh. I can't just tell you anyway, is the thing. Sometimes I wish I could. But... see, perhaps you've noticed this, or perhaps not because nobody tells you a damn thing about my Service career - I have a little bit of an enormous insubordination problem. I ignore orders, I argue, I am a vast pain in the ass to command for anything more complicated than sitting on a box of ciphered data disks like a mother hen on her eggs as they travel from point A to point B. And sometimes even then. I'm like that because I am very smart and very good at my job and often temporarily put in situations where I am under the command of someone less smart and less good at my job than I am, and having to dodge their misaimed instructions is tedious and counterproductive. But the point, the aim of it all, is to get the job done. And there's no justification I can honestly concoct in which the job actually requires you to know Barrayaran military secrets, unless you have been concealing an ambition to join ImpSec from me all this time—no?—didn't think so."

Pace pace pace.

"So I can't just unilaterally decide that you get to hear the shop talk because you deserve to. Even though I truly believe you do. If I am told to conceal sensitive information from you, and I can think of no way it is strongly in Barrayar's interests not to, I must."

[isthisart]

"I mean - I understand that there's a reason I presently know more about what Ivan does all day than what you do when you're gone. And I haven't been asking," she says. "It would be nice if I knew when to expect you back when you leave, or - I don't even know if couriering tends to be dangerous; it doesn't sound it, but why would I know? - but I don't, in fact, harbor a desire to report for duty in that abominable building, though it would make a truly interesting picture."

[thisvorlunatic]

"It kills me, though," says Miles. "Emotionally speaking. There's no way out. I want to tell you a lot of things about my work - innocuous things, things like how long I expect to be out on a trip, or that I passed through Tau Ceti between runs and nearly got my face bitten off by a very pretty lizard - I hasten to clarify that this is a facetious example and has not actually happened. Or slightly less innocuous but still reasonable-for-most-ImpSec-fellows-with-wives things, like when I come back from a trip whether it was of the egg-sitting variety or actually involved getting shot at."

He turns back and paces in the other direction.

"And I can't. Because you are very, very smart, and even if you don't want the secrets, won't ask for the secrets, won't do anything with the secrets - I am just as forsworn if you happen to figure one out from a series of individually innocent hints that I could have avoided dropping but chose to be careless about. So I have to turn my entire career into the biggest black hole of non-information I possibly can, even though I very much don't want to - particularly because, if you started getting close to something so secret you could not even be allowed to know there was a secret there at all, and I had to lie to you to protect it - I would, God help me. And I want to do that even less. Words cannot express nor the vast reaches of space encompass how much I don't want to have to lie to my wife in the service of my empire, but," he throws up his hands, "that's the fucking job for you."

[isthisart]

Well, now she has to scoop him up mid-pace and snuggle him again.

"Well," she says, "maybe in a year or a few Captain Illyan will decide I am not a plant after all and that I can know about the - scheduling and broadest strokes of your nesting habits. And in the meantime, if you don't tell me anything and I don't go looking and I never know what planet you're on when you aren't openly there you will not have to lie to me."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles sighs.

"I love you," he says, flomping his head onto her shoulder again. "So much. And God, do I hope Illyan relents sometime soon. I just - I - my private nightmare is that I'll go out on one of my trips and I won't come back and they still won't tell you what I was doing. Killed in action in the black hole of mystery."

[isthisart]

Pensive snuggle.

"This is more my fifth thought than my first, which I assure you is more upset and sentimental - but it is the first that comes in the form of a question - if that happens, and there is not already a baby on the way anyway, ought I cook one up anyway, in the absence of convenient collateral descendants, or do I talk that over with your parents, or...?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Well - at that point I think it's your choice," he says. "Whether to cook up a kid - and probably pretend they were already in the replicator when I left, to divert accusations of necromancy, or possibly necrophilia - or ditch the whole sorry planet and go be an enormously successful entrepreneur somewhere more civilized. If you wanted to stay, Ma and Da would back you. You're part of the family, as far as Mother is concerned, so that's that. But nobody's going to keep you if you don't want to be kept. If you wanted to keep the Vorkosigan line going but didn't particularly want to stay, you could start a son and hand off the replicator to his grandparents and escape. Ivan would probably be grateful; the Vorkosigan countship goes to him if Da and I both die heirless, and he doesn't remotely want it."

[isthisart]

"I suppose I'll postpone that hypothetical until and unless it's needed and go over options with the other involved parties. It seems like if nothing else it would depend on how far along I was on the design; I haven't even really started. Since the mystical gamete thing requires slightly more involvement to start out than we've previously troubled with."

Snuggle. It may be possible to tell that she does not want her husband to die!

[thisvorlunatic]

Snuggle. It is probably very easy to tell that her husband does not want to die on her.

"If I'm dead at the time I care much less about the mystical gamete thing, and God knows I've been through enough assorted medical procedures that you could construct some kind of horrible Miles-effigy out of the scraps, life-size if not life-like. You won't lack for genome samples to run off a quick random-assembly from, if you choose the 'drop a kid on my parents and flee' route."

[isthisart]

"Yes, but I would not become more inclined towards 'quick random-assembly' in this situation, I'd still want to make the basic health tweaks. - It occurs to me to ask, once mystical gametes have mystified, I'll be able to produce simulations of what the child will look like at various ages. Are you going to want to look at those?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"...I... am not sure," he says. "How accurate are they?"

[isthisart]

"Do you want to see my simulation-pictures? Next to actual pictures of me at those ages, if you like."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I - sure."

[isthisart]

Linya woggles her pen through appropriate picture summoning rituals, and produces two portraits of a five-year-old girl who looks just like her. They are distinguishable, but not in subject - only in hairstyle, setting, facial expression, and outfit. The one that is presumably the simulation picture displays a neutral expression and wears a basic blue dress in front of a green background and has her hair down (falling only to mid-thigh). The other picture looks like someone asked her to turn around and smile on her way to her piano lesson; there's a garden behind her and a book of sheet music flimsies in her hand and she's grinning and her pigtails are mid-bounce.

She's painfully cute.

[thisvorlunatic]

"...You were adorable," Miles informs her, though in an oddly subdued tone. "And - um. It occurs to me that - I mean - you could generate pictures like that of me. Couldn't you. The unaltered Miles phenotype."

[isthisart]

"Yes. My pen can't take a complete sample with just its identity-checking measures, but if I had a copy of your genotype to feed the problem I could. Do you want me to?"