calligraphy

[isthisart]

Linya is working on a massive flowchart-like diagram of a planned software project for Dr. Cheung. It's laid out in every color and in three dimensions with sprawl of its little writing that takes up most of her office and keeps fading out at the edges and in her shadow when she moves around, but reappears when she turns or approaches.

Comments

[isthisart]

"You spend time with people," murmurs Linya. "Which is not timewasting exactly - behold how I am spending time with you right now - but it does not tend to lead to you knowing calligraphy at the end of the day. And if we know one thing about Mark's upbringing it's that it was woefully short on people."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...True. Well, now I'm sad and slightly jealous."

[isthisart]

Snuggle.

[thisvorlunatic]

Huggle.

But soon he's smiling again. "MPVK," he murmurs. "One of the most heartening four-letter strings I've ever seen."

[isthisart]

"It's possible he chose it principally to be recognized and not because he's using the name privately, but yes."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I don't know... I'm getting a definite impression that if he wanted a way to be recognized without acknowledging the name, he would've found one. Include a dried bean, maybe. The initials feel very - deliberate. The whole thing feels very deliberate. You know, apparently when they successfully manage to follow Mark around, most of what he does is read books and commit casual petty theft. I'm getting the weirdest picture of his life."

[isthisart]

"I suppose a bean would have done the trick handily... What does he pettily thieve?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Food, books, clothing, basic necessities. You'd think the money I gave him would be more than enough to cover that sort of thing. Maybe it's some kind of obscure statement."

[isthisart]

"Does he ever buy things in front of his supervisors?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Well, all I have is a summary of a summary of the agents' summaries of what he does with his time, so I don't know. But I haven't heard that he does."

[isthisart]

"I suppose it's unlikely that he lost the chit."

[thisvorlunatic]

"He pays for interplanetary passage pretty regularly, one must assume, and that isn't the sort of thing you can scrape up the money for by fencing stolen hats."

[isthisart]

"I expect he's at least as capable as you are of effectively hitchhiking across the galaxy. Do you claim you couldn't talk your way onto jumpships without a budget in excess of stolen hat range?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I... won't say that I couldn't, but I wouldn't want to depend on it. I wouldn't make it a way of life. And if I had to sweet-talk my way through the wormhole nexus, I'd have somewhere to go - any Barrayaran embassy, the Dendarii Mercenaries if I could find them. Mark is clearly not choosing to deal with Barrayar, and he hasn't gone near the Dendarii either. He's just - adrift. Doing nothing in particular with his time except read, steal, and evade ImpSec with near-supernatural skill. No, I think he's kept the money. Maybe he just hasn't decided what to do with it."

[isthisart]

"If he does enough interstellar travel it will eventually run out."

[thisvorlunatic]

"True. Unless he's been making very clever investments all this time."

[isthisart]

"Which seems like the kind of thing ImpSec might have noticed."

[thisvorlunatic]

"You'd think. They haven't found the money yet, but given the dried beans incident I'm not confident that means anything. The books-and-petty-theft routine could be an elaborate runaround. Five thousand dried beans."

[isthisart]

"Oh? They didn't turn up a purchase record for the beans? Or a theft report."

[thisvorlunatic]

"As far as the poor fellow could determine, those beans appeared out of thin air. I mean, they were small beans, five thousand isn't a lot - enough to cover the surface area of a bed with a smallish inter-bean margin, apparently. I can think of half a dozen ways I could get my hands on a sack of beans without leaving a clear trail—if ImpSec wasn't bloody following me at the time!"

[isthisart]

"Do they know if he placed them himself?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Well, no. But in the absence of information I'm going to guess yes, because the other option is that he managed to find and hire someone to untraceably cover a bed in dried beans, which presents the same 'ImpSec was bloody following him at the time' problem as doing it himself plus the additional problems of who it was, how he found them, and how he convinced them to take such a crazy job. Well, I suppose the answer to the last one is 'put on his Miles hat'. What an absolute little... Naismith he is."

[isthisart]

Linya giggles. "Unsettling though I find his Miles hat, it is occasionally very entertaining to watch you contemplate your own characteristics from the outside."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I feel a deep sympathy for my parents, I have to tell you."

[isthisart]

"Maybe Aral Adri will take after me."