overture

[isthisart]

Nine days into their fourteen-day trip, the courier ship arrives in the Komarr system. Five more jumps to go. Miles is not yet capable of peeling himself off a willing Linya before he passes out (and willingness is in no short supply), and the resulting peculiar sleep schedule causes Ivan no end of giggling. Linya draws him diagrams of more complicated braids as aspirational goals (getting five and a half feet of slidy-soft hair to be in even the simplest braid properly is a little tricky), which induces Miles to spend most of a day fascinatedly braiding and rebraiding her hair in various configurations. She, meanwhile, writes pen software that eats standard comconsole software and renders it for pen-ability in what she thinks is a user-friendly manner, and works on Russian.

When they reach the Komarr system, there's a message squirt, bounced at lightspeed from the little ships that do nothing but dance back and forth from side to side of the intervening wormholes collecting and broadcasting data. It says that Captain Illyan invites Miles to supplement his mission report by bringing his wife along.

Comments

[isthisart]

"Are you going to need to change rooms, or is the one you already live in suitable for two people?" she wonders.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ah..." He considers this question. "Well. It's bigger than our cabin on the courier ship - speaking of low bars. I suppose we can take the General's—my grandfather's—old suite, assuming Father materializes no objections."

[isthisart]

"The ship cabin was all right for two weeks, but I was very deliberately not unpacking."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah. There's plenty of room in the house, I just haven't been using very much of it."

[isthisart]

Linya looks around at Vorbarr Sultana around them. "I looked up pictures of this city ahead of time, but - I already explained why pictures never look right. I like the look of it in person."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I'm glad," he says. "Both that you like it and that your opinion of Barrayaran architecture hasn't been permanently soured by Cockroach Central—ahem—ImpSec HQ. I've heard Illyan's been after Gregor to get him a new building, but there's no room in the budget, not when the one they have works perfectly well and just happens to look like the enormous concrete dropping of some kind of mythical Bad Taste Dragon."

[isthisart]

"It would probably look more cheerful if arbitrary neighborhood children were supplied with ladders and invited to spraypaint it however they pleased," Linya points out. "I doubt that would cost very much, although possibly the ImpSec personnel would object to having arbitrary neighborhood children swarming the place for security reasons."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah. Plus I'm sure someone would object on the grounds that the pressed gargoyles might give the neighbourhood children nightmares," he snorts.

[isthisart]

"Perhaps the gargoyles could be hastily spackled over first."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I'll suggest it if it comes up in conversation with the appropriate people," giggles Miles.

[isthisart]

"Progress could probably also be made with - awnings, drapery, mosaics, less amateur sorts of paint-based decoration. Or just put the entire building in a force bubble and then at least onlookers won't have to behold it."

[thisvorlunatic]

"The force bubble will appeal even less than tearing the place down and rebuilding it from scratch, because at least rebuilding it from scratch is a one-time cost. I'd lead with the neighbourhood children idea as a joke, then make comparatively appealing followup suggestions - some kind of design contest for architecture students, maybe. How To Cover Up The Ugliest Building In Vorbarr Sultana."

[isthisart]

"There aren't even windows to have to work around. Any large flat art project suitable for the outdoors could be installed without drastic changes."

[thisvorlunatic]

"The lack of windows may, alas, be one of Illyan's complaints. But at least if they have it painted over, those of us on the outside of the building will be much happier about it."

[isthisart]

"Yes, I don't know enough about architecture in general or the structure of the building to say if windows could be added. Does he want windows to look out of or to open to the air?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I couldn't tell you. Although I suspect they would not be opened to the air very frequently, ImpSec being ImpSec."

[isthisart]

"Because there are non-window-based ways to produce either an accurate picture of the outdoors, or scenery to be less offensively institutional for the eyes."

[thisvorlunatic]

"True. Although it's possible some of them might be more expensive, less appealing, or both."

[isthisart]

"It seems odd that there's been no attempt to mitigate the place's... itselfness. I would almost think that someone was deliberately blocking attempts, perhaps to make the thing sufficiently intrusively unappealing as to increase the chances of a complete replacement. It probably would take longer for it to be replaced if it were covered with mosaics on the outside and the interior offices had screens with scenery on them on the walls."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Eh, that or people have more important things on their minds. Or, to look at it from another angle, are stubbornly holding out on prettifying it any because it would just turn out to be a waste if and when someone finally tore the damn thing down."

[isthisart]

"Mosaics or frescoes or what have you could be put on separate facades and relocated, hypothetically."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ooh. An excellent point."

[isthisart]

"And then there would be several large walls of freestanding art projects somewhere else and the entire thing could be titled 'the shell of ImpSec, Architectural Hermit Crab'."

[thisvorlunatic]

...He cracks up.

[isthisart]

"There was a girl in my building in the constellation, a few years younger than me, she usually did my hair because I'd let her try things she didn't have down perfectly yet and no one else would - and she kept hermit crabs, well, heavily engineered little crustaceans that behaved in hermit-crab-like ways with containers that she made and decorated."