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

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ideally I'd like to minimize the amount of opposition we encounter in the first place," Miles puts in, faintly indignant at Illyan's unsolicited accuracy.

[isthisart]

"Via whatever psychological mechanism, he appears to strongly anticipate success," Linya says.

[as_i_remember]

"Invariably," Illyan agrees. "Well, this has turned out to be a much shorter story than I anticipated."

[isthisart]

"There was hardly time for it to get much longer, considering how infrequently it was possible for me to extract him from his social engagements and conduct conversations."

[as_i_remember]

"I was disinclined to underestimate Lord Vorkosigan's ingenuity in escaping undesired social engagements for his own purposes," says Illyan.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah," says Miles, "I'd hope you know better than to underestimate my ingenuity by now, sir. If you're done making fun of me, can we go now?"

[as_i_remember]

He spreads his hands in a gesture of agreeable dismissal.

[isthisart]

Well then. Linya gets up.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles escorts her out of the maze, and when they are once again on the exterior of the appallingly ugly building, he pauses before calling somebody to pick them up.

"We could walk home from here, if you wanted," he suggests. "It's half an hour or so. The route's safe enough. Not all that scenic, but I promise we're standing in front of the ugliest thing you're going to see on the way."

[isthisart]

"Ah - sure. If it's safe."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah."

In that case, walking! Perhaps they can even hold hands. (Eee.)

[isthisart]

She will happily hold hands.

"Do your parents know I'm coming?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I judge it a high likelihood, especially since we sent our luggage ahead and Illyan didn't suggest, for example, including a note to explain why there were thirty more articles than I left with."

[isthisart]

"But you have not, say, told them?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"No. I hate composing vid messages and avoid it wherever possible. Real-time communication is so much more - alive."

[isthisart]

"Hmm." Well, they're his parents. They are, in fact, parents at all; she's hardly one to talk. Her designer might not find out that she's left Cetaganda for months yet.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Anyway. I stand by my prediction that Mother's going to like you."

[isthisart]

"I hope you're right."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I often am!"

[isthisart]

"Any advice on winning over your father?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"He is... less transparent to me than Mother," sighs Miles. "I'm really not sure what he's going to think of you, which makes it very hard to give you any tips in advance, you see."

[isthisart]

"Mmm. Is there a shortlist of possibilities...?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Not exactly, no." He looks up at her, then away, trying to marshal his thoughts. "More like a long list of impossibilities. My father is a good man. I know he's not going to - disown me, try to have you deported, do anything physically dangerous... what I don't know is what he will do. Maybe he'll fire off a round or two of sarcasm and retreat in good order, like Illyan. But I don't think so; that's less his style. I... fear that he might see you as an irrevocable bad decision on my part, or a threat to my safety, or to Barrayar's. That he might try—and certainly fail—to convince me I should pack you off to Beta Colony as soon as possible. Or to somewhere more remote. But that doesn't seem quite right either. And thus we come back," his free hand makes a horizontal circling motion, "to 'I don't know'."

[isthisart]

"You are very categorically dismissing the possibility that I was a bad decision on your part," she points out.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yes," he says. "Should I not? Do you disagree?"