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]

"It's a big leap to make. A kind of culture shock, I suppose you could call it. These people didn't grow up with this sort of thing - it's still new to them, still strange, often nobody's been able to coherently explain why they'd want all these mysterious objects that they don't understand how to use or make or maintain, and the hillfolk are classically stubborn. We've made progress since my grandfather's day, God knows, but there's some distance left to go."

[isthisart]

"If someone offered me objects that worked by literal magic, incomprehensible in principle, irreproducible, and unprecedented, that did things I couldn't do as well without, I'd be annoyed at the incomprehensibility, but I'd still take the magic artifacts."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Right, but imagine you've never seen a computer before," says Miles. "Never used information technology more complicated than pen and ink. And you're from a very small, very traditional rural community, and somebody breezes in from the big cities you vaguely distrust, showing you this machine that makes sparkling lights and words appear in the air, and they can't explain what it is or how it works or why you should care, and they want you to take time out of your busy day to figure out where to put this apparently totally useless decorative artifact whose only obvious function is showing you pretty pictures and words from places you've never been to and don't give a damn about, and then someone's going to have to learn how it works and someone's going to have to learn how to make basic repairs to it, but if it really breaks it'll cost money you definitely don't have to get it hauled a long way to the nearest place where someone knows how to fix it properly."

The stream of words runs down at last. Miles shrugs.

"I'm not saying it's impossible to get a Dendarii hill village to accept some technology - Silvy Vale's done it - I'm just saying the approach required is a hell of a lot more delicate than most people on our side of the cultural divide would guess, and it takes time and effort and money we don't always have, just to get one individual village to see the point of all this modern foolishness and then set them up with enough modern foolishness to keep them going once they've got the idea."

[isthisart]

"I wasn't saying I don't believe you, I'm just saying it's a hard mindset for me to understand even if I analogize to the nearest equivalent."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah. I'm, um, a little defensive of my district's hillfolk. Local target of many a joke about incest or illiteracy - I forgot to mention, they often haven't even used pens and ink. That's getting better these days, too, I'm happy to say."

[isthisart]

"I am all in favor of literacy," says Linya, with what sounds like it may be drastic understatement.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Me too."

[isthisart]

"I tend to do most of my serious thinking in writing. I'm not sure what I'd do if I couldn't even read. I can't remember that early into my childhood."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Huh," says Miles. "Why in writing?"

[isthisart]

"I react differently to things that are outside of my head. I don't think it strictly has to be writing, I suppose, I could do the same thing with an audio recorder - but something about experiencing it as though it could have been about someone else, instead of from inside my skull, makes it clearer and less slippery."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Hmm," he says. "I'm not sure I'd get any meaningful benefit from writing it all down. When I really need to do a lot of thinking, it's often under a lot of time pressure anyway - case in point, the recent funeral - and the writing part would only slow me down. My best problem-solving always seems to happen on my feet at full speed, whether literally or metaphorically."

[isthisart]

"I don't think badly on my feet - the writing is more for general maintenance and sometimes emotional management and long-term algorithm invention and tweaking, than it is for emergencies."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles shrugs.

[isthisart]

"I have a fair amount of conscious control over how my brain functions, when I put the time in to work on it."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Huh."

[isthisart]

"It's very useful for being able to compose myself in tense or emotional situations."

[thisvorlunatic]

"That does sound handy."

[isthisart]

"It is!"



Despite Linya's willingness to show up to an interview with Illyan, Miles does not make a reply to his boss during the remaining five days of the trip. He does, however, braid and rebraid her hair about sixty times over several sittings, and eventually learn to suggest adjourning marital relations for lunch or other concerns before he falls asleep on Linya some of the time.

Five jumps from Komarr to Barrayar. Hop, hop, hop, hop, hop.

[thisvorlunatic]

After the final jump, as they make their approach to Barrayar, Miles is only a tiny bit nervous. He decants his written report to Illyan onto a cipher disk, wipes it from the courier vessel's system, double-checks that all his luggage is properly packed, and then flomps onto the cabin's bed to wait out the last hour or so.

[isthisart]

Linya sits beside him and pets him. In Russian, she says, "Are you all right?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I'm fine, I'm fine," he replies in the same language, snuggling up. "Waiting is one of my least favourite activities. I'll live."

[isthisart]

"You probably have time to braid my hair another four or five times, if you want."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ooh. What an excellent plan." He sits up.

[isthisart]

Linya giggles and calls up the most recent project - French herringbone! whee! - with her pen and puts it where he can see it over her shoulder.

[thisvorlunatic]

Ooh. Goals. Miles does love a nice moderately impossible goal.