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]

"A combination of the two; he hadn't tried this kind before today. He's been surprisingly enthusiastic about learning to do complicated braids."

[greatcomposure]

"Miles likes a challenge."

[isthisart]

"I'm seeing that. Um -" What else, what else, she is reasonably sure that people are not supposed to know things about their children's sex lives so what else. "He likes it when I sing, and play the keyboard - he told me there's a piano here?"

[greatcomposure]

"There is. And you're welcome to play it. I'll have to have somebody track it down, though - we don't use it often and it lives under a sheet in some dusty back corner somewhere."

[isthisart]

"So you won't mind if I retune it to well temperament?"

[greatcomposure]

"Go ahead."

[isthisart]

"Is there tuning equipment with it or will I need to acquire some? I left my grand piano behind with its accessories and didn't know until I'd already done so that I was going to have access to another instead of just my keyboard."

[greatcomposure]

"I'm sure there's tuning equipment somewhere. Whether you'll be able to find it is a different question. Maybe Miles can lead an expedition to the attics."

[isthisart]

"Okay." And that seems to be the piano exhausted as a topic. Um. "He said he'd teach me to fly a lightflyer."

[greatcomposure]

"Did he? Well, I hope you have fun. Please don't let him disable any safety systems... though I doubt he'll do that with you aboard. And he might have outgrown the practice by now anyway."

[isthisart]

"Is there some purpose to disabling the safety systems?"

[greatcomposure]

"Thrill-rides. The safety systems interfere."

[isthisart]

"Ah. Yes, I will be sure to object if he tries that. At least my first few times out, anyway."

[greatcomposure]

"I don't really expect it to be a problem, but I thought I'd mention it."

[isthisart]

"Any other risk-seeking behavior I should be advised about?"

[greatcomposure]

"He seeks risks," she says dryly. "In general. Although I'm sure you couldn't get him to admit it. It's not for the sake of the risk, anyway, most of the time... I think he just has a tendency to get caught up in his bright ideas and neglect to worry about trivialities like the consequences of failure. Whether it's pulling exciting stunts in a lightflyer or whatever mythical feat he accomplished on Eta Ceta. There was some sort of mythical feat involved, wasn't there?"

[isthisart]

"I am entirely uncertain about your relationship to local classification procedures, but I'm sure no one on Eta Ceta would thank me for producing a detailed description. I can tell you that he earned me in a more or less plausible manner, for all that I had to put in a request in order for the relevant derring-do to bear fruit."

[greatcomposure]

"I'm perfectly willing to leave it at 'mythical feat' for now. If the details are embarrassing or politically sensitive somehow, I don't need 'em. I admit, the fact that he earned you made me a little nervous when I first heard it... why did you marry my son?"

[isthisart]

"I'm not sure if the answer you're looking for is more along the lines of 'he's cute' or a complete description of my history as a malcontent."

[greatcomposure]

"If those are both reasons, then I'm looking for both of them."

[isthisart]

"Well, he is cute. There was a little conversation in between episodes of the mythical feat, and - I like the way he talks and I like the way he looks at me and I like the way he reacts to things, and one of the things he reacted to was my disinterest in marrying a ghem-lord. Up until the business with the mythical feat I was fairly marginal as haut go because I am disinclined to ornamental wheel-spinning in between small increments of progress on an enormous gradual committee-handled project that they'd never have let me touch anyway unless I pretended to be other than I am - I'm only eighteen, I would have had a solid decade of further grace period in my constellation before I would have been even subtly nudged towards the exit, but I am not patient, and that was part of the problem. If I was going to go I wanted to go; I was beginning to investigate routes besides 'marry some ghem-lord' by the time I was eight.

"After the business with the mythical feat I was in fairly good favor with the haut Lisbet who is now the Empress, and probably could have reversed course, stayed put, and worked for her, but it would still have been on a gradual committee-handled project. I preferred to take my ticket off planet and immediately get to work on other things. I'm probably going to begin with a consumer version of this." She taps her pen.

[greatcomposure]

"And what's 'this'?"

[isthisart]

"I call it my pen." She plucks it from her necklace, gestures it on and in drawing mode, and draws a streak of white light through the air. "It can do most anything a comconsole can, except play audio without a peripheral." She woggles it again, defines a plane, and gets a flat desktop; calls up a blank text file and gestures letters into it at a rapid clip.

[greatcomposure]

"Ooh. I want one," says Cordelia.

[isthisart]

"Then you can have one, as soon as I've secured what I need to make consumer-version prototypes. What's your opinion on the form factor? Miles wants his to look like an old-fashioned pen, but I'm not sure I can do a nib-shaped end that works like these ends do."