isthisart | overture

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.

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"Thank you." Linya annotates this design idea and then shoos it and puts her pen back in its collar.

"So besides the pen, what sorts of things do you see yourself working on?"

"I'm probably not in a good position to try to directly involve myself in any local social programs, much as it dismays me to find that illiteracy and lack of plumbing and so on remain problems in this century. I might, however, be able to accumulate large quantities of money via consumer electronics and the software and give it to people who are not so conspicuously Cetagandan, who are doing useful work. Or find things offplanet that I can interfere in more directly, if I'm willing to make business trips - that will probably depend on what I find my day to day life here to be like, especially if Miles is away for his own work often. One thing I'm interested in that I didn't have much affordance to study on Eta Ceta is medicine - I know human genetics and the allied fields, but nothing that does much for anyone who has already gotten as far as starting to exist, I'm afraid. Cryorevival and life extension in general are of particular interest to me, there, and I'm also curious if the effectively abandoned science-fiction idea of rendering minds on hardware substrates rather than wetware is feasible."

"I definitely like your style," she says, smiling.

"Thank you."

"And I think I can see why Miles is so charmed."

"I do take some satisfaction from the fact that he seemed to like me even before I took down my force-screen."

"Did he? I'm not surprised. Granted, I'm also not surprised that he liked you after you took down your force-screen."

"He liked me a lot after I took down my force-screen," says Linya wryly. "It was actually the first time I'd gotten a reaction like that - I'd seen people reacting to other haut-ladies, but not me. Everyone who'd seen me before then was either another haut or a ba."

"You're very striking," says Cordelia. "But you have much more to recommend you than a pretty face, that much is clear."

It is at this point that Miles returns.

"I've had all our things moved to Grandfather's old suite, and taken off all the dust covers," he says to Linya. "Did you, ah, have a nice chat...?"

"Yes. Please don't disable safety devices on lightflyers while I am in them."

...He cracks up.

"Mother! I didn't know you knew about that!"

"I know everything," she says. "It's a mother's job."

"And I'm going to retune the piano, whenever tuning equipment can be turned up, and she wants a pen, too."

"Everyone's going to want pens. Pens are amazing. You're amazing."

Linya is not sure if "right in front of his mother" counts as "private", so she does not scoop him up, but she does beam.

Miles hugs her.

"Do you want to see the rooms?"

"Yes."

Then he will show her the rooms! It's a somewhat longer journey, up to the fifth floor. Their luggage is all lined up in a cozy sitting room, where a slight sprinkling of dust here and there suggests the floor was hastily cleaned while all the dust covers were being removed from the furniture. Beyond that, more coziness awaits - bedroom, bathroom, closets, an office or study with a huge oaken desk. More than enough space for all of Linya's things.

"I suppose I'd better unpack. Unless there is someone else I should meet as soon as possible who is also immediately to hand."

"No - Father's in Hassadar, tending to District business. He'll be back... sometime in the next few days, probably."

"Does he know I exist?"

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