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]

"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."

[thisvorlunatic]

"That's... adorable, in a kitten-tree sort of way."

[isthisart]

"Kitten tree?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ah - I believe it was at the Bioestheties Exhibition - one of the most memorable sights I saw in the course of my official duties on Eta Ceta was a tree that sprouted kittens in leafy little pods. Very pretty, very cute, very unexpected, faintly unsettling. Very Cetagandan, all in all."

[isthisart]

"Oh, a literal - kitten tree. I wonder how that project was first conceived. I wonder if it was set up so the kittens would grow into adult cats after being picked or if it stunted them."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I hope they were meant to become adult cats one day. Stunting them seems needlessly cruel, for some reason. Although not as bad as keeping them on the tree forever. In fact, a tree that produced eventually-adult cats seems almost preferable to the usual way of producing more cats - you're nearly guaranteed not to have a problem with feral populations establishing themselves, assuming the cats thereby produced are, er, seedless. So to speak."

[isthisart]

"I know that there are commercially available permanent-puppies - although it's cosmetic; I think they develop adult personalities insofar as dogs have personalities - but I'm not sure if I've ever seen a permanent kitten, perhaps simply because people are disinclined to walk them. I'd be astonished if the kitten tree produced non-seedless creatures, anyway, that would be the sort of thing that would get one marked down at a Bioestheties competition. Smacks of lack of control over the product."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Oh? You wouldn't be able to argue for, I don't know, greater authenticity of the resulting kittens?"

[isthisart]

"No one really cares about that. Well, no one who'd be judging a Bioestheties Exhibition does."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ha."

[isthisart]

"Which means it's sort of odd that they'd just be kittens and not winged kittens or amphibious kittens or at least permanently-miniature ones. It's a little strange that they were recognizably cats at all and not, say, a fictitious alien creature from the designer's favorite science fiction series, but I suppose they didn't want the project to look dated later."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...Winged kittens? Is this a hypothetical or has someone actually produced some? Do they fly? I can't decide which option unsettles me more - a winged cat that can't fly seems tragic; a winged cat that can fly sounds like an ecological nightmare."

[isthisart]

"I haven't seen winged cats in particular. I have seen a winged rabbit - with added antlers for some reason - which glided fairly competently if it started from a height, and could get rather more airtime when it leapt than an unimproved rabbit, and a winged shrew, which could in fact fly properly. Any of these creatures would probably be engineered to sufficiently picky eating that it wouldn't attack wild fauna, anyway. There was a tremendous fad for making winged things about a decade before I was born and some of them are still around. At one time it was suggested that haut could be made to have wings, and fly with them too, but this, along with revising our eye designs to avoid the blind spot and other dramatic anatomical changes, was ruled out on the grounds that we weren't at the point where we wanted to sacrifice the theoretical ability to reproduce without design intervention with - there's really no polite word for humans without engineering done, is there."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Uh, assuming 'normal' is insufficiently descriptive or otherwise ruled out..."