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]

"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..."

[isthisart]

"There are plenty of ways to be other than normal besides being engineered," she says. "How about - heirloom? It's technically supposed to refer to produce, old strains of it that haven't been tweaked away from how they were variously lengthy periods of time ago. Expensive tomatoes and so on. It's complimentary, if you don't mind being grouped with tomatoes."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I think I can live with positive tomato-related connotations."

[isthisart]

"Anyway, there are several things people have proposed adding to the haut genome that would sacrifice our ability to even theoretically have random-assembly children with non-haut, although in practice no one does random-assembly, even haut-wives. And none of these changes have been made to the haut, though there have been ba made with the rearranged retinal anatomy to see if it works as a speculative project in case this constraint is ever deemed obsolete - I'm not sure if wings ever saw live testing."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Random assembly. One way to put it, I suppose."

[isthisart]

"Should I think of a tomato-related complimentary word for that too?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I wouldn't object if you felt like it. 'Random assembly' seems fairly neutral, though."

He pauses briefly, then adds, "It occurs to me that producing the next generation of Vorkosigans will have to be the subject of an eventual conversation, but I'm in no hurry."

[isthisart]

"...Also not in a hurry. Although I might as well tell you now that I'm almost certainly incapable of body-birth, not that this has been tested in generations - ba obviously don't make good test subjects for that in particular. Keeping the capacity simply wasn't a priority."

[thisvorlunatic]

"There are some Barrayarans who might fuss about that, but I'm very much not one of them. I was a replicator birth myself, if you hadn't heard."