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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thisvorlunatic

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

From:

isthisart

He'd need about twice as many hands to find some of these braids easy as opposed to "maybe someday doable".

Linya contently studies Russian until the ship gets where it's going.

From:

thisvorlunatic

Miles manages the French herringbone on the third try, then unravels it and does it again more neatly, then unravels it again and produces a version in which his eyes can detect no flaw.

And scant minutes later, they make orbit. There is a certain amount of bustle involved in loading themselves and their belongings onto a shuttle, then offloading them again once they reach the spaceport. Miles is an old hand, and cheerfully capable of overseeing not only his meager pair of luggage cases but also all thirty of Linya's - he retrieves a large float pallet once they're on the ground, making the load possible if unwieldy for Linya to cart around without help. Then, after navigating them through the spaceport, he checks outside the front gate to see if the family has sent a groundcar.

From:

as_i_remember

They haven't.

Someone else is waiting there, however.

"Lieutenant Vorkosigan," he says pleasantly. "I hope you don't mind, but I was afraid something might have happened to my message. Such as you ignoring it."

From:

thisvorlunatic

"...Good afternoon, sir," says Miles. "This is my wife, Lady haut Linyabel Miriat Vorkosigan—" an on-the-spot arrangement of her unprecedented combination of titles, which he feels rolls nicely off the tongue. "Linya, this is Captain Simon Illyan."

From:

isthisart

"Hello," says Linya politely.

From:

as_i_remember

"Congratulations," Illyan says, somewhat dryly. "I would love to hear just how this happy event came to occur. Perhaps you'd like to send your luggage to Vorkosigan House and come into my office for a... chat. On reflection, I'm not going to promise a quick one."

From:

thisvorlunatic

"I have no objections on my own behalf," says Miles. "By the way, did you know fast-penta doesn't work on haut women?"

From:

as_i_remember

"Mm," says Illyan.

From:

isthisart

"As an immunity, not an allergy, so if you care to test it I will not be liable to expire."

From:

as_i_remember

"I wasn't intending to try it without your permission, and I see no reason to change that plan now that you've told me it wouldn't work," he says. "But thank you for the clarification, Lady Vorkosigan. And what are your feelings on coming to my office to discuss your recent marriage?"

From:

isthisart

"I don't object."

From:

as_i_remember

"I'm pleased to hear it."

Miles makes arrangements for the luggage. Illyan offers them a ride to ImpSec headquarters in the groundcar he has waiting.

ImpSec headquarters is a phenomenally ugly building. Tallish, squat, windowless, and 'decorated' (to use the term loosely) with a tangle of ugly relief sculptures of various fantastic creatures.

From:

isthisart

Linya has never seen anything that offensively ugly in her life. She stares at it.

From:

as_i_remember

"I apologize most sincerely for the architecture," he says as he escorts them inside. No one tries to stop them or administer any intrusive security measures, although they definitely pass through at least two separate scanners as they enter the building.

From:

isthisart

Linya is unarmed, and the only thing of electronic interest on her is the pen. She sticks close to Miles.

From:

as_i_remember

He leads them through a maze of labyrinthine corridors to a smallish, minimally decorated, exquisitely tidy office, where he takes a seat behind the desk and gestures the wedded couple into the two chairs in front.

"Now," he says, looking contemplatively at Linyabel. "I would like to hear, from your own point of view, in as much detail as you feel is relevant, with as little editorial commentary from your husband as possible, just how the two of you came to be married."

From:

isthisart

"In the course of my running errands for the then-Handmaiden, now-Empress, the haut Lisbet, I encountered Miles during a series of unusual events I imagine will be fully described in his report, though I will redundantly summarize them if you like. I was already more or less poised to be ejected from my constellation in favor of exogamous marriage most probably to a ghem-lord, though normally this would have waited a decade or two. This came up in conversation between myself and Miles, and I found him more appealing than an arbitrary ghem-lord or continuing to cool my heels in ornamental uselessness in a constellation apartment, and he found me more appealing than... most anything, as far as I can tell... so when he was sufficiently impressive to earn various rewards from the Cetagandan Empire, I asked Lisbet to arrange that I be one of them. She did."

From:

as_i_remember

"I would be fascinated to hear your redundant summary," he says.

From:

isthisart

"It involved a matter embarrassing to certain parties among the haut, and ideally would not spread willy-nilly as social gossip."

From:

as_i_remember

"Of course," he says agreeably. "Believe me, I'm familiar with the principle."

From:

isthisart

Linya nods.

"The haut gene bank was kept in a single central location and accessed with a single cryptographic Key. This Key was stolen, a decoy was made and fell into Miles's hands - I'm glossing over the whys and hows because the question you asked was about how we came to be married - and Lisbet sent me to draw him aside at one of the events surrounding the previous Celestial Lady's funeral and ask for it back in case what he had was the real one. He didn't have the decoy on his person that time; the second time he had, and I found it defective, and after that I conducted him to meet Lisbet directly, as she acknowledged his interest in the matter.

"There was a modest amount of social conversation between us around these interactions, and at one point Miles asked me why I didn't want to marry a ghem-lord, and I told him that it would be a step down in terms of ability to do practically useful things - discouraged more or less for aesthetic reasons while I was within the constellation, impractical for resource and time commitment reasons if married to a ghem-lord. And he produced a very appealing little speech about what he would do with a haut-wife if he had one, and I told him to warn me if he did anything very impressive in the environs of Cetaganda.

"And then when Lisbet sent him away on that occasion she asked me 'do you want to marry the little Barrayaran?' and I said that I did and she said she'd put a word in with Emperor Fletchir.

"Miles did something impressive within the environs of Cetaganda. I helped; I masqueraded as the haut Vio who was in on the key theft plot and smuggled Miles up to the culprit's shuttle in her rejiggered force-screen. The key was retrieved, the guilty were captured, and our helpful offworlder got - presents."