tremolo

[isthisart]

Gregor and his accompanying security personnel depart to do other imperial things. Linya is on time for her video call economics lesson and business planning session with Tsipis, which she enjoys enormously. He wants a nicely packaged concept report on her pen - obviously she can't part with the existing prototype itself, but to get electronics companies bidding on its construction and investors to foot the bill for the initial run, he needs to tell them what they'd be making. She gets some details about what format he wants that in, spends the rest of the day less dinner and midnight snack time and an hour on the piano putting that together, sends it in, and goes to bed with her tiny Barrayaran. He is so snuggly.

Linya is underburdened with clothes for a haut-woman, even one who has only had her adult height for about a year, which means that she only has an excessive number instead of a preposterous number, but she's not sure it's a good long-term plan to go around in her Cetagandan clothes. They aren't recognizable as Cetagandan, exactly - haut styles overlap little with the ghem and prole fashions even on the same planet, and technically every garment she owns is unique if only in color, embroidery, and tailoring and not entire concept; and to the extent there is a coherent aesthetic among haut-ladies, it is not the sort of thing that would have ever filtered to Barrayaran public consciousness. She does not, however, look like she's trying very hard to fit in with Barrayar. When she mentions this over breakfast the following day Cordelia introduces her to Ivan's mother, Alys, who is only cordial on a personal level but actively intent on being helpful as far as clothes are concerned. She seems to consider Linya an interesting canvas on which to ply her art, and Linya is all too willing to let her.

After that long shopping trip (again accompanied by an Armsman, again uneventful except for strange looks, and interrupted in the middle by dinner) Linya hasn't brought home any Barrayaran garments except for one midnight-blue bolero jacket and a pair of black shoes, as everything else needs to be nipped in or let out or remade from new cloth to meet Alys's fit standards. She does, however, wear that jacket and those shoes with one of her existing dresses the next day, after she has - eventually - rolled out of bed with her tiny Barrayaran to put clothes on. Any time today she doesn't spend meeting Count Vorkosigan or otherwise being sociable, she plans to divide between refining the gesture-assignment interface for the consumer pen and studying Greek.

Comments

[greatcomposure]

"Hmm... I'd put it this way," she says thoughtfully. "They have a system, and when the system works, it works very, very well. But when it fails, it can fail pretty badly in some pretty awful ways. It failed me once."

[isthisart]

"Are you inclined to share the details?"

[greatcomposure]

She shrugs.

"I told you already that Aral and I met when we were on opposite sides of a war. He was the first person to capture me; the second... was less pleasant. And when I got out of that alive and found my way back home, they absolutely refused to believe that the Barrayarans hadn't edited my memories, just because I wasn't inclined to share the details of exactly which broken bones had happened exactly when and how. Combine that with my affection for Aral, who had... something of a sinister reputation, and some bright light among the military psych people evolved a theory that I was an unwitting mole of some kind. When I withdrew consent for her therapy, she took that as confirmation that she was on the right track. I had to get offplanet in a hell of a hurry to escape being peeled apart in search of secrets that weren't there."

[isthisart]

"I'm glad you got away."

[greatcomposure]

"Me too," she says dryly; and more seriously, "Thank you."

[isthisart]

"Is there anything I should know about your husband's sinister reputation?"

[greatcomposure]

"What do you know about the Barrayaran invasion of Komarr?"

[isthisart]

"An overview. It was considered relevant to my general education, but it had a lot of competition for time. I assume you're about to describe the Solstice Massacre - I know that it occurred and that the Count's name was one of those germane to it but have no particularly credible way to distinguish fact from rumor."

[greatcomposure]

"Aral was very proud of his Komarr invasion plan because, up until that point, it had been completely bloodless. Not a single shot fired, as far as I know. And then his Political Officer decided, on his own initiative, to go behind Aral's back and kill all those people. After Aral had given his personal word that they were to be spared. Aral had him executed on the spot. Unfortunately, the galactic propagandists either failed to pick up on or deliberately omitted some of those crucial details, and all that made it to the wider audience was that a lot of people had been killed on his watch. You still hear the title 'Butcher of Komarr' occasionally. I strongly recommend that you never use the phrase in his hearing. It causes him pain."

[isthisart]

"I will avoid it," agrees Linya.

[greatcomposure]

"Thank you."

[isthisart]

"If you think of any other - warnings like that one I would appreciate them. And for that matter if you come up with other questions about the history and aesthetic of the haut project I'm certainly your best resource to hand."

[greatcomposure]

"I imagine I'd be fascinated to hear just about anything you could tell me, but I hardly know where to start asking."

[isthisart]

"Oh, off the top of my head - about fifty percent of us are bisexual. In early days there was close enough to consensus in favor of trying to make all haut heterosexual for reasons which apparently seemed obvious enough to them that they didn't write their justifications down. They managed ninety-five percent of that and could not quite pin down the remaining factors, and the tiny percentage of would-be non-heterosexuals were lonely and highly irritated and successfully pushed for the policy we have now."

[greatcomposure]

"...What can they have been thinking?" she wonders.

[isthisart]

"Symmetry, maybe? I really couldn't tell you for sure."

[greatcomposure]

"Seems a hell of a long way to go for aesthetics."

[isthisart]

"There is almost no limit to what haut will do for aesthetics. But fortunately as a group they find a lot of genuinely problematic things unattractive, so I do not find myself a single-purpose organism."

[greatcomposure]

"Single-purpose...?"

[isthisart]

"Well, dual-purpose, I suppose. If you look at how most haut actually spend their time it looks like art and genetics for women, art and politics for men. Plus some games designed almost entirely to be time-sinks for competitive geniuses. But because it would be pathetic - or possibly insufficiently challenging to the designers' aspirations - to make any haut who fell short of the highest standards in other potentials, I can also run more or less as fast as the fastest non-haut of my height without having to practice, even though no one ever expects me to; and I'm immune to fast-penta, even though under the prescribed course of my life this would never have come up; and I do not get tension headaches or dental cavities or suffer from any of hundreds of other standard human ailments because that would make me a less cleverly developed art project. The idea is to make as few compromises as possible. If I can be a musician and able to learn languages in two weeks of concerted study apiece and have an immune system that refuses to acknowledge that the common cold exists, and I can also have the entire laundry list of other unambiguous or close enough improvements, it would be unthinkable to leave any out. Only when tradeoffs that they can't work around or compensate for materialize do the priorities of haut projected time expenditure even come up."

[greatcomposure]

"I see," she murmurs. "It's interesting that the haut seem to parallel the Vor that way - the men run the governments; the women run the bloodlines. But the haut seem to do it more openly. On Barrayar it's another one of those unwritten codes."

[isthisart]

"It is absolutely open among the haut. Occasionally a man will study genetics and maybe even assist on a project, or his political activities will be informed by his female friends or love-poems, but by and large it's very divided."

[greatcomposure]

"...And a love-poem is...?"

[isthisart]

"Oh - haut don't marry amongst themselves, but there are relationships, and the most common category of setups has the partners referred to as one another's 'love-poems'. As in, the person one would write a love poem about."

[greatcomposure]

"Aha. I suppose it makes sense that a group like the haut would separate romance from reproduction... but it still seems strange to me."