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

[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."

[isthisart]

"It's not unheard-of for someone to design a child that's principally her and her love-poem's genes. But it's equally not-unheard-of to do the same with one's friends, and in either case if whoever one answers to - the constellation contract-arrangers or the planetary consort or the Empress herself, depending on how high up one is in the hierarchy at the time one attempts this - if she finds that one is designing for sentiment rather than improvement then one risks losing considerable creative control. It is very common to make minor cosmetic changes for sentimental reasons. My designer gave me her best friend's eyes, for instance."

[greatcomposure]

"Creative control... and here I thought Beta Colony was strict with its child licenses. At least they only control quantity of offspring and quality of parents. I'm not personally drawn to the idea of designing a child, but if I decided to, I can't imagine letting anyone but my husband have substantial input into the process."

[isthisart]

"Yes, oddly enough creative control is one of the most sought-after things for haut-ladies, and the only way to get a complete clear pass to do whatever you like - short of becoming the Empress - is to marry out, which is the least sought-after thing. Though whether complete creative control with drastically fewer materials is a true improvement on that axis is I suppose genuinely debatable. Typically the husbands aren't geneticists, so it's assumed that they choose quantity and timing and sex and maybe make cosmetic requests but are otherwise non-participants... That's if they're ghem. I haven't had this conversation with Miles yet."

[greatcomposure]

"Geneticist or no, I expect him to have opinions, but I'm afraid I have no good way to predict them."

[isthisart]

"Well, neither of us are in a hurry to start, so there will be time to discuss it. Technically by the terms of the award ceremony cum marriage he's entitled to do as he likes, which would be absolute scandal on Cetaganda, but this is not Cetaganda."

[greatcomposure]

"This is not Cetaganda," she agrees. "The parameters of scandal are very different here."

[isthisart]

"Yes. I'm sure there are plenty of uniquely Barryaran ways to introduce dismay into the mood of the population to compensate."

[greatcomposure]

"Miles seems to manage it just by existing."

[isthisart]

"So at least there's someone experienced around."

[greatcomposure]

"Yes. And I'm sure he'll be happy to let you benefit from that experience."

[isthisart]

"Aid where needed," murmurs Linya.

[greatcomposure]

"Indeed."

[isthisart]

The conversation trails off from there.

Linya has lunch, and programs up in her room, making sure that her pen will be able to gain evidence about what gestures it's seeing from accustomed users' grip strength and hand position and speed as well as the path the nib takes through the air even when the users in question are not her. (In her case most of these features are serving as secondary identity confirmation in addition to the DNA lock.) She does not loiter near the entryway; there was no disaster when she was the first person Emperor Gregor encountered, but she is not sure she wishes to repeat the sequence of events with Count Vorkosigan as well.

[thisvorlunatic]

Around midafternoon, Miles comes in, looking thoughtful.

"Father's home," he says. "And from what I - er - accidentally overheard, he seems inclined to give us the benefit of the doubt."

[isthisart]

Linya scoops him up to hug. "That's good."