"Not really excessive, just - relative. I might have disparaging opinions about how most of the other haut choose to use their potential, but insofar as they apply it - well, practice effects still exist. I haven't had time to become an actually good, to narrow to a specific example, singer. For one thing, I never practiced enough and it was all improvisational."

"Improvisational?"

"I didn't want to spend twenty hours a day practicing," she explains. "So I joined an improv music group that would consider people my age. There was nothing to practice beyond general facility with the instrument, there was no repertoire, and the only drawback was that sometimes I'd have to put down a book in the middle to provide music on no notice, because while to get a proper choir or band you'd need to work out a set list ahead of time, all improv needs is a place to put the instruments and a general sense of the mood of whatever poorly-planned event was going on. We sort of meandered around cuing each other whenever we had something we wanted to try. I play the piano in particular because that meant I didn't have to try to dance."

"Aha. Hence the grand piano you couldn't take with you."

"Yes. I was four, I went to a second piano lesson after I had my first, and I found a keyboard in my apartment. When I'd kept at it for ten lessons the grand appeared."

"...is that how things usually work, with the haut?"

"That would be a little overgeneral. The ba who looked after the constellation dormitory I lived in tried to anticipate our needs without cluttering the spaces beyond manageability when they were making purchases for us, so it would have been unusual to have to actually say 'I want a grand piano' and equally unusual to find one in the living room without appreciating it, but, again, I'm eighteen. If for whatever reason I were still on Eta Ceta when I reached various other ages I would have had the opportunity to make different arrangements."

"I see."

"It occurs to me that I have no idea what other people imagine haut day-to-day life as being like."

"Oh, you know, contemplate the mysteries of the universe, break to drink rosewater and eat meringue, set aside the afternoon for internal political jockeying and telling the ghem to conquer something, go to bed."

"...That is inaccurate as a description but very charming as a parody. Except for the rosewater and meringue bit. Haut actually eat a lot; some of the earliest gains to be made in genetic engineering involved removing the biological expectation that food scarcity was always just around the corner."

"I was wondering," admits Miles.

"Oh." She looks at her plate. "Yes. It's not a huge difference, I think, but it's there."

"Not just hungry, mutant hungry," mutters Ivan.

"I am literally the exact opposite of a mutant."

"Common Barrayaran usage disagrees," sighs Miles. "Nevertheless: Ivan, shut up."

"'Mutants on purpose are mutants still', is I believe the phrase," says Miles, baring his teeth at Ivan. "Hell, most of the really bad ones won't even let go of their problem with me when they learn it's not a genetic defect."

"It's more complicated with you, because you're haut - you get prejudice about 'mutants' coming one way and prejudice about Cetagandans going the other. The fact that you're stunningly beautiful is mostly going to help, I imagine. A higher proportion of snide remarks to people trying to beat you up in alleys. But... I still recommend not visiting any alleys without a bodyguard. I'm sorry - you said you looked me up, I thought you knew."

"It makes some semblance sense that people would mistake you for someone with a real, random, harmful mutation. I'm - I'm an art project, no part of me happened randomly, anyone who knew what the word mutant meant wouldn't be able to assume I was one. I knew being Cetagandan was going to be an issue because of lingering feelings about the war, I just didn't expect a - double dose."

"The Barrayaran problem with mutants is... complicated. It's half about - defects and peculiarities," he gestures at himself, "and half about unusual genetics," he gestures at Linyabel. "And during the Time of Isolation there wasn't a way to tell the difference - something in the genes was just the assumed explanation for any defect, it's not like they let the visible ones stick around and breed to see what happened - so when we emerged into the bright new world of the wormhole nexus, human nature being what it is, of course certain people decided genetic engineering was just... mutants on purpose. Deliberately tainted, as opposed to accidentally. Maybe it wouldn't have gone that way if it hadn't been Cetaganda that invaded us, I don't know, but here we are."

"Here we are. All right," she sighs. "Bodyguard. That will be new, the bubbles obviated the need..."

"I wouldn't personally have an objection to you reinventing yourself a bubble and bubbling around in it, although I imagine the Cetas might fuss."

"I could probably do it, but it would take a while, and - I went and got used to the idea of leaving it."