"I should have figured he'd be hearing something about this before I had a chance to land and deliver my report," Miles sighs when he reads this message, sitting next to Linya in their cabin. "How do you feel about an interview with Illyan?"

"Assuming that it's - civil and he isn't going into it absolutely certain that I'm some unconventional sort of spy, that sounds all right."

"Oh, he's definitely not going to pre-judge," Miles assures her. "I mean - that's not to say you have a high chance of convincing him to be absolutely certain you aren't some kind of spy, not in a single conversation, not without fast-penta. But he'll at least be willing to acknowledge that the balance of evidence suggests you aren't, and act accordingly."

"Never before have I had more than a vague philosophical reason to be glad of the immunity to the stuff. If I weren't immune I imagine refusing to accept a dose on the grounds that it would be... let's go with 'upsetting'... would look fantastically suspicious."

He shakes his head. "Not fantastically, no. It's not something most people would rush to volunteer for, however compelling the reason. Even if you could, it's entirely understandable that you'd rather not."

"I suppose maybe I managed to accumulate the wrong impression by reading too much fiction. In any story with a mystery element you can bet whoever has an objection to fast-penta has something to hide."

"Not the most healthy of implications, if you ask me. I have conducted a murder investigation before, and my conclusion is that whether or not someone objects to fast-penta doesn't give you anything like the final word in guilt."

"You have? When? Why?"

"A few years ago - a woman came down from the hills seeking justice for her murdered baby daughter; my father sent me as his Voice to sort it out. She thought it was her husband - turned out it was her mother. Nasty business. We're trying to wipe out the old custom of infanticide for birth defects, but it's hard going, sometimes."

"That... sounds rough on the marriage, if the fellow's wife thought he'd murdered their child. What does the trying to wipe out the custom look like, besides prosecuting the killers?"

"Prosecuting the killers is complicated enough by itself - there's a reason Harra walked all the way to Vorkosigan Surleau from Silvy Vale to demand the Count's attention on her case. To prosecute the killers you need someone within reach who's willing to prosecute the killers, and someone who's willing to ask them to, and you don't often get both. Not in some of those little villages. Getting the trappings of modern civilization out there - transportation, education, computation - helps too, but not everyone can be convinced to accept them."

"What's the rationale for not accepting transportation and education and computation?"

"It's a big leap to make. A kind of culture shock, I suppose you could call it. These people didn't grow up with this sort of thing - it's still new to them, still strange, often nobody's been able to coherently explain why they'd want all these mysterious objects that they don't understand how to use or make or maintain, and the hillfolk are classically stubborn. We've made progress since my grandfather's day, God knows, but there's some distance left to go."

"If someone offered me objects that worked by literal magic, incomprehensible in principle, irreproducible, and unprecedented, that did things I couldn't do as well without, I'd be annoyed at the incomprehensibility, but I'd still take the magic artifacts."

"I wasn't saying I don't believe you, I'm just saying it's a hard mindset for me to understand even if I analogize to the nearest equivalent."

"Yeah. I'm, um, a little defensive of my district's hillfolk. Local target of many a joke about incest or illiteracy - I forgot to mention, they often haven't even used pens and ink. That's getting better these days, too, I'm happy to say."

"Me too."

"I tend to do most of my serious thinking in writing. I'm not sure what I'd do if I couldn't even read. I can't remember that early into my childhood."

"Huh," says Miles. "Why in writing?"

"I react differently to things that are outside of my head. I don't think it strictly has to be writing, I suppose, I could do the same thing with an audio recorder - but something about experiencing it as though it could have been about someone else, instead of from inside my skull, makes it clearer and less slippery."

"Hmm," he says. "I'm not sure I'd get any meaningful benefit from writing it all down. When I really need to do a lot of thinking, it's often under a lot of time pressure anyway - case in point, the recent funeral - and the writing part would only slow me down. My best problem-solving always seems to happen on my feet at full speed, whether literally or metaphorically."

"I don't think badly on my feet - the writing is more for general maintenance and sometimes emotional management and long-term algorithm invention and tweaking, than it is for emergencies."

Miles shrugs.