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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.
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isthisart
isthisart
"Everything is going to be different here. I knew that, I sought it out on purpose, and it's taken a while to sink in on a properly visceral level. But I think I will manage. In the early days of the haut project someone said that well before the end goal was achieved you ought to be able to put a half-dozen haut five-year-olds on a half-terraformed planet and leave for thirty years, only to find that after twenty-five, they had become tired of waiting for you and were sitting on your doorstep. And I am not five and this planet is more than half-terraformed."
thisvorlunatic
"I'll help however I can," volunteers Miles. "Aid where needed, eh?"
isthisart
"Yes. I appreciate it very much. I imagine that if I were wandering Beta Colony alone, instead, I could get some form of official help, but my only previous brush with Betan bureaucracy did not leave me too favorably impressed. You are much friendlier."
thisvorlunatic
"Friendlier than Betan bureaucracy, that's me." He sketches a little bow in her direction, impressively managing not to break stride in the process.
isthisart
"To be dubiously fair to the fellow I interacted with the one time I bubbled up to the embassy to inquire if they could carry me off if I needed to be carried off, I did make the mistake of telling him that I was eight."
thisvorlunatic
"Oh dear," says Miles. "Yeah. A little too honest and direct, maybe. Could've used, uh - twelve-year-old me, God, that would've been a scene." He giggles. "I bet I could've got you offplanet through some sleight of hand or other, but I won't swear I could've done it without starting any wars."
isthisart
"I definitely don't care to start any wars," she says, shaking her head. "I can be useful, I think, but probably not enough to offset an entire war, at least not with high confidence and on a short time frame. Anyway, when I was eight I didn't want to leave right then. The constellation was a fine place to grow up, I just didn't want to stay forever or take the traditional way out. And I wasn't sure I'd be able to find a third option at all, since everyone invested in making sure it was one of the two is about as smart as I am and they're considerably better connected and more numerous. I hedged my bets a little at least in terms of what sort of education I collected and in the end I had Lisbet's help."
thisvorlunatic
"Well, 'tidier than interplanetary war' is not a high bar to clear."
isthisart
"Yes. I would like it to be tidier by a considerably greater margin."
isthisart
"Are you going to need to change rooms, or is the one you already live in suitable for two people?" she wonders.
thisvorlunatic
"Ah..." He considers this question. "Well. It's bigger than our cabin on the courier ship - speaking of low bars. I suppose we can take the General's—my grandfather's—old suite, assuming Father materializes no objections."
isthisart
"The ship cabin was all right for two weeks, but I was very deliberately not unpacking."
thisvorlunatic
"Yeah. There's plenty of room in the house, I just haven't been using very much of it."
isthisart
Linya looks around at Vorbarr Sultana around them. "I looked up pictures of this city ahead of time, but - I already explained why pictures never look right. I like the look of it in person."
thisvorlunatic
"I'm glad," he says. "Both that you like it and that your opinion of Barrayaran architecture hasn't been permanently soured by Cockroach Central—ahem—ImpSec HQ. I've heard Illyan's been after Gregor to get him a new building, but there's no room in the budget, not when the one they have works perfectly well and just happens to look like the enormous concrete dropping of some kind of mythical Bad Taste Dragon."
isthisart
"It would probably look more cheerful if arbitrary neighborhood children were supplied with ladders and invited to spraypaint it however they pleased," Linya points out. "I doubt that would cost very much, although possibly the ImpSec personnel would object to having arbitrary neighborhood children swarming the place for security reasons."
thisvorlunatic
"Yeah. Plus I'm sure someone would object on the grounds that the pressed gargoyles might give the neighbourhood children nightmares," he snorts.
thisvorlunatic
"I'll suggest it if it comes up in conversation with the appropriate people," giggles Miles.
isthisart
"Progress could probably also be made with - awnings, drapery, mosaics, less amateur sorts of paint-based decoration. Or just put the entire building in a force bubble and then at least onlookers won't have to behold it."
thisvorlunatic
"The force bubble will appeal even less than tearing the place down and rebuilding it from scratch, because at least rebuilding it from scratch is a one-time cost. I'd lead with the neighbourhood children idea as a joke, then make comparatively appealing followup suggestions - some kind of design contest for architecture students, maybe. How To Cover Up The Ugliest Building In Vorbarr Sultana."