View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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.
isthisart
greatcomposure
A little while after breakfast, Cordelia tracks her down.
"I've heard from Aral; he'll be home this afternoon."
"I've heard from Aral; he'll be home this afternoon."
isthisart
"Good to know. Any advance information on his opinion about me, or is he reserving some combination of judgment and comment?"
isthisart
"Beautifully. Tsipis is fantastic, he's handling all of the things I wasn't yet sure how to manage myself with what appears to be flawless competence, it's speeding my timetable up quite a bit because I don't have to stop and personally investigate the local economy and its customs. I can just write software and draw schematics."
isthisart
"It's mutual. It would be hard for his enthusiasm not to be contagious even if I didn't have a vested interest, I think."
isthisart
"Well, then perhaps I will compliment him on his hiring choices, if the circumstances of the conversation seem amenable."
isthisart
"Oh, and thank you for the referral to Alys. I didn't spot you after I got home last night to mention it then, but I appreciate it."
greatcomposure
"She was a great help to me when I first arrived on Barrayar. Still is, for that matter."
isthisart
"She is apparently very well suited to the task of making sure I still don't have to care about what I wear except to the extent that I don't think orange and pink go together."
isthisart
"I had acquaintances who tended to do the same thing back on Eta Ceta. And who did my hair. So that's both tasks replaced, at least until Miles goes off somewhere and I go back to styles I can do myself." (Miles has, today, conquered an angled Dutch braid which goes over her shoulder.)
isthisart
"It's not necessary. I like that Miles does the fancy ones, but if he's routinely called away courier-ing things I'll just simplify. I'm no longer surrounded by people who are constantly evaluating whether my genotype contains sufficiently prosocial tendencies or whether I'm well-acculturated or what have you and don't need to maintain the corresponding standard anymore."
greatcomposure
"I think there's a certain amount of undue fuss about appearances in most cultures, but if you say the haut take it to a whole different level, I'll believe you."
isthisart
"What we're wearing simultaneously advertises aesthetics and acculturation, both of which are of immense importance. Someone whose outfit falls short of whatever the going standard is has either got defective ability to tell what looks nice, or," Linya raises a hand, "sub-par interest in investing effort into meeting the standards set collectively by their constellation or the haut race in general, which is certainly a tendency that should be shown the door as soon as possible. One does not keep over a million people all heavily engineered for competence and theoretical self-sufficiency all acting in concert by encouraging them to start their own cultural offshoots. There've been dozens of promising improvements shot down because they were shown to 'reduce neuroplasticity', but the actual reports on the experimental ba in question didn't show anything nearly that general, I think." Pause. "Stop me if I'm boring you."
greatcomposure
"No, I'm fascinated," she says. "'Reduce neuroplasticity' being a subtle excuse for... what? Staying away from changes that might lead to maverick haut?"
isthisart
"Neuroplasticity is here code for - a disposition to turn into the same sort of human as one grows up around. So, yes - although at the same time they don't want to entirely quash creativity or originality, so they're constrained noticeably in anti-maverick efforts."
greatcomposure
"I see. It seems damn strange to me," she says. "Well... maybe not that strange. They can be a little unfriendly to outliers on Beta Colony, too. They just don't go as far as trying to eliminate them before birth."