"Is Beta not the haven of tolerance and civilization that I'd heard it was? Should some other planet top my list of 'if relocating from Barrayar, send care of thus and such'?"

"Hmm... I'd put it this way," she says thoughtfully. "They have a system, and when the system works, it works very, very well. But when it fails, it can fail pretty badly in some pretty awful ways. It failed me once."

"Are you inclined to share the details?"

"I'm glad you got away."

"Me too," she says dryly; and more seriously, "Thank you."

"What do you know about the Barrayaran invasion of Komarr?"

"An overview. It was considered relevant to my general education, but it had a lot of competition for time. I assume you're about to describe the Solstice Massacre - I know that it occurred and that the Count's name was one of those germane to it but have no particularly credible way to distinguish fact from rumor."

"Aral was very proud of his Komarr invasion plan because, up until that point, it had been completely bloodless. Not a single shot fired, as far as I know. And then his Political Officer decided, on his own initiative, to go behind Aral's back and kill all those people. After Aral had given his personal word that they were to be spared. Aral had him executed on the spot. Unfortunately, the galactic propagandists either failed to pick up on or deliberately omitted some of those crucial details, and all that made it to the wider audience was that a lot of people had been killed on his watch. You still hear the title 'Butcher of Komarr' occasionally. I strongly recommend that you never use the phrase in his hearing. It causes him pain."

"I will avoid it," agrees Linya.

"Thank you."

"If you think of any other - warnings like that one I would appreciate them. And for that matter if you come up with other questions about the history and aesthetic of the haut project I'm certainly your best resource to hand."

"I imagine I'd be fascinated to hear just about anything you could tell me, but I hardly know where to start asking."

"Oh, off the top of my head - about fifty percent of us are bisexual. In early days there was close enough to consensus in favor of trying to make all haut heterosexual for reasons which apparently seemed obvious enough to them that they didn't write their justifications down. They managed ninety-five percent of that and could not quite pin down the remaining factors, and the tiny percentage of would-be non-heterosexuals were lonely and highly irritated and successfully pushed for the policy we have now."

"...What can they have been thinking?" she wonders.

"Symmetry, maybe? I really couldn't tell you for sure."

"Seems a hell of a long way to go for aesthetics."

"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."

"Single-purpose...?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"...And a love-poem is...?"

"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."