"Oh - not too far from the capital. Just a few hours by groundcar, and much less by air. We moved recently, for Tien's new job."

"Miles is going to teach me to fly a lightflyer but it's a little hard to arrange in the middle of the city. I don't know how to operate a groundcar either, but I tend to go with a bodyguard when I leave the house anyway and I suppose some of them can drive."

"I can't imagine needing a bodyguard."

"It took some getting used to. I used to go most everywhere outside constellation grounds in a force screen attached to a float-chair, but I gave it up when I got married. There I didn't expect to be attacked, it was mostly just a haut-lady status symbol thing - here, there is the risk that someone will ignore the fact that I am unarmed, a noncombatant, female, married to a Vor, etcetera, not to mention the fact that the war has been over since well before I was born, and decide that violence is the answer to their - confusion."

"I hope no one does that," she murmurs.

"Yes, so do I. But at any rate I take an Armsman along when clothes shopping or what have you. I can't help but wonder if they're bored - nothing requiring their protection has come up yet - but it seems rude to ask."

"I imagine they must be... but I suppose a bored bodyguard is better than the alternative...?"

"Enormously an improvement. Which is only another reason to regret the necessity. And I'd probably find it difficult to make transactions if I just reengineered my force-screen and went around embubbled whenever I left Vorkosigan House."

"Embubbled?" She smiles.

"The force-screens are spherical, can be made any of a variety of pleasing colors, and hover a bit off the ground since they're generated from float-chairs," explains Linya. "The effect is very bubble-like."

"That sounds cute."

"I don't think most haut-ladies would like their personal defensive equipment and status-broadcast to be described that way, but it is, a little. What's really cute is when little girls three and four years old get to be old enough to pilot the chairs and go zooming around bumping into each other deliberately, shouting at the top of their lungs, and then abruptly demonstrate total decorum when told that it's a requirement for going out in the chairs."

Ekaterin giggles.

"Male haut just go around with ghem guards in the same contexts ladies use bubbles, but it's much harder to ride those around at speed and crash into your friends."

"Oh dear, yes."

"I mean, I'm sure it's been tried, but probably not successfully."

"It seems like the guards themselves might object, and it would be hard to arrange without their cooperation."

"Yes. And the ones escorting little boys here and there work for the constellation, not for the little boys. By the time haut-lords employ their own retinues they're a bit old to sit on their shoulders and order a charge full speed ahead."

"I'm sure the guards are happy about that," giggles Ekaterin.

"I'd assume, yes. I've generally found it a little hard to get a clear read on how more or less anybody working for the haut felt about it. There are far too many clear expectations about how they ought to feel about it and this could be rather obscuring."

"Oh. Hmm. Yes, I can see how that might be - like you said, obscuring."

"The ghem at least have to have sought their jobs at some point with something north of indifference. I worry more about the ba servitors."

"I don't know what one of those is," confesses Ekaterin.

"I think they're very little known outside Cetaganda - outside haut circles in particular, I suppose. The ba are a class of sexless individuals every bit as engineered as the haut - often more so, because they're a testing ground for most new ideas for genetic tweaks - which do most of the day to day servitor work around constellations, private haut estates, and other relevant establishments. There is - nothing else for them to do and nowhere else for them to go, they are every bit as smart and talented and highly potentiated as haut are by express design, and - by some mechanism no one ever detailed to me - they turn out uniformly loyal and malleable servants who do everything from raising baby haut to cooking to chauffeuring to lab assistant work. It doesn't seem to actively distress any ba I have ever met, or I might have prioritized doing something about it over other projects, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of tragedy in a quiet way. At least on a collective level haut indolence is self-inflicted; the same cannot be said of ba servitude."

"...I can't help thinking that - you might not know if they were distressed," says Ekaterin. "They might not be inclined to let on."