"What happens if female Vor marry non-Vor, then?"

"Well... they don't. But if they did, I imagine... he might take her last name; she wouldn't take his, unless she really wanted to, I suppose. But she wouldn't stop being Vor. The most that might happen is that she might... lie, pretend, take his last name and then deny ever having been Vor in the first place. It's completely strange to think about."

"Huh. Vor-ness trumps the patriarchal lines. Except for the part where they don't do it? Not ever? If you have a daughter and she wants to marry the - I don't know, the son of somebody your husband works with who doesn't have a Vor in his name, when she grows up? What happens?"

"I... I don't know."

"I mean, I'd likewise say that outside awarded haut-wife arrangements haut tend not to find love-poems outside the breed, but if they did they wouldn't be marrying them anyway, so it could be very quiet and I wouldn't necessarily hear of it..."

"I haven't ever heard of a Vor woman marrying someone who - wasn't. I suppose it must have happened at some point. It's just so strange."

"Huh. Maybe I'll look it up. Obviously Vor men marry non-Vor - or at least Vorkosigans do it."

"Yes. That's allowed."

"I would be very annoyed if I had managed to be unallowably married all this time. So are there a lot of Vor lady spinsters or a hugely disparate death rate or just not enough Vorkosiganlike behavior to cause a problem in the ratios?"

"The last one, I think."

"Makes sense."

"If there's a difference in the death rate I'd be astonished if it didn't lean toward the men, especially now that we're not constantly dying in childbirth."

"I suppose so. Although that must depend heavily on the generation, mustn't it? There is not literally constant warfare."

"Yes, but - um. I'm not sure we've ever managed to go an entire generation without a war, until this one."

"Maybe I ought to read more Barrayaran history."

"Maybe. I don't know very much, but I don't get the impression we've ever been an especially peaceful planet."

"No, I suppose not."

"And, well. Then we were invaded."

"Yes. ...Again, that was before I was born."

"Before I was born, too. I'm not trying to - it's just - if we were ever going to turn into a peaceful planet, I don't think that helped. I'm not trying to say it's your fault, or anything - that would be utterly silly - but it's something that happened. Part of our history."

"It was a pointless and counterproductive thing to do."

"Really? I mean - I'm inclined to agree, but - counterproductive? Counter to what, um, production?"

"Any production worth producing. Even if the invasion had somehow, bloodlessly, overnight, acquired Barrayar, the integration project would have been -" Linya pauses, unable to think of a polite word for "a clusterfuck". She shakes her head in lieu of generating alternative vocabulary. "And even if the bloodless overnight acquisition was accompanied by seamless magical cultural integration, why? I don't think anyone involved was motivated by the desire to see Barrayar or Barrayarans grow and thrive. It doesn't have galactic strategic importance, there is nowhere to go from here but to turn around and leave the same way one comes in. Cetaganda isn't overwhelmingly hemmed in for need of living space; no one was planning to park excess proles on your excess wilderness and work diligently on converting the soil and beating back the native wildlife so they'd have a place to raise children or open clusters of restaurants or what have you. It just looked like an easy target to people with bad judgment, obviously, and the decisionmakers - were acquisitive, wanted to look accomplished to the people who judged them, didn't need a better reason and so didn't trouble to turn one up or pause for its lack."

"...that might be the most insightful analysis of the Cetagandan invasion I've ever heard," says Ekaterin, blinking. "I mean - I don't want to give the impression that it's competing with very much, but - I feel like I understand things that I didn't before."

"...Really?"