"...That's also not the thing people are usually referring to at home when they say 'mutant', it's more, flippers for arms, six eyes, entire body a mirror image with the heart on the right side and all, sixteen toes."

"Does that happen? I know random malignant mutations happen, but I've never heard of a physical change that dramatic that wasn't accompanied by awesome powers."

"It happens. And no awesome powers, fairy tales aside. It used to happen a lot on Barrayar. Less now, but out in the sticks a baby with a cleft palate or funny-looking ears is - is in trouble. They haven't necessarily come around to the idea that galactic medicine can fix the whatever, and before we had the galactic medicine it was all just infanticide. M'cousin has a teratogenic health problem - completely clean gene scan, nothing fiddled with that, but his mother was poisoned while he was a fetus and he looks like a mutant and gets shit for it. Most of the reason I'm so progressive by Barrayaran standards."

"That is terrible."

"Which part?"

"Mostly the infanticide, but all of it! ...Except you being progressive by Barrayaran standards, not that."

"Well, yes. And then the flip side of m'cousin's situation is his wife's. She's absolutely healthy. And heavily genetically engineered. Doesn't help that her planet tried to conquer ours a few decades ago; adds up to she has to go out with a bodyguard on Barrayar."

"Well, 'they tried to conquer us' is...better than some reasons. What's she engineered for?"

"Everything. I haven't seen her pick up anything heavier than her husband or anything, mind, she's normally a very intellectual sort, but to hear her jabber about the work she's doing on their kid-to-be and the compromises she's making to be sure he winds up half his da - apparently the idea of the haut, the whole bunch of genetically engineered people she's from, is, let me see if I can remember this straight - you're supposed to be able to drop half a dozen haut five-year-olds on a half-terraformed planet intending to leave them alone for thirty years only to find that after twenty-five they've all survived and invented space travel and came to see what was taking you so long?"

"Okay, I'm impressed. Not that being my kind of mutant doesn't have all sorts of advantages, but you generally only get one or two apiece."

"Well, she doesn't have - magnet powers, so, yeah, there's that. Miles isn't letting her overengineer the kid. She has to justify anything she wants to do as a 'quality of life' intervention."

"I'm on the higher end of powers awesomeness, some of them are really hard to control and some of them are dangerous if you can't control them and there's overlap."

Ivan shudders. Just a little.

"Technology helps. My friend Scott is in the overlap and he has this visor that prevents his plasma eye beams from hurting anything."

"...I don't think that is even how genetics works in my world."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I'm pretty sure that if you could get plasma eye beams - for that matter, if you could get magnet powers, although that's less of a stretch - from fiddling with genes, the haut or some wildly unethical experimenter on Jackson's Whole would have figured it by now and I would have had to sit through a training course on How The Barrayaran Military Expects Officers To Handle People With Plasma Eye Beams."

She cracks up.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know that's not funny to you, it's just, the mental image..."

"I mean, it would be like plasma arcs, mostly, I imagine? I bet it would be like plasma arcs except you can't stop them from aiming at you by interfering with their arms, so."

"In all seriousness, it's not the magnetists or the plasma-people you need to watch out for, it's the telepaths. We are very, very lucky that the three strongest telepaths alive are fantastically ethical people."

"...Lucky you, yes. God, ImpSec wouldn't sleep for a month, by the end of figuring out how to deal with that they'd be hallucinating that their building is beautiful and well-architected..."

"It's not, I'm guessing."

"Oh, no."

"I'm a lot more casual about this than most people, one of them is my father, one is my best friend, and we're still-good-but-not-as-good friends with the third."

"That sounds convenient."