"I'm pretty sure I'm not going to fall into the sky; beyond that - general fear of the unknown?"

"I would offer to catch you if you fell into the sky, but I suppose that in the event 'falling into the sky' began to be a thing that happens it might as easily happen to me..."

"How exciting. We could take a route through the forest, would that help?"

And here is the cave. Linya turns her pen into a little lamp.

Stalas steps inside... and relaxes immediately, as soon as there's solid rock over his head. "Much better. Okay, so the crazy bar and the crazy bar's backyard didn't screw me up permanently, good to know."

"Is your sense thing working or is the ceiling just sufficiently reassuring in its own right?"

"My Stone-sense is working. Which answers an interesting philosophical question, actually, because I bet no dwarf ever went to rest in this Stone. So either the Stone-sense comes first, doesn't depend on the souls of our ancestors, or all Stone really is fundamentally one. Even across universes."

"So Barrayar should be comfortable, if you are installed in some caves. There are some caves to be had, although this leaves wide open the question of how public and to whom your existence should be; Simon will probably have opinions about that."

"I'm planning to loiter for a while in the bar figuring out how to exploit it as best I can without excess Vorville-related complications, so perhaps I'll bring home interesting trinkets that will help support the story."

"Miles was cloned in large part because he is third in line heir presumptive, though that going anywhere would be contingent on tragedy befalling Emperor Gregor before he reproduces - but the screaming fits resulting would probably suffice to deafen half the galactic nexus and my involvement would certainly not help. I'm from a different planet which belongs to a different empire that in living memory - albeit not recent living memory - attempted to conquer Barrayar, and on top of that the Barrayarans object to my having been genetically engineered."

"'Genetically engineered'?" asks Stalas.

"I can't be sure if dwarves work the same way - this brand of medical scanner doesn't do gene scans - but in humans, the reason children are similar to their parents, especially in appearance and heritable diseases, has to do with chemical 'instructions' present in each cell which tell the body how to grow. In my empire of origin, it is customary for my social class to exercise considerable creative license in rewriting those instructions to suit goals more complicated than 'generate baby human'."

"So..." says Stalas, contemplating this, "you end up with children who aren't really their parents' blood relatives? That sounds confusing."

"Technically," says Linya, "I don't have parents at all. I have a designer, a secondary main gene contributor, some minor relations, and plenty of people who share the same from-scratch additions to their genome, like my ability to see more colors."

"...For one thing, even on Barrayar the use of uterine replicators is catching on, so the fetuses don't have to incubate inside of people who have other things they might want to do with themselves besides being good embryonic environments. And for another thing, once you know how the very earliest stages of gestation work, it's not that hard to assemble them from scratch, however you like, with the right equipment. I'm in the middle of making some modest changes to a future child for us." Pause. "I can show you sims of what he's going to look like at various ages but only if Miles isn't looking, he doesn't want to see."

"Children. From scratch," says Stalas, wide-eyed. "That's - that's amazing, how do you do it? Is it something I could bring back to Orzammar, if I ever go there again?"

"I... don't know how dwarves work, but if you're similar enough to humans - I suppose so? It would be hard for you to maintain the equipment without the underlying infrastructure, and I don't know yet if there's going to wind up being any way to keep a permanent world-to-world connection even if the door turns up somewhere more convenient, but it might be enough to give your population a jump-start."

"Yeah, that's - what I was thinking," he says. "I mean, the traditionalists would shit themselves, but let them, I would rather in a thousand years there be dwarves who think about caste and inheritance differently because they can pull babies out of thin air than no dwarves at all because the darkspawn are killing us faster than we can breed."