hell of a party | Glowfic Constellation

isthisart

"I have higher aspirations for any babies of any species that I help in any way to create than cannon fodder," says Linya. "If the darkspawn problem is intractable I'm much more inclined to evacuate than perpetuate Malthusian competition therewith."

thisvorlunatic

"Uh—"

"Reconsider what you're about to say," hisses Miles, recognizing the look on Stalas's face even though he's only ever experienced it from the inside.

Stalas shoots him a disgruntled look, but amends his incipient outburst to, "I don't know if we can evacuate. We probably can't convince every single dwarf in Orzammar to pack what they can carry and run through a magic door, and if we only convince most or even half or, shit, even a third of them, we'd be leaving the rest to die without us. And people would want to control who got to go through, and I might not have the sway to stop them. There'd be fighting. And then without Orzammar, the darkspawn would probably overrun the surface within a century. So even if I could haul every single man, woman, and child in my kingdom out here and set them up in these mountains, there'd be the surface dwarves and the humans and elves and qunari and the dwarves of Kal-Sharok left with the shit end of that stick. If you want to go try to convince every single person on my home planet to evacuate it, I won't stop you. But you'll fail. And to the extent that you succeed, you'll be throwing every single person you leave behind to the darkspawn. We're holding out, right now, but not by a whole lot, and it won't take much to bring that down. Evacuation is not the answer."

isthisart

"I'm not planning to try to prevent you from coming to Barrayar, and once you're there, I can't reasonably stop you from - I don't know, writing a bestselling series of fantasy novels about your world and using the money to buy lots of uterine replicators and teaching yourself to use them, and I have no control over whether Milliways offers you another door in such a way that you can bring them back with you to do whatever you like. But if the problem is that there are some people who are under constant attack by monsters, I will not render assistance should you choose to address that situation by adding more people - not unless I think the monsters are a soluble problem, and if I think the monsters are a soluble problem I would like to solve it via a method other than babies."

thisvorlunatic

Stalas looks at Linya disgustedly for a few moments, and then turns and stalks deeper into the cave, into the darkness and out of sight.

"That went well," Miles remarks.

isthisart

Linya sighs.

thisvorlunatic

"I would offer to go after him and try to exercise diplomacy of some kind, but I cannot confidently wander around in a strange cave even if I brought a light, which he doesn't appear to need."

Ivan Xav Vorpatril

middlingalong

At this moment Ivan catches up with them, having been distracted by the door-explaining napkin of Linya's. "Hullo. Where'd Stalas go?"

isthisart

"I believe I offended him. He's wandered off into the caves. I'm not sure how much cave there is to wander into."

thisvorlunatic

"I think he... I'm not sure what I think," says Miles. "Besides that he was about to be very rude before I stopped him. He seems to have strong feelings about his kingdom being under attack by monsters. I suppose I would too."

isthisart

"If you do want to wander into the cave looking for him, you could try leaving a trail for yourself with your pen - the same spatial memory drawing program I made for Ekaterin's gardening application should work fine for spelunking; you can draw yourself a path and it will reappear if you get closer to it. What I'm not sure is if I trust that to work with the space-folding Bar mentioned."

Ivan Xav Vorpatril

middlingalong

"But - how did you offend him?"

isthisart

"I made it plain that my availability as a gestation consultant is contingent on expecting the consulted gestations not to ultimately end in death by predictable monster attack."

thisvorlunatic

Miles looks contemplative.

"I mean... I'm not going to tell anybody that they can't have children until they stop being at war," he says. "Be a bit of a bloody hypocrite if I did, considering."

isthisart

"He was talking about making children from scratch, not about any specific family that wishes to add a bundle of joy. And 'I won't help' seems to me very different from 'you can't'. I do not hold all of the galaxy's uterine replicator knowledge hostage."

Ivan Xav Vorpatril

middlingalong

"You might be the only repository of it he can talk to without running into problems for being a magic wormhole dwarf or being a Miles or both."

isthisart

"If he contacts people anonymously - I suppose he might not know he could do that."

thisvorlunatic

"And I think the problem he is actually trying to solve might be low fertility," says Miles, "in which case you are sort of looking at an entire society of families who want to add bundles of joy but can't manage it by themselves. I'm not sure, he wasn't tremendously clear on the details before he stormed off, but that's what I think."

isthisart

"I think we are probably agreed that if something can be done about the attacking monster hordes then that should be done first thing, and he was clanking around in distinctly ancient armor, so it could be that adding some galactic tech other than uterine replicators solves the problem very promptly."

thisvorlunatic