"There are three of you. Two was enough! One was really more than enough! I really hope you come with your own name. And, uh, don't want to assassinate anyone." Ivan backs away slowly. "And where did you come from, Vivienne cannot have invited you without noticing and that's not exactly a party outfit...?"

"I mean there's m'cousin Miles, and then it turned out someone cloned Miles, and apparently they did it twice because here's you, but you got too tall or something so they put you - wherever - but the other clone already took the spare grandfather's name - so, Stalas, that's very namelike - Linyabel's going to want a scan of you first opportunity, extra inches or no. What are you wearing?"

"Stolen armour. Who the shit is your cousin Miles? Who the shit are you?"

"M'cousin's Lord Miles Vorkosigan. I'm Ivan Vorpatril. Where'd you come from? I didn't think Vivienne's parents kept a bar on their second floor but I think even less they keep a wormhole here."

"...I came from the Deep Roads. Orzammar, before that. Where did you come from? And where are we now?" He glances around, catches sight of the Observation Window, and gives it a brief perplexed look before returning his attention to Ivan.

"I was trying to find my girlfriend's sweater for her -" Ivan looks at the window too. "...weird... And went up to her room to look for it, she's having a house party, but this room wasn't here when I got the grand tour so I don't know what's happened since I stepped into it. Where's Orzammar? You can't expect me to have memorized every out of the way little station and moon."

"Of course I'm a hu-" Pause. "When you say 'dwarf' you don't mean that one kind of mutation that can happen to humans that makes them all short and scrunchy, you mean you are not actually a human?"

"I mean I am not actually a human," he confirms. "Do you not have real dwarves where you come from...? I don't know much about humans, you're the first one I've met in fact, so I can't tell you if the humans where I'm from get 'short and scrunchy' sometimes."

"We do not have real dwarves! Unless someone on Jackson's Whole has been very busy manufacturing short people besides just Mark in an unncessarily complicated manner! And I've occasionally referred to Linyabel as an elf but she isn't actually! It's just humans and - tweaked or sick or something - also-basically-humans."

"Oookay," says Stalas. "Well, on Thedas we have dwarves and elves and qunari and humans. And darkspawn. I bet you haven't heard of darkspawn."

"Nope. Or - qunari. I wouldn't even know what sort of person I'd be calling a qunari to tweak their nose, which is less than I can say about dwarves or elves."

"They're sodding enormous and they have horns," says Stalas, helpfully. "Well, maybe not quite as sodding enormous to you."

"There are none of those where I'm from. But we do have people living on moons. I live on a planet, though, which I'm sure you've never heard of."

"Well, just so we're on even footing, what's it called?"

"Barrayar."

"I don't know where we are. I'm supposed to be in my girlfriend's house, but I'm increasingly thinking that this is not my girlfriend's house. Possibly I've been drugged or something, actually -" He pats his pockets, and pulls out a black wand with clear round tips. He wags it through the air. Pictures appear in said air. "Damn, no service. Vivienne's parents didn't retire that far into the sticks."

"...What," says Stalas, staring at the wand.

"Oh, this is a thing Linyabel invented, 's called a pen. It's great, if it can't find a signal here there isn't one. We are not in Vivienne's house. Possible we aren't anywhere on Barrayar."

"We have pens in Orzammar. They write on paper. With ink," says Stalas. "That is not a pen. That is some kind of magic thing that doesn't work anything like any magic thing I've ever heard of."

"It's not magic, it's cunning electrical engineering, I don't know how it's put together but they - do you have literal actual magic on top of dwarves and elves and whatever the hell else?"

"Yes. Yes we do," says Stalas. "Not me personally, because: dwarf, but the world does in general. And you have - electrical engineering - instead, apparently."

"I'm not sure that's so much an instead. Okay, if you have literal actual magic, riddle me this, when is a girl's bedroom or wherever you were going instead a bar with a weird holo-video of supernovas playing on one wall?"

"Damned if I know... what's a supernova?"

"Exploding star. Like so." He waves at the window. "Usually less... continuously and densely packed, but that's what I'd call the lightshow they've got playing."

"Exploding star? Stars explode? And it looks like that?"

"They don't do it often, and you're not advised to look at it happening straight on, but, yeah, more or less?"

"I am very, very far from home," he mutters, and shakes his head. "Can't complain, though, nothing's tried to kill me in the last five minutes."

"Oh, do you lead an exciting life, too?" Pause. "I wonder why you look like Miles, if you're not another clone? You sound like him, too."

"I really couldn't say. I still don't know anything about Miles except his name and that apparently he's a short, scrunchy human. Is he skinny, too? Does he bruise like an overripe peach? Does he bleed lyrium? Well, I guess if you don't have magic you probably don't have lyrium either."

"He looks like you but he's a few inches shorter. He... doesn't bruise, he breaks. I have no idea what lyrium is. I could find a holo." Pen woggle. "I might not have anything but wedding holos, though, and people who look like you are two for two so far on having, uh, strong reactions to Linyabel."

"Who's Linyabel?"

"Miles's wife, the one I have been known to refer to as an elf. She's... very... pretty."

"I have seen pretty girls before," he says, in a remarkably Miles-like tone.

"They actually had two weddings because the first human marriage ceremony didn't carry enough weight with the sort of humans who practice the second human marriage ceremony," says Ivan. "I don't have any holos of the first one, though, it was sort of sudden."

"Humans are complicated," says Stalas. "But you have the population to be complicated, so good for you, complicate away. There aren't enough dwarves left for much diversity of customs to take hold."

"Why, how many dwarves are there?"

"Two hundred thousand nine hundred and fifteen, according to the last census three years ago. Plus maybe a couple thousand more on the surface, and however many are left in Kal-Sharok."

"Wow. That's... yeah. Okay then."

"It's... yeah. Darkspawn, did I mention darkspawn? They come from somewhere very deep underground and kill anything they can reach. Dwarves live underground. It hasn't been a good time for us since they started showing up."

"That... makes sense. Especially if you're all stuck on one planet." Pause. "I feel like this situation would benefit very much from someone more qualified to handle it than I am but I have no idea what will happen if I open the door."

"Want to find out?"

"You are some kind of bizarre excessively tall un-clone of my cousin, swear to God. Why don't you open the door first?"

Ivan inches his way towards the door. He opens it a little, then the rest of the way. "Vivienne's parents' house, second floor, that's the lav across the hall so you'd think this would be her room..." He waggles his pen a bit. "Aaaand I have signal! Let's see if Miles is available. You can Miles at each other." He opens his message-sending function and says to his pen, "Miles, I am not fucking with you, I found some kind of magic wormhole thing in Vivienne Vorville's parents' house and in it is a fellow who looks like you as a Time of Isolation reenactor heavy on the artistic license in high heels and a lot of foul-smelling gunk, here is a picture -" He takes a quick holo of Stalas and woggles his pen - "would you like to come investigate this fascinating phenomenon so I don't have to?"

The speech-to-text has to catch that, since Ivan didn't bring his earbugs with him to a party. "You expect me to know? Right, how could I have forgotten my copious magic wormhole expertise? Look, just tell Vivienne that there's some sort of family emergency, she won't give you a hard time, come up and look at this thing."

"That was Miles's disembodied ghostly head. There are three of you, I don't want any more mixups than I've already encountered, thanks." Ivan gingerly shuts the door.

"...Is there a story there?"

"Yeah, the clone who is actually a clone, Mark - well, I can tell them apart now, but - yes, there is a story there. It is long and involves me being shut up in a seawall."

"Not that I know what a seawall is, but that doesn't sound fun. My sympathies. You know, it occurs to me that if the door leads to the Deep Roads when I open it and this Vivienne's house when you do, your cousin might have an interesting time trying to get in from the other side."

"...that is a good point. And I don't have signal when the door is shut so he won't be able to call to be let in, either. I suppose I'll stand in the doorway and hope Vivienne forgets she sent me up and... gets less cold? I don't think she'd be at all amused if she followed me and found her bedroom missing." He opens the door again.

"Most people wouldn't, I imagine. Bedrooms aren't the sort of thing that goes missing very often, and if one does it can safely be assumed that something has gone very, very wrong."

"Yes. Speaking of features that Vivienne's house should not permanently acquire, that stuff on your armor - at least I hope it's the stuff on your armor - smells repulsive. Since nothing is trying to eat you or whatever here any chance you could hop out of it and put it off in a corner somewhere far away from the door to Vorville and Madame Vorville's house?"

"...I mean, I'd love to get out of this crap, I'm just not completely sure I believe that things are done trying to kill me. Things trying to kill me have been a major feature of the past few days. I'm all in favour of cleaning it, though. Heh, I don't suppose your cousin has a spare set? Or does nobody wear armour on Barrayar?"

"As, what, a blend of stylish and practical? What would it be for? If somebody's trying to kill you on Barrayar, they'll shoot you with a plasma arc. Or a nerve disruptor. Or they'll do something else armor-irrelevant. I'm not certain Miles's clothes would fit you. I mean, you're not that much taller, but he gets things very specially tailored."

"Miles's clothes would fit me better than any other human's or any other dwarf's," Stalas says practically. "And they'd sure as Stone fit me better than armour I scavenged off dead darkspawn. The foul-smelling goo is dried darkspawn blood, by the way, I promise under normal circumstances I smell much nicer."

"That's a relief."

He snorts. "Yeah. Are plasma arcs and nerve disruptors more not-magic things like your not-magic pen?"

"Yes. But Miles's wife didn't invent them. Why wouldn't another dwarf's clothes fit you, aren't they all about yea high...?"

"They're about yea high and about yea wide," he says, gesturing to either side of his torso. "I'm the skinniest dwarf alive. I'm actually not substantially weaker than the next man, but you wouldn't know it to look at me. Are you normally this tactless or is it circumstantial in some way?"

"Look, I don't know anything about dwarves-the-species, how would I know - anyway. So. The, uh, darkspawn. Killing them what you usually do with your time?"

Ivan looks ceilingward and sighs.

"No," he says brightly. "In fact it is not. My younger brother had my older brother assassinated and pinned it on me, and as a result I was exiled to the Deep Roads to kill as many darkspawn as I can before they get me. I've been going three days so far, I think. Hard to keep time with no clocks."

"Oh. Well. Maybe Miles will give you a plasma arc before you go home."

"Maybe I won't go home."

"...you'd be in a pretty complicated situation on Barrayar looking like Miles as you do and being a not a human, but there's the rest of the galaxy, I s'pose."

"I'll take 'complicated' over 'literally every living thing I meet wants to kill me'," he says.

"...yes, the domestic quail Vivienne's parents keep in the backyard will be quite harmless to you, I will give you that without reservation."

"I mean, I might reconsider, especially since I bet you don't have many underground cities and I'm not sure how I'll take to sky. But at this point, even that sounds better than meeting more darkspawn, exciting-sounding magic weapons or no."

"Again: not magic. What's the matter with sky?"

"Common wisdom has it that if you don't hold onto something you'll fall in, but I think common wisdom is probably wrong because you never hear it from someone who's actually been to the surface. Still, though. Nothing above you but air? I'm a dwarf. The Stone is my home. Some of us can adapt, I just don't know if I am one. I've never tried."

"Well, you could live indoors. You could move to - not Komarr specifically, I think, that's one place where looking like Miles would get you in trouble, but on Komarr all the inhabited parts have roofs and there's probably other planets that have arcologies too. The roofs are transparent, though."

He makes a face. "Why are the roofs transparent?"

"Sunshine. Useful for things like keeping warm. Komarr has a bit of a sunshine scarcity."

"Down in Orzammar, we have lava."

"They do not," says Ivan, "have lava on Komarr."

"Poor Komarr."

"A bit." Pen-woggle. "Miles, what's keeping you, did you decide to bring half of Impsec with you to Vivienne's parents' house, that's not going to go over well?"

"Not everyone drives like you drive, Ivan," comes Miles's weary response. "I'll be there in a minute."

Okay then. Ivan pockets his pen again. "If you do want to go from Barrayar to any other planets there's a lot of sky in the way, fair warning," he tells Stalas.

"...In... what sense? I admit I'm a little vague on what you mean by 'planet'."

"Do... you not live on a planet? I am not sure how you'd get lava in some kind of... non-planet. Planet is a big ball of rock with stuff on the surface of it like trees and water and volcanoes, exact parameters depending on the planet. Planets go around suns, which are like stars, but nearer by."

"I don't live on the surface of a planet," Stalas reminds him. "I've heard of sun and moon and sky and stars, but I've never seen any of them. Unless you count whatever that is, I guess," this with a wave at the Observation Window. "So, yeah, big ball of rock, lava and optional darkspawn in the middle, surface-dwellers around the outside, I'm with you there. Rock, I understand. It's past that where things start to get iffy."

"...Do you bother with days and nights or are you on some sort of Dwarven Standard Time there? Seasons?"

"I mean, we talk to surfacers, trade with them and so on, and we sleep on the same kind of schedule, so it's convenient to work with the same day cycle as nearby surface kingdoms. Seasons, not so much. Seasons affect what kind of fruit and other plant-stuff they trade to us when, and that's about it. We do count years and ages the same way, though."

"Okay, so a year is how long it takes a planet to go around the sun." Ivan produces a makeshift gestured astronomical diagram of this. "A day is how long a planet takes to spin around. Sun's shining on about half the planet at once at any given time."

"Okay, sure. And all these objects are traveling through what? Lots and lots of sky?" He looks mildly uneasy at this prospect.

"Well, sort of - depending on what you're thinking when you say 'sky', not exactly. Air falls down like anything else does, so around planets that have got air, it's just a few miles thick. Above where the air is there is Literally Nothing. Vacuum."

"...And people go from planet to planet by, what - falling into the sky voluntarily and flying through the horrifying void until they hit air again? Humans are fucking crazy," says Stalas.

"It's not like we do this stark naked. There are spaceships! They hold in plenty of air and fly around quite competently in the horrifying void."

"...I'm not actually sure I could survive a trip like that," says Stalas. "I mean, even surface dwarves have good solid Stone nearby in one direction. Who knows what happens when you take us away from it entirely."

"...Are you in some way physically dependent on being near rocks?"

"Miles! In here!" says Ivan.

"He said he was a dwarf!" says Ivan, letting the door close. "I had to clarify! Even if I knew what mutation does dwarfism in humans why would he know it?"

"If we can convince him that space travel won't send him into fatal rock-proximity crisis, he might want to leave with us, instead of back where he came from to kill more smelly things," Ivan volunteers. "I wonder what'd happen if he ran into Mark."

"Yeah, that came up before, he thought my pen was magic."

"What does magic have to do with dreaming? Or souls?"

"What's the Fade, exactly? Like... placewise. I had to explain planets so..."

"And you have to be the right kind of person and have undergone the right kind of brain surgery," puts in Ivan, "and be in the right kind of spaceship, to do the things."

Ivan has no idea either. "What language do you think you're speaking, Stalas?"

"Does magic do that? You are the one who knows what magic does."

"That," opines Ivan, "is an uncharitable summary."

"Is it?" they ask, simultaneously and in perfect unison.

"...that's creepy. Makes me want to borrow Linyabel's medical scanner, inches or no inches."

"Should I haul Linyabel over here too? I have no idea what Vivienne would make of her, actually..."

Ivan opens the door and pens to Linyabel. "Hey, Linyabel, there's - actually I think I'm going to make Miles explain this time. Miles. Explain."

Linyabel appears in the pen display to reply presently. "And how am I supposed to explain myself to Vivienne Vorville?" she inquires via speech-to-text subtitles, arching an eyebrow.

"All right. I can be there in -" the display wobbles slightly - "ten minutes, longer if I'm held up at the door deflecting questions about the nature of the emergency. Where in the house are you?"

"Second floor, leftish."

"Leftish. Thank you, Ivan. I'll be along presently."

The call ends. "I showed him a wedding holo, this can't just be astonishment at the 'pretty human'."

"And I am still Ivan, and Linyabel only lets Miles call her by nickname so she's probably Lady Vorkosigan to you, and can we think of a better name for this place than 'magic wormhole bar'?"

"Damned if I know," says Miles. "Does it call itself something, I wonder?"

"There's not a sign."

"No 'ring bell for service', no listed hours of operation."

"I did not need that possibility. If those are real live exploding stars this place has got to be fantastically radioactive."

"A vital resource that the galaxy was previously desperately short on."

Ivan sighs, and shuts up.

"The scanner," she says, peering at her forlornly beeping device, "tentatively agrees with him. It's not even entirely sure he's a mammal. It thinks he's got artificial bones which it unconfidently identifies as an unclassified ceramic, and that he has a preposterous amount of bruising, and that he is slightly, exotically, but not dangerously radioactive."

"What shall I tell the scanner that the non-ceramic substance is instead? Genuine dwarf bone, or have you in fact had bones replaced with something? And what is lyrium?"

"It is potentially," says Linya, labeling the substances that have foxed her scanner "dwarf bone" and "lyrium" respectively, "a familiar story."

"...What?" says Miles, alarmed, climbing up on a nearby table for a better vantage. Stalas goes for his daggers, but doesn't draw them yet.

"What."

"How do you tell what's unsafe?" asks Stalas, interestedly. "I mean, you could get away with giving me something lyrium-infused - more of it than you could give to a regular dwarf, even. But it'd kill these humans."

"...You know what, caloric sounds good," says Stalas. "Caloric sounds very good. Do you serve food too?"

"Thank you, that's very kind," says Stalas, climbing up on the stool next to Miles. "I'll take my free drink and my free dinner, then. I don't suppose there's also a free bath around here somewhere?"

"...Time is paused? Then how did Miles and I get here?"

"Oh, I was holding the door because there's no pen signal in here if it's closed."

"Well, that's eminently sensible," says Miles. "Then again, why isn't there signal in here with the door closed? Surely the magic wormhole could accomplish such a thing if it tried."

Miles giggles. Stalas smiles, too, but it's the smile of someone who doesn't quite entirely get the joke.

Ivan finishes his drink and sets down the glass. It vanishes.

"Very convenient, that," remarks Miles of the vanished glass. "What would you recommend to me, incidentally?"

"Sure, I'll have a creative coffee. Might as well."

Ivan laughs tipsily.

"And do what," says Miles, "take over the galaxy?"

"Well, that would depend on whether any of me were interesting nonhuman species with magical powers or things like that. And whether they had more pressing issues than un-taken-over galaxies on their ends, too."

"Taking over the galaxy is generally considered a bad move," says Miles. "The galaxy tends to object."

"But Miles, there are large parts of the galaxy with nobody in them to object."

"Nor I."

"It has crossed my mind that I could try to buy this house to maintain access to the door, but they'd probably object to being unable to retrieve Vivienne's belongings and to the house being continuously occupied by me and people I know during the negotiation for it."

"Vivienne's bedroom has windows, doesn't it?" says Miles.

"The necessity of the use of which I can explain how? I think I'm using all my 'if you're rich you're not weird, you're eccentric' leeway merely on being Cetagandan, and it's not even sufficient to cover that some of the time."

"You couldn't buy the house in the next few days anyway, Vivienne's using it because her parents are on Komarr at a convention, something about ornithology."

"The explanatory napkin says sometimes people get doors only once, sometimes routinely, for a few lucky individuals at will - the bar is unable to predict category membership."

"Of what?"

"Possible death by rock deprivation," snorts Stalas, "has much to recommend it over certain death by darkspawn." To Linya, he explains, "I don't know what happens to a dwarf in the horrifying void between planets. Every dwarf who was ever born has lived their whole life no farther away from the ground than walking around on top of it, and not many of us even that far, and we have a connection to it that's hard to explain."

"Humans all used to live within a very short distance of our original planet, too, but we've colonized unproblematically. Does anything in particular happen to dwarves who do go as far as the surface?"

"They lose their Stone-sense. Well, and all of their social status, but that's a policy problem rather than anything mystical."

"And Stone-sense is?"

"We know exactly where we are underground, and we can tell things about the rock around us - what kind it is, what pressure it's under, where the weak points are. It's not very ostentatious, but it's useful. Comforting. I'm kind of uneasy about being here, actually, because about all my Stone-sense can tell is that wherever I am, underground definitely isn't it. Although it is reasonably confident that there's ground under me."

"Well - sure, I guess. But I've never been to the surface, so unless there are reachable cave systems under this backyard place...?"

"Possibly you should have sunscreen on."

"Eh?"

"Most humans, especially pale ones, slowly burn if they're exposed to strong sunlight for long periods of time. I don't, but I have all kinds of advantages. There are substances that prevent it."

"...Well that sounds exciting," says Stalas. "I haven't heard anything like that about surface dwarves, but maybe they're just embarrassed about their sky-burns."

A key appears. Room 447, says the accompanying napkin. There will be towels in the bathroom.

"Thanks," says Stalas, grinning. He scoops up the key and looks around. "And where do I find Room 447...?"

Up the stairs, fourth floor, hang a left, it will be on your right between rooms 445 and 449.

"Please don't find anything interesting. We're over quota."

"We'll see."

Miles looks between Linya and Ivan, and then decides to follow his wife.

"I noticed that. I'll ask the bar about it, I think. Earth-standard gravity, too."

"Yeah. You'd expect - I don't know. Something unexpected."

"You expected the squid and didn't warn me, Miles?"

"The squid is not the kind of unexpected thing I expected. I didn't expect the squid twice over."

"What kind of unexpected thing did you expect, Miles?"

"Something not from Earth!"

"Maybe it's deference to our humanity and Stalas will see plants from his world."

"...How would that work? Anyway, from the sounds of it Stalas wouldn't recognize a fruit from his world unless it happened to be bearing edible fruit."

"Magically, I assume. He might have seen pictures? Or there could be forests of mushrooms in the caves, I don't know."

"The caves we're looking for that may or may not exist? Those caves?"

"In his caves, there may be mushroom forests. It seems unlikely that dwarves live underground, with that much commitment to living underground, and depend totally on trade with the surface; I expect there's an underground ecosystem of some sort."

"Right. And then if we're going with the hospitality theory, and there are caves in those mountains, presumably they'll contain legions of alien mushrooms. Except that apparently there are humans where Stalas is from, so maybe his planet is full of Earth life too?"

"The food he was eating looked approximately recognizable - I'm not sure I could identify all the spices, but that's equally true of some things I've eaten in Escobaran restaurants."

"It's unsettling how not alien the magic wormhole bar is," says Miles. "It's a more human-oriented environment than my home planet."

"Well, it seems likely artificial. There is a magic talking bar. There are chairs. Your home planet is working on getting more artificial, but it is larger than a bar."

"'Working on getting more artificial'. That's - a way to put it."

"There probably aren't large animals of the non-waving variety, right? I don't know, do we trust the magic talking bar to be the sort of person who would've warned us if there were? Maybe we should wait for the well-armed guy with an underground navigational sense before we go poking our heads in. Well, for some values of 'well-armed'. He did give the impression that he knew how to use all those sharp objects."

"She didn't mention the squid, but it didn't do anything but wave... perhaps we should go back and ask her. And/or wait for Stalas."

"And. Definitely and. Go back and ask her and then wait for Stalas, that sounds like a plan."

"Thank you," says Stalas. "If I say 'something comfortable that won't stand out egregiously on Barrayar but that I can still figure out how to get into without help', can you work with that?"

"Heh. Try seventeen," says Stalas, scooping up the provided clothing and turning to go back upstairs.

"How old is that for a dwarf?" wonders Ivan, not particularly expecting to be answered anytime soon.

"Old enough to command armies," he calls over his shoulder as he disappears into the stairwell.

Ivan... snorts and orders another one of the interesting dark pink beverages.

"He's upstairs again. Ran up a tab getting a set of clothes. Apparently he's seventeen. An age which he described as 'old enough to command armies'."

...Miles cracks up quite helplessly.

"Yes, but then he went up before I could tell him why it was funny."

"I wouldn't dream of denying you that pleasure," snickers Miles, "when he comes down again."

"How do your dwarfish alts from magic wormhole bars interact with... classification, though? I don't think you are actually supposed to tell most people you meet about that small army you have."

"I declare Stalas to be sufficiently me that he gets to know the things I know," says Miles. "In part because I think it would make the whole situation even more confusing if I had to watch my mouth around him, in part because I think trying to keep secrets from him in the long term is probably a doomed effort when we think so much alike that we could probably start finishing each other's sentences, and in part because - he's very me. I'm inclined to trust him the way I trust myself, adjusting for information barriers like the fact that you had to explain to him what a planet was."

"Great. I even agree with you. Will Illyan?"

"Yes."

"I am blaming you for everything if you are wrong."

"You left before I could tell you that seventeen is when Miles acquired an army to command," says Ivan brightly.

"Miles's story ends with having to introduce his army without its own knowledge to the ranks of Barrayaran service lest he be put to death for amassing a private force while having a Vor in his name."

"Miles accumulates interesting stories," says Linya, petting him.

"And accidental mercenaries. And clones. And plastic skeleton replacements."

"We did find a cave, but wanted to ask Bar about it before going in. It turns out the lake contains a giant squid she didn't mention."

"Which you found out... how?"

Stalas eyes it suspiciously.

"Aim that bit at whatever part of yourself will be exposed to sun, then press that button. A thin layer will do. Don't spray it directly into your eyes and avoid inhaling more than strictly necessary."

"How reassuring," says Stalas, but he follows this procedure.

"It wouldn't damage - well, a human, and I suspect based on Bar's acquiescence that it wouldn't much damage you either, but it does sting, in the eyes, and it is a liquid, in the lungs. So." To the back door.

Linya goes first. She spreads her arms illustratively. "It's very convincing in its facsimile of real outdoorsness."

"What scenario in particular is alarming you?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

Linya sighs.

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"But - how did you offend him?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Yeah. I'm sure he wants stunners and plasma arcs and nerve disruptors too, or would if he knew what they were, but I think—he doesn't want the one thing to depend on the other."

"Perhaps you should do more of the talking. If he were a me I'm sure we'd understand each other perfectly, but."

"I did manage to forestall the profanity-laced tirade."

"For which I thank you." Head-kiss.

"I'm glad he's not a me. That would just... have no advantages at all."

"...What, you couldn't guess what another of you was thinking?"

"I could! That wouldn't make it useful."

Miles snorts.

"I suppose it probably sounded hostile to emphasize that I won't help..."

"Have I mentioned recently that it's always very comforting when you do not succeed at things on the first try?"