"Alas."

"Even the one time I was summoned as an example into a class. Couldn't say a word and be all, 'excuse me, Professor Idiot, consider working in your first language and stop teaching your students this crap, just because Latin is cool doesn't mean you will not miss grammatical gaps so big you could drive a steamroller through them'. And the only way to take advantage of the gap he left in my circle would have been to actually hurt somebody."

"Damn," snorts Miles.

"Yeah. I have vague worries like that about a number of people who've summoned me. And there was also the time somebody died because I was too tightly bound to do anything about it."

"...oh dear. What...?"

"There was a forest fire. A few demons were summoned to dump water on it in extremely constrained paths and amounts because they didn't want us flooding anything or otherwise wreaking havoc with the water. The summoner who was working next to mine wandered too close to the fire and a branch fell on him and I couldn't put it out or knock it aside or yell, but the fellow who summoned me - I wasn't entirely clear on whether he thought I'd managed to cause this indirectly by spraying the water in a specific way or if he just didn't understand what he was doing to the point where he thought I could have saved the guy. Either way I got yelled at a lot."

"Ouch," says Miles sympathetically.

"Yeah. That was probably the worst summon I was ever on, all told."

"I can imagine."

"Could have been worse. There's nothing stopping a summoner from calling up a daeva and then leaving them in the circle, no task and no dismissal, indefinitely. There was a literal zoo that did that, they got shut down after a couple years of operation, I met a girl who was one of the exhibits when she was doing a speaking circuit back in Hell."

"Damn."

"The fairies they had couldn't do much about it, but they were all positioned so they could see each other, and the demons and the angels got rid of their interesting-looking extremities in protest."

...Miles snorts.

"Which was particularly interesting as a collaborative boycott of interestingness, because most of the time demons and angels don't like each other. Can't even send mail between Heaven and Hell during the concordances because the place is inevitably mobbed by idiots who want to have a tiny war."

"What is the point of a tiny war between one bunch of indestructible people and another? Do you even have some equivalent of stunners with which to knock each other out?"

"No. It's entirely stupidity and theater. Although if I'm home for a Heaven/Hell concordance sometime in the future I'm extremely tempted to go stun all the idiots and see if there are any sane angels around who want to establish a mail route."

"I'm having trouble envisioning this because I don't know what a concordance looks like, but from what I can picture that's beautiful," snickers Miles.

"A concordance is a sort of pocket that opens up between any two of the non-mortal worlds. It doesn't look like much until you go into it, and then it still doesn't look like much except there's daeva and packages everywhere. They're saturated with correspondence in every other case, but if for some reason I wanted to send a letter to an angel I'd have to route it through Fairyland or Limbo - preferably Limbo, fairies lose things."

"And Limbovians don't?"

"Limbo loses things much less. Fairyland has its own functional economy; they like presents but don't require them. But demonic largesse is a huge deal in Limbo, and if we were less encouraged to pay them for their mail-routing services, their postal workers would be much less happy. So a concordance rolls around and the demons show up and hand over the parcels and the payment for handling them, and the Limboites scamper to make sure it's well looked after. A concordance with Fairyland happens and the fairies take their trade goods and stuff the packages in a warehouse and maybe somebody sets it on fire or leaves the window open to the weather or breaks in and rifles through everything looking for goodies - rogue fairies are also harder to keep out of the warehouse than Limboites. Limboites have no special powers."

"Aha. Sounds bloody inconvenient all told."

"It really is. And concordances happen only every few years per pair. I can get letters from my parents by conjuring up Letter to Cam number 547, by Renée Swan, or whatever, without waiting for anything to happen but her writing it, but if I want to send something - particularly interesting care packages - it has to go directly through Limbo postal or Fairyland. Damn angel war prevents me from giving them stuff fifty percent more often."

"...Right, so, when we get back to Barrayar, mind if I sit you down and run experiments on exactly what sensitive information you can and can't conjure?"

"Too hard to dispose of the results here? Yeah, I don't mind. Demons do thoroughly complicate security procedures. Our big limitations, to save you some time, is that we can't produce anything that we don't know to try to make - but that can be routed around if we just go big, if I'm doing 'the entire planet of Barrayar' or something rather than something specific and then finding what I'm looking for a different way - and that we can't make anything that hasn't been recorded in static form. I also can't decrypt things that have only ever been set to material record in encrypted format."

"Illyan will be so thrilled."