"Hello, I am Lev," he says in halting and even more heavily accented English.

"He's from a thousand years in the future," in both languages. 

Lev kisses VKsha's forehead. "Well, all the Levs except Levva speak Russian, and Levva is too busy watching videos of babies to do much work." 

"All of you are mes," he replies in Russian.

"Yep."

"And both of you are from centers of intellectual achievement and not backwaters like Barrayar, and probably have learned far more than I."

"Have they literally all done this." 

"Yes," Sasha says and sits down. "Probably they have not, actually, you're from a thousand years in the future." 

"It doesn't count if the only reason you can see further is that you are standing on the shoulders of giants--"

"It does so count. Mine is the one that doesn't count, I have a superpower, I'm cheating."

"You both count," says Smolsha. "If anyone here is stupid it's me." He sounds very tired. 

"No!"

Simultaneously: "No!"

"The Levs that know a Sasha really like him," Levva explains to Barrayar Lev.

"Yes. I barely know anything about my home world and I can't concentrate and I don't have anything useful to do and you can all stop arguing about which of you is ths stupid one because the stupid one is me." 

Xenolev and Cascadilev have identical miserable expressions, and Cascadilev hugs him.

He folds himself up in Cascadilev's arms and lets himself be hugged and says something quiet about being a glorified teddy bear. 

"...Do you want to come with me to Cascadia?"

"I don't know anything about Cascadia." 

"I don't know what sort of questions you want to ask. --Uh, it's very pretty. There are really beautiful forests. You wouldn't have to go to school unless you wanted to. No one would attack you. I speak Russian and I can find other people who speak Russian for you to talk to, and you can learn English from an actual teacher."

"And is there enough to eat and do the hospitals work and do they let you leave." 

"There is enough to eat and I really can't imagine a situation where we don't have enough to eat. There are free hospitals that treat most kinds of injuries or illnesses you can have. You can leave whenever you want to but some of the good countries won't necessarily let you in. --You can stay here in this world too, I think it also has food and hospitals and emigration."

"Do the free hospitals work? The country as a whole has enough to eat, will I?" 

"If you get sick and need medicine or surgery, the hospitals will treat you and you can get better. There are lots of things we can make better that they couldn't make better in 1988, like HIV. The hospitals try to save money but mostly by not doing tests if they won't change the doctor's decision and preventing diseases and not treating people who are so old or sick that they're going to die anyway. --I have a lot of money. If something really bad happened and money stopped being a useful way to get food, my husband Asher could feed us by hunting and fishing and gardening and gathering food. If you decided you didn't like me, you could go to the government and ask to have someone else as a guardian or ask them to become a legal adult; if you're a legal adult, you'd be able to get a job. If you're really worried about any of those things, Asher can teach you how to find food in the woods yourself so you're not reliant on other people."

"Okay," he says, quiet. "I'll think about it." 

Is the argument about which Lev is the stupid one over, at least.