"To explain that part I have to start way back in the beginning of the Time of Isolation. One of the many things that went wrong involved a kind of... heritable poison. A child would be born with some problem, whether subtle or obvious - the ones with no head or no mouth or no lungs tended to die at birth or earlier, but if it was no eyes, or only one lung, or something wrong with their nerves that did nothing noticeable for a few years and then made them collapse in unbearable pain never to recover... well. We can't fix our own bodies, you know. Nothing even as simple as changing our heartbeat or temperature. We're stuck with whatever we've got. So our options for intervention are limited, and much more so when everyone's just lost all their knowledge and technology. Lacking any better idea, terrified and heartbroken, the people of Barrayar started killing their own babies, any of them that looked like they might have something wrong with them, because if there was anything wrong at all it could've been one of the very bad things and getting rid of them as soon as possible made for less pain all round. I can't say I approve of their solution, but I do understand it."

"Oh. Oh no. Oh no oh no - children - you poor, poor - that's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard about Men, and I've heard a lot."

"Yes," says Miles. "So then we come to my grandfather. He was a war hero. Born in the Time of Isolation, coming to adulthood right around the Cetagandan invasion, resisting the occupation until we threw them out, then turning around and fighting a deeply upsetting, deeply necessary civil war almost immediately afterward, when the new Emperor went mad with fear and started killing everyone he thought was a threat to him, including Grandfather's wife and two of his three children, my father being the third. Grandfather fought through it all. He was incredible. And he kept up with the changes, all the new things the wider world kept throwing at us. New weapons, new devices, new knowledge. He was ecstatic when my father married my mother, I'm told - very anxious to finally acquire grandchildren. But someone poisoned my mother. By accident, actually, they were aiming for my father, it was a political grievance gone very personal. And I nearly died, they had to transfer me out to a uterine replicator to have any hope of saving my life, and I was not going to be a perfectly healthy child. All those old Barrayaran fears got to him. He told them to get rid of me, that he couldn't have a grandson like that, and when my mother refused and my father backed her, he tried to do it himself."

"Because you'd be born sick?"

"Yes. He was very Barrayaran, my grandfather. It was a different poison, a different problem - mine isn't heritable, my children if they had any would be fine - but it was still unacceptable to him. Well, my parents got me a bodyguard, and for the first five years of my life my parents and my grandfather were not speaking to one another. Then they tried - my grandfather kept horses, you see, and loved them dearly - they tried showing him what a charming child I was by introducing me to his horses."

He smiles.

"I was a very charming child, and I loved his horses just as much as he did, and so he finally became willing to acknowledge my existence. We got along pretty well after that. I didn't actually learn about the attempted murder until much later. Although I did pick up on some of the tension even before I heard the whole story. He tried, but he was never perfectly happy with me. I'm short and funny-looking even by human standards; there was no pretending I was normal."

"I'm very sorry. It's - good your parents seemed to be concerned with the right things."

"Thank you," he says. "I'm not entirely sure I can identify the point of this particular Miles Story, but it's something like... what he tried to do to me was awful and unforgiveable, and if my parents had decided not to forgive him for it, that would be reasonable and I wouldn't blame them. And yet I'm still glad they kept trying to reconcile, still glad I got to know him even if it was only for twelve years, and I still loved him and grieved his death."

She nods. "That seems like a very relevant moral to draw from that story."

"It turns out I have a lot of stories with relevant morals. I wonder if anyone's going to start thinking I'm making them up?"

"You have the Balrog-killing weapons. And - it's not as if you come off particularly heroic, in any of them."

"I've done a few heroic things in my time, but yeah. Old pains, by and large, are more educational than old triumphs. Which reminds me of an exciting alternate use for magnets!"

"Oh?"

"Railguns. Magnets can cause things to move; a sequence of precisely placed magnets can cause things to move very quickly. A steel ball moving very quickly can really ruin somebody's day. Might not do much good against a Balrog, but it'll have better range than a bow if you build it right. They're uncommon in my world because there aren't many situations for which a railgun is the right weapon anymore - simple physical projectiles are too easy to shield against. But I have not observed any orcs carrying force shield generators, and a railgun is beautifully simple to build. I did it by accident when I was a child. Damaged the magnets exhibit at the science museum, and I'm lucky no one was hurt."

"...I feel like you'd have accidentally broken Valinor before your majority, if you'd been born one of us. All right, let's build a railgun. Can we send projectiles whizzing over the cousins' heads, or would that be childish?"

"That would be childish. And vaguely threatening. Childish and vaguely threatening is not a good combination, in my experience. Let's build a railgun - oh, but first, the alphabet, I nearly forgot."

"They have Maitimo now, they're not going to overreact. And yes, let's do the alphabet."

"I'd like to avoid even risking an overreaction, if possible. Alphabet! Come visit my shuttle. I apologize for the necessity of swimming there."

He tromps underwater to his shuttle, climbs it, and opens the hatch to let her in, then brings her to the comconsole and demonstrates how to write on a proper display using a stick that projects a narrow beam of light.

She's delighted. "Do you mind if I just make circles on the parchment? Getting the feel of it?"

"It's not meaningfully possible to waste space on a comconsole, not with drawn or written things anyway. Play around all you like."

She starts doodling, delightedly. "Even if you're the King's granddaughter if you did this at home people'd flinch and tell you it's disrespectful of the animal to be so wasteful."

"Hah. Well, after enough reinvention you'll all have these and doodling will be univerally available."

She's sketching a city skyline, now. "Can't wait."

Miles giggles.

A family, awkwardly posed on elaborate furniture - a man, a woman, four children. She makes a line where she doesn't intend it and grimaces.

Miles shows her how to erase.