He nods. "And because this was known to anyone, the enemy had the same incentives."

"Yes. Not a nice situation. Could have been avoided completely if Vordarian hadn't bloody decided he wanted to be Emperor badly enough to kill a child and start a war."

"Yes."

"Anyway. My grandfather tried to kill me, at some point during all this, while I was still in the replicator. Because I was going to be born visibly unhealthy - even with the best they could do for me, I'm short and funny-looking and my bones are unusually fragile - and he couldn't stand the idea of his grandson being a mutie."

Much as with 'uterine replicator' but more painfully, he packs all the history and meaning into the word. This is what gets shouted at you in alleys and schoolyards, muttered by the people who cross the street when they see you walking down it, hissed and growled in heated arguments with people you thought were better than that, when you look like Miles does and live on Barrayar. It's awful and unreasonable and totally understandable and he was helping to fix it...

He's getting distracted again.

"After that, my parents got me a bodyguard. His name was Konstantine Bothari."

A troubled soul to be sure, but always there for Miles when he needed protection, from the world or from himself. They're fifteen years too early for that story, though. Miles thinks of Bothari's fascinatingly ugly face, the absoluteness of Miles's trust in him, and then he thinks of his early childhood, the cast of characters at last assembled, their names and young faces.

"My closest friends when I was a child were Gregor, my cousin Ivan who was born during Vordarian's War, and Bothari's daughter Elena. For the first five years of my life, I had to wear this awful spinal brace because my bones would break at the slightest provocation and if they broke too often I'd be permanently fucked up to an even greater degree than I already am. I couldn't stand or walk or run, with the brace on; I had to be picked up and carried anywhere I needed to go. Bothari did that, mostly. I think my parents credit my time spent in the brace as the reason why I'm so charming and persuasive, charm and persuasion having been literally my only recourse if I wanted to accomplish anything at all during that time; but I'm not so sure. If I'd been a different person with different talents, maybe the way I worked around that obstacle would've been by crying a lot and inspiring pity, or being very annoying and inspiring grudging compliance."

"Or being useful, and having people want to have you around."

"I was a tiny fragile child who couldn't stand up without help. My options for being useful were extremely limited."

"I do not think I have ever once solved a problem with a skill of mine that required bones."

Miles laughs. "I'm starting to get the impression you and I have a lot in common," he says.

"Sensibly, becuase you must be generated at least half by my floundering subconscious. Do continue."

"Sure. So the first five years of my childhood," he broadcasts an impression of how much of a human childhood that actually is, "were spent in a back-brace, unable to walk, charming the hell out of everyone around me. Then the brace came off. I'm told I immediately took off running and barely slowed down for days. Some would say I still haven't."

"I noticed."

He laughs.

"My parents and my grandfather were also not speaking to each other during that time. Grandfather still wouldn't budge on the question of whether it was acceptable for him to have a mutie grandson. But he kept horses, and loved them dearly; and my parents took me to visit him, shortly after I came out of the back-brace, and someone foolishly told me I couldn't ride the horses, and I took this as a challenge, and only after I'd climbed one and was stubbornly clinging to his back did they clarify that no, they meant I didn't have permission, not that I wasn't able to. I fell off and broke my arm," which comes with a vivid sense-memory ingrained over many repetitions of how that feels, "and Grandda was impressed with my wit and courage and discernment - I'd picked his own favourite to climb, because I liked the way that one moved best of all of them. The family was very happily reunited after that."

Grandda, seen from a five-year-old's perspective: an old man, sometimes stern, often smiling, whom absolutely everyone looks at with immense respect, but who always has time for his only grandson. A source of knowledge and wisdom and the opportunity to ride horses and watch maple sugar being made. Five-year-old Miles did not know his Grandda tried to kill him before he was born.

"When did they tell you?"

"Later. I'm not sure exactly when. As I grew up, his attitudes became gradually obvious, until when I finally heard the story I was barely surprised. He never admitted it to me himself, though. I... sometimes wish I'd been able to talk to him about it." An impression of old grief. "But we're jumping ahead."

"He died?"

"Yeah. When I was seventeen, just on the cusp of adulthood. It came at a bad time and I reacted badly. For a while it seemed like I'd personally disappointed him to death."

The impression of what that felt like is muted by time but still not especially fun.

"Seventeen, just on the cusp of adulthood," he echoes, amused.

Miles laughs. "Everyone enviously makes fun of Betans for expecting to live to a hundred and twenty, and here you all are not considering someone an adult until they're, what...? I get the impression it's more than a century but I haven't picked up on a number."

"Fifty Valian years, but each of those are ten of the years by this Sun."

"Five centuries, wow. I can't imagine being an Elf. I'd have been so impatient about everything." Also, if his childhood had lasted that long with proportionately many escapades, he's mildly worried about the scale of the resulting destruction. "Then again, I suppose you make up for the five-hundred-year childhoods by living forever afterward." At least in theory.

"Time ...also passes differently in Valinor. It felt brief. Anyhow, you were seventeen and a man grown..."

"No, no, I have an entire childhood and adolescence to recount still. I managed to pack a lot into them."

Where was he... ah yes. Family.

"My father was extremely busy, but he made time for me wherever he could. My mother was not much less occupied, but her work was more compatible with childcare, so I saw more of her in general. Gregor having run out of parents by that point, my mother raised him too, and we spent a lot of time together. He was twice my age when I got out of the brace, but I had twice his energy. I had twice the energy of anyone, most of the time, and spent the majority of it finding interesting kinds of trouble to get into. Like the time I had my friends try to dig an escape tunnel away from my house, or the time I found an abandoned weapons cache and convinced my friends to try piloting one of its semi-defunct vehicles, or the time I almost got us lost in a cave... there's an idiom in English, 'shooting fish in a barrel', referring to something considered almost too easy to bother with, and when I was around eight I decided to empirically test the implicit assertion. It didn't hold up."

His childhood memories are blurred by time and coloured with nostalgia, but he tries to reach down to the most accurate representation of each. It's not the most flattering possible picture of young Miles. A relentlessly energetic bundle of mischief with only a vague and distant understanding of consequences, driven to accomplish things by boredom and a pervasive underlying sense of being thought unfit and incapable, but limited in the scope of those accomplishments by a child's resources and a child's mind and an unusually fragile child's body.

"I'm just glad they stopped me before I tried a plasma arc," he adds, "the steam explosion would've put me in the hospital for sure, and I spent enough time there already just on maintenance, let alone how many times I put myself there by accident. I broke a lot of bones as a kid. People kept trying to get me to slow down and balance my risks more prudently, and I kept interpreting that as commentary on my ability to succeed at things, and that led me to try harder, resulting in further dangerous stunts and accompanying injuries, which led my parents to worry more, which... you get the idea."

"You would have gotten along with my father," he says. "Very well, I think."

"I haven't heard much about him, but what I've heard leads me to suspect you're right."

"The...pushing. Believing everyone was disappointed, and constantly fighting to prove them wrong, and constantly unhappy because he couldn't be good enough because they weren't evaluating him for sufficiency in the first place."