So Miles replays the recording of the song.

Hair flutters. "Huh," he says. "We tried this in Valinor but didn't have the precision. Well, that's useful."

"It does seem pretty useful. I only have so many recording devices, of course, but making more is relatively simple compared to, say, reverse-engineering a nerve disruptor."

"We'll want to start making them as soon as possible. Or, really, the playback devices are more important than the recording ones if they are not the same."

"Yeah, different devices with different underlying engineering problems to solve, although conventionally they usually appear together."

"I may ask Curufin to stop what he's doing and take a look at it, this would be tremendously useful and maybe I could sing you younger and buy him some more time, I've never tried it but it seems like a thing song should be perfectly able to do."

"I'm not sure the problem is complex enough to deserve the maximum available amount of genius. I could probably have a prototype worth testing put together in a few weeks, although I might have to lean on Ténië to help with circuit design, and there are a few unknown details that could turn out to be thornier than I expect."

He smiles at 'the maximum available amount of genius'. "Hmm. All right. We have other engineers, I can ask them."

"I'd be happy to discuss it with whoever you like. If I can find an example that's not attached to my armour or my shuttle, I can bring it in for somebody to dissect."

"Could we have a few people who have a passing familiarity with electricity and can do precision metalwork meet Miles later?" he says. "In one  of the secondary workshops, please -" and he gestures - "at your convenience, Miles."

"That sounds like a perfect post-storytelling recovery project."

"How much more story do you have?"

"Let's see, I've covered 2993 - I had a fairly quiet couple of years after that, I could tell some lighthearted stories about doing stupidly risky tricks with flying vehicles and accomplishing assorted minor missions with the Dendarii - then in 2995 the Empress of Cetaganda died and I averted a civil war, and after that I had a pretty harrowing mission on Jackson's Whole and made one lifelong enemy and one lifelong friend, and this year, '97, I accomplished the third largest prisoner-of-war breakout in history and then spent several months fleeing Cetagandan assassins. And that's what I was up to when I vanished inexplicably and showed up with my shuttle above your bizarre flat planet."

"2993 years since what, under your counting system?"

"Some arbitrary event that I'm sure had a lot of significance three thousand years ago."

"This is the first year of the Sun, on this world. Good a starting point as any."

"Earth had a Sun long before it had life, let alone life that could count. Counting years since the existence of your sun seems like a really sensible system under the local conditions."

"Barrayar counts from events on Earth?"

"Everyone does. The length of the local year on any given planet varies, but we started on Earth and having to learn a new timekeeping system every time you travelled to a different planet or station would be insane, so everyone keeps Earth's calendar in addition to their own and uses Earth's when it's important to be universally understandable."

He nods. "Sensible. If there's a wormhole near here, and we manage to find our way to contact with your galaxy, I can see how it'd be useful to have a universal time standard."

"The day length here is surprisingly close to standard. I'd be weirdly unsurprised if the year length turned out similarly. But anyway, is now a good time for storytelling?"

"I'm not sure. Yes, probably. I think at this point he's made up his mind, for whatever that's worth."

"Well, I signed on to tell my life story and I will happily continue doing so for as long as he's willing to listen. Whether that's for entertainment or evidential purposes is - not information I can ask for in good conscience."

He walks with him. "Really? Why not?"

"Because from the perspective of the person trying to decide whether reality is real, up until the point where you've firmly decided one way or the other, giving any feedback on how convinced you are might just be playing into the hands of the person who is trying to deceive you. And if he's half as twisty-minded as I am, it would be a reasonable strategy to draw out the length of time he spends pretending not to have decided, even if his decision is that reality is real, because deciding ahead of time to draw it out either way means that the length of time it takes him to decide can't be used as information about the effectiveness of the method. So, knowing that, I have to be prepared to keep telling the story even once it's already worked, without asking - because to do otherwise would be acting in a way that would be strategically advantageous if I was trying to deceive him about a hallucinatory reality."