"...fair enough. And you're a good storyteller."

"Thank you! I try."

Maitimo is awake.

"Good morning."

"Good morning."

"So, lighthearted anecdotes about the two uneventful years following the Hegen Hub conflict, or straight on to that time I went on a diplomatic visit to the Cetagandan Empire for their empress's funeral?"

"I could do with some lighthearted anecdotes after yesterday's story."

"Lighthearted anecdotes it is! So, when we were younger and stupider, me and Ivan used to race lightflyers down the gorge near my lake house."

He provides a mental image of the gorge in question. It's the sort of place you would not be best advised to race a fast flying vehicle.

"We had to disable a lot of safety features to get the vehicle to do any of the really interestingly dangerous stunts we wanted. Our favourite game was for one person to take the controls, the other person to take the copilot's seat, and the pilot would fly the course in as terrifying a way as possible and try to get the copilot to admit defeat by begging them to slow down or stop. I like winning, so I took my lightflyer out to the gorge every day for weeks and learned it so well I could fly the whole thing purely by feel. The next time we played, Ivan forfeited as soon as he noticed I was flying with my eyes closed, and that was the end of the game."

Even after five years, he can provide a vivid and precise recollection of the ingrained sense-memory of flying that gorge. Exactly how to manipulate the controls, based only on nonvisual cues like the sound of the wind and the vestibular feedback from changes in acceleration and the occasional slight jarring of the vehicle's frame when something touched its light mass shielding. It wasn't a rote series of movements; if he'd only memorized a single way to fly the course, instead of learning how to do it blind, he wouldn't have been able to respond to changes in the terrain and might have wiped out on an unexpected obstacle. Of course, a big enough unexpected obstacle could still have done him in, but they never disabled the ejection system, so he and Ivan would probably have been fine even if they'd totaled the lightflyer.

God, that was fun. And a satisfying victory.

He's smiling. "How does a light flyer work, can we build one?"

"I'm not really well acquainted with the engineering details, unfortunately. But I'm sure you can put one together eventually and I'll be happy to help."

"I imagine we can."

"Let's see, lighthearted anecdotes, lighthearted anecdotes... I could remember music at you but all of my favourite music is sad..."

"Shall we skip to an Empress's funeral, then? What had happened to her?"

"Old age. The Cetagandan haut live longer than just about anybody else, but they're still human."

He nods. "My condolences."

"So Barrayar sent a delegation to her funeral, and the delegation consisted of me and Ivan. It was supposed to be totally uneventful. Show up, participate in mourning rituals, leave. I'm sure you can guess that that prediction was inaccurate."

"I know you, and could also cheat off the fact that you're telling me the story."

Miles laughs. "Yes. Well, honestly, even if it had all gone completely according to plan, I'd find the time to tell you about my visit to Eta Ceta in as much detail as possible. The Cetagandans have a number of flaws as a society, but their aesthetics are exquisite."

The planet takes shape in his thoughts, seen from above as he approached the orbital transfer station. Sparkling with the lights of civilization, their patterns hundreds of times brighter and more complex than the Barrayaran equivalents. Miles spent rather a lot of time on Eta Ceta feeling small and ugly and broken and out of place.

"My visit to Eta Ceta is the reason I'm not going around constantly floored by aesthetic awe around Elves and the things you create." Also the reason why his first thought on meeting Macalaurë was embarrassment at not being able to take him seriously enough because he didn't rule eight planets out of a palace the size of a city. Sorry, Macalaurë.

"Not yet."

He giggles. "Fair enough. Anyway. They were giving us the runaround on our way into the station - 'dock here, no, dock there' - and when our passenger pod finally got settled, instead of a pleasant reception by local officials there was some wild-eyed fellow with no eyebrows who hurtled into the pod and went to pull out some concealed item with a look on his face like someone taking their life in their hands. I yelped 'Weapon' and Ivan tackled him. Funny thing, he did have a weapon but he hadn't been reaching for it initially. The original concealed item was an unrecognizable artifact with no detectable dangers, and he only pulled a nerve disruptor after the fight broke out. When we'd extracted both objects from him he fled back into the station, and while we were standing around in bewilderment, traffic control told our pod pilot to back out and come around to a different docking bay, where we found the reception we were expecting and absolutely no mention of weirdos with concealed weapons."

It was kind of unsettling. Exciting at first - what a marvelous puzzle! - but unsettling as time wore on and no one showed up to quiz them about the hairless man or his objects.

"As an ImpSec officer, however bizarre my career trajectory thus far, I figured it was my duty to play the game a little. Wait for Cetagandan Security to send someone looking for the items, learn more about the situation from what they chose to ask and how they chose to ask it. Also I was maddeningly curious, of course. But they never did. We met with the local Barrayaran ambassador, who conveyed us to the Barrayaran embassy on the ground, and he clearly hadn't heard anything, and nobody came after us wanting to talk about our encounter. It was unfathomable. Ghosting in and out of our passenger pod like that would've taken a really incredible series of coincidences, or a really incredible conspiracy, and I had no idea what mix of the two had transpired or what we'd done to deserve either."

"And you neglected to share this story with your superiors?"

"The local ImpSec man, Vorreedi, was actually not present at the time of our arrival for totally unrelated reasons. I couldn't have reported to him even if I'd wanted to. Which is just as well, because yeah, I really didn't want to. I was... you know, they gave me a medal after the Hegen Hub conflict, but they gave the medal to Admiral Naismith; Lord Vorkosigan did not appear in that drama at all. So I had to shove it in a drawer and forget about it. Accomplishment classified. And then the next two years - I did a lot of good things, worthwhile things, but nothing on that scale again, and nothing I could be recognized for outside the false identity of Admiral Naismith. I craved that recognition. Which is a stupid selfish reason to do the things I did, but I acquired better reasons as I went on."

Now, let's see, what happened next? Was it the ceremony of the laying of the gifts? No, right, it was the incident at the Marilacan embassy, ha.

"We were invited to a party the night of our arrival, held by one of the other delegations at their planetary embassy. Nothing exciting. I met a woman from the Vervani embassy there, though, hanging on Ambassador Vorob'yev's arm, and she was of course very pleased to see the son of my father, since Aral Vorkosigan's contribution to resolving the Hub situation had been highly public. I showed her tracings of the mystery item's identifying marks and asked her what she could make of them, and she said she'd look into it. Then I was accosted by a local, a ghem-lord named Yenaro, who really wanted to show off his art installation. In fairness to Yenaro it was a beautiful art installation."

He calls the details to mind. A walk-through sculpture, all clean lines and soft lights and fluttering scraps of fabric, turning through an endless cycle of seasons from winter to spring to summer to fall and back again, with subtle changes in the light and motion gradually transforming the floating bits into petals or leaves or snow. There was water, too, flowing in captive streams beside the little path through the sculpture and subtly contributing to the visual and auditory experience.

"I told him I wasn't eloquent enough to voice an opinion on it worth hearing, which was the plain truth, but he insisted, so into the installation we went. And I noticed my leg braces getting hot - I wore these steel leg braces, up until the point where I got my leg bones replaced with plastic replicas, to help reduce the chance of them breaking anytime I did anything. They went from noticeably warm to uncomfortably warm to blisteringly hot in the time it took me to bolt out of there at top speed. An unlikely side effect of the exact mechanism used to accomplish the motion of the sculpture, totally unpredictable to him unless he'd very specifically researched my personal weaknesses. Which would have been a nontrivial expenditure of effort. So either this was all a big coincidence or someone was after me, personally, and had chosen to open their attack by causing me a painful and embarrassing injury in public using an exquisitely well-targeted, perfectly plausibly deniable method. Naturally this made me even more curious."

"I want to visit Cetaganda," he says, enraptured.

"I thought you might say that," says Miles. "Is it the way they do art, the way they do politics, or both?"

"I was just thinking of the art," he says, "I have no desire to rule a planet of Men that seems perfectly well-ruled internally. I suppose I might figure out how I could rule my own planet that lured Cetagandan defectors. But no, just the art. It's beautiful."