"I bet Cetagandan defectors would love to move to an Elven planet," laughs Miles. "Here, let me remember the Celestial Garden at you..."

He closes his eyes and reaches into his memory. He's probably getting some of the details wrong, but here's the vast translucent pearly force dome that covers the entire palace complex, and here's the first thing he saw when he stepped through that outer shell - breathtakingly beautiful architecture, all slender columns and elegant curves, and wide open spaces covered in beautiful plants, not a leaf or twig out of place. Every object and organism inside that force dome, with the exception of the galactic guests and their gifts, was handcrafted to perfection. At the time it was intimidating as hell, but in retrospect he's glad to have seen it so he can share that memory with the Elves. He'd walk around being jealous and intimidated by the beauty of his surroundings for weeks if the end result was Maitimo having that look on his face some more.

Which he definitely does. Utterly enraptured. "If it takes us ten thousand years we will find a wormhole."

"If it is within my power to do so, I will arrange a tour of the Celestial Garden for any Elf who wants one," Miles promises.

He remembers the haut-ladies in their mourning-white bubbles, floating along opaque and mysterious. The way the light filtering in through the dome caught the translucent petals of a flower and cast beautiful shadows on the path beside it. There's still an actual story to tell, here, but remembering the beauty of Cetaganda and watching Maitimo appreciate it is just so intensely fulfilling.

"Does your world generally have such strict gender-based social roles?"

"...The division isn't usually as - complete, or as formalized, as the Cetagandans have it, but yeah."

"That seems wasteful."

"Strict formalized gender roles? Yes, a bit," he agrees. "I didn't see many complaints about that in particular, but... it does occur to me that a little more social freedom in the right directions might benefit the subjects of the Cetagandan Empire a lot."

"Our planet will welcome them. Anyway, continue."

"So the first time I entered the Celestial Garden, I was there for the ceremony in which we were supposed to lay out our mourning gifts. Barrayar's was a sword Dorca carried in the war when they first invaded us. We had a little while to wait around holding our gifts before the ceremony, and during that time a servant approached me and told me that a lady wished to speak with me, so I handed Ivan the box and went off to see who it was and what she wanted."

The glowing white bubble was waiting for him in a semi-private area of garden, every bit as exquisitely beautiful as the entire rest of the garden.

"It was a haut-lady. She wanted to ask if I had taken receipt of any stolen goods lately. I said that if I had, I lacked a way to verify the identity of their owner. She acknowledged the point. Then I had to go because the gift-laying ceremony was starting and I was about to be late."

With his legs still thoroughly fucked up from the previous night's misadventure, bolting along the stunningly gorgeous garden paths to get back to the pavilion in time was not very much fun. But he caught up okay. Partly because there was an unexpected delay in the schedule.

"The whole parade was backed up, and not by me. They were redirecting us away from the Empress's bier with our gifts still in hand, which hadn't been in the schedule at all, and everyone looked very frazzled and they weren't letting us anywhere near the pedestal. So of course I walked right past the guards to have a look at what they were hiding. What they were hiding turned out to be the mystery man from the transfer station, lying dead at his Empress's feet in exactly the spot reserved for the highest-ranked funeral gift, as though he had killed himself there very recently. A frazzled officer came hurrying up to politely and firmly tell me to get back in line, and I asked him who the extra corpse was, and he identified it as the Empress's personal servant, Lura."

"Intriguing." To put it mildly. Cetaganda remains distractingly beautiful, except for the haut ladies who are a little boring.

"I was definitely intrigued! We all brought our gifts to what should have been the post-gift-laying lunch, and I explained what I'd seen to a few people, although I didn't mention having recognized the body. The other assorted delegations were curious, but I didn't catch anyone behaving suspiciously. We paraded back into the rotunda after the meal and set down all our gifts - they'd cleaned up the body by then, as though it had never happened, very quick and tidy, probably immensely forensically destructive - and then we all went home, and my Vervani contact showed up to deliver a fascinating lecture on Cetagandan etiquette and sociology, opening with the revelation that the symbol I'd asked her to look up was the seal of the Star Crèche - the fancifully named haut gene bank."

Let's see, how best to explain...

"The Cetagandans have a two-tiered nobility, haut and ghem, operating in separate social and political spheres with very little overlap. The Emperor and Empress, the planetary governors and their consorts, those are all haut. Military officers tend to be ghem. Genetic alteration is a big thing in the Cetagandan Empire, and the haut are a sort of enormous bioengineering project proceeding under the supervision of the Empress. There's no institution of social parenting among the haut. A child will be designed by a woman who may or may not be its genetic mother, using material from a male and female genetic parent who may or may not have ever met, and then the design is approved by Star Crèche geneticists and the child is created and raised communally in its genetic father's clan - they call them 'constellations' - with all of that constellation's other children, potentially never meeting any of the people involved in its creation."

It kind of still weirds Miles out, but it seems to work for them, mostly.

"I do not think that would work with the Eldar."

"I don't know how the Eldar go about having children, so you might very well be right. Anyway, ghem family structure looks a little more normal to my eye, involves people marrying each other and having children with their spouses, but they retain the firm division between politics as an essentially masculine pursuit and biology as essentially feminine. And marriage among the ghem is polygynous - one man may have many wives. Sometimes the Emperor awards a haut-lady to a particularly successful ghem-lord as an extra wife, which is the only time the haut do anything resembling marriage as I understand the concept, and she gets to design whatever children she likes without further oversight but she may only use her own and her husband's genomes to do it - she has no further access to the Star Crèche's gene banks to borrow interesting tidbits. It's weird. Cetagandans are weird."

"They sound horrifying. But very pretty."

"'Horrifying, but very pretty' is a fairly reasonable summary of their culture. Individually they vary, of course, like anyone. Anyway, my contact eventually got around to showing me a few holos of items known to bear the Star Crèche seal. The one that precisely matched my lost object turned out to be something called the Great Key of the Star Crèche, an item belonging to the Empress's formal regalia, function and purpose unknown but likely important. I freaked out a little. Ivan freaked out a lot. But that haut-lady I talked to... she'd seemed like she knew what was up, and she'd been remarkably non-accusatory for someone in her implied position. I thought it was worth waiting for the second conversation she'd promised. And, well. I do think the decisions I made ultimately led to a far better resolution than I could've gotten if I'd turned the whole problem over to Vorreedi at the first opportunity... but I kind of wish I'd actually reasoned through it at the time instead of just being drawn in by the lure of intrigue."

And then - right, the party.

"So Lord Yenaro invited me and Ivan to a little party at his house, and I decided to go along, because if he was personally innocent of the little accident at the Marilacan embassy then it would be safe and I might learn something, and if he wasn't it would probably be safe and I'd definitely learn something."

"Even when I had Mandos to fall back on I don't think I played so lightly with my life."

"I had security arrangements. It was a risk but not that big a risk. And I was right. He wasn't innocent, it was safe, and I learned several things."

He smiles slightly.

"I'd been anticipating that the haut-lady from before would take this opportunity to contact me again, and she did. I went traipsing off into the gorgeous rainy countryside in the dark, following her servant, and I told my security arrangements not to track me. That was dangerous, but I didn't feel like she was going to make me regret it, and she didn't. I explained that I'd managed to discover the nature of the stolen goods, and she introduced herself as Lisbet Serise, Handmaiden of the Star Crèche. We went back and forth for a while on whether there was any reason for either of us to trust the other. I told her what the last few days had looked like from my perspective, and she explained a few things in turn."

It's no effort at all to call her voice clearly to mind. The Great Key is the only means of accessing the metadata on the haut gene bank. Without it, the Star Crèche's gene samples are unlabelled and stored in random order. It would be the work of decades to recreate the information that the Key unlocks.

"So. I agreed to turn over the Key, but only if she dropped her bubble so I could see her face. A little insurance in case some authority came after me asking where the key had gone - I could at least describe the person I'd given it to. When the bubble came down..."

He was not remotely prepared. Ghem-ladies were unnaturally pretty, but Lisbet was perfect. Comparisons involving goddesses of ancient myth sprang to mind. She was a vision of impossible beauty, utterly without flaw. Down to the finest stitch in her layers of mourning-white robes, everything about her was mesmerizingly, captivatingly beautiful.

"...I, um, embarrassed myself by falling to my knees in sheer awe," says Miles, contemplating the memory with some amusement. "But I handed over the Key, and she checked it, and it turned out to have been a fake. Of course. At which point I bet she was supposed to have flown into a rage or something, but she was too smart for that. Instead she gave me her side of the story. Apparently, the late Empress was dissatisfied with the status quo of one gene bank and one Key and no backups whatsoever."

('Milady, that's fucking insane,' Miles had said, and she'd smiled very faintly and replied, 'If I had been in charge when these decisions were being made, things would have turned out very differently.' Anyway, the Empress...)

"Can't blame her for that, but she chose to address the situation by contacting each of the planetary governors in secret and promising them their very own exclusive copy of the gene bank and its Key. She planned distribution to occur at her own funeral because occasions where the planetary governors visit Eta Ceta are that rare otherwise. But she had a hell of a time copying the Key in secret - it was older than she was by a good long while, and she didn't have a secret cipher lab handy. Which is where Lura comes in. According to Lisbet, Lura claimed to have been acting in accordance with the late Empress's wishes by taking the Key to one of the governors to be copied, only to be ambushed by a squad of six armed Barrayarans, who shouted rude things about the Empress and stole the Key. Lisbet... had her doubts about this narrative. Mine sounded much more plausible. Where, after all, would these hypothetical Barrayarans have gotten the idea that the Key was there to be stolen? Lura told no one about the trip ahead of time, not even Lisbet herself. The only people who would've known were Lura and whichever governor it was - which Lura had been too distraught to specify, and then died the next day."

Goodness, the lack of gender-neutral pronouns here is really getting awkward. Miles notices that he hasn't explained Lura's gender yet and assembles a brief summary-explanation of the sexless ba servitor class, created by the haut to test new gene complexes before introducing them to the haut genome itself, conditioned from birth to loyalty and obedience. Aren't Cetagandans creepy? Moving right along.

"To both me and Lisbet, this sounded a whole lot like the governor in question had decided to steal the Key for himself and frame Barrayar for the crime. Lura's apparent suicide became an obvious murder. The incident with the sculptural installation was an artistic flourish to give my downfall a more pleasing narrative structure."

"Plans that complicated are unwise."

"It was actually really neatly done. I'm impressed. Most of its major flaws were in the premises rather than the execution. For example, even if all the parts involving fucking me over and Barrayar through me had succeeded, the best he could've hoped for would've been a nasty civil war against the other seven planets of his empire. The accompanying war with Barrayar would've distracted them, but not enough to save him. And he took it as a given that Barrayarans and Cetagandans can't trust each other or cooperate towards common goals. Which might have been true, if we hadn't had Lisbet on one side and me on the other."

He is so very glad that he and Lisbet were the people on each side of this problem. Either one of them probably could've carried it alone, but with both gone and more typical subjects of their respective empires in place - if it had been Ivan on his side and a more typical haut-lady on hers... yeah, there could've been a big problem.

"So, we had a list of three governors who'd been docked at that orbital transfer station during the window of Lura's visit. Somehow we needed to narrow it down from there. Lacking immediate leverage, we went our separate ways to think about the problem. A Cetagandan investigator, Dag Benin, came by in the next few days to ask me pointed questions about Lura - apparently they'd finally noticed that connection. I yielded up the nerve disruptor but made no mention of the Key. I also... may have implied to Colonel Vorreedi that I was on a secret mission from Simon the details of which he wasn't cleared to know. Well, I was the sort of person Simon Illyan frequently sends on secret missions, and I was carrying one out, and I never actually told him outright that this particular secret mission was of the authorized variety, I just let him assume. Anyway, with transit delays, if I'd sent for confirmation from Headquarters the whole show would've been over before Simon had time to reply. Sometimes you just have to do the work that's in front of you. I was sure that whatever personal consequences followed from my decisions, I'd like them better than multiple wars."

He reflects wryly on the solidity of this logic. At the time he'd been... a little more lost in Lisbet's eyes than he might have liked to admit, particularly to Ivan. Could he have turned the whole thing over to Vorreedi and not regretted it? Maybe, maybe not. He's happy with his decision not to. If Vorreedi had jogged his elbow too much, he might not have been able to bring it off, or might not have been able to bring it off without disobeying direct orders, and Vorreedi didn't deserve that.

"A few days went by without much in the way of solid information. It was getting uncomfortably close to the deadline - at the end of the final ceremony on the last day of the funeral, Lisbet was going to have to turn over the Empress's regalia to be given to the new Empress, and if there wasn't a working Key in the set at that point, trouble was going to ensue. I got invited to a diplomatic event and learned the etiquette for addressing a haut-lady outside her bubble, which is 'don't', and had totally uninformative conversations with two of the suspects, haut Kety and haut Rond. There was a poetry recital and some singing."

The singing was... exquisite. He does his best to remember it, but he knows he isn't retaining a tenth of the beauty and intricacy of the original. The poetry was similarly well-crafted, but rather outlasted his tolerance, especially since they seemed to get more abstract and indecipherable as the hours wore on. Miles's taste in verse runs to either the silly and lighthearted or the deeply emotional; polished verbal edifices in complicated formal styles he's never heard of leave him cold. Still, he makes a mental note to remember Cetaganda when he's seeing how much human literature he can drag out of his memory. Maybe someone here will get more out of it than he did, and he bets it'll make the linguists happy.

"I think there are a lot of Elves who, if access to your galaxy is ever achieved, will make a beeline for Cetaganda and be deliriously happy for a long time."

"I wholeheartedly look forward to it."

He loves making people happy. Making people happy is the best thing.

"And that should help your realms figure out immortality, too. It sounds like they're fairly close and we must be genetically - relevant."

"If yours isn't some sort of soul thing untouchable by modern medicine, which it might be. But yeah. I will be absolutely delighted to introduce a bunch of Elves to Lisbet. I expect Lisbet will be absolutely delighted to meet a bunch of Elves. Anyway, where was I, I'm getting all out of order... right, so Lisbet managed to rule out one of the three after a private conversation. Ivan of all people had the brilliant idea that Lisbet should do a recall of the gene banks, tell everyone the copy was scrambled and she needs to check it over to get it straightened out, which would leave our culprit with a key but no lock, simplifying our problems considerably. Oh, and someone tried to assassinate us at an art exhibition using Lord Yenaro as their tool."

It was a peculiarly Cetagandan art exhibition, focused primarily around genetically engineered plants and animals created by ghem-ladies. There was a tree sprouting fluffy white kittens in leafy little pods. Ivan, not fully comprehending the nature of the kitten tree, attempted to rescue one by picking it; this left him with a dead kitten-pod to secretly and hurriedly dispose of.

"He was helping one of his friends with her exhibit, and he had a rug made of five kilos of military explosive and a pitcher full of its catalyst, which he'd been told would yield intoxicating fumes when combined. Another hilarious prank to pull on the Barrayarans. I had Ivan take him aside with his pitcher and a tiny fragment of his carpet, and demonstrated how the tiny fragment and a couple of drops of catalyst reacted vigorously enough to leave an unsightly scorch mark on the floor. That was an error of execution on haut Kety's part, first of all because he should've expected us to recognize asterzine when we smelled it, second of all because he was careless enough to let Yenaro know who he was and after that scare Yenaro was only too happy to pass the information along. So now we had our target, and once I passed Ivan's suggestion along to Lisbet, we made plans for me to infiltrate the relevant ship and seek out the Key."

A tricky prospect, to say the least.

"We needed a time window where I wouldn't be missed by my own people for at least long enough to get beyond their reach. This would've been a good time for Lisbet to come up with any other trained intelligence agents, but she was on the feminine side of the Cetagandan imperial dichotomy, and she couldn't bring in the masculine side without admitting to her Emperor that she'd been helping her boss the late Empress plot against his interests, which seemed very likely to introduce nasty complications at just the moment when nasty complications were least welcome. So it was down to me. Lisbet sent out the consorts to recall the gene banks, and we figured out the best point in the funeral schedule for me to set off on my mission. There's this old saying - no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. In this particular case, contact with the enemy came in the form of a haut-lady kidnapping Ivan."

Cetagandans. Ivan's taller and prettier, Miles is doing all the footwork, therefore obviously Ivan's the one in charge.

"I spotted her hauling him unconscious into her bubble, alerted Lisbet, and Lisbet and the consorts got her cornered before she could make off with him. It turned out to be the haut-wife of Kety's general, a woman named Vio. Bitter about being awarded to a stranger as a trophy of good conduct and cut off from haut society and haut privileges in the process - Kety promised her a position as empress of his incipient rival empire, and she leapt at the chance. I distracted her," with an extremely heartfelt rant expressing his intense frustration at the fact that she'd thought Ivan was the mastermind here, "long enough for them to stun her and get Ivan away. At that point, we had to make our move. Vio was going to be missed if we didn't, and she was riding around in a bubble stolen from Kety's planetary consort, which suggested that said consort was either dead or currently being interrogated aboard Kety's ship: not a very stable situation either way. So we stole the bubble back, and Lisbet sent one of the other consorts along to impersonate Vio, with me in her lap in case of contingencies requiring my expertise."

Well, not literally in her lap, he perched on an armrest of the float-chair. But the interior of a haut-lady's bubble is extremely close quarters. He's glad Lisbet sent one of the consorts instead of doing this part herself; that would've been really awkward, after their brief conversation concerning the fact that he blatantly had an enormous crush on her and if she were twenty years younger and less invested in her local career she would've seriously considered running away with him. Which, um, yeah, that conversation is a thing that happened. It has been omitted from all Miles's other accounts of this story to various parties, but none of those people were telepathic, so here we are.

Tempting someone out of being Empress is very impressive.

"At the time I didn't even know she was going to be Empress! And neither did she, not for sure, but in retrospect I'm pretty sure she knew it was very likely. She was effectively interim Empress during the funeral ceremonies - that much I noticed when she handed me an Imperial comm override code in case it proved useful for the mission - but I don't think it's a given that the last Empress's top assistant will become the new Empress, it's ultimately up to the Emperor to decide who will create his next heir and oversee the shaping of the haut genome, and he can choose anybody he likes. Anyway, so we got up onto Kety's ship without him noticing anything was amiss - those bubbles are a massive security hole - and found haut Nadina, and she led us to where they were keeping the Key..."

They were holding her in this ridiculously impractical setup where the ends of her hair were gently yet firmly clamped to the floor, leaving her quite a bit of freedom of movement since haut-ladies have absurdly long hair, and even at the moment of rescue she couldn't actually bring herself to cut her hair to get free, Miles had to do it. Cetagandans. Both the ones who chose to imprison someone by their hair and the one to whom that was an effective trap.

"We had one dose of the drug-mist that Vio had used on Ivan, and one stunner, but if we used the stunner we were absolutely going to get caught, there's ways to detect that a stunner has been fired nearby and they'd have to be complete idiots not to be monitoring the Key's location for it. When we entered the room, it contained two cipher techs working on analyzing the Key and one general getting in their way. We went for the general with the knockout drug, didn't quite get him, and ended up with me, Nadina, and Pel inside Nadina's bubble with the sole true Key and a very angry Kety storming into the room yelling about what he was going to do to us once he got through the bubble, which Pel and Nadina expected to take him about half an hour. It wasn't looking good, but then I had a brilliant idea."

He's still proud of this one. It's so... himself.

"The primary value of the Great Key to haut Kety lay in the fact that he had the sole working copy; being the only person with access to the full records of the haut genome is a position of considerable power, but the moment anyone else got their hands on the data, he would no longer be able to hold it hostage as protection against military retaliation from his Emperor. The primary value of the Great Key to the Star Creche lay in not having to spend decades reorganizing their gene bank, and in not letting Kety get away with taking it. No one else could get any value out of it at all, since, as previously discussed, a key without a lock is meaningless and only Kety and the Star Creche still had copies of the gene bank. So I hooked up the Key to the float-chair's comm unit, and broadcast it indiscriminately to everyone in range with every override code I possessed. We didn't have the capacity to tightbeam it discreetly back to the Celestial Garden, but we did have the capacity to get that information onto the comconsoles of every other ship docked at that orbital transfer station, causing a huge commotion in the process and completely eliminating all hope of Kety getting away with his theft."

The look on Kety's face when he realized what they'd done was... frankly terrifying, but also satisfying as hell.

"Live or die, we still won. And I was worried for a minute there that it was going to be 'die', but I was mostly too exhilarated by my stunning victory to care, and then rescue arrived before they managed to crack the bubble. Kety got arrested, Lisbet got made Empress at the end of the final ceremony, and I got awarded the Cetagandan Order of Merit, a stunningly pretty and highly prestigious medal which I couldn't wear in public as either of my selves because Admiral Naismith didn't earn it and Lord Vorkosigan would court unpleasant political consequences by going around wearing a Cetagandan medal on Barrayar."

Here is a mental image of the Order of Merit hanging on its neck-ribbon, all asparkle like a giant snowflake or a tiny star. Isn't it gorgeous? Irony aside, and despite his protestations to Emperor Fletchir, Miles is genuinely deeply proud.