Elves and Cetagandans would really get along astonishingly well, it's going to be lovely meeting them. Maedhros is as enchanted by Miles at Miles' memories of how pretty the haut are, if in a slightly different way. "Congratulations."

"Thank you!" beams Miles.

"And I imagine now you ended up with some other absurd interplanetary assignment?"

"It's like you've been listening to me recite my life story for days, or something. Yes, but first I went home and got my leg bones replaced, which was awful but substantially less awful than continuing to go around in those damn leg braces, and had a reasonably quiet convalescence. The memory of Lisbet telling me how attractive I am was extremely cheering. It's been one of my great secret joys ever since."

"I can imagine."

"It nearly cured me of envying Ivan. When he'd get yet another girlfriend and I'd otherwise have been annoyed by the disparity, I'd think to myself, 'well, the Empress of Cetaganda thinks I'm a catch. Quality over quantity.'"

"Were you unusually picky?"

"...As an explanation for why I didn't have many girlfriends, you mean? No, the only two people who've ever spontaneously expressed romantic interest in me are Lisbet Serise and Bel Thorne. And one of them is busy being the Empress of Cetaganda and the other is not of my preferred gender." He pauses, then adds, "I suppose you could count Cavilo, but I usually don't."

"Well, Lisbet Serise is very pretty," he says. He does not ask whether it's not a tremendous insult to express romantic interest in a man if you're a third-gender person because it is not terribly relevant.

"So's Bel, for that matter."

The tone of his thoughts does not suggest that it was a tremendous insult. Actually, the tone of his thoughts is not wholly in agreement with the original implication that he didn't return Bel's interest.

"But no, the joke about quality over quantity was... mostly just a joke. I do think it gets at a difference in approach between me and Ivan, but I'm not sure the difference is that I'm pickier exactly. Part of the trouble, I think, is that when Ivan gets rejected he just shrugs and tries again five minutes later with someone else, and when I get rejected I need to spend hours or sometimes weeks recovering my emotional stability."

"Ah. Yes, that's - not a great way to go about it. Though I can't say I relate, since the Eldar are quite different."

"What are the differences...? The bits and pieces I've picked up on have been mostly comprehensible but I don't think I have anything close to a complete picture." Irissë's offhand joke about Tyelcormo wedding himself to a rock had some fascinating sociocultural implications once he thought about it for a bit, but finding someone to ask about these things just hasn't made it onto his overstuffed priority list. And Maitimo did in fact explain that one, sort of.

"Ah. 'girlfriend' isn't much of a concept here. If you're seeing someone you're probably going to get married or stop seeing each other, there are people who have extended relationships without getting married but it's not typical and it's not very wise, lest you have too much to drink one day and wake up married anyway. Also I think most people would be alarmed by a third gender expressing interest in them, Eru's teachings wouldn't be clear in that case but the taboos that are derived from Eru's teachings would be persistently present."

"...Um?" says Miles. "That almost raises more questions than it answers. Eru's teachings? And marriage actually does just result directly from, from...?" His silence somehow manages to heavily imply the missing verb even without it appearing directly in his thoughts.

"From a man and a woman having sexual intercourse," he says drily. "Yes. I had already gathered that was not true among your people. Eru is the one who makes marriages happen and teaches which ones are proper - no siblings, for instance - and I don't know what he'd think about Betan hermaphrodites."

"That makes marriage sound like... less of a cultural thing and more of an - almost biological one," he says. "Or metaphysical, or something. Am I reading that right? It's purely socially constructed, among Men, there is no underlying fact of the matter about whether or not two people are married that can be affected by things they do in private while drunk. And, uh, on most civilized planets there aren't gender restrictions..."

"Yes, marriage is a - not a biological fact, but certainly a fact about the state of the world. You can tell if people are married by looking at them. By 'there aren't gender restrictions' do you mean that Men regard it as a marriage if two people sleep together even if they're both women, or there's a third gender..."

"A fact about the state of the world," he echoes. "...I'm too Betan for this."

There has never before been an occasion on which Miles was even slightly tempted to declare himself too Betan for something. He is very much a product of Barrayaran culture, and Barrayaran marriage customs have this same exact problem, and he's, well, he recognizes that it's not ideal but Barrayarans who feel very strongly about this issue can always go live on some more civilized planet, it's not written directly into their metaphysics...!

He pullls himself together to answer the question. "The exact conditions defined to result in a marriage vary from planet to planet. Usually sleeping together isn't explicitly one of the conditions. You make some sort of formal declaration of your intent to make a life together, and optionally have a big party so all your friends and relatives can see you sign the document or make the promise or whatever, and that's that."

"I see. Yes, not how it works among our people."

"Evidently not."

This is such a silly cultural feature to be getting hung up on, in the grand scheme of things - but it's not a cultural feature or he wouldn't be so hung up on it, right? It's a, a, design decision. A design decision by an entity with utterly baffling priorities.

Wow, he's not getting any less Betan about this, is he. It's actually kind of fascinating. He had no idea he had it in him.

"It's not one it'd particularly occurred to us to be baffled by. It's a sensible definition of marriage, whatever Men do."

"I suppose if you frame it around the production of children and have what is by galactic standards a very old-fashioned understanding of how one might go about producing children... and, I don't know, maybe Eldar actually can't produce children in any but the old-fashioned way... but if that's also a design decision then I am likewise too Betan for it."

"I shall be intrigued to someday meet a Betan."

"Now I've gone and imagined you meeting my mother."

He still doesn't think they're going to get back to his galaxy before everyone he's ever met is dead. But if they do, he is absolutely introducing Maitimo to his mother. He is not at all sure what will happen, but he's sure it will be good, whatever it is.

"I'd be delighted."