Ooh. Here are three relevant chapters of the Survey Handbook, and a couple more books besides, is there a spare reader floating around? There is! Have a spare reader! Enjoy your reading material! Miles also knows a fair bit about galactic medical technology from personal experience. If they want his perspective on relevant topics - field medicine and all things bone-related, mostly - he's happy to provide.

Field medicine sounds highly relevant, yes. 

It's also some of the only galactic medical technology he can actually provide examples of! Next time he visits his shuttle he'll be sure to bring back some spare items for analysis. And if none of the people working on the medical magic project is literate in English, Miles can suggest some members of the linguistics guild who are, to translate the recommended reading material for them.

He loves being useful. He loves being useful so much.

Maitimo has someone come and fetch him by the time he's shared everything he can in terms of medical technology.

"Doing all right?" Maitimo says from his stretcher.

"Oh, I'm having the time of my life. You?"

"This is way more exciting than I thought planning my coronation would be and I was very deeply looking forward to planning my coronation. If it wasn't obvious I am throwing you at open settlement problems I think your technology could solve; there are a lot of them. We have correspondingly many open diplomatic problems, mainly regarding contact with the locals, but I am not sure you'll help there and you may scare them; they're suspicious of scarily powerful people. If there are other things I should be using you for you'll have to tell me what they are, I haven't thought of them."

"I am a bit scarily powerful, it's true," he acknowledges. "I think I could get better than nowhere even so - charming mistrustful people in high-stakes situations, one of my many specialties - but my advantage is probably greater in the solving problems with technology department. If you want more or different people to know how to use the weapons I distributed, I'm still the best teacher available, although I'd have further thoughts to share on that subject before I committed to doing it. I should organize my approximate mental timeline of which technology I expect to redevelop before or after which other technology and get it written down and nicely summarized at some point. I could probably reconstruct and reconfigure my father's illegal orders lecture for the local context but it would be a multi-day time investment and I think I'd need someone to work with me on it and I don't have an immediate idea of who would be best. Do you know approximately when you're going to run out of problems I can solve with technology in less than six hours? 'Problems I can solve by earnestly befriending people' is another relevant category but one of my favourite ways to earnestly befriend people is by helping to solve their problems so it's going to have heavy overlap with other problem-solving categories..."

He wanted Maitimo to be king for exactly this reason, but it still manages to surprise him just how pleasant it is to have a local authority figure he can just work with like this. It's not just the part where he has no fear of being stifled or misused - although that reminds him, he still needs more details about this Oath people keep mentioning, it seems like even more relevant information now - it's the fact that Maitimo is actively seeking to use him to his full potential and is off to a pretty fine start in that endeavour. Miles is so pleased with his choice of King.

I think the strategy of not learning any shielding so everyone can trust you completely has served you very well and was a very good idea, but you should probably pick it up; you could at some point be in range of the Enemy.

"Yeah, I've been thinking it probably wouldn't be long before I needed to do that."

I don't know how good the Enemy's mind-reading is. But yes, you should. I bet you'll pick it up quickly.

"How quickly? Is this going to be more like 'set aside some time for a lesson' or more like 'someone tells me the trick and off I go'?"

"When we teach it to kids it takes months for them to be doing it consistently, but the concept can be explained in a few minutes and you can start the habit right away."

"Well, feel free to explain it at your convenience, I'm not in a hurry."

"The concept is simply that you need to mentally distinguish between public thoughts and private ones, usually by having a visualization or spatial metaphor that accompanies all of your thoughts and that you use to sort them. Some people imagine thinking in front of them or thinking behind them, people can think in one language for public and one for private if they are able to do that..."

...Miles laughs.

"Well, that sounds outrageously easy," he says. One Miles to think the private thoughts, one Miles to think the public ones, he already has this exact mechanism in place, it's just a matter of applying it to the context—he visualizes them side by side, Lord Vorkosigan standing stiffly in his brown and silver House uniform and Admiral Naismith radiating easy confidence in his grey and white, and then his mental presence vanishes completely.

A moment later it's back, but far less open than before. He's wondering whether it worked (he expects it did) and how you target mental communication to a particular person (he's picked up that this is possible but hasn't figured out how it works yet).

"Yes, that's the idea, then you just have to get in the habit. Talking to someone is like putting your thoughts in their space, and usually requires either familiarity or looking directly at them."

"Hm."

He contemplates this paradigm privately for a moment, and then he adjusts his model, and now if he's got it right all his private thoughts are available to Maitimo and no one else. (His private thoughts are mainly smugness about how he's already well-practiced enough at distinguishing two separate tracks of thought that he doesn't expect to make a single mistake as long as the discipline really is as straightforward as it sounds. Letting Maitimo into the private channel requires barely any extra effort; it's just a matter of mentally designating him as 'on Barrayar' in the internally relevant sense.)

He is barely even sure he can give himself credit for taking less than two weeks to reunite the Noldor under his command and win the deep personal loyalty of the useful space alien, he just lay there and nodded patiently for most of it. 

"You have an extraordinary aptitude for this. That worked. Usually you'll want to talk to people without giving them access to your private thoughts as a whole."

"Yeah, that's an obvious extension, I'd just," he temporarily evicts Maitimo from figurative Barrayar and addresses him over figurative ciphered tightbeam, do this, and then he reverts to his preferred scheme and finishes, but I like having all my thoughts open to someone, it exerts useful kinds of pressure on my personality, and you're a particularly good recipient both because it's rather too late to worry about maintaining my privacy from you and because I generally expect you to use information well. I can stop or find someone else if you prefer.

Since Maitimo is back on figurative Barrayar he will also get the unspoken third reason - Miles often finds that the easiest way to convince someone to be trustworthy is to trust them, and Maitimo comes across as very much the sort of person with whom this is an effective approach.

I have no objections; it seems plausibly useful if merely because I cannot apprise you of hundreds of years of strategic information and it's this way less likely something important goes unmentioned. I won't be reciprocating. If you want to know which memories I'm reliving you can just try guessing from your world's own illustrious criminals. 

I have been trying not to guess the details of what your imprisonment was like because I prefer to respect your privacy and also because blackout rage is not a strategically useful mental state.

Wise of you. He releases prisoners, sometimes, just as psychological warfare against the friends and families who hesitate to take them back in. Hesitate to take them back in because escapees of Angband sometimes go suddenly mad and kill everyone around them. 

Well, that's worrying, he says of the last bit. And contemplates possible reasons why this might be the case and ways to mitigate the damage if it suddenly happens to Maitimo, although it seems really unlikely for it to suddenly happen to Maitimo.

I've given it some thought. It's 'suddenly seized by madness', not 'suddenly possessed by the Enemy', which matters because the harm I could do if bent against you would be substantial enough to make taking a position of power unwise. I - I have some hypotheses, which suggest I'll be fine. But it's a thing that happens. 

Thank you for letting me know. I will now proceed to mostly ignore this possibility because you seem like you're in a better position to handle it than I am, but if you need my help preventing yourself from going mad and killing everyone around you, I am of course at your service.