Archive of Our Own ^beta

Reader, I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith!

The good news is, I transmigrated at exactly the moment canon started. It took me a few days to remember this, but in my (limited) defense, I was pretty busy at the time, and also I hadn't read the books in a while. Look, I did not expect to transmigrate into an award-winning book series from the '80s. Who does, right?

Thankfully, I have all of Canon Cordelia -- henceforth: Canondelia -- yeah I don't know, I'm still workshopping that -- whatever, I have all of her domain knowledge. I know everything she does about being a spaceship captain and about her scientific specialties, and I got her backstory all nice and clear: her brother's name, her mom's favorite books, the whole enchilada.

What I did not get was a nice and detailed timeline telling me where and when I was relative to events happening on Barrayar, and that the planet we were surveying would one day be named Sergyar, and that we were about to be attacked.

So I was busy when all this started and I don't think I need to go over all the events in detail, because I'm sure you read the books, and from my memory, things progressed about the same way, I guess. Dubauer was injured, Aral Vorkosigan was inscrutable and admitted to murder (who does that? Who does that????) and I told him about my awful ex. Canondelia's awful ex. For me to have an awful ex, I would have had to have ever had, you know. Someone to be ex about.

Some people are lucky in love. Some people are unlucky in love. Some people have just not had the opportunity to discover their luck in love.

But as you can understand, I didn't expect Aral Vorkosigan to fall in love with me.

Okay, to put it bluntly, I was really incredibly, not-fourth-wall-breaking, surprised.

Now I'm in the cell of his ship and finally have a moment to pause and reflect, so I've been pondering the moral issues at play here. Should I try to escape? Should I play along and go to Barrayar and try to prevent the invasion of Escobar? But what could I possibly do to prevent it? Everyone on Barrayar -- with the exception of Aral who is, notably, not on Barrayar -- wants it to happen, all for different reasons. What am I supposed to do, get to Barrayar and singlehandedly stop the entire thing?

And then my crew rescues me, so it's a moot point.

Once I get back (not back, I've never been there before, but please roll with this, okay? We'll never get anywhere if you keep pointing out that I haven't been Cordelia Naismith for all that long) to Beta Colony, I tell everyone debriefing me that Barrayar is going to invade Escobar, and that Aral Vorkosigan isn't on board with the plan but no one on Barrayar cares about what he thinks. No one reacts like they're particularly surprised by this; I guess the folks they picked to talk to me know a lot more about internal Barrayaran politics than ever made the pages of a book I last read a decade ago.

They also sit me in front of a shrink, and this part I remember from the books. Mostly I remember it from the books from the way I had to skip it on rereads because it's just so horrifying and unethical and medically disgusting.

I don't know if this therapist is supposed to be the Good Kind of Betan Therapist who helps Mark off-screen, or the one we'd seen on page, but I'm a pro at telling medical professionals what they want to hear. I've had to do it under circumstances with higher stakes than this, which Canondelia probably didn't, and also I know what therapy is supposed to be like, which I don't know if Canondelia knew. I know this therapist wants me to tell her something. It'd be unrealistic to think that I went through all I just went through and not be dealing with any problems because of it. The trick is to tell her just enough and then run out the clock. She wants me to be just a little bit messed up, but in a fixable way. She wants me to be in and out of her office in three, maybe five, quick sessions, and then back to normal and back to work. I need to show resilience but also vulnerability. I need to show that I am rattled but not about to run off to Barrayar and marry a member of their government.

So I spend my sessions talking about my horror at what happened to Dubauer and how scared I was for him, which are all fully true! That did happen! And it really was harrowing! But of course it's nowhere near the whole story, but this therapist doesn't need the whole story and I'm not interested in getting into it. After all, I need to get myself recruited to go bring the plasma mirrors to Escobar.

Which I do, because I have all of Canondelia's knowledge and my own to boot. But I do make one detour before shipping out. I have to get a full look-over from the doctors anyway, and so I bring up my main concern.

"How's my contraceptive implant doing?" I ask her. She checks the scans and gives me the all-clear. "Great," I say. "Can I get something stronger?"

"Stronger?" she asks me.

"Yeah," I say. I wave my hand vaguely toward my uterus. "These things can be disrupted and removed, right? I need something that can't."

She looks appropriately horrified and I remember that she's one of the people who debriefed me when I got back from Sergyar. "Has that been threatened?"

"Not threatened," I say carefully. "But it was made clear to me that that's a possibility. I just want to make sure nothing like that will happen if I'm captured by the Barrayarans again."

The doctor makes a very firm note in one of her pads, then gives me a determined smile. "We can give you something stronger," she says.

I'd figured that, space medicine or no, I was not going to get the space version of my tubes tied (but easily reversible by surgery) in an outpatient appointment and then just walk it off, but I'd forgotten that this was also the place that turned Donna Vorrutyer into Dono Vorrutyer in something like a week or whatever. So, yeah, I do walk out of there the next day with the space equivalent of my tubes tied. It's not something anyone is going to easily undo and I breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Since I'm on Beta, I've also been wondering if I should, you know, also pull a Dono Vorrutyer, or something less drastic. I have the opportunity now. Should I give myself a beard? Should I do something about my breasts? I'm not dealing with any dysphoria right now but if I think that's going to pop up, I should fix it now rather than after I go to Barrayar. Since Aral is soldier-sexual, I'm pretty sure that marriage proposal is still valid even if I swap around some body parts.

I scratch my chin and try to imagine it growing a full beard. I'm not sure that's something I want. It's always sounded itchy, and anyway, I've never been a big shaver of my legs, so why do I think I'll suddenly be willing to shave my face all the time? Making my life an eternal struggle to either deal with a beard or have to shave -- and clean up the razor -- every day... ugh, yeah, I don't know.

Should I get myself a dick? If I do, how big should it be? These really are questions I should give more thought than I have been.

I haven't been having dysphoria on Beta but Beta is supposedly Space California circa the 1980s; I was not in Earth California in the 1980s and so cannot verify that. Would I have problems on Barrayar? I've never been femme.

But Barrayar, from the books, isn't the kind of femme I need to worry about. It's not like the polished feminine looks from billboards and magazines, that specific kind of advertised, marketed femininity. Barrayar is a skirts required planet, but it's not a miniskirts required planet. No one is staring at your legs and judging your workout; they expect you to wear skirts to your ankles. When I've had to wear skirts, I've always preferred that length. A long flowing skirt is not a big deal. I've done that before. It's not my preferred style, but I can manage, and I can especially manage it if I'm not making a style statement by doing it or a cultural statement. If that's the uniform of the planet, I can probably manage. This is not a skirts are sexy thing, this is a skirts are gendered clothing thing. If I got myself a dick and a beard, I'd be expected to wear uniforms all the time. So I'm really just picking between two different kinds of uniforms: one with pants and one with skirts. And the skirts one definitely has more room for interpretation; you can wear pants under a skirt, but you'd have a harder time wearing a skirt under pants, believe me, I've tried.

Besides, Barrayar has got to have different ways of doing gendered clothing. There must be butch Barrayarans. The books just don't spend enough time on Barrayar for us to find out. Alys Vorpatril is high femme, but we shouldn't assume everyone is high femme. For every Alys Vorpatril, there's probably ten butches going around in heavy thick skirts and heavy boots, shirts -- tunics, right, Barrayarans wear tunics -- anyway, their tops buttoned up, their sleeves rolled up, their butch hair signifying to everyone who can read the signals that this is Barrayaran Butch Lesbianism at its finest.

Which is around the time I stop and consider if I'm attracted to Aral Vorkosigan. I've been acting this whole time like of course I'll marry him. Narrative determinism, right? He wants to marry me, so why shouldn't I go along with it? It'll get me to Barrayar and I'll be able to fix everything. But am I attracted to him? Do I want to have sex with him?

I stop and try to think of him naked. I frown. I might be too much of a virgin for this question.

No, that's nonsense. I've felt sexually attracted to people before. Sure, I've never understood the whole thing about if you have "types"; I figured having "types" is for people who have options in the first place, but I've never understood the idea of treating dating like you're going to a restaurant and picking off a menu. If you have an opportunity for a relationship with someone, you evaluate that person, right? There's never any hypothetical person you could date, it's not, oh, I want someone with the personality of Friend Y but with the hair style of Friend Z. That's nonsense. I never really understood the whole thing.

So I consider Aral Vorkosigan again and frown again.

Maybe I'm just too queer for this. Or maybe he's just always fit a specific form in my mind and I'm not attracted at all to that box that form fits in.

So I try to consider Aral in a dress, maybe some light make-up -- ah. I blush a little. Okay. So the military Barrayaran look is absolutely not for me, but if I mentally undress and redress him -- yeah. Okay. I can work with this.

So that's the sexual attraction part sorted. I think this is definitely a solvable problem. We'll cross the whole Mechanics Of Sex part of the bridge when we get there; I've got all of my sexual education, and all of Canondelia's sexual education, and it's not like Aral's a virgin. We can figure this out when we get there. Plus, I think most of his sexual history is queer, too, right? He's not going to think the only way to do sex is endless PIV. We can definitely solve this, two queers together, figuring out orgasms.

I don't feel the need to elaborate on what happens next; Canondelia already covered it. At least, I assume it was the same. If I'd known I was going to transmigrate into it, I'd have reread it more recently, or at least asked a friend to read it for me. We deliver the plasma mirrors and then I'm captured and oh wow, there's Ges Vorrutyer, right on schedule. And there's Bothari, too, right on schedule.

When Aral bursts in, I'm ready with a quip, a jaunty assurance of "you won the break-up", but it all melts on my lips when I see his face.

Anyway, it all happens.

Once I'm back on Sergyar, I start trying to fix things again. I have two real targets here. The first are the uterine replicator fetuses. That part always bothered me. They should never have been sent to Barrayar. It's flat-out the wrong decision. Barrayar doesn't have that technology and doesn't know what to do with them, and that's clear to that awful dude who is trying to pass them off. Wasn't he even told to his face that the travel time is too long, and it's not like they've got people who can handle it? This whole plot point was some kind of get-out-of-abortion-free card, along with a way to get uterine replicators to Barrayar so that Miles can use one, but this whole thing just pissed me off so much. It's shitty worldbuilding! The idea that these fetuses belong to the rapist is also disgusting, considering that 1) no they don't, and 2) there is no step two. Handing them over to the rapists's government and then, on purpose, having all the replicators fail on the way to Barrayar, what the fuck, what the actual fuck.

So obviously I pull a huge stink about it and tell them that if Escobar isn't going to take the fetuses, then Beta Colony is, and I have authority as this and that and the other thing, and if they still don't like it, I'm going to adopt them all. Plus! Plus! Plus! As I told that smarmy official, Barrayar has a huge cultural prejudice against bastards, so what the fuck are you even doing. What did those fetuses do that you're punishing them like this? And no, they are absolutely not the property of their biological fathers!!!!! If they belong to anyone, which they don't!, but if you mean they have citizenship, their mothers are Escobaran and Betan, so shut the fuck up.

Spoiler: I don't end up adopting them, and I don't end up even needing to pull out my back-up plan, which is to state that I'm the mother of one of them, but I'm not sure which, so we'll have to go back to Escobar or Beta Colony to check on it (since, as I've belabored immensely, the Barrayarans don't have this technology!!!!) and then wait out the clock until birth.

But thankfully that doesn't have to happen and the replicators go to Escobar, like they always should have.

The second part is the rapists themselves. Yeah, I throw even more weight there, joining in with all the Escobarans and Betans, and all the respect I've gained from the Barrayarans by being the one who, as they think, killed Ges Vorrutyer.

Bothari disappears into a criminal court and I don't feel even a little sorry. He's going to go to jail on another planet and never have any more interactions with the plot, but I don't care. I know the books wanted me to feel sorry for him, but I absolutely do not.

Actually, let me sidebar for a minute, because I do want to be clear. This isn't an issue on if I should be grateful to him or not for not raping me and for killing Ges Vorrutyer. 1) Ges Vorrutyer was already going to die; I have the knowledge from reading the book that Aral and Illyan were going to kill him, but even in a broader sense, I know that he was sent to this war to die. And 2) if I had been anyone other than Canondelia -- and, let's not forget, I'm not Canondelia -- he would have raped me. That's not conjecture, I know that for a fact, because of all the other women he brutalized and raped. Just because he didn't hurt me doesn't mean he didn't hurt a lot of other women, and it doesn't erase it. It shouldn't erase it. He doesn't get to walk away, having done one good thing, or, rather, having at one point decided not to do a bad thing. And it was only because of Aral that he didn't rape me. It wasn't that he realized what he was doing was wrong. It was that he wouldn't rape Aral's woman.

So, yes, am I glad that Bothari stepped in when he did? Obviously yes. But that doesn't mean all his victims stop deserving justice, just because he was nice to me. That's not how this works. I'm not Canondelia, I don't put up with that shit. I'm not betraying Elena Visconti to save Bothari just because Canondelia pitied him.

Even if I do nothing else in my time in this book, I have given Elena Visconti the piece of mind she never had in canon, and I've saved Elena Bothari and all the unnamed war bastards.

And then comes the day that Aral asks me to marry him again, and to be honest, I wasn't ready, it's not like I have a timeline I can keep checking. But he takes me to the side to tell me things I already know and asks me to marry him again, and I flash back to reading listicles and relationship advice columns and three (3) Jane Austen books. There are important things we need to discuss! Uh. Children. Finances. Um, general political opinions? That's probably not relevant here. Parenting strategies. Are the kids going to day care or is one of us going to be SAH. I know that one already, Aral is rich and his family employs servants, any kids we have are going to be nannied.

So really, the big one is children. Oh, and politics (my side).

"I'd love to but we need to talk about some matters first," I tell Aral, and he looks overjoyed and also apprehensive. "The big one is children."

And he's nodding and he's settling in to sit down on the grass, expecting a long conversation. I sit down next to him.

"I have a-- let's say, I'm not a big fan of things going in my vagina, and I'm really scared of childbirth. I always have been, my whole life," I say. I know Canondelia fetishized bodybirths but I'm not Canondelia. One thing I always loved about this book series was that it provided a way to have babies without having to, you know, have them. "In fact, I had an operation done on Beta Colony that means I can't give birth without going back there and having the operation reversed. But I love kids and I'd love to be a parent. I want to use uterine replicators. That way, we can have the kids whenever we want to have them, I don't have to be pregnant, and it's safe and simple."

Aral asks some questions about uterine replicators and I admit that I (Canondelia) was born out of a replicator, as are most people on Beta Colony. He seems surprised that I was born from a machine but it also makes him think.

"My father won't like it," he warns me.

I shrug. "I think I can bring him around." Aral is immediately skeptical. I put my hand on his hand. "Aral," I say. "Why didn't your father get remarried after your mother was murdered? If he was some kind of mindless automaton who only wants heirs, why wouldn't he have had more heirs? Because he's not a mindless automaton and he just lost his wife and two of his children. Right?"

Aral whispers, "yes."

I know the death of Aral's siblings and mother weighs on him so I hadn't wanted to bring this up with him; I'd only planned to hint around it with Piotr, to get him on my side about uterine replicators. I still can do that, but I want to be more delicate with Aral's feelings than with Piotr's. I know how to handle people like Piotr, but handling is all it is. Aral is someone I want to be closer to. Aral is the man I'm going to marry.

"If our babies are born out of uterine replicators, no one has to know about them until they're born. They can stay in a secure maternity ward in a location your family controls, with only trusted people going in and out. I think your father is going to like that part. Am I wrong?"

"You're not wrong," he says. "You've given this some thought."

"It's our kids," I tell him, not lightly. "And that's the other part. Aral, I don't know what the political situation is right now on Barrayar but I bet it's not good. Your family was assassinated because of an Emperor's paranoia. But would your uterine replicator kids, off of your strange Betan wife, ever be a real threat to an Emperor? Isn't that very idea just completely laughable?"

"Dear Captain," he says reverently and kisses my hand. "You are a greater strategist than many I have worked with."

I'm taking that as a yes on the uterine replicators but I need to be sure. "So do we agree on this? I don't have strong feelings on numbers of kids. Maybe four? Five?" Back on Earth, I called it the minivan limit. You start out with the sedan limit, which, considering the size of car seats and maneuvering kids, realistically means two kids, and not three. Then there's the minivan limit. Most people do not cross the minivan limit, because when you cross the minivan limit, your automobile choices get a lot more restricted and a lot harder when you bang your head on the ceiling trying to get back to the third row. The best solution are those big passenger vans, which are fuckoff expensive, very conspicuous, and frankly I have never tried to handle car seats in them, and I don't even know how much trunk space they have. I don't think they're intended for having trunk space. If you want trunk space, you get a van that isn't a passenger van.

"You would want that many?" Aral asks brightly. "My grandmother always said that the child limit stigma on Beta Colony is pervasive."

Oh. Oops. "I've spent most of my adulthood on Betan Survey ships," I tell him. "I'm not the best example of a Betan." I'm not really any example of a Betan, but who's counting. "Four or five is fine with me, as long as we space them out reasonably. I'm not doing quadruplets." I remember in the later books that Miles had a whole lot of kids in a short period of time; there's no way I'm doing that. I want to enjoy being a parent and not speed-run it.

"And we can make that decision," Aral says, a man who understands what technology can do for him personally, and likes what he hears, "because we'll be using uterine replicators to control the process."

"It gives us complete control," I agree. I don't bring up the big specter of gene cleaning. We can burn that bridge when we get to it. But we're definitely getting to it.

"Then I agree," he says. "What's the next matter we need to discuss?"

Okay. This is the big one. This is an even bigger one than the kids issue, and that's where a lot of relationships hit deal-breakers, or so I'm told. "It's about me being Betan. If I go off with you and marry you, Beta Colony isn't going to be happy. But there's a way to make them happy, I just think your government is going to hate it." He waits patiently and I say, "I'm going to have to make Beta think I'll be their spy."

He does not look surprised at all. "I would never ask you to break any oaths you have made to Beta Colony."

"I haven't made oaths the way you mean it or--" I break off. I don't know. It's possible I have, and anyway, what do I really know of Vor honor? They probably do think I've made oaths. "Okay, I've probably made oaths. That doesn't mean I'm going to betray you after marrying you. I take this marriage seriously."

"Do you mean to say you won't be their spy if they ask you?" he asks.

"I figure if they ask me, we can decide what I tell them," I say. "I'm probably going to have to tell them some things, but that doesn't have to be a bad deal for us. We can make it work. But it's not going to make me look good, and it's going to make you look worse."

"On the contrary," he says. "Did I ever tell you about my grandmother?"

"You've mentioned her," I say. This has got to be the Betan grandmother, who canon barely discussed.

"She did the same thing you suggest doing," he says. "She called it serving as an information broker. I will simply be continuing a fine family tradition of marrying Betans who send long letters home."

I laugh, because if only he knew how often I've ever written a long letter. "Yeah, all right," I say. "I think that covers my issues. Do you have any?"

We spend the next half hour or so talking about more deal-breakers and potential deal-breakers and I feel a lot more confident about marrying him by the end of it.

"Oh," I realize belatedly. "We should talk about gender, too."

Aral says cautiously, having gotten to know me a lot better over the course of the last hour, "what in particular, dear Captain?"

"Well, gender's highly cultural, right? The genders on Barrayar won't match up precisely with the genders on Beta Colony. On Beta, the three main genders are man, woman, and herm, and about 90% of our population uses those categories," thank you to the Betan Census available on the Betan space internet that I looked up while resting from my surgery. "And I'm fine with being in that woman box. My problem is when someone shows up with a much smaller, much different box, that is also labeled Woman and tells me that since I go with the bigger woman box, I should contort myself to fit into that one as well. Because that goes from treating woman as a category of the population to considering woman as sexual objects of desire. And it's times like that when I want to jump into the Man box instead, to escape from the pressure of being expected to fit that. There might be times on Barrayar when I seem like I fit more into the Man box than the Woman one, but there might not be. I probably won't know until I get there."

"You already do fit more into that category," Aral says, "because you're a soldier."

I want to snap my fingers at him in agreement for him being right, but I don't know if that's considered rude on Barrayar or not. I really need to watch the Barrayarans more and see what kind of gestures they do. "Yes, precisely. Those gender roles don't map at all onto anything I'm used to. I probably seem queer to you just for that, and that's fine, because I think I'd be confused if I was in a culture where I wasn't considered queer. But I think that's important for you to know, that I am queer."

He takes this in slowly. "I'm bisexual," he tells me.

This is a serious moment so I don't say, yeah, your ex-boyfriend mentioned it. Or maybe I should. I don't know. I'm never good with heart-felt coming out moments. I've never had one in my entire life, and all the ones I've read about seemed really uncomfortable for everyone involved. I want to just pat him on the shoulder and say solidarity forever. "I'm just queer," I say. "There's a lot of words and I don't pay much attention to them. But I'm attracted to you and want to marry you. Do you still want to marry me?"

"Yes," he says firmly. "Yes."

"Great!" I say. And I remember one more Just One More Thing. I really should have made a list. "Oh. And monogamy. I'm happy being monogamous but you need to be monogamous, too."

"Agreed," he says. "I made a mistake in my first marriage."

Yeah, see, that would work on me if I hadn't read the books. "See, that's what's concerns me, because you have a history of it. I don't want you fucking your secretaries." His face makes a slight twitch that betrays, probably, how he feels about his current secretary, who I have met and I agree with Aral's assessment; they would not have a good time in bed together, because they loathe each other and everything the other one stands for. "Let's say you get a new secretary and he's hot and brilliant and an excellent soldier, chest full of medals. I need you not to fuck him, too." I take a deep breath. "And if we're not going to be monogamous, then I still need you not to fuck him. Because where I come from, that's called an abuse of power. If we're not monogamous and you want to fuck him, I still need you to wait until he's not in your chain of command."

He's studying me like he realizes this is not a hypothetical situation. "I give you my word as Vorkosigan that I will not betray you in this manner." 'Unlike your shitty ex-boyfriend' is left unsaid.

We'll see if he remembers this later, but who knows, maybe he does take his word of honor as seriously as canon claims he does. "Thanks, I appreciate that," I say. "And I won't betray you like that either. I really have no problems with monogamy." Having never had a relationship before, I don't actually know if, in practice, I have problems with being monogamous, but considering that I have gotten this far in my life without a relationship at all, I feel that points pretty strongly to not having an issue being monogamous. You can't have an urge to expand your relationship to include more people if you don't have the first part of that sentence.

When I get back to the dorms where we're all staying, I'm immediately grabbed by Serena, who is the unofficial leader of my bunk, and who I figure is the likeliest of all of us to be working for the Betan equivalent of the Three Letter Agencies (no, not the IRS) (you know what? Why the fuck not, maybe also the IRS). She grabs me to the side and says, "you need to be careful, everyone's whispering that Vorkosigan wants to drag you back with him to Barrayar."

Oh, perfect, I can implement my plan immediately. Thank you, Serena! "Yeah. He does." I steel myself for her reaction. "I've agreed to marry him."

She does not disappoint. "What??????!!!!!!?" she asks me, punctuation very emphasized.

"Exactly," I say. "Of course I said yes. Have we ever had an opportunity like this, ever? And he's just handing it to me on a plate."

I see her mentally take a step back and reassess the situation. "Cordelia, no one would ask you to do this."

"No, but since it's fallen into my lap, we'd be wasteful to give it up," I tell her. "Look, we have to make this look real, okay? You all need to reject me for siding with the Barrayarans. This has to look really real, or else the Barrayarans will get suspicious. They know there's no way you'll like this situation. But we cannot pass this opportunity up. I don't know everything about the Barrayaran political situation, but he told me he could be running their government by this time next year. I can't just say no."

"Cordelia, after all you've been through," she puts her hand on my arm. For verisimilitude, I should shrug it off. I don't. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"I'm sure I need to do this," I say. "I'm sorry, this is all a bit sudden." It is not at all sudden. "I didn't expect it either." This is the second time he's proposed marriage. "I know we don't have time to set anything up." Yeah, on purpose. "How about this? I'll write to my family and then once I'm on Barrayar, someone can get in touch with me to set up something more secure."

"You know once you do this, you can't undo it," she tells me.

And, yeah. I know. "I know," I say and I guess I look convincing and sure of myself, because she uses the hand on my arm to shove me to the side and then she starts shouting at me and kicks me out of the bunk.

I spend the rest of my time on Sergyar bunking with the international human rights workers, who give me a lot of space. No one's sure what to make of me, and it's a relief to finally get on board a ship to go to Barrayar with Aral.

It's a few weeks to get to Barrayar, so I spend the time figuring out language classes, which I think Canondelia did, too. I have the advantage of being genre-savvy: I'm not in a book where the language divide is a plot point. Therefore, I really shouldn't be running into any language-related problems on Barrayar. It makes sense. If you want a book to be about language problems, you treat the languages stuff realistically. If you don't want the book's plot to be diverted constantly into language problems, you treat all characters like they have the metaphorical fish in their ear.

Sidebar: I wonder sometimes about the fish in the ear. Just, think about it. Consider survivability bias. What if Hitchhiker's Guide is somehow the only work of literature to survive from our time? Would future generations think we really went around putting fish in our ears? Would they think that was a normal pedagogical technique? Would there be entire journals about the fish in our ears? So, if any of those future English majors are reading this, I need you to know: I did not put any fish in my ear.

Considering I've been having no language or word choice related problems, I assume that's going to continue, but I don't have much else to do anyway, so I spend it studying. I also write some letters to my family, letting them know that I've had a whirlwind romance with Aral Vorkosigan and am on my way to Barrayar to get married, hope they can visit soon!

I also go through the ship's library and settle in, a notepad by my side for any cultural questions to ask Aral. I ask him about them over dinner and we also talk about honor. Honor is one of those words that I never really know what it means; everyone who uses it seriously assumes you already know what it means. It has to do with a moral code, but which moral code? Whose moral code? People who throw around words like honor assume you already know, and that you already agree with them. I know a bit about Barrayaran honor from the books and that's a good start, but it's just a start.

As for the other matter, all I know about spying comes from Tom Clancy novels and James Bond movies, so in other words, I know nothing about spying. My plan for that is, first, do no harm, and second, try to do good. It will be a way for Aral to leak things to the Betan government that they might not otherwise believe, and be another source for the Betans to weigh against all the others. But on the other side, I won't pass anything from the Betans to Aral without a lot of caution. If he needs to preface things with "my wife told me this but I don't believe it", so be it.

But thankfully, no Betan spy comes up to me on the ship and tries to do spy things with me. I figure they're in wait-and-see mode on this in a lot of different ways. If I were a spy agency, I also would not trust some random Betan scientist volunteering to be a spy all out of nowhere.

But the advantage for me is huge. Unlike Canondelia, I have not publicly burned any bridges. My name is not being publicly slandered. The letters back from my mother indicate that I'm a nonentity as far as media coverage is concerned. This is perfect. I've never wanted anyone to know who I am and I'm about to become the Regent's wife, who is described textually as being basically invisible. It must take a lot of talent and skill and effort to be basically invisible when you're married to the person running the show. Hopefully I'll get treated the same way as Canondelia.

But for the most part, I spend my travel time making a list of things I want to do during my time on Barrayar.

Item the first: have a good marriage. This is an ongoing process, so I won't be able to assess it very well, but on the other hand, I'll be constantly assessing it from inside of it. As a goal, it would fail my previous workplace's goal criteria (it's not measurable), but it's absolutely a high priority.

Item the second: help Aral have a good support system. This goal contains the sub-goals of trying to save Padma Vorpatril, if at all possible, and seeing if I can prevent Aral from becoming Regent, which I have no real expectation of being able to do as an outsider and I suspect no insiders would help me with this. I remember from the books that Aral really didn't want to become Regent but got maneuvered into it. But he could not have been the only option; you don't send your only option to a war where he'll easily die. Ergo, Ezar Vorbarra had backup plans. Would I like those backup plans? No idea. Would it be worse for me if one of those backup plans happened? Also no idea. But aside from the Regent problem, I want Aral to have friends and family who are on his side. There's not going to be any bodybirthed Miles to hit with poison, so that should prevent the rupture between Piotr and Aral. But after that? I'm going to have to do my best.

Item the third: do whatever good I can. The books don't spend that much time in the Vorkosigan District, but there's enough details to get the gist of it. Canondelia definitely did her best on the education and health care front, and I want to do better than that. Piotr might be my biggest obstacle, but I won't know until I get there. But I'm being put into a position of great power by virtue of marrying someone who is a hereditary military aristocrat and I mean to use it.

When I finally get to Barrayar, it does not disappoint. I gawk from the windows as our shuttle descends, staring at the beautiful landscape, and even more importantly, all the signs of human habitation. This is always my favorite part. I love the reminders that people live here. That they have whole worlds and whole lives and all I see of them is just one glimpse on one simple day. It's why I always loved taking the train. You know how it is when you're driving on the interstate and sometimes you see houses and towns but mostly you don't, mostly it's just fields and warehouses and mountains and scenery. It's not like that on the train. You can take a five hour train ride and barely be out of sight of where people live for the entire time. It's just an endless reminder that the world is so, so large, even when it seems so, so small.

And this is a whole new world. This is a planet and a new start and I press my fingers against the window and don't want to ever look away.

Of course, I do have to look away eventually, because we land. Aral's father is there along with the rest of the welcoming committee, and I'm swept away to Vorkosigan House in Vorbarr Sultana, where I'm told we'll spend the night before heading home to Hassadar. Well, we except Aral. He's going to stay in the capital and debrief, and I'm to go ahead of him and start wedding planning.

The wedding planning has, of course, already been started, and I don't have many opinions on it. Aral did ask me if I had any Betan customs I wanted to include, which I do not, and in terms of my own customs, I feel like since I've transmigrated into this world, I should go with this world's customs. And I don't really have any objections to the Barrayaran wedding ceremonies as displayed in the books. It's seemed pretty low-effort on my part. I just have to show up and say some things and then eat a celebratory meal. Not a big deal.

That night, I get introduced to Lady Anne Vorhalas, who is Piotr's hostess in Vorbarr Sultana, and Lady Ola Vorhovis, who is Piotr's hostess in Hassadar. Both are eighty if they're a day and I am not told how they are related to Piotr or Aral; later I find out, as I expected, that the answer is "they're not". One of them (everyone is unclear on which) was married to Piotr's trusted second during the war (which one is, again, unclear) and he died and Piotr needed a hostess, and the other one of them (or maybe also both of them) is tangentially related through marriage, but whose marriage is, as I have said, unclear.

To take a step back, it seems like Piotr found himself needing a hostess and found two options. One of them didn't want to live in Vorbarr Sultana and one of them didn't want to live in Hassadar, except that it also makes perfect sense for him to need someone to run the house he's not currently staying in.

Lady Anne starts berating Aral for his strategic decisions while Lady Ola takes me into a room, undresses me, and starts handing me different options for undergarments.

"You can wear that tonight for dinner," she says, pointing with her chin at what I had arrived in, "but I want to see what we have that can be adjusted quickly to fit you. I suppose you've given no thought to your wedding dress."

"Not in the specifics," I say. "In the general, though, I have given a lot of thought to my style decisions for my new wardrobe."

I gain an approving nod from her. "Yes, I'd thought so, young Aral did say you have a strategic mind."

This is something I've been looking forward to. I've never worn any clothes that were made for me before, but I know there's no way Lady Vorkosigan buys off-the-rack dresses. I finally get to discover what clothes can be like when they actually really fit!!!!!! Instead of being just whatever is the best you're gonna get that day in that store, and live with what happens after you wash it. The most tailoring I've ever experienced was when I bought a dress to wear to a wedding and went to the local dry cleaners to get it hemmed six inches, because I didn't trust my rusty hemming skills to a dress that had to actually look good.

Plus I don't have to worry about polyester in everything. I can wear only natural fibers and best of all, as Lady Vorkosigan, I am unlikely to be the one who has to wash all that wool.

Over the next few days, I meet with the Fashion Strategy Committee (Lady Ola, Lady Anne, and six of their great-granddaughters for focus group testing) and refine my approach. I want to look matronly but still young enough that no one is concerned that I'm too old for kids. I do not want to be a fashion icon. I want to look just a little strange.

"Strange?" they ask me.

"Like I'm a Betan who doesn't fit exactly," I elaborate. "I don't want to blend in perfectly. I want to look like I belong but not like I'm trying to belong too much. I don't want to look like I'm gearing up to become the next Empress of Barrayar," I add and understanding dawns on them and they start sketching different options for me, because they also don't want me to look like I'm gearing up to become the next Empress of Barrayar.

"We'll keep just enough of the Betan fashions so you look like you're going to get bored and move back to Beta in two years," notes Great-Granddaughter Lucille (didn't catch the last name, absolutely did catch that she's not a Lady).

"I don't know much about Betan fashions," I admit. I'd looked around when I was on Beta, but I don't know enough to know what's fashionable and what's someone's space version of laundry day.

"Don't worry, we do," says Great-Granddaughter Gwendolyn (Vorhovis, and a Lady).

We go through several versions of it, and each time, I make them explain to me in depth what these outfit and hair choices convey, which the great-granddaughters take great joy in. I am trying, essentially, to avoid the miniskirt problem. I don't want any clothes where there's ever an argument to be had about who is allowed to wear them. Because, hey, if you ask me who is allowed to wear a miniskirt, of course the answer is whoever the fuck wants to wear a miniskirt is allowed to wear one. But then if you ask me, yeah, sure, but who is allowed to wear a miniskirt, and then we're into it, because that's a question of reality. Sure, in theory, anyone can wear whatever the fuck they want. In practice, that is absolutely not the case. Public acceptance of miniskirts depends a lot on the sex and age and body type of the person wearing it. Because you can say whatever you want about miniskirts in theory but the reality is, they're a garment people have opinions about, because the reality is it's sexualized.

I do not want any of those. In fact, if possible, I want dresses that completely obscure the fact that I have a body. I've always liked the looks of those old dresses where it's all padded in different places and you can't really tell what the person would look like if you took all of that off. Dresses should be a performance. Dresses should be art. Dresses should be a tool. And it's a tool I want to use to say: nothing to see here, move along, move along.

I am not a Betan seductress. I am not someone who wants to be Empress. I am someone who has come to Barrayar for the most personal of reasons, who plans to stay for the most personal of reasons. These are not the politics you are looking for. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.

Once we've got my wardrobe planned, we turn to my portfolio. Like Canondelia, I want to focus on education and health care. This gets me approving nods; it seems like these are considered womanly endeavors here, too. I say I want to have as little to do with politics as possible, which gets me looks that mean I am not going to get my wish.

I don't know what the budget will look like for my projects; it's far too soon to ask to look at the Vorkosigan finances, even if I had the background to understand what the numbers mean in terms of buying power. The Vorkosigans are the kind of rich which means they can never actually run out of money, because their money comes from rents, but I know from the books that they don't have as much cash on hand as some other Vor do. However, I expect I can leverage existing resources for these initiatives. In other words, I'm sure they're already happening, and that cash might not be the biggest barrier to implementation; access and acceptance might be.

I spend the rest of my time getting oriented and watching everyone around me for cultural clues they might not think to teach me. How do they talk, how fast do they talk, do they look up or down, do they touch each other, are you expected to interrupt or never allowed to interrupt, what are the unspoken variations in rank that everyone but me knows about, that kind of thing.

I get etiquette classes, where I'm told that it's okay if my table manners are the Betan version of correct, so long as I don't do things that cross over into what Barrayarans consider rude. My own table manners pass muster, which is good. But there's a lot of things I need to know if I'm going to swim in this ocean along with Aral that he thinks is just water, and I know isn't: who greets who, who gets introduced to who, who is allowed to leave a conversation whenever they want, who is stuck in it forever, what insults are okay, are blondes acceptable targets of misogyny, is it fine to turn people's names into pejoratives, all the invisible markers of acceptable conversation.

I'm told that Barrayar isn't very formal and then given twelve different rules about formality. Because when you're informal, you have to be informal the right way.

Thankfully, both Lady Ola and Lady Anne have shepherded their share of clueless people through the process of entering polite society; I'm not their first, I'm just their oldest.

I also learn the names and the jobs of the household staff: armsmen, servants, and Miscellaneous Other.

This is exciting and terrifying for me because I've never been a boss before and now I'm in a management position via marriage. Lady Anne and Lady Ola have both made it clear to me that they're not stepping to the side just so an ignorant Betan can destroy everything they've spent decades building, which I'm very grateful for. I can't imagine how bad this would be if I had to go in and become Piotr Vorkosigan's hostess immediately just by virtue of becoming his daughter-in-law. No, instead they're planning a phased handover. Considering that I would politely call them both Formidable, I suspect it will not be much of a phased handover. If I'm lucky, they'll continue on in the spirit of teaching me until the moment they are unable to continue in their positions. Only then will they relinquish them. Women like them do not retire; women like them are already living their perfect lives. No one, least of all me, wants to get in the way of it.

And this is perfect, because I'm sure learning how to do their jobs is something that's going to take me years.

In my culture, weddings are about the guests, not the location. We'd rather have two hundred people in the local community center than twenty at a destination wedding with beautiful vistas. My wedding on Barrayar contains both a lot of people and a beautiful vista. We get married in Hassadar in a beautiful garden, surrounded by who's who of the district and Aral's friends and military buddies and Piotr's friends and military buddies and political allies and political enemies and political connections and also the Emperor of Barrayar. Who I'd been under the impression from the books would be too sick to travel, but being too sick to travel is a sliding scale depending on how much money and resources you have, and Ezar Vorbarra has the most money and resources.

So my wedding is attended by the man who has manipulated and maneuvered Aral Vorkosigan every day of his life since he was eleven, and also there was the Escobar stuff and everything else that I've heard about Ezar since I first met a Barrayaran.

It's my wedding day. I don't say a word to him, just mangle my way through a curtsy. I'm not dealing with this today.

My wedding dress is perfect. The cloth is heavy and structured but still feels light and airy. It hangs beautifully and I'm not sweating through the fabric the way I thought I would when I first saw it. The skirt twirls nicely and doesn't hug my legs, my shoulders can move freely, and everything stays where it should when I raise my arms. Wearing clothes made for me is a revelation.

We have no problems with the wedding night. One of Aral's old military buddies had dropped off a marital aid before the ceremony, making an off-color joke, and Aral had flushed, but, excellent husband that he is, he'd kept in mind that I didn't want anything up my vagina, and realized that a strap-on would solve both our problems nicely; Aral told me he'd always preferred bottoming.

The day after the wedding, I start the new plan: avoid Vordarian's Pretendership as best I can.

Every time someone mentions his name to me, no matter who they are, I always take too long to respond, like I'm trying to make sure I don't say more about him than I should, which is a strange thing, because I'm a Betan, I shouldn't know anything about him.

I'm overjoyed to meet Princess Kareen. I want her to survive, too, and the best way I can help her is by following her lead. She's managed to survive a horrendous marriage without ever being allowed to let anyone know it was a horrendous marriage. She's had to put on a brave face, the face everyone expects from her. She must be an incredible actress. She's also a savvy political player.

When our discussion turns to Vordarian, she winces a little around the eyes.

"Back on Beta Colony, there were a lot of men who wouldn't take no for an answer," I wildly invent. It might be true, who knows? Certainly not Kareen Vorbarra. "I figure there's plenty of men here, too, with that problem. But I can't just kick them in the balls here when they make a pass. How should I be handling this?"

"As if they were armed and you were not," Kareen says.

Lady Ola had given me a Vorfemme knife when I got married and told me how to use it and when. It's a close-up weapon. It's for when you need to defend your honor. It's not for ballrooms.

"I have a lot to learn," I say, and I leave that visit with an invitation to come back next week and meet some of Kareen's friends.

I also get to know Alys Vorpatril, who takes me around to meet even more new friends. I don't have to act too hard at this; both Canondelia and I are new to Barrayar and are still learning the ropes. I probably align well enough with the politics of these women -- they don't need to know that I plan to only have babies via machine and want to drastically improve health care even for disabled people and poor people.

Ezar flies me and Aral to the palace to convince Aral to become Gregor's Regent and Aral looks to me for my response and I hesitate. I don't know. I really don't know.

Aral doesn't want to be Regent. I'd rather we spent our marriage in his district.

But someone is going to have to be Regent of Barrayar. Are the alternatives better? Are the alternatives worse?

If Ezar had shown any interest in Aral's suggestion of Quintillan, I'd have backed him up fully on that one. That option seems so fascinating to me. What would Barrayar be like if they'd given someone who isn't Vor control over everything for sixteen years? I know Aral in the books did his best to deVor the government as much as possible, but he was working under the limitations of being Aral Vorkosigan and having a lot of unexamined biases. And then there's the Komarr factor. They hate Aral Vorkosigan and for good reason.

But I don't know Quintillan either. I do know Aral.

And if I want to make sure Kareen survives and there's no Pretendership, I should want someone with the most support from all the factions in charge of it. That person seems to be Aral Vorkosigan.

I've hesitated too long and Ezar takes that as my agreement. Aral says, "dear Captain, are you certain?"

"No, I'm not certain," I admit. "But I'm still very new to Barrayar. I don't know who would be a better choice because I don't know any of them. I do know you. I know you'd do the best job you can, and then when the job is over, we can have a quiet peaceful retirement and let the next generation take over."

I'm playing up how old I am and how old Aral is, but that's a sentiment I believe in, and I know Ezar believes in it, too. Ezar wants Gregor Vorbarra on the metaphorical throne, and that's fine with me.

At the vote to confirm Aral as Regent, the Vorhalas sons settle down behind us again and talk rudely and loudly, like no one ever told them to shut up. I turn around and smile at them.

The older one, Evon, is in the military and presumably has other things to do, such as in the future attack me and Aral and try to kill us. I don't know if he was fully on Vordarian's side or if he was just convenient. It's possible that Vordarian will pick someone else to use. But Evon supposedly did it because Carl died.

I can't stop Carl from getting into drunken fights, except, actually, I can.

"Lord Carl," I say to him warmly, "I've heard so much about you." Technically true, because I've made sure to ask the great-granddaughters who are around his age. "I was hoping you could visit. You see, I want to buy some gifts to thank Lady Ola and Lady Anna, and I'm told you know all the best places to find the best quality for the best price." Not true, but true enough to be worth the flattery.

Alys is giving me a certain kind of look, which I ignore. Later, after I've gotten Carl to agree to visit me tomorrow so I can start dragging him off to stores whenever I feel like it and keep him around for dinner afterwards, in hopes of preventing at least some drunken duels, Alys all but yanks on my arm, except she doesn't because she's full of decorum and class.

She reminds me that Aral has a history of violent rages, and I'm touched. I really am.

"Aral won't worry about me cheating on him with a boy half my age," I say, wildly estimating Carl's age. And even if Canondelia isn't twice his age, I certainly am. "We've talked about it."

"You've talked about it," Alys says, measured and judgmental.

"Yes," I say. "And more than that, those boys are in mourning for their uncle, who was one of Aral's closest friends. I know everyone who had someone die over Escobar is probably angry at Aral for marrying me. I want to re-start my reputation with them. I don't want them to think of me as a Betan enemy. I want them to know that I'm working to become a Barrayaran."

That night, because of course it is, a Betan spy contact gets in touch with me. I suppose the calculus has just shifted for them. Before, it was a risky, stupid thing. Now, it's still a risky, stupid thing, but it's with the wife of the future Regent. They've probably done riskier, stupider things.

One of the armsmen notices it and Piotr is more suspicious of me over breakfast. There's nothing I can say to him about it, so I decide to let Aral do the talking for me, at whatever point Piotr decides to confront Aral about the spy he married.

I've been writing long letters home every week and I keep to the same schedule, letting my mother and other family know about all my adventures on a planet none of them have ever visited. Their letters back started out short and stilted -- clearly we were never a family of long letters -- but have picked up length and warmness recently, which might be natural and also might be someone on the Betan side exerting influence. The letter I write this week is about the confirmation vote and what it means to be a Regent and what powers their Emperor has, and how by virtue of my position, I won't have any real power on Barrayar. "After all, no one voted for me!" I add breezily at the end.

Carl Vorhalas comes to visit right when he promised he would, bearing a gift from his mother to me. I put him to work at once. I've been slowly accumulating a staff. I can't hire him on officially, but what I can do is make sure that Armsman Petrov's son Vasily is the one to bring me all the reports from the district on the current state of health care and summarize them for me. Carl's thirty minute visit stretches all morning, and if he looks more at Vasily than at me, I'm sure it's only because Carl is very interested in the abysmal state of health care in my district.

I'd told Vasily that my plan was to distract the son of one of Aral's key political allies from his mourning over his uncle and he said I should leave it to him. Sure enough, by the time Carl leaves, he's promised Vasily that he'll swing by the district in two days with his sister, his mother, and some of their friends, to see if there are ways the districts could work together to make improvements that would help all stakeholders. And, as a reward, Vasily would show them around himself, for as long as the Vorhalases wanted him to.

"I'm not asking you to sleep with him for the benefit of the district," I clarify to Vasily later.

He gives me an amused nod.

"I mean it. I want Carl happy and distracted, and his father still friendly with Aral even after --" dammit, what was Rulf Vorhalas's military title again, I don't remember -- "Rulf Vorhalas died. How you do it is up to you, but I'm not asking for more than you want to do."

"Leave it to me," Vasily assures me. "It will be no hardship."

I track down Armsman Petrov later to assure him that I am really not offering his son's sexual services, and don't want Vasily to feel pressured. Petrov heaves a sigh. "No, Vasily will sleep with him because he likes his men stupid and pretty, and Lord Carl is very stupid and very pretty, if you'll excuse my bluntness, my lady."

"I appreciate your bluntness," I tell him.

"He gets this from his mother," Petrov wants to be sure I know. "She caught me the same way."

Fair enough. Shove your way into sexual mores without knowing what you're doing, get too much information for your trouble.

Carl Vorhalas starts popping up at times afterwards, but I don't really care about whatever casual sex is happening in general, and certainly not in the specifics right now because Ezar up and dies and now it's a Regency.

There were things I expected but it's still unpleasant for my marriage to suddenly go long distance when we're still living in the same house. I barely see Aral, and when I do, he looks stressed.

I have no real solution to this problem, so I work on solving problems that I might be able to solve. I make nice with Piotr, who still seems suspicious of me and my motives for marrying Aral, which makes me think better of him than I did from the books. I don't want him to think I'm taking advantage of Aral for suspicious Betan reasons, and on top of that, if anyone is actually running the district right now, it's him, and I want to make changes that he may or may not like.

Okay, I want to make changes he's certainly not going to like, but I'm not starting with those. I'm starting with ones I can probably convince him to like.

I vaguely remember from the books that he didn't give a shit about educating poor people. I also remember that Canondelia thought you needed a computer to get an education. You don't, of course. What a computer does help with is if you want to standardize curriculums and testing and spread it widely and make sure people are adhering to it. I don't care about that. I'm sure the district standard curriculum -- if it exists -- probably could stand to be updated, but I'm happy to leave those updates to those who know how to design curriculums. I do not know that.

What I do know is that later books claimed that the district has a massive brain drain problem. Some of that problem can only happen with changes that canon Aral made to the feudal society as Regent, but some of it doesn't. Their best and brightest men are enlisting in the military, and the best and brightest women might be leaving for the Auxiliaries or for anything else that will hire them. I'm pretty sure people are allowed at this point to cross district lines without the Count's permission, it's just that they can't permanently move somewhere else, or just transfer oaths -- I don't really know at what point, if ever, you need to do that. Maybe it's totally fine to have your oath with VorA while living in VorB's territory. I don't know. At this point, I don't really care. Because a brain drain is something I can get Piotr to care about.

How do you stop a brain drain? Force or incentives. I'm going to focus on incentives. We're going to make the Vorkosigan District a better place to live and raise your family.

So, the district financials. Where does the money come from? Unsurprisingly, a lot of it comes from Ezar. You can't get water from a rock. The district was devastated by multiple wars right after each other. The financial officers tell me that after the Cetagandans left, several counts were paying money directly to Piotr. After the civil war, which yet again devastated the district, Piotr was getting paid by even more counts. And then about ten years ago, Ezar made a deal with Piotr, and all the money instead started coming directly from the Imperial purse.

The advantage of that is that the counts stopped hating Piotr because they had to pay him and each payment was a reminder. The disadvantage of that is that the Emperor can turn off the money spigot at any point if Piotr pisses him off enough.

With Aral as Regent, we don't have to worry about that right now or for the next sixteen years, assuming all goes well.

And as long as we don't piss off Gregor, we should be good to go for longer than that.

This means we can do some long term planning. The money is stable for now; we know how much we're going to be getting every year. We can work with it and make plans. And if I can successfully avoid the Pretendership, I'm sure everyone in the district would be better off.

I don't even tell Piotr about the brain drain problem for now. I start with infrastructure. I want good roads in the mountains. Yes, yes, yes, this is Space Future, everyone who can afford it has a Space Helicopter and doesn't need roads. Except for all the people who do. I want one good school per village, but how many teachers can I get per village? I need people to be able to move around their local areas in bad weather, especially if I start managing to get specialized schools in nearby places. Boarding schools, commuter schools... I don't know what will work. But I do know that I don't need to make all the arrangements. Parents in general want their kids to do well. If I start putting down infrastructure that helps with existing arrangements, people will improve the arrangements on their own. If the only thing stopping kids from getting tutoring in math is that the math tutor lives three villages away and it's hard to get around in winter and no one with a Space Helicopter can commit to flying the kids back and forth, if I can make it easier to get around in winter -- improve the road? Improve snow clearance from the road? Space Future Public Transit Option that can handle snow and ice and storms just fine? note to self: see how they're doing it in snowy mountain climates in other places in this Space Future, there is no need to reinvent anything here -- then those kids are getting math tutoring without me doing anything about it directly.

I don't tell Piotr about kids getting to school. I tell him that armies need roads to move.

I don't tell Piotr about making sure everyone has enough food for the winter. I tell him that we need to make sure there's enough supply to feed an army on the move.

And I don't tell Piotr about reading, writing, and arithmetic. I tell him that he needs to know who to recruit for district service, so he doesn't lose them to Imperial service instead. They're his vassals, I tell him, he should get the cream of the crop.

Because when Piotr was born, he was born to be the uncontested dictator of this specific area of land, trained to see the people there as just resources for him to use and consume. Work with him, not against him.

I'm still working with him when Gregor's birthday rolls around. My staff have gotten me an excellent dress that's much less fancy than my wedding gown, but still has the same color theme. We're doing great so far on my Lady Vorkosigan: Strange But Nonthreatening Betan branding. My hair is piled up in braids, which is the only way I can handle it. I'm sure there are wigs on this planet for women who can't grow long hair but I've been told again and again that if I can make the hair work, it will go a thousand miles toward making me look like I fit in. And so my hair is up and off my neck and not too tight, and I can mostly ignore it. There are some fancy pins in it today, but they don't poke me. I've worn worse. It's a shame that ribbons would make me look young while I want to look old. Apparently ribbons in your hair at your wedding is fine, but if you keep wearing them, you look like you're trying to be twenty. Alas.

I've been prepared with a lot of flashcards and memory games and I've got Lady Gwendolyn (one of the great-granddaughters) by my side to whisper in my ear if I forget any names. Of course, when I send her off to get some refreshments for me is when Count Vidal Vordarian charms his way over to me.

Ugh.

He's so annoying. After everything I've done to paint him as a Betan spy, and he's still being a pain.

"Vorkosigan's bisexual, you know," he tells me.

"Outing someone is violence," I respond automatically.

We stare at each other, him in bafflement, me in rising indignation. Yeah, sure, the Barney Frank rule, but come on, how often is that ever relevant? And even if it is, I don't think it's helpful. Just call it revenge and be done with it, don't try to wrap it in morality, because who exactly is going to replace the guy you ruin for being queer? You really think it's going to be an improvement? If so, you better be sure of that before you destroy him. Of course, in Vordarian's case, he wants to be the one to replace Aral after he's destroyed.

And then I remember this happened in canon. Oh, right, it's just slander.

"Betans!" Vordarian exclaims, as annoyed with me as I am with him. We have achieved an equilibrium of annoyance.

"He killed his first wife," Vordarian tries again. "So beware in your little... friendship with that Vorhalas brat."

I shrug. Yeah, that one I'm not sure about, either. When I was reading the books, I was half-sure Aral was the one who killed her. The whole circumstances as Aral described them, in text, made him sound really suspicious and guilty, and I didn't notice anything different when I was the one it was being explained to. And that it was never really resolved in the books? Yeah, I figured Aral was probably the one to kill her. This guy went into an on-page explosive jealous rage just because his wife was sitting next to his secretary, and had previously admitted to killing a man in a similar rage.

I don't think I have plot armor or anything. I just know something Vordarian doesn't know: Aral didn't kill Cordelia in the books.

Sure, he cheated on her with his secretary (a different one from the one he thought was fucking his wife, for those following along at home who didn't read that far in the series), but I don't know, it was kind of a retcon anyway. I don't know if I should hold it against Aral, other than making sure this Cordelia doesn't stand it, even though Canondelia apparently did.

"Was he ever tried in court?" I ask. "I'm still figuring out your justice system."

Vordarian growls something at me and stalks off, smile belatedly pasted on to his face to make it seem like he didn't just try to blow up Aral's marriage on the floor of a ballroom with everyone around him.

Good riddance.

Gwendolyn comes back with my space seltzer and inquires politely about what Vordarian wanted.

There are plenty of people standing close enough to me to overhear, so I just laugh a little and say he wanted to know what Beta Colony is like. "I wonder if he's planning a vacation," I gossip. "It sounded like he's done so much research already into the Orb."

There, that's what you get for outing my husband.

Kareen calls me over to her later in the party, after Gregor's been taken to bed. I hang out with her and Alys and Laura Vorinnis and a few others whose names weren't on my flashcards and it's been too long of a night. I don't think this is Kareen's inner circle, because I wouldn't be in that, but this is definitely a group of women that Kareen wants to have near her for the quieter afterparty.

Laura Vorinnis passes me a small blueberry pastry and says, "Vidal Vordarian is spreading around a rumor that you're sleeping around on the Lord Regent."

I roll my eyes. "Predictable."

She huffs, amused. "Your husband has a reputation, but you're the woman who killed Ges Vorrutyer. I don't see why he thinks you're scared of your husband."

"He probably doesn't, he just wants me to stop telling people that he's a Betan spy." It's late. I don't know how long the timeline is before Vidal Vordarian makes his move. I don't know how much longer it is between now and Carl's canonical duel, or how much longer I need to distract him so he doesn't do it, or if there's some kind of narrativium that will make someone else have a duel and have a vengeful brother. I know that Aral suspects Vordarian, but since Vordarian is a Count, Aral has to move carefully, and Aral is also distracted by the threat posed by the Cetagandans and by plenty of others. I'm just overly focused on Vordarian because I know what happened in the book, not what might have happened. I need to get Vordarian out of the way. I need to undercut him so he can't try to seize power, or convince him not to even try in the first place. Either way, I need allies.

"Is he a Betan spy?" Kareen asks.

"I don't know, the Betans don't tell me these things," I complain. "All they do is ask me to tell them things about my husband, but when I ask for intelligence in exchange, they freeze me out. I don't get it. They know that a stable Barrayar is a better trading partner, and that Vordarian wants to replace Aral." And then force Kareen to marry him and rape her until there's a replacement for Gregor and then kill Gregor, but Kareen certainly knows all of that, and all of Kareen's friends must know all that, so who needs to say it out loud? "I don't know why they'd think Vordarian would be better for them than Aral. Aral's grandmother was Betan and so am I! Surely that counts." I frown. "They think I'm too straightforward to be a good spy."

"They're right," someone mutters to my left.

Kareen darts a sharp glance at whoever that was, and takes my hand. "I'm glad you know Vordarian is a threat." Your husband doesn't seem to, is again unspoken.

"It's almost comical the way he goes around," I say. "On Beta, we'd say he's got a neon side saying ask me about my treason plans." We would not actually say that on Beta, and Vordarian has not, actually, been that obvious. Kareen spotted it because he's been trying to convince her to marry him. I know because of the books.

Kareen moves the conversation along, and as I'm leaving, one of the women whose name I've forgotten -- no, wait, it's Belinda Vorharris! She's the one with the grey streaks in her hair and the earlobes with four piercing holes -- you try navigating a brand new social sphere while being faceblind and get back to me on better ways of telling people apart, I'll wait -- offers to accompany me home. Once we get there, I call for tea and refreshments and we stay up nearly to dawn while she tells me about how she's arranged and located the teachers colleges in her district and how they fund scholarships so students can afford to go to school.

Piotr comes down at dawn and does a well-bred double take to see her there. She rises as he enters the parlor and says, effusively, "Piotr dear! I was just talking to your daughter-in-law. She has such wonderful ideas. You must be relieved that Aral picked so much better this time."

I'd thought Piotr had picked Aral's first wife for him, but from the look on Piotr's face, she's not talking about his wife. She's probably talking -- no, she's definitely talking about Ges Vorrutyer.

Damn right I come out better in any comparison to Ges Vorrutyer.

I make my excuses now that Piotr is awake to entertain our guest. Belinda doesn't seem tired at all and gleefully takes the opportunity to join Piotr for breakfast.

I settle into bed next to Aral, who is out like a log, and quickly join him.

Belinda had told me something very useful: the Vorkosigan District was near the bottom of the Imperial recruitment numbers, not because they didn't try, but because standards have been raised and the recruits often don't meet them. Piotr is embarrassed and ashamed of this, because, being an Old Vor fossil, he values himself and his district by how useful they are to Ezar and the greater Imperial project of keeping the Cetagandans the fuck away forever.

So, thus armed, I finally have a better target: Piotr's sense of Vor honor and obligation to his liege lord.

Piotr approves more funds for education and then for medical care, too, after my staff split out the numbers of failed recruits by failure to pass the written test vs. the physical test.

Carl Vorhalas and his entourage come with me when I go to Hassadar to meet with the head of district education. Carl and his friends go clubbing -- in the daytime? I guess the party doesn't have to stop if no one wants it to stop, and if someone in this district is making money feeding off of Vor partiers, I'm not going to say that's a pointless waste of time, since ergo, it appears not to be, as long as no one grabs a weapon -- and I settle down with my staff.

The head of district education is a man about my age, last name Negri. Son? Nephew? Cousin? Doesn't matter. The Negris are an old, well established, and relatively rich district family. I'm sure it's impolite to ask.

Ruslan Negri opens the meeting with several briefing materials and starts to make his case for X, Y, Z, and also A, B, C, and probably 1, 2, 3 while he's at it. Five minutes into the pitch, I lean forward and say, "is this all you want?"

He tosses in alpha, beta, and gamma, too.

I wonder how much they multiply what they actually need so that when Piotr and his flunkies say no, Negri can winnow his request down to what the district actually cannot do without. Considering how hard it was to get Piotr to agree to increased funding, I imagine they barely expect X and Y, and will settle for X.

"I'm not here for the short term, Dr. Negri," I say to him. "I want a fifteen year plan. When my husband returns from the Regency, what kind of district will he be administering? The agemates of the Emperor will be old enough to make their way in the world. How prepared will they be for the Barrayar that they meet? I'm here to invest in the future, not starve it."

He doesn't believe me. That's fine. I've got all week.

After tackling education, I meet with the heads of all the hospitals and clinics and give them the same speech. I want a comprehensive plan. They know what they need in the short term. I want them to think about the long term, because I'm not going to let Piotr yank the money away to go use it on his pet projects. It's time for my pet projects. Piotr wanted a daughter-in-law because he wants grandchildren. I haven't had the uterine replicator conversation with him; I'm not going to have it for at least a year or more, not until the district can handle the technology. By that point, Piotr should be very angry with his daughter-in-law for not providing some ready-made heirs.

But even if the district could handle the uterine replicators now, I wouldn't start a baby now. I want to wait at least a year; I am not dealing with babies along with an unstable political climate.

My letter home this week is even longer, talking about what I'm trying to do with the district and asking my mother to do some research for me. I know a huge barrier to universal education is going to be child labor. I want my mom to dig through the sources and send me some advice on how people have solved the issue in the past. I know a key element will be making it so that the families don't require the labor or the money the kids bring in from outside labor, and I know this isn't going to be quickly or easily solved, but it needs to happen. I already told Negri that I want more focus on night schools and alternate options, including adult education. I want anyone in this district to be able to choose to change their career and be able to do it, and I want it to be free so long as they agree to stay in the district and work to improve it. I know Canondelia did something similar, so at least I know it was already done, even though I don't know how she did it.

My mother's response comes three weeks later with a useful summary of the literature and an offer from a Betan group to come observe and offer advice and assistance, in exchange for using us as a case study.

Piotr's going to hate it.

However, I don't actually need to ask him.

I do mention it to Aral for the sake of marital harmony and because I know the Betans will absolutely be sending actual spies along with this. He's tired, the way he always is, lines drawn on his face. We get so little time together now and so much of it is spent briefing each other on what we're doing.

"What do you think they'll want?" Aral asks.

"Control, I imagine," I say. "I've already talked to Dr. Negri. All district instruction and assessment must be in the district languages, and an expert committee has final approval on curriculum changes. But the Betans will try to influence things anyway." I shrug. "I don't think it's a bad thing. It will add an element of galactic education, and we want to have galactic partners coming to the district in the future anyway. They'll add some rigor along with the Betan propaganda."

I put my hand on my stomach.

"And I want them there, because the sooner we have Betans around, the sooner we'll get some Betan-standard medicine, and the sooner we can have a baby. But not yet," I add quickly, not wanting to be cruel to him. "It's still too chaotic."

"I'm working on that," he tells me. It sounds like a promise, like a prayer. "Soon, dear Captain."

I slip my fingers into his and hold on.

The Betans arrive four months later, which makes me realize it's been four months and there's been no disasters. I still see Kareen every week or so, and Carl has been going in and out of the district with frankly shocking regularity. Sometimes he brings his mother, more often he brings his friends. What are they doing? I have no idea.

I ask Armsman Petrov one day, with the autumn coming in, and Alys looking like she's going to give birth any minute when I saw her at Vorhartung this morning for one of Aral's tight, tense votes on rebuilding efforts on Komarr.

Petrov tries not to laugh when he says, "Lord Carl and his associates are learning how to ski."

There are no ski resorts in the district. I'm sure plenty of people ski, but they do that because they live on the mountains and it snows. I'm also not sure where they're learning to ski, since I'd thought they were staying in Hassadar the whole time.

"Does learning to ski involve taking their clothes off or ingesting substances?" I ask Petrov.

"More the former than the latter," he says. "However, Vasily promises me that they are learning how to ski as well."

So the next time I'm in the district, I track down Vasily Petrov at a warehouse right outside of Hassadar. There are machines in there that simulate a ski environment. There are Space TV Screens on the wall that show scenic scenery. There are--

--a fully created, fully funded business plan for opening a ski resort in the Dendarii Mountains, which will employ only people who have lived on the mountain since the Cetagandans left.

"I told you to leave it to me," Vasily says, smiling.

I flip through it, amazed. Lord Carl's friends have deep pockets and a drive for new experiences. What could be newer than this? They've even bought land and gotten approvals.

"Vasily, you're wonderful," I say. "Can you keep them going? I want more outside investment. I want tourism."

"Yes, my lady," he says.

A week and a half later, Vasily comes to me and says "when my lady mentioned wanting tourism..."

"If they spend money here, I want them," I reply.

"They are reenactors," Vasily pronounces the word as if he thinks it will offend my delicate sensibilities. I imagine it would absolutely offend Piotr's delicate sensibilities. Possibly also Aral's.

"What are they reenacting?" I ask, dreading the answer if it's something recent.

"The second war between Emperor Phillipe Vorbarra and Emperor Marcus Vorbarra," Vasily says. At my uncomprehending look, he explains, "it lasted six months, four hundred and twelve years ago."

"Is this something someone is going to complain to Lord Vorkosigan about in Vorhartung?" I ask.

"No," Vasily promises.

"Then as long as they spend money and don't kill anyone, go ahead," I say.

Things don't even fall to pieces when little Ivan Vorpatril screams his way into the world. He's born in a state-of-the-art facility, all shiny and new about a stone's throw away from the Imperial Residence, and Alys has complained about it the entire time I've known her. It had been a sticking point between her and her husband. Padma had wanted the most advanced maternal care possible on the planet. Alys's mother and grandmothers had given birth in war camps and she didn't see why any fuss should be made. The fact that I tended to agree more with Padma than with Alys annoyed her. And when Ivan is born late but without complications, Alys feels even more justified in feeling like Padma had over-reacted.

I don't argue with Alys, just tell Padma that I understand that he loves his wife so much and wants her to have the best, and that I wish all Vor husbands valued their wife's life and safety as much as he does.

The winter is spent in negotiations with a children's television show about the Cetagandan War. Lady Ola's granddaughter Libby has been involved in the production for years and, apparently, the show has always wanted to film in my district and always been told absolutely not. Libby had heard through her daughter Lucille (remember her? the one who wasn't a Lady) that I was open to all kinds of investment and tourism in the district, and so had decided to try her luck.

The negotiations drag on and on, but this time, Piotr's opposition comes in very handy. I want to drive a hard bargain: at least 50% of the crew had to be from the district, they had to pay everyone whose house or land they filmed in, they had to pay all the extras, they had to use consultants from the district, the show had to be made available in the district in all district languages, if they damaged any property they would have to rebuild it to the owner's specifications not to what it had previously been, etc etc. While the district does have a small film industry, it isn't very large and has its own projects to work on, and so Captain Vortalon And His Exciting Adventures would have to commit to training and employing our people in their crew.

And what would they get in exchange? Oh, nothing much, just the ability to say that their show is approved by Count Piotr Vorkosigan himself.

We have something they want and can't get anywhere else. They have something I'm willing to spend an entire season negotiating for.

Piotr wants more than that, and what he wants surprises me: he wants Captain Vortalon's sergeant to be promoted to lieutenant. He lectures the producers at length. Piotr Vorkosigan, it transpires, was the first Vor to promote a non-Vor to officer without then having him made a Vor, and then was the first Vor to promote a non-Vor above a Vor.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that Piotr was a shocking radical in his youth and sometimes events conspire to remind me of that.

As spring unfolds, we shake hands with the production crew and they begin filming in the district three days later.

At Kareen's birthday, I look around. Vordarian is still there, but almost subdued. Aral had told me that he thinks Vordarian's attempt had fizzled out for several reasons: first, that Aral never left the capital and thus never gave him the opportunity. Second, that my whisper campaign about him being a Betan spy got enough people to look suspiciously at him that he didn't feel he had enough support to try anything. Third, that what Vordarian wanted more than power was security. If Vordarian were Emperor, he wouldn't be left to the whim of an Emperor he didn't trust, and Vordarian had had good reason not to trust Ezar. As time went by, Aral gave him more reasons to trust him, and Vordarian was willing to be convinced, since he had come to accept that his attempt could not succeed.

Belinda Vorharris's niece is in the late stages of negotiating marriage with Vordarian, which would gain him access to further resources just across his district's border. He would be busier at home, and one hopes, willing to ignore that Gregor Vorbarra is the Emperor and Aral Vorkosigan is the Lord Regent, and stop trying to undermine anything.

"How are you settling in?" Aral asks me one night, the only one to understand that, yes, I am still settling in. It's a process.

He's rubbing my shoulders and I'm as relaxed as I even get these days, which is more than I was when I first showed up on this planet, so at least here's that. "I still hate the hair," I say.

He rubs two of his fingers along the side of one of my braids. "Some do cut it shorter for summer."

"Mmm. Not as short as I'd want to," I say. He digs his thumbs into a knot on my shoulder blade and I turn into a metaphorical puddle. "I'm managing. As long as I can focus on how nice it looks and it doesn't hurt my head or neck, I can ignore that I don't like how it feels to touch it."

"I've often thought I'd like longer hair," Aral says. "Military regulations don't allow it."

"Something for retirement, then," I say. It's a long way away, but I think it's helpful to start making plans anyway. Little things, big things, all kinds of things. Once Gregor is twenty, we'll do this and that and everything. We just have to get there. But once we do, we know what we'll do.

"You would like it?" he asks.

"Yeah," I stretch my arms up over my head and start a couple stretches. "It's different when it's someone else. I'd love to run my fingers through your long hair. It's just my own that bothers me."

He's quiet, thinking that over. I've let him brush it out and braid it, but I've always considered my long hair as a thing that's attached to my head. He doesn't touch it while we've having sex since the first time he tried it and I flinched.

"Does anything else bother you?" he asks.

"Not too much," I say. Space Bras are breathable and don't cause shoulder or back pain; Barrayar tends more to a corset-type than the sports bra type I'm used to, and it's far superior in terms of comfort. And thanks to Betan medicine, I'm not ovulating or menstruating, so I'm not in pain all the time. The fashions favor full-coverage, which I'm in favor of. I've always been a big believer that my clothes should not indicate my body shape at all; spandex is the enemy. And being rich is great, because everything is made for me and I don't have to settle for something that doesn't fit well or I hate the color or the pattern.

I'm reminded, out of the blue, of a couple I'd known a long time ago. I'd gotten along better with the husband than the wife. When the husband made the decision to transition, her wife was what I'd called supportive but not thrilled. They'd been together for so long, had built a life together, had five adult children and were hoping soon for grandchildren. The decision she had to make was could she live with this change or would this spell divorce. And she decided that her life-partner was still her life-partner. But their lives were stressful and hard enough, why did her spouse have to be this way and make it all harder on them? Of course, she knew it wasn't her spouse's fault, it was society's fault that this was hard. But that didn't make it easier. So. She was supportive. Her spouse was her spouse, her life-partner was her life-partner, they'd continue the marriage, they'd stay together. But she also wished it had never happened. While I was happy for my friend, I also understood why her wife was so apprehensive. I understood worrying that this would tip them over, that my friend would lose her job, that their combined salaries which were required for the mortgage wouldn't cover it anymore, that the careful balance of their lives would become unbalanced and collapse, all because my friend had taken several years and much soul-searching and decided to be herself, rather than himself.

Fundamentally, we live in a society. Your choices affect other people, especially your nearest and dearest. And for Aral Vorkosigan -- with all that he is -- his choices affect everyone, and he's been raised with a sense of duty strong enough to know that. You never make choices in a vacuum. You just have to make the best choice of the choices in front of you. And Aral's choices these days can't be ones that deviate from the norm too much. It's too dangerous for everyone and he's the first one to know it and feel that knowledge. But he's my life-partner. I can help, however I can help.

So I ask him, "would you want to start wearing my nightgowns?" The only difference between our nightgowns is the cut of them and mine has a lot of ribbons. His doesn't. But if he wants to start experimenting, I want him to know that he can trust me.

"Yes," he says.

The next night, with him wearing one of my nightgowns, and me in one of his, he's more relaxed. I don't even think it's the joy of cross-dressing, I think it's simply a matter of trust and comfort, to know that he can be vulnerable and that I won't reject him or consider this a weakness.

"Any news from home?" he asks, glancing at the letter I'd gotten a few hours ago.

"The Betans want me to get you to open up Barrayaran space again to the Astronomical Survey," I tell him.

"It was ever open?" Aral asks, surprised.

"I guess so?" I shrug. "Since the Betans were the one who re-established contact--"

"Ah," Aral breathes.

"Yeah," I say. "They want it because finding unfound planets and then selling them is a source of revenue for the Betan government. You want it because finding another wormhole out of here is a pressing security concern. I think you should open the space to all Astronomical Surveys, but I understand if you don't feel comfortable letting the Escobarans in. You don't need to let any of the crews on planet, just pass through your space, but of course if you really want crews to come, you should let them resupply on planet."

"Do you find so many?" Aral asks. "Inhabitable planets are rare."

"Not that rare," I say. "In a few hundred years of exploration, we've managed to find more habitable planets than I can count, and a lot more wormholes than that. Wormholes are hard to find, which is why I had a job, but if it was too rare, we'd never have made it to space as a species in the first place, and if they were slightly less rare, we'd only have a handful of planets with humans on them. They estimate that in an Astronomical Survey career, you'll find three to five wormholes and countless planets. In a hundred careers, you'll find a planet that's inhabitable. It's only a question of how expensive is the terraforming and how remote all the wormhole jumping makes it."

Yeah, those numbers seemed high to me too when I had first remembered them through Canondelia's expertise. But it makes sense. This is a sci-fi setting that has no faster than light space ship travel; it relies on wormholes. Ergo, for the setting to work at all, wormholes can't be statistically rare compared to the size of space. It's just wormholes that go anywhere you want to go that's the problem. But take the Komarr to Barrayar route. No one was going to find that if they weren't very happy to keep jumping between useless wormholes to see if there's a habitable planet at the end of it. It might just be there isn't a habitable planet at the end of it yet.

Of course, 'habitable' there includes Beta Colony and Komarr, so it's a much wider category than things that resemble Earth or can be made to resemble Earth if you try hard enough.

"Our Survey only ever found Sergyar and we started it forty years ago," Aral says.

"And then we found it, what, a year later?" I ask.

"About that, yes," Aral says.

"And how many blind wormhole jumps did you do?" I ask.

"Ten, and we lost nine crews," he says.

Nine failed jumps. "That's either bad luck or incompetence," I say, because marriage means you can tell someone when their planet's Astronomical Survey is a shame to the profession. "Who trained them?"

"I don't know," Aral says wryly. "Would you like the job?"

"No, I'm too busy with the one I have," I say. I suspect the Barrayaran opinion on implants is not helping their pilot selection pool at all. "But I can tell Beta to send me some names and I can go through them to find people I'd trust. Or if you don't want to put all your eggs in the Betan basket, you can open it up to anyone you'd like. The Terran-Martian Astronomical Survey loves doing training. It's far, though, and they require one year at home for every two years in space."

"I'll talk to Illyan," Aral says.

I've met the Betan Ambassador a few times, and I see him again the following week at a ball held by Prime Minister Vortala. We exchange greetings and I mention that Barrayar is considering allowing in the Betan Astronomical Survey, because it's always nice to apply external pressure to Illyan. I know Canondelia got along with Illyan, but I have too many problems with his job for that. Yes, yes, I'm married to Aral "The Butcher" Vorkosigan, I have plenty of qualms about that, too, but Lady Vorkosigan is a job title and it lets me do a lot of good and help others do good, too. I also recognize the amount of worldbuilding that slammed down hard on Aral and shaped him as a person and how, despite all he's been through, he's trying to craft a Barrayar that's better, not one that's worse. He won't always succeed, but I know he's trying. One man can't change a system alone, but a man in the position of Regent can lead a change, and that's what he's doing his best to do.

Okay, he did probably kill his wife. Worldbuilding didn't make him do that. And plenty of other things, too. But my point is, I understand the forces that crafted Aral. Illyan's just doing this because it's his job. He could get another one.

I dance with the Betan Ambassador and then with a few more people. I love dancing. It's great not to be out of breath all the time and tired. And this is the kind of dancing where you get taught exactly what to do and then do it, so as long as you can follow directions, you can dance. Absolutely my kind of thing.

Vortala's wife lives in the district and his daughter and daughter-in-law are his hostesses. I haven't met his wife yet; everyone tells me they've been living apart for their entire marriage. The first ten years of their marriage had events that forced them to live apart and they found out that they preferred it that way. They send letters back and forth and meet in person maybe three times a month, I'm told. Hey, whatever works. Lady Myra Vortala is his daughter-in-law, Lady Magda Vortala -- married a cousin, husband works as an economist -- is his daughter, and I made a mnemonic so I'd remember it, because sometimes that's what you have to do.

Lady Myra Vortala comes over to me and, after the usual pleasantries, asks me if I've served as a baba before.

I haven't.

She tells me her son Philip would like me to be a baba for him.

"Does he want this woman to marry him?' I ask incredulously.

"Yes," she says, long-suffering. "But he thinks that if you're the baba, Jeanette will believe that he has been listening to her."

I square my shoulders. "All right. I'll talk to your son."

Her son is earnest and I'd guess late 20s. He and Jeanette Vortyler had agreed to marry when they turned thirty if they haven't found anyone else yet. Thirty is looming, but he wants her to know that he wants to marry her because he wants to marry her, not because they agreed years ago.

Obviously, Jeanette Vortyler is here tonight. Might as well do this.

"I've been asked to play baba," I say to Jeanette Vortyler. "Are you interested in hearing about it?"

"No, I'm already engaged," she tells me. She isn't even feigning any regret, she's too obviously excited to be talking to The Captain Naismith Of Captain Naismith Fame Did I Mention Captain Naismith.

So we talk about Captain Naismith stuff for a while before I steer her back with a gentle, "may I ask who is the lucky fiance?"

"We're keeping it quiet for now," she says.

This could mean one of two things. Okay, it could mean one of many things. But I was not born yesterday and I'm very familiar with women claiming to have other romantic entanglements in order to brush off unwanted advances.

"Philip Vortala sent me," I say. "He says he's very serious about you and loves you and wants to marry you and partner with you in all your endeavors, including your field work on --" drat, I've forgotten the moon. Right! "--on Phoebe 11."

"Oh," she says quietly. "He really said that?"

"Yes," I tell her. "That man wants to marry you and hopes you want to marry him, too. If I tell him no, he'll forget about your marriage agreement and not bother you again. If I tell him yes, he's prepared to start wedding planning whenever you'd like."

"Oh," she says again. She blinks and looks around the room, spotting Philip Vortala, who is not being smooth about anxiously watching us. She smiles. "You can tell him yes, then. If you will, please, Captain Naismith."

Romantic, but seems a lot of fuss to propose to someone you were already going to marry. Still, I can see the appeal of being clear, and of creating a specific social role for when you want to invite an elderly woman in to be a partner in your journey toward marriage. The scope is clear and demarcated. If you're the baba, they've told you what they want your help with. If you're not the baba, it's none of your damn business.

Lady Myra thanks me, as does Lady Magda, and thankfully no one else asks me to be a baba again that night.

As the preparations for Midsummer start to pick up, I gain an unexpected ally in my quest for uterine replicators. I didn't expect anyone to go for it yet; I have vague recollections from canon that full acceptance took a long time. But then Lady Vorhalas leans in toward me while Countess Vorhalas busily putters around my Vorkosigan House sitting room and makes sure we're not disturbed. It had taken Lord and Lady Vorhalas three years of striving to get their first, and there is still no hope of their second yet. They have exhausted all fertility options on Barrayar, and discovered that the galaxy had nothing to offer them in that vein, because everyone else just uses uterine replicators when faced with this sort of problem.

"It seems possible to do it discreetly," Lady Vorhalas says. "No one needs to know."

"Lord Vorhalas's participation and consent--" I start, because what the fuck, of course some people need to know.

She waves her elegant hand at me. "Evon can keep his mouth shut, he's hardly Carl. No, Evon and my father-in-law have come to see reason. But we must be able to keep it quiet."

Lady Vorhalas's figure, combined with current fashions, makes me think she wouldn't show a pregnancy until the fifth month or even the sixth; there's been a baby boom post-Escobar and maternity wear is in. It wouldn't be impossible for her to fake a pregnancy and "give birth" quietly in the district.

"I don't have the uterine replicators on planet yet, nor the techs to run them," I tell her. "We're on track for next year, if all goes well, but if it doesn't, I don't have a timeline I can promise you."

"Is the biggest problem money or the Count?" Countess Vorhalas asks from five feet away, rearranging flowers in a vase, in the tone of someone who thinks neither will pose any difficulty once she decides it won't be.

"Worse, it's space and resources," I reply. "There's a strong cultural stigma against genetic manipulation that the uterine replicators come too close to for me to rely on anyone from the district being actively involved without a lot of heavy vetting, so in a pinch, I might need to recruit only galactics, and I need a place to put it where it won't be conspicuous."

"How much care does a uterine replicator require?" the Countess asks.

"Not much once you get it started, but it does need maintenance and monitoring, so you can't just get it started on Komarr and bring it back here and assume all will go fine," I say.

"If you provide the Betans, we'll provide everything else," the Countess says with finality, and so I write my weekly letter home asking my mother to round up some Betans who want to be paid very very very very well to set up a uterine replicator facility in a city I haven't even visited yet.

This is a lightbulb moment for me -- note to future historians whose only record of this time is this log: there was no physical lightbulb, this is a reference to comedic storytelling conventions where a lightbulb would be shown over a character's head to indicate they had a new idea; people of this time had neither fish in their ears nor lightbulbs hanging over their heads except, I suppose, in light fixtures -- because I've never cared about getting credit for anything. In a choice between something happening but someone else getting the credit, or it not happening but I get the credit for the idea, I'd always rather the thing happened and someone else got to brag about it. It's never mattered to me.

And here on Barrayar, it's actually good if it's not all credited to me! Aral and Piotr have lots of enemies who'd love to use what I'm doing to hurt them, and I'm a suspicious Betan who they think killed Ges Vorrutyer. It's better if I don't get credit for things I really want to have happen.

This unlocks a lot of potential.

Because it's so much better if the uterine replicator I put any future children in isn't in the district and can't be hurt by someone, let's call him Piotr Vorkosigan, who might not like it. Plus, I'm really not sure if creating a uterine replicator facility in Hassadar is the best use of resources. Hassadar needs so much more first. I've prioritized the uterine replicators for personal reasons, but there are plenty of things the district needs that aren't uterine replicators.

I'm very cheerful when I go into the meeting with the nutrition council I've pulled together, which is good, because the nutrition council is extremely depressing. They've gone all over the district and talked to people and done some lab tests and now they can tell me all about all the many nutritional deficiencies and all the problems they cause.

How do we fix this? Money, mostly.

Oh, and better access to resources, including food quality. And also, again, I cannot stress this enough, everyone magically healing from all the trauma that the Cetagandans gave them, because having a Betan say, please take this medicine, it's good for you, is an uphill climb. It's so much better that this message is coming from other people, and not me.

In fact, I slam an edited version of it down in front of Piotr, and when he starts on his summer district tour, he's telling everyone to get their goddamn vitamins and minerals and fruit and vegetables and meat and iron supplements and B12 and calcium and all the space vitamins you can think of.

Because fundamentally Piotr sees the poor people of his district as future army recruits, and he wants his future army recruits healthy, dammit.

But didn't he already know about this problem? Yes. Yes, he did. But I edited that report with a very blunt hand. He hadn't seen the scale of the problem, not all the far-reaching consequences, laid out so bare in front of him, or if he had, he'd never bothered to pay attention to it. And then the report told him: malnutrition is a solved problem. You just have to implement the solution.

So with Piotr shouting at his vassals and willing to agree, begrudgingly, that it's better if people aren't on the edge of starvation, I get a lot done that summer.

Olga Klemova, the lead nutritionist on the council, shakes my hand.

We've gotten friendly over the last eight months or so. Her sister performs in a dance company called the Hassadar Non-Balletics. Ever since I came to Barrayar, I've been going to some kind of arts performance at least twice a week and I take along anyone I'm meeting with who wants to come. I've seen some shows more than ten times. I've never had this kind of opportunity before, I'd never even been to a concert. But now I go to the symphony with Aral when he can make it, without him when he can't, and I've been to ballets and plays and dance performances and poetry readings and private music evenings and gallery shows.

Olga was the one who introduced me to HNB and I love them. They have about thirty dancers in the company and they all look different, so I can always tell who is who. They also use that bodily diversity to great effect in their dances, really showing off what you can do with it. Their dance choreography highlights the various shapes you can make with just your arms and legs, so having fifteen dancers standing in a line and doing the same move is mesmerizing. Sometimes they wear floaty costumes, sometimes skin-tight, it all depends on the visual display they want to make. And going all the time like I do, I get to focus on different aspects every time. It's wonderful. I've accidentally become their main patron but they deserve it.

During intermission, Olga and I talk about the performance. She also has more books to recommend to me. I've been reading every book anyone recommends to me since I've moved here. I'm not exactly Grand Admiral Thrawn -- fictional character from the Star Wars franchise, not a real person in this or any world -- but you can learn a lot about a culture by its literature, and I still have a lot to learn about Barrayar.

As summer begins to slip into fall, my staff inform me of two things: one, that it's nearly Emperor Gregor's sixth birthday and thus I need a dress for it and a new fall wardrobe, and two, horrifyingly, Lady Ola and Lady Anne both agree that it's time I actually hosted something myself.

Now, have I overly relied on them to do a major aspect of the job of Lady Vorkosigan? Yes. However, this job isn't really Lady Vorkosigan's, it's Countess Vorkosigan's, and half the Countesses I've met delegate it to someone else, because they're too busy or they don't like it or they're Countess Vorhovis, who only hosts for two hundred or more, and anything less is her apprentice's, I'm sorry, I mean her granddaughter's job.

Okay, yes, sure, fine, it's part of Lady Vorkosigan's job to do this for Lord Vorkosigan, but he doesn't have an independent household and isn't here for dinner most nights anyway. In fact, when I first sit down with Lady Ola and Lady Anne to start planning, we all agree that we won't actually expect Aral to show up. He'll be invited, of course, and we'll plan for him in the seating chart because that's only polite and let's not tempt Murphy Of The Law Fame here, but when he has a last-minute cancellation because of Being The Regent, then Lady Beatrice from my staff will slip away from the table as well, so that the numbers stay even.

Hosting is half management, half facilitation, and no, the halves aren't equal. But if you are careful in your management before the event, the facilitation needs are much less.

And since Lady Vorkosigan is a management position, all I really need to do in advance is manage. The household staff know how to actually accomplish everything, I just need to do the top-level leadership work. Who to invite, but not how to invite them or writing the invitations. What food to serve, but not buying the ingredients or cooking the meal or serving it. Where everyone should sit, but not cleaning the room or setting the table or washing any dishes.

And then once all the guests have arrived, facilitate the room to make sure everyone has a good time and/or the purpose of the dinner party is accomplished. Always make sure that people you get along with outnumber the people you don't get along with by at least two to one, you can't let the room turn against you.

The purpose of this dinner party is to socialize with friends and also strengthen social ties. In other words, it's basically just a party with friends. They're starting me off on easy mode.

The invitation list is pretty simple. I'd wanted to invite Princess Kareen, but was voted down on the logic of: you really don't want to deal with the security nightmare of ever hosting the Princess. The Princess hosts you. It's not an etiquette rule, it's common sense.

Alrighty-then.

So it's twenty people, hosting in the small dining room. Lady Alys kisses my cheek and hands young lord Ivan over to me to coo over. Ivan is then whisked away by his nanny, to eat dinner in the nursery upstairs and then fall asleep in the crib. I'd thought the nursery had been set up as a pointed rebuke from Piotr, but no, it turns out that it's common practice to have a nursery available for guests to use for their children. Naturally, some guests do leave their kids at home, but plenty more think that Vorrish socializing must begin as early as possible.

And then it's a parade of the usual suspects. Oh, and Olga Klemova and Ruslan Negri and his wife Julia. It has not escaped me that Piotr primarily associates with his non-Vor vassals in the district, rather than bringing them to Vorbarr Sultana. I've been trying to change this status quo. Piotr is perfectly happy to have military men without the syllable at his table, but he complained at loud volume when I suggested having Dr. Negri for dinner at the same time as Padma Vorpatril.

I don't care about loud complaining, and Piotr knows how to behave as a host in his own house.

The dinner goes well, enough to be more ambitious with the second one. I was planning to have this one in the district, but then Astrid's ship comes in early, and I want to really impress her.

Astrid Bergstrom is one of my old Survey friends, who Canondelia last talked to about ten years ago. When Astrid left the Survey, she joined a group working on Space City Public Transit. I hadn't known that, and I doubt Canondelia did either, but my mother had mentioned it in a letter, so I'd gotten in touch.

Because it's time. It's time to tackle Hassadar's public transit system. And using connections and corruption is how we've decided to do it.

For my entire life as a user of public transit, the impression it gave me was that getting to where I needed to go was my problem, not theirs. Everyone who has ever relied on public transit has horror stories -- waiting for two hours on weekends for a train because fuck you, watching bus after bus go by without stopping because fuck you, having routes change or be eliminated because fuck you, paratransit? para fuck you is more like it -- and even without the horror stories, the overall sense is the same. Fuck you.

And taxis? Maybe you can get one there, but good luck getting one back. I once couldn't get a taxi from a large hospital in the far exurbs, and had to pay out my nose for a car service. Light rail? Not within two miles and certainly not walkable to get there. Buses? Not where I was going. Shuttles? Only for people who weren't me.

You wanna get around? Fuck you.

But now I'm on the other side of it and, as someone trying to get the most out of a city, I need public transit! I need people to be able to get around! If someone can't get to their job or back home reliably, that's a problem for me! If restaurants and entertainment centers can't get customers, that's a problem for me! If people can't get around, then the city has failed!

Thankfully, Hassadar is a planned city. It's hilly, but has a grid, with the breaks in the grid only for things like rivers and very large factories; Piotr, I'm told, took great exception when someone tried to plan a neighborhood that was fifteen degrees off the grid and wanted only one road to connect back to the main roads. And we're in Space Future: the light rail can fly. Express trains can have their own elevation. Live in the southwest of the city and need to commute to the northeast? Don't worry, there's an express for that. Or, well, there will be.

And parking! Fuck parking, too, honestly. For every job I never applied to because I couldn't get there by transit, there's a place I didn't go to because I wouldn't be able to park. Lightflyers are not smaller than cars. The Vorkosigan groundcars are enormous. And most people in Hassadar don't have either one of them.

We need transit! I need transit!

And transit is going to be expensive because, since I do, as discussed, need people to be able to get around, all transit rides will be free. And I'm not fucking around with stop locations, either. We're in space. We can stack things. The vertical is our friend. Every street will be on transit and every corner will let you on and off.

The mystery every city I've lived in has tried to answer with transit is where are people coming from and where are they going to. So routes are to and from, and meander around, and you have to stare at maps, and many routes are duplicates. So you'll be at one stop and see 10 buses go by, but none of them are ones you can take. Or maybe 5 of them are ones you can take, because for half the route, all those buses overlap.

We have a grid. We're not doing that. Every street is a line. Journeys should never take more than two trains. You go east and west. You go north and south. Find where you are, find your destination, and the kiosk will tell you which way to ride the train, when to get off, and which way to go.

Connections? Don't worry about it. Every train comes at least every 5 minutes. We'll scale up once we have ridership data and know when we need to add trains.

The trains run constantly, we don't shut down overnight, because I need people to be able to get around at night, too. And every time a train reaches the end of the line, it will be thoroughly cleaned before being sent out again.

And yes, the riders won't pay.

So how are we going to pay for this? The Barrayaran military is paying for all routes that go near their garrison or office buildings, and a percentage of the rest, because all routes depend on each other. And Astrid is doing the rest, because all that ridership data is going to her.

It won't be by person. They'll know how many people are getting on and off at every stop, every minute of every day. Her team will be allowed to do in person observations of who gets on and off at what stops. They can use this data for whatever they want; Astrid was very eager and very frank in our communication. Most places have data privacy laws. Most places won't let them get any data that will be used to develop routes somewhere else. Most places do not want a stranger trying to optimize them. Most places are not as desperate as I am.

That will cover most of it. The rest will be advertisements. I didn't want to allow ads but no one has come up with another way to bridge the budget gap. However, all advertising will be local. If you have a restaurant on Main St, you can advertise for it on the east and west Main St lines, and on all the north and south lines within five miles. Upcoming performance at the neighborhood performance center? Ten miles. Event at the in-progress downtown convention center? No restriction. I remember the annoyance of find out about a sports or entertainment event within my interest, budget, and schedule, but only a week after it happened, because no one did any local advertising.

We'll also allow TV and movie filming on them, and not require the background extras to be paid. I've sold my soul for public transit.

And after this is set up, I'm going to have to sell my soul all over again for inter-city transit. I won't get every five minutes, trains running empty as needed, but I'm aiming for 5 or 6 times a day. And they'll be trustworthy and reliable, none of this Greyhound asshole behavior where they'll happily leave you stranded at a rest stop in the middle of the night with only the contents of your pockets. People are going to be able to get around my district, by god!

But that's for the future. Right now I'm wowing Astrid Bergstrom and her partners with all the Vor glittering tinsel I can possibly accumulate. We even have the fireplace going, which I normally despise because of a deep-set instinct that I'm going to have a coughing fit every few minutes because of it.

I do not have a coughing fit every few minutes because of it, because Canondelia never did. The future is amazing.

"I hate your governmental structure," Astrid says to me while we're hanging out in the sitting room before it's time to go in to dinner, "but that said, I'm so excited to be dealing with a system where the rich people don't get to opt out of having public transit stops in front of their houses."

"Is that common?" I ask, thinking about Beta Colony, which is not exactly swimming in privately-owned space cars, or, at least, wasn't in the places I was hanging around for the short period of time I spent on Beta Colony. I just took the tube everywhere.

"Incredibly common," Astrid says. "And you're not deliberately leaving out the poorest neighborhoods. I could kiss you, Cordelia."

"It would be pointless to leave out the people least able to afford private long-distance transportation," I say.

I'd toured the poor parts of Hassadar a couple weeks after marrying Aral, and immediately made two assumptions. The first was that there was something toxic used in the building materials. The second was that the shitty landlord was Piotr. Both assumptions proved correct. And then I'd gotten lucky: there actually was an Imperial space asbestos abatement program. The downside of it was that it was very limited in how much you could claim from it per year. But that ended up being fine, because we can only go so fast. We have to host all the renters in hotels while their homes are being demolished and rebuilt, and before that, we have to work with them on what kinds of updates and upgrades they'd like to their existing homes. Each apartment building is being torn down and rebuilt better, and each unit is being customized. I'm also working on a plan to allow long-term renters to buy their homes, but that's an uphill slog with the end nowhere in sight. But at least the Vorkosigans are being less of a slum lord about it.

We're getting more green space. We're working on stormwater. Each new building is able to collect rainwater and melt snow, as part of a larger goal toward the entire city being able to collect and clean water.

And in these plans, only a few people had raised the question of creating more parking spaces. They were a lot more concerned with making sure the sewers actually worked. There were some groundcars, but the most popular form of transport I'd seen were varieties of bicycle, some human powered, some motorized. There had also been scooters, similarly customized, and various types of carts, wheelbarrows, and sleds. All of those were kept inside the buildings, often in a communal room, but sometimes in staircases or hallways. Anything small than a bicycle, such as a skateboard, I was told was considered communal property.

I'd somehow expected horses or mules or donkeys. I was told they couldn't afford to feed them or stable them in the city. There were dogs, some of which could pull carts and sleds, but mostly they used house animals for vermin control.

Astrid tsks at me fondly. "This is why I love you, Cordelia. You believe the best in everyone."

I don't believe the best in everyone and Canondelia also didn't, but I also know how to not contradict someone who is complimenting me. "How soon do you think we can get enough ridership data to start optimizing train car sizes?" I really don't know how many people, say, live on one edge of the city and want to take an express to the other side. We're going to have to experiment and see what kind of queues we end up having. This is also why a train every five minutes is mandatory. We can't let the line build up too much. If a train is full, then there damn well better be an empty train five minutes behind it. We're going to track the counts of how many people come on and off to get an idea of utilization of each stop, and if we have a lot of trains in a row with a lot of people getting on each one, then we have a line that's too long.

"It's going to be an ongoing process," Astrid cautions me, both because it's true and because she doesn't want to get her access to data restricted once this project doesn't need her funding anymore. "But we should have preliminary ideas after three months. But from the charts you gave me, I'd expect seasonal affects. You probably have a lot of people walking or using less durable transport in the summer months, who'll rely on public transit when the weather gets bad."

"It's going to be a phased roll-out anyway," I say, because Hassadar does have existing public transit. It's just not good enough.

The rest of the guests arrive -- Aral doesn't, but he hadn't made it to the first party either. We go in for dinner, and Piotr, to my utter shock, turns on the charm. Astrid allows herself to be charmed, and even gets Piotr to tell her the story of the in-progress convention center, which he'd begun more than two decades ago when he'd realized he didn't have a grand enough ballroom in the district anymore to marry Aral off in style to his first wife (fate left unmentioned at the dinner table). And so the building project had begun, and so thus is has continued, and it's actually getting pretty close to finishing. I haven't had anything to do with the convention center configuration myself, because I don't care, but I have put my hand in on the hotel room options. So you have one-bedrooms and studios, but also two and three-bedroom options and even a couple four-bedroom large suites, with multiple bathrooms, and every room can control the temperature in the room and open the windows.

No one on Barrayar had understood why I cared so much that the windows would open. They chalked it up to some Betan nonsense, I imagine. None of them have stayed in hotels with no air circulation, where it gets so stuffy at night you can't sleep, and you can't open the windows, and the ceiling fan is broken, and you didn't actually bring a fan with you in your luggage.

I don't miss hotels.

After dinner, we settle into the parlor with drinks and light refreshments and Astrid catches me up on her personal life, and I catch her up on mine. I apologize for Aral not being here, because it's the polite thing to do, and Astrid pretends that she wasn't given a list of things to ask high-level Barrayaran politicians about. She also asks me how marriage is going, and not in the 'you do know your husband has a history of murderous rages, right? OK just checking' thing that, to date, twenty-six different people have come up to me in private to warn me about.

Astrid asks me, nicely, how Barrayar is handling it, that I keep bringing Betans in on projects.

I laugh a little. "Do you remember those romance novels that Raanan used to read between wormholes?"

She does. I can see her putting it together. "Don't tell me. You bring the goodwill and resources of Beta Colony as your dowry?"

"Pretty much," I say. "They expect brides to bring her family's resources into a marriage. I'm just bringing a planet."

"Amazing," she says. "I'm telling Raanan as soon as I get home," and then we get into swapping stories about people we spent years in a tiny spaceship with, and before I know it, Aral actually does get home, and so Astrid gets to make whatever assessment of him she's been hanging around to do, before I show her up to the guest room for tonight. We're going into the district tomorrow afternoon and this is going to be great. It has to be.

I see Astrid and her team here and there over the next few months, but I'm caught up in budget talks and every kind of maintenance planning and budget allocation that can possibly be done for one of the Vorkosigan official residences, because part of being Lady Vorkosigan is dealing with that, too. I have a staff for all of this, but I have to have at least some idea of what the staff are doing, or else there's no point in them telling me anything.

Two weeks after Winterfair, I'm sitting in the gallery at Vorhartung Castle with some members of my staff, observing a vote, when Lord Carl approaches as if to sit in the seats near me. I pull him over at once. I haven't seen him in months and he looks well and not currently drunk, unlike the last few times I've seen him at parties. He's dressed as flamboyantly -- and as sharply -- as ever, and he looks, dare to say it, happy and fulfilled and all that. Amazing.

"Tell me about this ski resort," I say to him. "I haven't kept up on the news. Is it open?"

"Oh, yes, yes, we've been open for ages," he says. "Nearly breaking even!" Which means not breaking even, but no one expected it to break even for at least three years, if ever. This is the sort of expensive lark funded by trust fund kids with too much money and too much taste for adventure, a description that fits Lord Carl and all his friends.

Lord Carl talks my ear off happily about the ski resort. During the off-season, they'd used it to host various sports that take place on mountains, all of which I mentally classify as 'adventure sports' even if that's not what adventure sports actually means, I don't have the internet to go check, it's not like I was ever into it. Around Midsummer, he tells me, he did what sounds to me like the space version of base jumping with his nearest and dearest and had the time of his life. He talks about it for at least ten minutes. Lady Gabrielle looks like she's thinking fondly of covering his mouth with her hand to get him to shut up.

I don't do that. Instead, I encourage him to continue. Watching what goes on at Vorhartung is at times boring and at times infuriating and also at times both. I have to be here for this, but I'd rather not be.

He's in the middle of inviting me to go hang-gliding with him -- "thrilling!" -- when Lady Gabrielle does, actually, give in to her deep hatred of Lord Carl and his antics and says to him, "and how many ladies are part of your schemes?"

Lord Carl immediately and happily switches to a new target for his sales pitch that isn't much of a sales pitch. "My lady! Are you interested in our ladies only flying expeditions?"

Lady Gabrielle absolutely isn't. Unfortunately, Lord Carl doesn't really care. I check the clock on the wall behind me using reflections off the glass as Lord Carl tries to tell Lady Gabrielle about all the women's only events and sporting opportunities and how all the organizers understand that sometimes a woman wants a woman's touch -- I cough in shock, but he seems to mean that earnestly and with no sexual innuendo whatsoever, but Lady Gabrielle's eyebrows are raised to the roof -- and that everything they offer has mixed, men's only, and women's only options.

"Really?" I ask in surprise, not having expected that in the slightest, especially not from Lord Carl.

"Women are half the market!" he tells me, aghast. "We'd be missing out on so much money! And customers," he adds quickly, "and, uh, publicity." And then he swallows and obviously tries to dredge up more PR that someone involved in this resort had drilled him on at length. "And it would be rude," he finishes, off script. "Why, my sister would punch me in the nose if I left her out!"

"So if I came by with my friends," Lady Gabrielle asks in a low, threatening tone, that from the look on Lord Carl's face is surprisingly turning him on, "and we wanted to go rock climbing, no one would be looking up our skirts?"

"No!" Lord Carl insists, his voice a little high and his face flushed. "No one would do that!"

"And if we wanted to go gliding," Lady Gabrielle asks, still like she's got her Vorfemme knife in her dominant hand, which she doesn't, I check, "no one would be making off-color remarks about being under a woman?"

"No!" Lord Carl insists, louder.

"And if we wanted to go skiing," Lady Gabrielle asks, and I have to cover my mouth so I don't start laughing, "no one will say anything about fast women?"

"Absolutely not!" Lord Carl says, doing his best impression of someone who would never think such a thing. It's possible he wouldn't.

"Good," Lady Gabrielle says and sits back. Lord Carl deflates like a balloon. "I'll let my sister know."

"Your-- sister?" Lord Carl asks, wheezing.

"Lady Alys Vorpatril," Lady Gabrielle says, and Lord Carl has a coughing fit.

"No! No! Everything is suitable! There won't be any problems! Lady Vorpatril is welcome! And her husband, too! Or without her husband!" He adds, because Lady Gabrielle started giving him a look again.

Later, Lady Gabrielle says to me, in all honesty, "Lady Alys enjoys dangerous things."

And I have to nod, remembering the books. "Someone has to. It might as well be her."

It would be fantastic if we could make entertainment experiences the main industry of the Dendarii Mountains. There are some industries there that make a profit, but none are scalable. If we can sell experiences to people instead of goat cheese, then there's a much higher limit on what we can do, so long as we make sure all the money pours right back into the Mountains rather than vanishing into someone else's budget. There's a lot of land in the Mountains that could be used for this, we just have to make sure no one's getting cheated or exploited. But if we could manage that, then not even the sky's the limit, if what Lord Carl's telling me is true about people jumping out of perfectly good lightflyers.

I make sure to get the names of the women involved in this from Lord Carl so I can add them to my list of well-connected Vor willing to throw money at things, and then my staff arranges for me to meet with them individually over the next few weeks.

There are many kinds of Vor, I've been learning. The first kind is the kind we all know from the books: Vor military men. Those are Aral's sort, they're generally not useful to me. The next group are the Vor men and women who are busy doing other things, such as working in the district or having a job or attending university or what have you. They're also often not useful to me personally, on the district level, but they're good company.

And then there are the rest. Lady Alys disparagingly refers to them as Town Clowns (men) and Town Gowns (women). But I've found another distinction: the ones that want to be the Vor men and women busy doing other things, but that's not an option for them. The two main subtypes are 1) the ones who would happily be running things in their district, but their specific family configuration means that option was never available to them, and 2) the ones who would be running things in their district, except that job is no longer being assigned based on nepotism, so someone else is doing it. Those two groups -- mostly women, because the men in those groups primarily join the military and then, after military service, are back in the too busy group -- are well-connected, even if they aren't rich, and they are often eager to have opportunities to put their connections and skills to good use, even for someone else's district.

I love these Vor. They're the best. There are so many people from my district who have great ideas, and whose ideas score well on the matrix that my staff and I use to prioritize projects, but they don't score high enough for us to be able to find room in the budget for them. But just because Lady Vorkosigan can't find resources for them herself doesn't mean that Lady Vorkosigan can't find resources that can provide those resources! And these Vor women (mostly women) get invited to mixers with the district folks and they get to talking, and what do you know, suddenly more projects get off the ground. It's a win-win-win-win-win-win. And a few more wins besides that.

And then there are the Clowns and Gowns. I use them mostly for money. The ones who are eager to be used for other district work often have more connections than money; the ones who hang around Lord Carl's crew often have both, but not the patience to use their connections for someone else's benefit. The money, though? As long as someone on my staff can spin it so that the funder gets something they want out of the deal, we usually walk away with the Barrayaran equivalent of a nice big check.

I spend a fair portion of my time selling bragging rights, but it turns out bragging rights are a sought-after commodity in the Clown & Gown milieu.

And then there's the rich non-Vor of Vorbarr Sultana, but their stratification is less straight-forward than the Vor that I deal with. The Vor are easy: they aren't doing what their culture says they're meant to be doing. They're self-conscious about it and eager to fill that gap.

Take Lord Carl, for instance. His culture says he should be in the military, which he isn't. But consider the rest of him. Hell, consider the canon version of him. All we know from canon is that he drinks and gets into duels. But that's what he's supposed to be doing! The Vor men are all supposed to drink plenty of alcohol. And as for duels? It wouldn't have needed to be outlawed if no one did them. No, Lord Carl was the typical, the expected, Vor in all ways, except for the military aspect.

And what did he do that was so different from what Aral did? Nothing, and Aral was arguably worse. Aral's duels were premeditated murder, and he got away with them because his father put Ezar on the throne. Carl didn't get away with it, because his father didn't.

I think I remember that canon Aral made a comment about private law and trying to get away from it, but that really wasn't the case with Lord Carl. Aral made the decision to execute him based on reading the police report and thinking about it for a couple of hours. Was that the right choice? Was that justice? I don't know what all the lawyers do in canon, since they didn't help Carl, and they weren't there when Miles got his treason trial. But Miles did get that trial, and it went on long enough for him to travel back for it, and travel across the galaxy isn't instantaneous. Miles was across the galaxy when he was told about the trial, and made it back before he was sentenced in absentia. Meanwhile, Carl didn't get a chance to plead a lighter sentence, because he was executed.

But peel back Lord Carl's antics and all you see is Aral Vorkosigan, but with a less powerful father. In canon, Lord Carl never was able to live down a drunken bit of murder. Aral got busted down to Captain after a court-martial and that was the sum total of every consequence he ever experience in his life for killing someone.

And so, no, Lord Carl is not a bad example of a Vor. However, his culture doesn't see that, because he does everything a Vor man should do except serve in the military, and so it's not enough.

This makes it really easy to deal with Lord Carl. I know what he wants, and it's to not be insulted and belittled for not being the kind of man who can survive being in the military. It's to be valued and respected for what he can do. And I've given him an outlet and I have never denigrated him or his friend group. This already makes me more trusted than every other woman his mom is friendly with, because they're all Vor women who are married to Vor men who served in the military, and who believe that's the only legitimate path to take in life.

And this makes Lord Carl, and everyone like him, really easy pickings for me, because I want them for their money and connections and am happy to say nice things to them to get it.

If the Vor don't like that, they could try being nicer to people who don't fit into the prescribed cultural boxes.

This isn't to say that I don't go up to the rich non-Vor and try to get them involved, because I do, but it's a lot harder for me to read them and figure out how to give them what they want while they give me what I want. The Vor are a hereditary military aristocracy, so for a man to reject the military aspect is to reject a core part of what the Vor tell themselves that they are: honorable and officers. Of course, that whole honor thing is, uh. Yeah. I'm sure someone out there is perfectly honorable but I also know that I don't know what that means in practice and wouldn't like it if someone explained it to me. I just know that I don't think Lord Carl is a failure, but everyone else does, and that makes him and his cohort ideal for being manipulated.

That night, Aral and I attend the wedding of Frederick Eastmont and Leanne Vorhovis. This is great for several reasons: first, I haven't forgotten that I want Aral to have a support system and friends, and Admiral Eastmont is a friend of Aral's going way back. Second, Admiral Eastmont's daughters from his first marriage are bright young university students who are thinking about what to do after graduation, and my staff always needs people like that, especially ones who can help me understand a cultural group that I don't know much about.

Third, I love weddings. I really, really love weddings. And now I'm in a position where everyone invites me to their wedding, because they really want Aral there, and some of them really want me there, too. My staff organizes all the invitations and marks the ones where it's politically necessary or socially responsible for me to attend, and the ones where it would cause more problems than it would solve if I attended, and then the rest of them are based on if I have time to go to them.

And I do go to them, more often than not without Aral, because he's too busy right now. When he makes the time to attend a wedding, he's swamped by people who want to get some face time with the Lord Regent, so part of my job tonight is to block off enough time for Aral to get a chance to slap Frederick Eastmont on the back and congratulate him and have a drink together. Which I do, because Aral and I have worked out a system.

By which I mean, I physically block the door to the side room they've gone into for a chat, and hang out in front of the door with Leanne Vorhovis's sisters and cousins, who regale me with stories of what they've been doing in their district and wouldn't it be great if we could do it in mine, too? Oh, and have you seen the latest opera that just opened in Vorrutyer City? You haven't? Oh, you must come with us next week. Lily Vorrutyer is an investor, have you met her? No? Oh, Lily darling, please come over here and tell Lady Vorkosigan about the costumes! Oh, Lady Vorkosigan, you won't believe it, all the costumes are made of native Barrayaran plant fiber! No, no, there's no allergy issues, there's an old way to process the fibers that removes that, we just don't do much with it anymore because wool is so much better! Lily, tell Lady Vorkosigan all about this! She's promised to come next week and bring Lady Alys Vorpatril!

And so on.

Marriage is above-all-else a partnership, and Aral and I have gotten some parts of the partnership down cold.

I do go to the opera, and take Alys and Padma and Priscilla Eastmont and a handful of her friends, because Lily Vorrutyer told me it was a dramatization of the first planetfall onto Barrayar, told from the perspectives of the native vegetation and the spaceship, and I just had to see it out of morbid curiosity of how they managed that. The songs are amazing, the costumes look really itchy, and when I go backstage afterwards, I also run into the director of the traveling opera company that operates out of Hassadar, who was there to see about modifying the opera for their needs.

I get swept along to the afterparty and don't make it back to the Vorrutyer guest house until near dawn, with an invitation to come watch a rehearsal at the ballet academy in the afternoon. That one turns into a fascinating discussion with the choreographer about how dance is an artistic discipline that uses the air as its medium. A body at rest is not a dance. A body moving through the air is a dance. And so what better dance than to bring anti-grav into it and go into the third dimension?

The rehearsal is fascinating. I'm sure it will be very impressive and seamless once it's done, but seeing the seams in it, how they're smoothing out all the roughness, makes me appreciate it even more.

I leave with a promise to come back in a month to see how it's going, and to send along anything I can get from Beta Colony about zero-grav ballet, which neither I nor Canondelia have ever been to. I was too busy being on the Survey, I have to explain. I can't tell them how this is supposed to look in a true zero-grav chamber. I was a workaholic and worked a job that meant I was barely home and I loved it. And they nod and agree, because ballet dancers are also notorious for being workaholics and loving it.

Before I leave the district entirely, I pay a visit to young Lord Pierre Vorrutyer, who is set to become Count Vorrutyer any day now, or so I've been told repeatedly for months. He's a nervous sort. I'd rather talk to his sister (brother?) Lady Donna, but she's currently married somewhere else, a marriage that I assume is going to end soon.

But it's been hanging over me, the fate of Aral's first wife. She was this Pierre's aunt, and the daughter of the current Count Pierre Vorrutyer, but everything I've been able to find out about Count Vorrutyer indicates that he doesn't give a damn about his daughter or what happened to her. I'm not sure that young Pierre cares either. But if anyone is supposed to care, it should be him.

I lay it out before him. The honor of House Vorkosigan, etc etc, want justice for his aunt, etc etc, but I don't know what justice should look like or that it's even possible, but that her ghost haunts me.

And he has no clue what to do. Which is fair, because neither do I. The justice system on Barrayar confuses and frustrates and infuriates me. Someone should have done something for this poor woman, but no one has. And I don't know what's culturally correct here, but I do know that Aral isn't going to do anything unless I come to him with a solution that comes directly from the Vorrutyers themselves.

Lord Pierre and I go around in circles for about an hour and then he strikes on an idea.

"If you're so sure she was murdered," he says, still skeptical, "and I know for sure she was sleeping around." Does he though? He wasn't even born yet. I'm not disputing the cheating, I'm just disputing his certainty about it. "And you think the honor of your husband demands that she be avenged." I'm not so sure about that. "Then why don't we just create a charity in her name for woman who need divorces?"

What? "Is that kind of charity needed?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Sure, people always need money." From the mouth of babes. "So if a couple comes to court here in my district and I award a divorce based on adultery, I can also award her some extra money to start over again."

"It would have to include the man committing adultery as well," I say, because I'm not sure what's going on here, but I did come here asking for the Vorrutyers to tell me what the Vorkosigans can do to make things right.

"Okay," he says, "and we'll give the men some money too so they don't get angry at me," and he pages a couple lawyers and we draw up some preliminary documents and I bring them back to Aral, who reads them over, at first bemused and then a second time more serious, and then he signs them. And so the Vorkosigans commit to paying half the costs, and the Vorrutyers the other half, and if this is the best that I can do... then it's the best that I can do. I'm not really satisfied but I'm still surrounded by people who don't understand why I care about this at all.

"It will give her a better name and make her seem more honorable," Lady Susan from my staff attempts to explain to me.

And, yeah, sure, I suppose. I just have Twisted Sister shouting at me in my head: if that's your best, your best won't do.

But I'll keep an eye out for something better I can do about it, short of inventing a time machine, which isn't on my agenda.

What is on my agenda is more committee meetings back in Hassadar, doing the important work of keeping everything working.

Every time I start to grapple with the enormity of the problem that is 'feeding the district', I start having a panic attack. I have to remind myself sternly that it's not something I have to solve all by myself. In fact, none of these problems are ones I'm solving all by myself anyway, so why does the food issue weigh me down so much? I'm not sure, but every time I start to work through all the problems and the logistics, I feel so overwhelmed. Because it is an overwhelming problem and it's not one that's going to go away.

The district can't feed itself. Full stop, it can't. We will always be a net-importer of food. The district used to have good farmland, but that was in the Vashnoi zone, so it doesn't anymore. All I've been doing is supplementing and helping what people are already doing: I'm funding green houses, hydroponics factories, vat protein centers, etc. We can grow more but we can't grow enough to feed everyone well. Piotr can shout about nutrition all he wants, but if people aren't going to take magical space multivitamins, it needs to come in from food, and especially once we talk about flying food up the mountains in winter, I start hyperventilating.

I rant to Aral about this so much that one day he says to me, bemused, "do you want to bring the Komarrans in on this?"

Do I want to what? Oh, right. Komarr. Domes. Probably a ton of food issues. But wouldn't they also be a net-importer? They've got all those wormholes and all that trade. No, wait, fresh food. Fresh food has to either be grown or harvested on a spaceship or they won't have fresh food; travel times are too long to rely on ports for fresh food. Canondelia spent most of her adult life on Survey ships, which was mostly space MREs but did have a kitchen. But Survey ships are small and nimble. Trading ships are larger. It's not worth making a long journey if you aren't packed wall to wall with cargo, and you need more crew members than a Survey ship has. So Komarr probably knows about doing things in small spaces on ships, and in doing things in domed habitats. They might know how to help.

Would they be willing to help?

Not if the request comes from anyone named Vorkosigan, I assume.

"Would they be willing to help Captain Naismith?" I ask Aral. 'Captain Naismith' is a legendary figure. 'Captain Naismith' is a name that opens more door than I'd expected. 'Captain Naismith' killed Ges Vorrutyer and then turned around and married Aral Vorkosigan and everyone was very mystified why, until 'Captain Naismith' started importing Betan ideas and resources by the shipload. 'Lady Vorkosigan' is the woman married to Aral Vorkosigan, while 'Captain Naismith' is the woman using Aral Vorkosigan for her own purposes.

This situation suits Aral just fine. Piotr still grumbles sometimes, but he can't ignore the benefits. And since I'm Lady Vorkosigan in Vorbarr Sultana, the situation has not yet become untenable politically for Count Vorkosigan.

Aral agrees that Komarr might be willing to help Captain Naismith. However, I'm not sure if he's right. In addition, I'm not just Captain Naismith. Any letters from me do have that pesky Vorkosigan name on them.

No, we need something entirely without the Vorkosigan name on it.

I remind myself of my affirmations: Lady Vorkosigan is a management position. I don't need to do everything myself. It's best if I don't do things myself, that's not the best use of my time. I'm in management. I'm in a leadership position. Find a person who is suited for the role and offer it to them.

The care and feeding of this district does not rest on my shoulders alone. Stop having a fucking panic attack. Lady Vorkosigan is a management position. Lady Vorkosigan is a management position. Lady Vorkosigan is a management position.

And so I manage.

Millie Radcliffe is an elderly woman who makes Piotr quake before her. She runs the largest grocery business in the district. I'm on pretty good terms with her, considering she hates the Vor, and I married into the Vor.

But she loves to be necessary. She loves to be asked favors and to grant them. Anyone acknowledging how she built herself up to be a rival of the richest Vor in the district (not that rich these days, but let's not quibble over details, she's definitely richer than Piotr) is simply acknowledging the result of her hard work.

She's not Vor. No one on her staff is Vor. She certainly isn't Vorkosigan.

Getting her to ask Komarr for ideas isn't even my job either! Lucille Vortala (not a lady) is friendly with Millie's grandson Scott. Furthermore, several members of my Hassadar-based staff have previously worked for her.

I don't have to know anything about the grocery business! I don't have to know anything about agriculture, either space or otherwise! I don't have to know anything! All I have to know is which people know these things, and have them talk to other people, and come to some kind of agreement on how we're going to get the Komarrans to understand that they have common cause with the people of Vorkosigan District: that is, they, too, have been fully fucked over by the Vorkosigans. See, it's almost like they're friends already!

So I stay out of it, and every so often, Scott Radcliffe gives me an update on how things are going with getting the Komarrans to help us out.

Delegate, delegate, delegate. And do deep breathing rather than worrying about the food supply.

And that's just one committee.

Dealing with the library situation makes me long for Andrew Carnegie and his blood-soaked money -- hmm, now that's an idea. Who else has blood-soaked money and is looking to improve his public image? Ideally someone I also despise on a personal and professional level?

Vidal Vordarian it is!

This time, I get Princess Kareen to do the work for me. Vordarian is convinced that it would really rehabilitate his public image -- and that of his Cetagandan-collaborating grandparents -- to start printing off extra copies of all the books from the printing presses in his district and sending them out to schools and community centers and libraries all over Barrayar.

That's a start, so the next time I see him at a ball, I swallow down how much I can't stand this guy and go over to him and compliment his generosity and charitable spirit.

This is news to him, since he knows I hate him, but he's happy for anything that makes Captain Naismith apologize for her (my) previous insults to him. Ah, the power of turning over a new leaf, and of complimenting the ego of someone who'd wanted to rape Kareen and murder Gregor, but was satisfied with getting bought off and married off instead.

But it takes all tools to build a library, even an incredible tool like Vidal Vordarian. Plus, he's probably the richest damn Count there is right now.

This is a trick I can only pull off once, but I pull it off the once I need to do it.

Vordarian Libraries, free to the people!, start popping up all over the place in places that don't already have a library system. When the first branch opens in Hassadar, I stack the crowd with people who've agreed to fawn all over Vordarian and flatter his ego. He spends all three hours of the grand opening with a pleased smirk on his face, and before he leaves, the director pounces on him to talk to him about quadrupling the endowment.

Truly, amazing things can happen when you swallow your pride and your enemies are assholes who don't know they're your enemies.

I also sic the library director on Piotr before we leave. All in a day's work.

Magnanimous in victory, that night I take Vordarian, his wife Clara, and their entourage to the Hassadar Ballet. They're putting on the classic Barrayaran ballet The Maiden Of The Lake, which I've seen about twenty-five times now, so it's not an imposition for me to spend most of it talking to Clara about her priorities as Countess Vordarian. I hate him, after all, not her.

"Oh, you'll think it very silly," she tells me with a self-conscious laugh, leaning forward to share confidences. "You're the proper lady, caring about children and medicine and all that."

I chuckle. "I spent my professional career on a spaceship, Countess Vordarian. You won't be able to shock me."

"Not shocking!" she objects. "Only not as selfless as your work. You see, Vordarian Castle is five hundred years old and such a mess. You wouldn't believe how the masonry is, let alone the plumbing! It's going to take me ten years to get the castle into shape. While you were working on your educational committees, I was choosing colors for the drapes."

"But how the drapes look is important," I tell her firmly. "They control the light levels in the room, they help prevent fading, the fabric choices influence the entire feeling of the room. You should spend time on the drapes! And on the carpets and the upholstery and if the bricks are secure or going to fall down any minute."

This is the most transparent conversational technique ever, and it's one I hate because you only learn that it takes people off guard and they forget to insult you if you insult yourself first, if you spend your entire life hanging around with shitheads. I used to see this all the time in work meetings. A woman old enough to be my mother would have a great idea and say it but then dissolve into self-deprecating remarks and that it wasn't a good idea, never mind, and I'd see red, because what the fuck has been going on with this woman's life to make her insult herself first and downplay her ideas. What shitheads she's surrounded by. Argh. Hate it. So to see Clara go for it, because she expects me to insult her, and so if she gets there first, I can't insult her, I'd just be agreeing with her--! Argh. Hate it hate it hate it.

So I'd defend it even if it were something pointless, but it's not pointless. A fancy castle you can't live in isn't a house, it's an expensive collapsing museum piece, but Clara lives there. It should be livable! It has to be livable! And someone has to do this job, and by god do I know it's thankless. Everyone will complain about the process and no one will say anything good about the end result, they'll just sniff over it and say it should have been done somehow else. I'm sorry, were you volunteering to do any of the actual work? No? So shut up.

And Clara can't even tell her shithead husband to shut up directly, because that's not what good Vor ladies who become Countesses do. They just have to learn to manipulate their shithead husbands, and all the people who hate their shithead husbands and want them to fail in all their endeavors, ideally after giving them all their money. Of which I'm guilty, so I can't even blame Clara for it.

So instead of enjoying the ballet, I spend the entire time talking paint colors with Clara, who seems truly happy by the end, and we part with a promise from her to look over some of the interior design for a new hotel we're planning in Hassadar.

I love interior design. Piotr thinks it's pointless. Even Aral just humors me. But I'm aware enough to know what I don't know: I don't know how to make a room or a house or a building feel good on the inside. But it matters so much. Even how the lighting is set up can change the entire feeling of a building. It's the main reason I always hated Walmart: the lights gave me a headache.

Thus fortified with library funding and books in all district languages, I go to the next education committee ready to be depressed by the updates. But I know this is a slow process; after all, I'd told them to make a fifteen-year plan and we're still in the early stages of that.

And then from education, back to medicine, and then to food, and thankfully all my staff have specialties now, and they can brief me on the go, and someone keeps track of everything I need to be doing, and what I need to be wearing, and who I need to talk to, and what I need to say to them, and someone also makes sure I have a lunch break.

Being in management has its benefits.

By this point, I've been on Barrayar for nearly three years, and Piotr's impatience with me is at nuclear meltdown levels. The problem is, he hadn't had hope. He'd resigned himself to the status quo: that direct descent would die with Aral, and that the district would go to some cousin somewhere. But then, oh, but then, I'd arrived. And then the status quo wasn't good enough for him, because the presence of a wife indicated possibilities of children. And so he'd started to expect children. And the status quo had shifted. Now, instead of Aral's heir being whatever relative they could find somewhere, Aral's heir was something I was cruelly holding back from him.

I'd never promised Piotr I'd have any kids. But that's a funny thing, expectations. Just by me being on Barrayar, the choice had suddenly appeared in front of him. No longer could he be satisfied by dying without grandchildren. Now he was demanding them.

But I know a few things about Piotr. One of them is that he only married once. After Aral's first marriage dissolved into disaster (aka murder), Piotr probably did pressure Aral into remarrying. But Aral wouldn't do it, and Aral was in a career that was likely to kill him. And despite this, Piotr didn't adopt young Padma Vorpatril, or even adult Padma Vorpatril. He didn't find those Vorkosigan cousins and bring any back, training one up as a spare heir for the moment when Aral would get himself killed during military service.

Piotr has acted, this entire time, as if direct descent doesn't matter to him.

It's been a long time since I read the books, even longer now that I've been here. And I don't remember if Piotr, in the books, cared about direct descent. He was angry about Miles, of course, because Piotr hates disability, but it was Aral who was the one who cared at all about direct descent. Wasn't he? Eh, who knows, who cares.

The point is, I can roll the dice and gamble that what Piotr wants is grandchildren. He wants babies to bounce on his knee. He wants toddlers to hold his hand as he shows them around the district. He wants to teach the kids to ride horses and to love them. That's what Piotr wants: an old man, knowing he's outlived all his contemporaries, outlived the odds, seen his son outshine him, seen that son bring home a bride -- Piotr Vorkosigan wants some babies, dammit.

And not just any babies, although I've seen him with Alys's children. No, he wants grandchildren with the Vorkosigan name, who call him grandda, and who run to see him so he can sneak them candy.

And I have cruelly not given them to him, after giving him hope by being a woman married to a man.

And it's been three years, and the uterine replicators that Lady Vorhalas set up have shown multiple times that they work fine.

So it's time to tell Piotr that that's the only way he's getting those grandchildren he wants.

And he throws a fit, as you'd expect, and he even tells Aral that Aral married badly, which Aral takes as well as you can expect: that is, also a nuclear meltdown. Not exactly according to plan, but also not unexpected.

"I want to tell you a story about a man I knew," I say to Piotr one day, because I can match nuclear with nuclear, but why bother when you can deescalate instead. "He was married twice. The first marriage was short and unhappy and produced children. The second marriage was long and happy and produced no children. His children from the first marriage didn't see him for years after the marriage ended. They were not invited to his second wedding. He came back into their lives slowly. He attended their weddings. He would, at times, visit them. But when they would visit him, he never allowed them in his house. They would meet at restaurants, where he would pay, and he would give them money. He would do that for them, but he never again shared his life with them."

Piotr grumbles at me and waves his hand, not interested in this story unless it's going to get me to apologize for not wanting to bodybirth any babies for him.

I continue, "he did the same thing for his grandchildren. Some of them lived near him, but never saw his house. They would try to invite him into their lives, to honor him as their grandfather, and often he would agree to come, but then never arrive."

"Unreliable," Piotr mutters. "I wouldn't--"

I don't let him finish. "When he died, his children and grandchildren attended his funeral, where a whole side of his life was revealed to them. He had a whole life of which they had known nothing, because he had never shared it with them. And they mourned him to the fullest extent of their mandatory mourning customs, because he was their father and their grandfather, and they did owe him that. But that was all they did," I say with heavy emphasis, and Piotr actually winces. Good, so he does value his planet's mourning customs. He knows the insult in doing the minimum that's culturally required. I have never seen Aral do any optional mourning for his first wife.

I continue, after letting the point sink in. "This man had chosen his life over his legacy, and so he had no legacy. His descendants told no stories of him, because they had none to tell. They had no fondness for him, because he had never had fondness for them. They did all that was culturally necessarily, and did nothing that was optional. Instead, all that honor went to others, rather than to their ancestor." Because, yeah, the Barrayarans really value their ancestors.

"This story is a tragedy, Count Vorkosigan," I say, "and it's a tragedy of that man's making, who never thought it was a tragedy. But I do," I emphasize. "I don't want my children to have a grandfather who leaves them no legacy and no memories. I want you to love my children and be involved in their lives. When you die, and I hope that day is a long way away, I want them to remember you fondly as their dear grandfather, who taught them and held them and loved them and cherished them. But they can't do that if they don't exist. And I can't give birth the way you want me to. Aral and I agreed before we were married that our children would be born from a uterine replicator, and so they will be. And so it's up to you, Count Vorkosigan. Do you want to be the man I knew, who chose not to know his grandchildren, or do you want to be beloved? Only you can decide that."

There. That should work in well with Piotr's fears and with Canondelia's opinion that the only true wealth is biological, a stance I cannot agree with but wonder if it's a common sentiment on Beta Colony.

"This man you knew," Piotr says stiffly. "You don't think he regretted it. I'm sure he did."

"If he did, he had many opportunities to choose otherwise," I say. "You already have a legacy, Count Vorkosigan. Your name is famous and will always be." Because flattery never hurt anyone. "But you don't get to choose your grandchildren. You only get to choose if they will be your legacy, too."

Piotr is silent and then he gives me a nod. "You remind me of my mother-in-law," he says. "She would have loved you."

I smile. "Thank you."

"But they won't be mutants?" Piotr asks again a few days later and I sigh and explain it to him all over again. We aren't going to do any genetic manipulation, just making sure that the future children won't have hereditary health issues. Canondelia was gene-cleaned and so, I assume, was Aral's grandmother, but that just makes this easier, not unnecessary. And it is necessary. I'd known a Tay-Sachs child. I'm not fucking doing that to a kid or to the parents.

But before Aral's emotionally ready to make a baby, he has to deal with the Cetagandans.

I don't give a fuck about the Cetagandans. They're the Big Bad but I've never bothered trying to understand them. They're just this menacing enemy in the background, except for the book where they're not. I don't understand them, I don't understand their motivations, I also don't need to. I'm genre-savvy. They exist to provide stress to the plot, but that's about it. They're dangerous but they're dangerous in the same way plenty of other things are dangerous. I really don't remember if the whole Marilac thing happened before or after Miles went to Cetaganda and made nice with their Emperor, but I just remember that 1) Cetaganda is still in the expansionist empire business, and 2) Cetaganda claims not to be in the expansionist empire business and cares more about creating babies as scientific experiments.

Both of those might be true. Neither might be true. Who knows, who cares, I just know that the Cetagandans are causing problems in order so that we don't forget they exist.

Noted. I don't forget they exist.

I'm sure as a Betan, I'm supposed to care, but I don't. I really don't.

I just don't know what they want. I guess from later books, what they want is genetic tissue and samples? There are so many ways to get that. So many ways. Especially if what you want are sperm samples For Science, that should not be hard to get at all. And didn't Canondelia mention something in the book about what cells are even necessary for the uterine replicators? This should be so easy. So easy. So easy.

If they're just an expansionist empire, that at least I understand. I don't need to understand their social structure. I don't need to understand their politics. I don't need to even understand how old their Emperor is. Don't know, don't care. Aral's dealing with this and it's making him stressed and this is probably plot development.

I have passed on plot development, thanks.

The only bit of plot development that I'm doing is making sure young Gregor is fully aware that once Gregor turns twenty, Aral is retiring to the district and being a doting father to our future kids. That's it. That's all. No continued politics, no Prime Minister anything. That's it. Just Aral doing the job of papa and Lord Vorkosigan, in that order.

I'm not very close with Gregor, nor am I trying to be. I leave him up to his mother. Gregor Vorbarra is also more of a plot device than a person. Miles wouldn't have been able to do any of what he did in canon without Gregor being on his side, so it was necessary for him and Gregor to be on good terms, but beside from that, Gregor only exists to swoop in, save Miles from his own shenanigans, and then swoop out again. The little we get from him is just more plot devices. Oh, Gregor is depressed and suicidal? Let's not treat that like the absolute dictator of our expansionist empire is depressed and suicidal. No, it's just a way to get Miles out of trouble, because then Gregor doesn't need to be on Barrayar to swoop in and order people around. If Gregor Vorbarr didn't exist, Miles Vorkosigan would have needed to invent him or die.

So what this plot device is going to be like with a loving mother and a happy childhood, I don't know and I don't care. He's not my problem. He's only my problem if he gets to age twenty and suddenly decides he hates Aral for giving him that happy childhood. Or for being part of the plot to murder Serg. There was that part.

Did Serg have it coming? No, because if Serg had it coming, they'd have killed him on this planet, rather than deciding Escobar was volunteering for the job.

Sometimes I want to throttle Aral for not giving in to the urge to murder Serg before they'd even left Vorbarr Sultana. Is this hypocritical of me, considering how much I don't like it that Aral goes around murdering people with no consequences? Yes. Would it still have been the right thing to do, if the only other choice (spoiler: it was not the only other choice) was to get other people killed, who had nothing to do with this internal Barrayaran power struggle between an abusive old man and his abusive shithead son?

Should I have tried to do more to stop it before it started? Also yes, but I'm still not sure what I could have done. Aral, at least, had a very specific path to walk.

Literally if nothing else, he already knew about the plasma mirrors. He could have told someone. He could have stood up and said that the invasion was doomed because the Barrayarans didn't have a plan to defeat the new technology.

He could have said no.

And he didn't, because that's not the man that Ezar Vorbarra began molding when he was eleven years old. It was a feature, not a bug, when Aral started going around murdering people and Ezar ignored it. Ezar didn't care about Aral as a person, he cared about Aral as a tool. Why does it matter if you get your tools a little dirty?

You know, I just realized, I've accidentally become a patron of the arts. No one's sworn me to any kind of secrecy -- I've even forgotten if Aral knows that I know he knew about the plasma mirrors. I could totally commission a musical theater show about the perils of blindly following your liege lord and when, you know, you should not do that. It wouldn't even be groundbreaking, there's several of those shows already. I would just call this one "what the fuck did you think you were doing, trying to invade Escobar."

Okay, the title needs some work. We can workshop it later.

But those other artistic endeavors about the failures of honor are tragedies. I want this one to have that disloyal dude be right and survive and be happy about it.

Will this do anything? No. Will it make me feel just a little bit better? Also no. But, still, I should make this happen. I have the technology. I can make it bigger -- dammit, what's that full quote? I never really got it right all the way through and now I can't go look it up. Oh well. It's not important.

Gregor's not even really that important either, except as a placeholder. There needs to be someone in the role of Gregor Vorbarra. He as a person doesn't matter to anyone other than Kareen Vorbarra. Until he's twenty years old, he's a nonentity. Sucks to be him, but sucks to be anyone stuck in a monarchy. Honestly, some of the hardest parts of my marriage are dealing with the fact that Aral's a monarchist. An actual monarchist! From a man who saw an Emperor (his uncle!!!!) murder his family.

Ah, but as long as the liege-lord is a good one, then all's fine.

Except Ezar wasn't that great, either, and Gregor, as discussed, didn't even want the job in the first place and wasn't allowed to quit it.

And Aral has spent his entire life doing what Ezar told him to do, because the alternative might end up being that Aral ended up as the absolute monarch, and Aral didn't want that.

But somehow he's still a monarchist.

So, yeah. We don't talk about politics a lot. I tend to want to scream.

Is this any kind of marriage to bring a new baby into? I'm glad you asked. The answer is yes.

For many reasons, the most important of which is I'm not giving birth to Miles Vorkosigan and all my kids will be able to go live on Beta Colony starting from whatever age they want. I've even discussed it in my weekly letters with my mother. Beta Colony won't even be jerks if I end up having more than two kids and want those kids to live on Beta Colony.

Monarchists to my left, hippie eugenicists to my right, and here I am, not Canon Cordelia.

And so while I'm waiting for Aral to have time for babymaking (science version), I make the final decision about landscaping in Vorkosigan Surleau and then work with the newly-formed job training committee on the best ways we can do that. This idea didn't even come from me, it came from Piotr.

Piotr has to work with his vassals and use his vassals, but he can't get rid of any of them. That's the strength and the weakness of this system. You have your people; what do you do with them? And so, the job training committee was born, because if your people are your resources and you can't get other people, then you have to make your current people into the resources you need.

It's a work in progress. I'm keeping an eye on it.

Vasily Petrov, my newly official director of tourism, has found more conferences and conventions for our new convention center and hotels that are definitely going to piss off Piotr -- most notably a few medical conferences, and yes, Vasily assures me, they're aware that they have to give our medical students and medical professionals free admission -- and so it's good that I've got a ready-made distraction for him. Vasily, true to his word, has kept having so many ideas and making them happen that I really did need to do what Canondelia did, and punish people who do good work by giving them more responsibility. I did make sure Vasily was cool with that, though, before I did it, I'm not a total jerk.

And the experts have finally arrived from the Nili Institute on Earth to get the localized rainwater and wastewater cleaning stations in Hassadar set up, so each few blocks can be fully independent as needed or rely on the centralized stations as needed.

I walk around downtown Hassadar with them, showing them around. They nod appreciatively over the new transit stops, with instructions in all district languages, a button to push to have the audio in all languages, and a visual explanation for those who don't know those languages. We talk about the trash pickup schedules and how important public trash, bathrooms, and water access are. I walk them through the new parks and gardens and show them the irrigation systems we've set up.

And then I leave them to it and fly to Rileyville to go make a baby.

It doesn't take very long. Aral is nervous, but I made sure he read all the documentation, and we've had several of the techs over for him to talk to them about his concerns. I don't hesitate at all, just give them the swab. We'll come back in a week to check up on it; it's not necessary medically, but it's necessary emotionally. I recall that book where Miles and Ekaterin go on vacation while their twins are in the uterine replicator, and I could never do that. It's too much like placing an order for a baby at a store and then coming back to pick it up when it's ready. It's so cold and impersonal. I could never handle being pregnant but that doesn't mean that I want to treat my kid like a product I pre-ordered nine months in advance of the release date.

Aral and I then commence the most important part of the process: figuring out what to name the kid.

Aral has been adamant that he wants our daughter named after his mother. I've been in favor in theory but not really enthused about the idea. I'd do it, but only out of respect for the cultural customs of my husband. However, Piotr ends up being my ally in this, because although I managed to talk him around to his grandchildren coming out of a machine, he is loudly not going to allow any of those children to be named after his precious wife. Or, at least, certainly not the first one.

Aral proposes my mother's name instead. I say nope, not the Betan custom, my mother would be bemused but not honored.

And then the naming begins.

I wish I could say this was simple. I wish I could say it was quick. I wish I could say it didn't take nine entire goddamn months to come up with a name that we could both agree on, and that sounded fine with "Vorkosigan" on the end. Sorry, Vivian Vorkosigan, you sounded a little bit too fictional, even if you did make Aral feel better by sharing some letters with Olivia.

Eventually, we welcome Alexandra Vorkosigan with all fanfare and happiness and relief.

Now, I've been paying attention during these three years of the Regency, and here is the major finding: they mostly don't bother Aral in the morning. Oh, they're very happy to keep him late, sometimes after midnight, with important matters that just can't wait. But they won't wake Aral up in the middle of the night unless things are, actually, important matters that just can't wait. And while he does have morning briefings and meetings, the timing on them doesn't really matter.

And so, Aral's on baby duty in the morning. He gets up before he normally would and goes to the nursery and is the one to do morning diaper changes and bottle feeding -- I was not inducing lactation, but it's space future and getting personalized "breast milk" in a bottle is considered standard -- and get her dressed and play with her until he has to go to work. I'll show up part of the way through this ritual and have my breakfast in the nursery while Aral plays on the floor with our baby.

I made the decision to consciously treat our childcare workers as if Sasha is in an in-home daycare. In other words, I leave her alone and let the professionals do their job. I don't hover. I visit on a regular schedule and cuddle and kiss her and play with her, but when Mama goes to work, she goes to work. I also make sure that the workers get regular time off and work in shifts. I haven't even pretended to look into the issue of childcare in the district other than a brief look to see that it's generally done by grandparents and the older generation, but I'm not here to reinvent day care from first principles. Sasha is cared for by the wives and mothers of our armsmen and by an elderly woman who was Aral's nurse as a child. Aral didn't want outsiders and Piotr wouldn't allow it and I didn't care.

And so when I have my meetings and social gatherings, if it's not time for Sasha to have a break, or if she's in the middle of a nap, I don't bring her out to be cooed over. She only comes with me when I go to the district when I'm staying there overnight, but if I'm treating it like I'm commuting, she stays home. We arrange playdates with other children. Gregor even comes to visit, after some back-and-forth with Kareen about the best time for it. Gregor is careful with Sasha; he's learned well from dealing with the other children of his mother's friends.

Sasha is crawling when Kareen brings up the elephant in the room, but delicately. Did I have expectations of--

Ugh. No. Absolutely not.

"Beta Colony doesn't have the tradition of arranged marriages," I invent, because who am I to say it doesn't? I have no objections in theory but I have a lot of objections in this specific situation of my daughter and Kareen's son. "We let people figure it out themselves."

"What a lovely tradition," Kareen says, but she does relax a bit once it's clear that we're really not trying to marry off Aral's daughter to her son. Nope. Absolutely not. I haven't seen the future, but I have seen the past, and that is not going to happen.

Gregor's a good kid. He's also only allowed to be a kid in certain situations. The rest of the time, he has to be the Emperor. At least Kareen is doing what canon never did and making sure he's a well-rounded individual with friends and a sense of self beyond the pressure to perform.

But I'm not a monarchist, unlike all these people, even though I've spent years now benefiting from their system. I think Gregor shouldn't be Emperor and that no one should be Emperor. Sucks to be Gregor, but it also sucks for anyone in that position, and I'm not putting my kid in that position. If Gregor wants my help in running away from home when he's twenty-five, I'll give it, only so long as he properly abdicates first.

Sasha walks for the first time during one of her Mornings With Papa, and Aral is so happy he spins her around and then he kisses me.

I want to send her to a preschool in the district, but then Aral wouldn't see her, so we compromise and find a preschool in Vorbarr Sultana that claims they can handle the Regent's daughter. They aren't actually able to handle the Regent's daughter, so we switch her after the first week. Piotr grumbles at me about this, but I want Sasha to socialize with other kids, which she isn't getting the way I want her to. Yes, she plays with the children of my staff and the Vorkosigan servants, but in any kind of childish fight, everyone is going to side with her automatically. Piotr's been trying to convince me to make a school in the house, because after all I believe in education and shouldn't I want these kids getting the same education my daughter gets, which would convince me except that I know that any teacher would show a strong preference to Lady Alexandra Vorkosigan ahead of any other student, and that's bad for Sasha and that's bad for all the other students, too.

Plus, the kids of the servants deserve to go to a school where they're not just grouped together as "the kids of the servants". Vorbarr Sultana has schools. Those kids go there, or they live in the district and go to school in the district. Those kids are good playmates and friends for Sasha, but they can't be the only friends she has, or I'm going to raise a snob.

I do not want to raise a snob.

Sasha is nearly five when we bring out her younger sister Charlotte and when we finally find a school that has kids who aren't Vor in it that still is willing to deal with the Regent's daughter. Aral's in the process of getting the military academies to drop the Vor from cadets's names, and while this school doesn't go that far -- even though I wish it would -- it does at least have policies in place and monitoring to try to avoid the worst of the Vor preferential behavior.

I've told Piotr from the beginning that we're not having a boy until Aral is done with the Regency, because that way Aral will be around more and able to raise him and mold into being a proper Vorkosigan. Also the part where I know from the books that Piotr dies, like, two years after the Regency, so we won't have to deal with the kind of shit Miles learned from Piotr about how to be a Vor. Win-win.

So this gives us time to decant Renata and Julianne before we bring out Aral's son. Piotr's been willing to be convinced to give the boy his name, but I don't care; I'd promised Aral a decade ago that he would have my full support in any name he chose for our son.

Six months after the Regency ends, we introduce Lord Xav Vorkosigan to the world.

So, having survived the Regency, this is where I say we all live happily ever after in our quiet retirement. Which we do, even if it's not as quiet as all that.

Oh, and Sasha does end up marrying Gregor, but I guess you can't have everything.

The end.