"Well, I'm not an astronaut," she says, in an I mean, seriously, look at me voice. So small and skinny that she's just about drowning in the man's coat--who'd send her to outer space? "If anyone's alive in NASA, they have bigger stuff to worry about than going to Mars."

There's something that doesn't quite fit in what he's said and what she knows--and a lot of it is grounded in the fact that, despite everything that happened in the last two years, she's no longer on Earth--but she can't quite put her finger on what it could mean. Every explanation is insane-sounding when she comes up with it.

She's mulling it over, peering over at him the whole while, and slowly says, "You've gone all over the place, right? Off Barrayar, and...wherever."