forbarrayar | [ january i log: barrayar ]

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[ january i log: barrayar ]

Who: Everyone
What: Arrival on Barrayar and what follows
When: January 2nd - January 17th
Where: Barrayaran guerrilla camp
Warnings: None (at the moment)

welcome to barrayar.
It's the dark of night when you come to in the foothills. Snow on the ground, chill winter wind whistling. A steep mountain range towers just ahead, its peaks illuminated by the light of two moons. Whatever you last remember, it isn't how you got here, and you feel oddly jetlagged, slightly queasy.

And you're not alone. There are nine other people close by, all looking equally lost and confused. But before any of you have a chance to figure out what's going on, the soldiers arrive.

They're dressed in weather-worn green uniforms, bearing swords and bows, and they surround you immediately, poised to attack. But they quickly realize you're not their enemy, the ones they call Cetagandans. They're just as confused as you are, but rather than hanging around to puzzle it out, they start shepherding you toward their camp in the mountains while it's still dark. There's a war on, they say, and you unlucky bastards have just been dropped right smack in the middle of it.

the guerrilla camp
It's a few hours' hike through the mountains to get to their hidden camp, set up in a clearing framed by dense, hard forestry and backed against a rock face. Daylight is finally dawning when you make it there. You and your fellow sudden arrivals are ushered to an empty tent on the far end of the camp, just big enough to fit all ten of you. You can't help but notice they've posted guards all around it. You aren't under arrest – they just don't know what else to do with you.

You are able to glean, from hearsay and what the soldiers are willing to share with you, that you are on a planet called Barrayar, and this is their home, and ten years ago they were attacked without warning by the Cetagandan Empire. They've been holed up in the mountains fighting against their invaders ever since, outgunned and outmanned, but scoring little victories where they can. They don't tell you much more than that. Some dialect of Russian seems to be one of the predominant languages of the camp, but for the most part they all speak English too, if with an accent. They're gruff and wary, and if you look a little less – or more – than human, they'll eye you with suspicion, maybe even make obscure hex signs at you that seem intended to ward off evil or disease. But they aren't hostile to you, not unless you start something with them.

the outsiders' tent
It's not in the greatest shape, but if you look around the camp, the rest aren't much better off. It's cramped, but you've at least been provided with bedrolls and heavy wool blankets to ward off the frozen chill, and if you're in need of clothing, they'll provide it, although it probably hasn't been washed in…a while. The soldiers bring you food at mealtimes -- not very good food, mostly tough meat and groats, and they keep you your own campfire, just to keep you warm. They've also hastily dug you your own latrine area at the edge of the perimeter, just behind the treeline. No private bathroom stalls in this outfit, unfortunately. The entire camp seems tense and wary, and the soldiers are alert, but they don't talk much. You could try sneaking past them, but you probably won't get far.

Well, at least you've got each other for company: the outsiders on Barrayar.

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Ah. Ah. He can read fear - faint, yes, but fear nevertheless. In spite of himself, it twists something painful in his gut, a strike directly at a very, very old wound. Poor cold little thing. She wouldn't have the faintest notion of it. And even if she did, what would it matter?

"Mmph," he responds directly, giving a stagger in the direction of a tree, and then back again. One of the mountain-prole guards narrows his eyes at By, but By gives a little wave of his hand to demonstrate non-aggression. Their little band crosses paths with a downed branch, and he bends over, scoops it up. Pulls off a few leaves and bounces it experimentally against the frigid snowy ground.

"Not bad," he evaluates archly, and makes a grand show of being absorbed in his new stick, not looking back at her or the coat. "Good thought, hey."

Better to be cold now--socially, physically, it's all the same at the moment--than end up trapped within his arms later, especially when she doesn't have her knife. He gets the hint, luckily, and wobbles away to find himself a study branch. Beth, for part, just carries his jacket by the collar and wades through the snow, glancing his way once in a while. Digging her fingers into the fabric is enough to keep them a little warmer.

"You should keep your coat," she tells him, doing her best to toss it back over his shoulders when she spies a chance. He's still looking at his walking stick like it's his newborn son. "You might need it."

"Hmmm?" He twists out of the way as best he can, avoiding the fabric. Honestly...He thinks he's starting to understand Grandmere Vorrutyer's constant snits about the youth. Ungrateful things, aren't they? You tell an elaborate series of escalating lies and deceptions to try to get them to accept a gift, and they keep questioning. What ever happened to youthful credulity? Back in his day, he used to swallow lies wholesale. Lies about justice, lies about love, lies about decency and innocence...This cynicism is just so disheartening.

"I told you," he says back to her, thumping at the ground with his walking stick. "It's out of season. Autumn coat, winter weather. Keep it; it's garbage. Besides - " He hiccups again. "I'm Vor. I'm born to this sort of accursed wilderness."

She rolls her eyes, but if he's going to insist, it'd be stupid to leave a perfectly good coat lying in the snow behind them. Slipping one arm into it, and then the other (good thing the sleeves are wide enough to accommodate her cast),she mutters, "Fine. Enjoy your stick."

In the muted crunch and whisper of the snow--deep enough that it's both underfoot and all around--she tries to decide whether it's worth asking what he means. Curiosity gets the better of her, along with the knowledge that she's hurting for information about this freezing place. "What's Vor?"

Edited 2017-01-03 15:50 (UTC)

He catches that from the corner of his eye; a little bit of his tension relaxes. Of course, without the distraction of scheming and manipulations to keep his mind occupied, he becomes abruptly more aware of how damned cold it is up here. He suppresses a shiver. What a sad lot - cold, but unable to even show any sign of it lest she use that as an excuse to hand his coat back. There is no hell worse, in his opinion, than to have the joy of unhappiness without the joy of being able to complain about it.

How...very strange, though. She's obviously galactic - that's clear from her accent, her clothing, and her appearance - but to be on Barrayar with no knowledge of the planet at all...? Well. "Once upon a time," he intones windily, "the Emperor of Barrayar was pleased by the service of one of my noble ancestors. Vlad Rutyer, if I don't misremember. And so he cursed that poor sod with the title of nobility - the Vor title - and some pretty lands out on the Western coast.

"The Vor are the ruling class of this planet. You can trust most of them to be superior, haughty, and care not a whit for the lives of proles and galactics such as yourself. But if you can shame them into remembering that they're expected to be chivalrous and honorable, sometimes you can get them to behave."

"Oh." This time it's "galactics" that sticks out to her, and the way it sounds like her grandmother used to say Yankees. The meaning is clear without asking.

Everything else is kind of a mess in her mind, the sort of thing that sounds like it belongs in a fairy tale, or at least a history lesson. Emperors, good deeds (she imagines service must be akin to slaying a dragon), granted titles and the promise of a castle (or at least a big old house) somewhere beyond all this snow.

At least it's not hard to remember. Vor, the ruling class. Be prepared to fight for your share of attention. "So you're not from around here?" she asks, gesturing vaguely at the snow and the autumn-looking plants. "Or are we near the, um, the Western Coast?"

"Oh, I don't live on the Vorrutyer lands," he responds breezily, oversharing like any and all drunkards. "I am not Vor. I am...dis-Vor. Dissolute, disgraced, disliked, and most importantly: disinherited. I have a little flat in Vorbarr Sultana. Which is - "

He pauses, now, to wheel around, and then forward again, and then a quarter-turn to the side, like he's trying to orient himself to the mountain landscape. Which, admittedly, he is. Damn these mountains - can't even tell which way's the upslope, which way's the downslope - everything just more miserable, snowy peaks...God, he hates this land.

"In some direction from here." He starts walking again. "Northeast, in any case. Vorbarr Sultana is also where you will find all of this blighted planet's travel and trade. The city is currently under Cetagandan control, no doubt, but there are resources available that could get someone away from here. I know I intend to take advantage of them and flee, soon as someone's looking in the opposite direction."

And, young lady, I am certain you wish to hear about those resources. Go on, ask, so that I might prattle about my self-serving plans and you might profit by my information.

Beth watches him spin around and back again. She doesn't bother joining him; everything's unfamiliar enough without making herself dizzy on top of it. Eventually he'll figure out where, and she'll look--except that he doesn't, so she just keeps looking at him and curling her fingertips around the cuffs of his (her?) coat.

"Must be a busy place." Out here in the sticks, it's hard to imagine Barrayar having a bustling city, but anyone in rural Georgia might have said the same thing about Atlanta once. She likes to imagine it's out there somewhere--maybe with time and some effort she could get out there, find a way back to Earth, and even if she doesn't stay, get her sister and the rest of their group out of the reach of the walkers. Her voice grows a little quieter. "Where are you going to go? Back to your house? Or--?"

He's still got the noisy good cheer of somebody who's had too much to drink. A happy drunk, maybe a blind happy drunk. But if she can steer the conversation in a softer-spoken direction, maybe she can turn it toward the means he's planning on using to get out of her. Letting him holler out the answers seems like a really bad idea.

"Off-bloody-planet," he declares at once. "My house will hardly be safe. How long before the Cetagandans come knocking on my door? Or, worse, these cave-dwellers - " He gestures around himself. "Wanting to cut my throat for desertion. Because make no mistake - they're a primitive-looking lot, but Barrayar is not a primitive planet. Our spies are the best in the Nexus." Even if those spies are not always made for mountain-climbing. Even if those spies have absolutely no idea what's going on right now, and how Cetaganda got on-planet, and who's responsible, and why this is all happening...

"No." He leans in and raises his eyebrows and lowers his voice. "I'm going to march right over to the flat of my distant cousin Captain Ivan Xav Vorpatril, in the Old Town district of Vorbarr Sultana - he works for Military Ops, understand - and I am going to tell him, you can sneak me on board a courier, so sneak me on board a courier. And he will, because he is bloody honorable."

He blinks at the girl, then, like he's seeing her for the first time. And he says, slowly, "You should come with me when I do. He'd definitely never be able to turn you down if you asked. He's quite the knight in shining armor, you know - if he sees some kid in distress, he'll definitely help." Or run off on your own, find him, get him to dump you on the first fast courier out of here and away from this war. Don't bother to wait for me. Ivan sure as hell wouldn't help By out of here, but he'd absolutely help this girl.

"Where are you from, anyway? Which planet?"

She doesn't quite ask, but he answers anyway. A name, a place, a reason to leave. Captain Ivan Xav Vorpatril, in the Old Town district of Vorbarr Sultana--if she can just remember that, she can get out of here. Captain Ivan Xav Vorpatril, in the Old Town district of Vorbarr Sultana.

And things implied, like don't cross these men and their swords and get as far away as possible and the Cetagandans won't be any more help--she does her best to store all of it away.

At the suggestion that she join him looking for this Vorpatril, she just tries to look like she's thinking about it, neither too eager nor too repulsed. Given the choice, she'd leave without him and probably never see him again; it seems far safer than leaving herself in his private company, indebted to him, no less.

"Earth." There are plenty more specifics, but she's not sure how much countries and states matter when most of their residents are dead. Voice purposely light, she admits, "I didn't know there were other options before this."

"Uh." That comment gives him pause. He looks at her, his expression for just a split second more sharp than foolish, before he schools it into a more artistic, exaggerated look of confusion. "Really." He must be misunderstanding her meaning. Earth, after all, is the endpoint for all pilgrimages, all tourism, all knowledge-seekers. Even if she were completely uneducated, raised in a cabin somewhere in...oh, wherever there aren't many people, he certainly doesn't know Earth geography...she'd probably still have met at least half a dozen off-worlders before she could even walk. That's what they do on Earth. They help idiot off-worlders.

Or, well, he assumes, at least. It's not like he's ever been to Earth. He'd always sort of wanted to go, admittedly, see the sights, see where they all came from...Ah, well. The life of impoverished nobility is truly not as glamorous as they make it out to be.

"Meaning you never thought you'd actually be able to go off-planet?" he suggests. "I do understand that. Interplanetary travel can seem like a distant dream if you're without funds. Hitch a ride with someone else, that's the way to do it."

"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."

Mars? Good God, this girl should not be going to Mars. Not that she's a child or anything, of course, but, well - it is a rather scandalous place. Though he supposes if she grew up on Earth, that would be the closest exotic place - but what's all this about not being an astronaut, and...NASA, and...

He rubs his forehead. He's starting to feel as though he's developing a headache. Which is good, because it'll be conducive to feigning a hangover later, but...He feels like this whole thing is spinning wildly out of control. Who is she, where is she from, what is going on...

"Not...exactly," he admits, and clears his throat. "Komarr, Beta Colony - through Escobar space - Jackson's Whole." Jackson's Whole more than the others. The sorts he ran with and ratted out had a fondness for that place. He didn't. He was generally, after all, the member of the group who was responsible for finding drugs, alcohol, and sex for the others. And as a man of some hidden moral character, he always did prefer to find sex that was cheerful and willing and receiving proper health care and good wages from their agencies. Beta Colony's business models, in his opinion, were just so much more charming than the Whole's. He hesitates, then ventures, feeling decidedly disoriented, "Are you at least familiar with those names?"

"No." None of it means anything, though Jackson's Hole (it doesn't occur to her that it might be Whole) sounds like it could be some kind of three-person town in the boonies. "If we weren't on a different planet right now--" though as she says it, she realizes that aside from the weird plants, it could basically be Alaska, and they could be lying to her--"I wouldn't believe you."

So he knows all these different worlds and colonies, and she can name the planets in the solar system. And none of that even begins to overlap, except that he's apparently familiar with Earth.

"This is crazy." And it's cold, and the novelty of snow wore off sometime after a little of it got down inside one of her cowgirl boots, so now she has a cold, soggy foot on top of all this. She crosses her arms as she trudges up a mountain that might be Barrayar or might be Alaska, depending on how much she can trust any of these people. "If we could go to other planets, they would have shipped people off right at the start of the turn. All they did was set up FEMA camps."

There are certain things By is not so fond of. Numbers one through seven on that list are all members of his family, and number eight is heights, and number nine is sobriety. Number ten - high up on said list, all things considered - is feeling out of the loop. And right now, he is feeling terribly out of the loop. What, after all, is a femur camp? What is a turn? Or, no, he knows what turns are, obviously, that's a simple enough thing - but what does she mean when she talks about them here? His sensation of having a headache only increases.

"Perhaps," he says, rather delicately, "you might provide me with a bit of...background context on where you're from. Forgive me; I think I might not know some of the...Earth lingo. Or culture. Or anything. We don't get too many Earthers out here on Barrayar, you must understand."

"Fine." It's probably not fair, answering with the verbal equivalent of an eyeroll, but neither is anything else that happened today. She was almost home--she'd had one more thing to do (murder Dawn sounds horrible to think, even if she knew it needed to be done), and she was going to see her people again--and now she's probably lightyears away from everyone who matters to her. And it's cold, and she still doesn't trust him. Beth glances his way again. "You know about the walkers, right?"

Everyone knows about the walkers, even if they call them something else. If he doesn't, this conversation's going to get really, really basic.

He is guessing, given her peculiar emphasis, that she is not simply referring to people who prefer to stroll rather than ride. No, he does not remotely enjoy not knowing what's going on. Not a bit.

"Let us presume I do not."

Beth sighs. Fine, they'll assume he's never even heard of walkers (the biters, the rotters, the dead, whatever the rest of the universe calls them). Maybe it's some kind of secret, the way an entire spiderweb of planets beyond Earth apparently was to her.

"At home, when somebody dies, we have to stab 'em in the head." She has no idea how many times she's going to have to go over this. She hopes it's not a lot. "Once your brain's broken, you're really dead. If it isn't, your body keeps going without you."

"Ah," he says a bit helplessly. "You...do not mean merely in the sense that - ah - cryorevival can be carried out if the brain is undamaged. You mean that anyone can come back?"

Is that some childish flight of fancy? Some fiction she's been fed? She seems deadly grim. Hard to imagine this as a joke.

Beth gives him a blank look at the word cryorevival. Maybe it's the thing where they freeze people, but she always figured that was basically science fiction stuff, too. After a moment, she decides aloud. "No. It just happens. You die a person...and you wake up something else."

A monster--though there's something heartless about calling them monsters when they used to be as human as anybody else. They're deadly, but they're unfortunate. Pathetic.

"Ah," he says rather weakly. "Hm." He bounces his walking stick several times against the path and says, "So on your part of Earth, the dead simply are up and walking about. One wonders why...one has not heard of such a thing."

Beth's brows draw together, and her gaze slips away from the man. Instead, she's looking out at the snow beyond their little group: clean, fresh-looking, without the stumbling tracks of walkers. No grey-skinned faces anywhere around them, for that matter. She can't remember the last time she stood outside and saw only the living in all directions.

"You don't have walkers here," she says, some wonder creeping into the words. After years of having them at her back, she'd assumed their twisted forms were out there among the trees. Which is proof in itself that her tracking needs work, but she's not sure she can trust anyone here to ask. "You--you really haven't heard of them. At all?"

"The affairs of galactics are not my specialty," quite literally, hah, "but I should think that I'd have heard a bit about walking dead even many wormholes away."

Another thump of his walking stick on the frozen earth.

"So we are left with a mystery," he proclaims. "You with no knowledge of the broader galaxy, I with no knowledge of your Earth. I suppose there are a few possibilities that spring to mind. One, that you are from some other universe's version of Earth. Two, that we are both dreadfully ignorant. Three...hm. That someone has made your planet into some sort of laboratory, and fed you a very cruel fiction. Four, that one or both of us is mad."

Every possibility he comes up with is kind of crazy, though it's not like she can come up with anything that isn't insane.

"I'm not mad," she answers, rolling her eyes. That's the easiest one to answer--makes it the best place to start. "So it's not that. We're definitely both ignorant, but that doesn't really explain what's going on. And if everyone on Earth is a lab rat...that's not just crazy, that's really screwed up."

And it doesn't make everything happening fiction. The fact that apparently NASA lied to everyone about good space travel, maybe, but the rest of it...

Anyway, that only leaves one thing as an option, and she doesn't have much of an answer to it. Sophomore science never covered this stuff. "Is another universe even possible?"

"I said one or both," Byerly protests. "I might be mad and dreaming you up. It's not hard to imagine. Madness is nearly as common in my family as brown eyes. I could name you three cousins currently living who are confined to their homes for madness." Not, alas, an exaggeration or a joke. He wonders for a moment if that's what this is. His mental break, come at last. If he's broken down and raving about girls from planets with living dead men, locked in some room in some Vorrutyer manse. Or wandering the streets while raving, perhaps? Heaven forfend, what a dreadful thought. But his parents wouldn't bother to pluck him off the streets to protect him from disgrace...Dono would, though. Solid, reliable, honorable Dono would make sure that if his mental breakdown ever came, he at least wouldn't humiliate himself in public.

Oh, stop it. Not even worth thinking about further. If he is mad and hallucinating, might as well embrace it. That's wisdom gleaned from copious drug use: when you're in a hallucination, just go with it. Far more fun than sitting around pouting and doubting. And you're just making yourself depressed.

"And it's not like something being screwed up makes it any less plausible. If anything, it makes it a bit more plausible. The human race is nothing if not a bit sadistic." Ah, but you're letting your cynic show, By. Best to stop that, given the present company. "But truthfully? I haven't the faintest idea whether it's possible. Nothing like that has ever been shown to exist in all the years that we've been venturing into space and pushing the frontiers ever further. But it's hubris of the first order to presume that we know all there is to know."

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