All right. It's out, then, or coming out. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, By thinks: it's out while he's here and can work on countering it. "Your nephew?" By asks, his brow crinkling incredulously. "Well, that's the oddest damned lie I've ever heard a man use to get into someone's pants."

And then, as an aside to ghem-Yulang, By goes on, "The man I met back at the Barrayaran camp - he's a compulsive liar, I fancy. He told all sorts of tall tales - one of them was that he was pretending to be a time traveler. I guess he heard the exotics' stories and decided to make himself even more interesting. Damned idiot thing to do, in my opinion."