'Does signing a contract mean anything to you, or is it just a social pastime, like sex?' 'It's not finished yet, is it?' he asked rhetorically, interpreting her reply with depressing correctness. 'Are you going into one of your impresario phases again?' she inquired, attacking the flank. 'It's the first of the month, Anias,' replied Gonzales, frowning right back. 'Yeah, what is it?' Anias said, with all the ungraciousness she could muster.

He was a large, booming man whom Anias generally did not care to face before her first cup of coffee. The unwelcome features of Helmut Gonzales, Rio de Janeiro's most successful feelie-dream distributor, snapped into focus on the screen. The machine, finicky, refused to obey until she cleared her throat and repeated it in a more normal tone. As it continued to ding inanely, she regretfully gave up the desire to emulate him and, in spite of the certainty in her heart that curiosity was more likely to be punished than rewarded, croaked 'Answer,' and pulled the screen to face her. She knew only one man with the moral strength to ignore the vone at the moment it seemed his most admirable trait. She rolled over in a tangle of covers and regarded its small blinking light malignantly. Her consciousness coming into sharper focus, she correctly identified the harpoon sensation as the musical chime of the vone. She had the blurry thought that if the waking had been a transition in one of her own works, she would edit it out in the very next take. The story takes place approximately six hundred years before the events in Cordelia's Honor.Īnias Ruey, the feelie-dream composer, floundered up out of sleep feeling like a sea creature being hauled out of deep water by a harpoon.

Yes, the ill-fated Ensign Dubauer from Shards is a later descendant of Chalmys, both genetically and literarily. Having invented Beta Colony and the future history of the wormhole nexus as backstory for co-protagonist Chalmys DuBauer, I promptly recycled it as the place Cordelia Naismith was from when I plunged, a few weeks later in December of 1982, into the start of my first novel. 'Dreamweaver's Dilemma', at about 16,300 words technically a novelette, also is the foreshadowing or first draft of what has come to be dubbed 'the Vorkosiverse' or 'the Vorkosigan saga', my long-running (and still running) science fiction series.

Falling free by lois mcmaster bujold