superstitions

[vorbarra]

A lot can happen to a legend over a period of almost a thousand years of isolation. Although the original settlers of Barrayar were Earth-born scientists-- leading even modern day Barrayarans to consider themselves atheists-- people are still people, and over time, the medieval level of technology they had been plunged into after the wormhole collapse had fostered superstitions. Old folk legends brought from Earth took on a life of their own, and warped.

It takes a while for Barrayarans to start being a presence around the Nexus even after contact is reestablished. They spent the first twenty years in a bloody, gruesome, guerrilla war, after all, and then lurching forward in tech development, using the scraps left behind by Cetaganda after they'd pulled out to launch themselves into space. This means it's not really until around the time of Gregor's father's generation that Barrayarans can be casually seen on space stations and other planets. Infrequently, and always out of place in their old-fashioned military uniforms or full skirts, but increasingly common if not accepted. Most of the city dwellers, probably, are not so prone to buying into superstition, but carrying death-charms around their necks was still fairly standard practice for servicemen and gone unquestioned.

The first time Jack probably notices anything different about the Barrayarans is when one of the country-bred ones looks directly at him on a space station somewhere and shrieks, leaping backward, clutching their chest where the death-charm is. This sets a trend: not often, but occasionally, a Barrayaran will see or hear him, and react dramatically. They are never very cooperative for interacting, though, and certainly not in public where they're trying to combat a galactic reputation of being backwater barbarians barely accustomed to indoor plumbing. (This is unfair; they've had indoor plumbing for a whole generation now.)

As for Gregor, he was one of very few Barrayarans raised by a scientist who is also a theist, and encouraged by her to think openly and freely about the universe around him. He also is prone to trying to make friends with his servants, feeling weird about living in the sprawling Residence with them while having them be quietly underfoot, and as a hungry teenager is similarly likely to sneak into the kitchens for snacks. His servants indulge him at this age, for the most part; and so he'd grown up listening to a good amount of these country stories, and had questions about the supernatural patiently and thoroughly answered by his foster-mother, who always maintained a position of informed skepticism but not certainty.

Regularly he can be found reading outside in the Imperial Gardens, a sweeping expanse of manicured land maintained as green rather than the native reddish-brown of Barrayar by painstaking effort. Gregor's favorite places to read are all off the pruned pathways and out away from easy eyesight, curled up against trees, sometimes doing his studying for classes and sometimes reading books of poetry, guiltily, and sometimes doing neither and wistfully daydreaming. Today is a daydreaming sort of day; he's a lanky, tall form not quite used to his height dressed in overly-expensive hand-tailored clothes, which he is getting dirty on the ground not out of carelessness but simply because he needs to do some things to keep himself sane.