Ms Brown had mid-length chestnut-coloured hair, and wore a bottle-green suit. Mr Smith had very little hair, wore a grey suit, and held a datapad.

Ms Brown cleared her throat. 'You feel adequate to the demands of this position? What qualities do you feel you personally have to offer?'

Kosta tried to think. Did he have any good qualities? His therapist had been coaching him on this for years. Years that he'd spent in a secure mental hospital on Beta Colony. Not just to undo the memory-suppression conditioning from the time he'd spent in a military mental hospital on Barrayar, but because he was crazy. A psycho. Dangerous.

But Lord Vorkosigan and Commander Naismith – no, he was supposed to get used to calling them by their first names, on Beta you're not supposed to be formal with people you share an apartment with – Aral and Cordelia thought he wasn't a bad person. So did his therapist. He'd been released, now, as long as he wasn't living on his own. He had a parenting licence. He was cleared to look for work. He should be doing something useful, other than keeping an eye on young Elena and Olivia.

It was just hard to remember, here, in this office, why anyone would want to offer him a job. He tried to remember anything good anyone had ever said about him. 'A good soldier.'

Mr Smith made a note. 'Ah.'

It had been the wrong thing to say. He was a soldier who fought against Beta Colony. He was a war criminal who tortured Betan prisoners. But he'd been a soldier since he was sixteen years old. What else was there to say?

Ms Brown broke the silence. 'Let us consider your application form. Your qualifications, though impressive, are – not, we must admit, precisely what we had in mind. Would you care to defend their relevance?'

The application form had said to list every job he'd had since he was a teenager – well, it said since he left school, but he'd never gone to school – and every qualification he had. He'd written about graduating from Imperial Service basic training at the top of the class, with high marks for weapons knowledge, unarmed combat, escape and evasion, and field first aid, and about commendations for his military service and citations for being wounded in battle. Before everything had started to go wrong.

None of that was relevant to working as a tech in a uterine replicator centre, he knew. But the form said you had to write it anyway. He'd written in the 'qualifications' section about the courses he'd done while in hospital – learning to read Roman script, just as he'd learned Cyrillic in the remedial literacy classes when he joined the Imperial Service, and qualifying for a parenting licence, which you were supposed to study for before you had children, here. And he had done a training course 'Introduction to replicators'.

In the 'Why are you applying for this job?' section of the form, he'd tried to explain about how his mother was a midwife (she was also a whore, but he wasn't going to write that – it had been hard enough talking to his therapist about it) and how when he was a child (before he ran away from home), she used to take him with her to help out, so he'd seen what normal childbirth was like, bloody and dangerous and full of screaming and pain and sometimes death, and about how his daughter was one of the first babies on Barrayar to be born from a replicator (because she'd been given away before she was born, because she was the result of rape and her mother didn't want ever to set eyes on her) and how replicator birth, safe and peaceful, was the opposite of normal birth, was what birth should be like. He'd been with Lord Vorkosigan to visit the lab where the replicators were kept, and to collect the babies as each one was born and take them to the ImpMil orphanage, apart from Elena, and the technician had explained to him how everything worked, and it was interesting.

So when he and Lord Vorkosigan had had to flee to Beta Colony, when they'd had to think about finding new jobs here if they couldn't be soldiers any longer, he'd remembered the replicators and thought, yes, that was what he wanted to do. A way of making up for the people he'd hurt, if he couldn't train as a medtech (he'd applied for that, too, but there hadn't been any reply and he wasn't surprised).

But there hadn't been much room in that box on the form, and most of it wasn't the sort of stuff he'd tell anyone (and certainly wasn't going to risk writing down now that Elena was learning to read), and he wasn't good at putting things into words.

'I can learn,' he managed.

Mr Smith nodded patiently, obviously humouring him. 'Indeed.'

'Now your age,' continued Ms Brown. 'Perhaps you feel able to make your own comment about that, too?' She gave a tinkling giggle. 'We are conscious ourselves of the need for a candidate with precisely the right degree of immaturity.'

'I'm forty-nine – uh, forty-seven.' He'd had to lie about his age to join the Service, when he was sixteen and tall enough to pass for eighteen, so the dates on his papers were two years out. Anyway, they wouldn't believe he was that young, probably. In your forties was middle-aged, on Barrayar. On Beta, where most people lived to be at least a hundred and twenty, middle-aged was in your sixties.

'So glad we agree,' said Mr Smith.

Ms Brown coughed awkwardly. 'And now a delicate matter: your looks. You do appreciate this work involves contact with the actual public? Might they, perhaps, find your appearance – disturbing?'

Yes, they would. It wasn't just that he was ugly. Anyone could see that his face was the same one that his victims had put together from photofit images. His therapist had asked him whether, once they were confident that he wasn't a public danger and could be released, he might feel safer if he could have surgery to change his appearance, and change his name. He hadn't wanted to. What was the point of all those years of therapy, of learning to uncover the memories he had been forced to suppress and the memories he had made himself forget, of putting together a life story book of who he was, if he was going to ditch it all and start again as someone else? How would it make sense to Elena, after Aral and Cordelia had been bringing her to visit him for all those years, if he suddenly looked different?

But yes, it would have been safer. Being recognisable, on a planet where he wasn't allowed to carry weapons, and where plenty of people had reason to hate him, was dangerous. But then, Aral had to live with that, too. Even if he hadn't actually done anything wrong, people still called him 'the Butcher of Komarr'. But still, how was this going to work, at work?

'I can keep out of the way, when parents come.' According to the training course, lots of parents came only twice, once to give egg and sperm samples and then nine months later to collect their child, but the ones who came every day to read to their foetus came only during visitors' hours, and com-called first. He could stay in the back room.

'Quite so,' said Mr Smith, but he didn't sound convinced.

'And your accent,' went on Mrs Brown. 'That is the way you have always spoken, is it?'

He didn't answer. On Barrayar, his Caravanserai accent marked him out as a street rat, vermin from the slums, and having a flat, emotionless monotone voice didn't help. To a Betan, maybe he just sounded Barrayaran – maybe they didn't even notice the difference between his accent and Lord Vorkosigan's – but sounding Barrayaran, to a Galactic, was probably even worse.

'What of your education?' continued Ms Brown. 'Were you educated?' – she stopped, as though embarrassed to be caught out in a mistake, but he was sure it was deliberate. 'We mean, of course, where were you educated?'

'Imperial Service Basic Training.' Apart from the remedial literacy classes, there'd been classes in everything recruits might not know, like how to take a shower, or eat with a knife and fork. Some of the recruits had come from the city slums, like him, and others from villages in the mountains.

'And how much of a handicap is that to you, would you say?' asked Ms Brown.

He wasn't going to answer that. She knew what being handicapped meant, on Barrayar. Babies born with something wrong with them got killed, so adults who showed any signs of having something wrong with them could get killed, too. If it was something people couldn't see, like schizophrenia, you could get away with it, maybe, as long as you were useful. People with visible injuries, like Ensign Koudelka, were in far more danger. He wished they'd had time to ask Koudelka if he wanted to flee to Beta with them, but they'd had to get out in a hurry, when the Regent accused Lord Vorkosigan of treason.

Ms Brown was goading, now. 'Married, children, we see. The usual dubious desire to perpetuate what had better not have happened at all.' She didn't mean just the fact that he had raped a prisoner of war, and had done so after taking out her contraceptive implant, to satisfy a prince who liked torturing pregnant women, but the fact that he existed. On Beta Colony, it wasn't that they thought sex workers shouldn't have children, but someone like his Ma would never have qualified for a parenting licence until the authorities were satisfied that she wouldn't allow her child to come to any harm.

Of course, he'd never really been married – who would want to marry him? But he still pretended to be a widower for the purposes of paperwork. Elena must never find out that she was a bastard.

'We do not ask what domestic disasters shimmer behind that vaguely unsuitable address,' Ms Brown sneered.

There was nothing wrong with the apartment he shared with Aral and Cordelia and his daughter and theirs. It wasn't like a Count's Residence on Barrayar, but it was warm and clean and had electricity and a bathroom and a comconsole, and it was much posher than anything he could have imagined as a boy. Aral missed living on a planet where you could go outside without needing a breath mask, but Kosta didn't mind. It was no worse than being on a ship.

But, on the other hand, it was a safe house for people the public might want to attack. It might look just like any other apartment, but it wasn't.

'And you were born—?' prompted Ms Brown.

He didn't need to say 'In a whorehouse in the Caravanserai, to a whore, unqualified midwife and abortionist who only bothered keeping me because she could make more money hiring me out to the perverts than hiring herself out to the regular customers.' It was enough just to say, 'Barrayar.'

Mr Smith shook his head. 'Yes. Pity.'

'I'll go now,' he suggested. He needed to be home, needed to see his friends, to remember that not everyone thought he was disgusting for existing.

Ms Brown nodded. 'So glad we agree.'