The Vorkosigan Companion (16 page)

But now the thumbscrew is turned again. The child
might
be saved if he could be given heroic treatments which would poison and kill Cordelia. Enter the uterine replicators given to backward Barrayar by the Escobarans at the end of their war. If the fetus, Miles, can be transferred to the uterine replicator, heroic measures
could
be tried.

That's good till the next crisis.

Civil war breaks out as an opportunistic count sees a chance to make himself Emperor. In the fighting, we see the use of aircars (lightflyers) and scanners which can find people. Separating the animals from the people through a forest canopy is a lot harder, allowing General Piotr Vorkosigan, Cordelia, the child emperor Gregor, and Bothari to escape on the high technology of the Time of Isolation—horses.

The backcountry of Vorkosigan's district, the Dendarii Mountains, runs on old technology—no electricity, modern vehicles extremely rare, outhouses and wood-burning fireplaces.

Then comes one of the implications of having your baby in a uterine replicator—the unborn baby can be kidnapped and held for ransom. The unborn baby is in a technological device not understood by the kidnappers and needs heroic medical treatment to reverse the poison gas cure's damage. The kidnappers could never manage the treatment even if they knew of it!

Cordelia takes action, using car, truck, monorail, sewers, and the high technology of an actual sword to drive the dynamic final quarter of the book.

By the beginning of
The Warrior's Apprentice
, Miles, at seventeen, has already undergone "an inquisition's worth" of medical treatment to his ruined bones. He can walk, even run and do most physical activities, if he's very careful of his bones. He's short, at "just-under-five-foot," and distinctly hunchbacked. He looks like a mutie on a mutation-hating world.

Miles is the child of one of the youngest ship captains and admirals of Barrayar, who was then chosen as regent for the child emperor and later made prime minister of Barrayar. His astrogator mother was captain of a ship of the Betan Astronomical Survey, exploring and mapping wormholes and exploring new worlds. The least members of her crew were the cream of Beta Colony's intelligent and scientific elite. Miles is not dumb.

Miles fails the physical entrance test to the Barrayaran military academy, but, being Miles, he goes off to find
something
to do.

On Beta Colony, Miles buys a junkyard-ready starship, serviceable but old and not economical. Jump-ship pilots use neural interfaces to control their ships, particularly during the jump. The pilot of Miles's obsolete ship has the neural interface for the obsolete drive system and has been medically down-checked for a new interface. If he's ever to fly a jump again (which he thinks is "better than a woman—better than food or drink or sleep or breath"), he has to go with the ship.

Miles finds his cargo and supplies via the comconsole in a process quite similar to using the World Wide Web—noteworthy since the story was written a half-decade before the invention of the World Wide Web and a decade before most of us noticed it.

The logistics of paying and supplying a mercenary fleet become important. When receiving the fleet's pay Miles has a "fantasy of glittering diadems, gold coins, and ropes of pearls. Alas that such gaudy baubles were treasures no more. Crystallized viral microcircuits, data packs, DNA splices, bank drafts on major planetary agricultural and mining futures; such was the tepid wealth men schemed upon in these degenerate days."

On planets, most financial transactions are done with credit cards and electronic transfers; however, paper money is still used as currency on most planets.

The range and intermixing of technologies is a key part of "The Mountains of Mourning" as Miles investigates an infant murder in the backcountry hills of the Dendarii Mountains.

As deputy for his father, the district count, Miles meets the locals on their own terms by riding horseback into the mountains rather than using a lightflyer. The village speaker has a small,   battery-powered radio to pick up news from the outside and that's about all the modern technology in Silvy Vale. Miles's armsman, Pym, uses a hand-scanner to search the brush for threats when Miles seems threatened.

It comes down to convincing the locals that Miles
can't
make a mistake on identifying the true murderer because he's going to use the modern technology of fast-penta, an effective truth drug.

The Vor Game
technologies are similar to those in
The Warrior's Apprentice
. The action takes place on spaceships and space stations that are gearing up for war. When this resolves into the Cetagandan invasion of Vervain and the Hegan Hub, we see the only major space battle shown in the Vorkosigan Saga as Miles's Dendarii Mercenaries join in the defense of the Hegan Hub's jump point.

Since the development of the plasma mirror the plasma beam is less effective and several ships need to gang up on one to overwhelm the plasma mirror defense. The few ships with the short-range gravitic imploder lance try to find chances to use it. Another navy with longer-range gravitic imploder lances is much more effective.

One of the few uses of major automation in the series is the tactical computer. As Miles sits idly in the tactics room, he's reminded of the academy jape "
Rule 1: Only overrule the tactical computer if you know something it doesn't. Rule 2: The tac comp always knows more than you do.
"

The main technologies in "Labyrinth" tend to be biological. Prototype 9, for instance, is a wholly engineered human. Nine is a constructed warrior human and a sixteen-year-old girl, albeit eight feet tall with fangs and claws. Other characters include Nicole, the quaddie (four arms, no legs), and Bel Thorne, a Betan hermaphrodite.

On the side is House Ryoval, purveyor of depravity in a bordello using bioconstructed and surgically altered slaves. Not somewhere you'd want to be taken captive—yet Nine, the girl, has been sold to Ryoval.

At one point, the Dendarii find themselves barreling along in a float truck, over the trees at a paltry 260 kilometers an hour, all the speed that crate would do.

On a space station, we see Nicole, the quaddie, in something like her natural environment as she floats in a null-gee bubble. In null-gee, she can play her two-sided hammer dulcimer using all four hands at once, with virtuoso skill. Quaddies use a cup-shaped anti-gravity float chair when they visit planets and one-gee space habitats. They control it with their lower hands, leaving their upper hands and arms free.

The plot in
Cetaganda
keys on computer technology. Lois lets the surprisingly decent Cetagandans suffer the utter folly of having a single point of failure of their most important resource.

The Cetagandans are masters of chemistry and especially genetics. The ghem compete with genetic wizardry on plants and animals. The haut only work with human genetics. They gene-engineer their race as they work for something higher than human and it looks like they're making progress.
All
haut children are engineered from the single master gene bank.

In the Emperor's Celestial Garden's Star Crèche is a frozen genetic sample of every haut who has ever lived—in randomized order. There are hundreds of thousands of samples. But there is only one master-index Key with no backups. "It is a matter of . . . control," said haut Rian Degtiar, Handmaiden of the Star Crèche.

The previous Empress decided that the haut race was getting stagnant and new competition and expansion was needed. So she ordered the gene bank to be duplicated and distributed to the governors of the eight Cetagandan planets to make eight new, competing centers of expansion. But the one, master, Great Key is not yet duplicated and distributed. Instead, it is stolen.

The Celestial Gardens, home to the Emperor and the haut, is permanently covered by a force dome six kilometers across requiring an entire power plant to maintain it. The haut-women's float chairs use force bubbles for safety and privacy, as the haut-women are never seen by those unworthy. Even a penthouse rooftop garden has its own force dome and the Empress's cremation is contained inside a force bubble.

Little things that show up include marvelous perfumes, technically enabled art and sensitized asterzine, the fabric that can be formable, dyeable, and totally inert until it comes in contact with the liquid catalyst, at which point it explodes.

Ethan of Athos
begins on Athos, an all-male planet which gets away from the sin of women's influence over men by using the uterine replicator and cultured ovarian tissues. But a couple of hundred years after the colony's founding, the ovarian tissue cultures are dying of old age.

An attempt to buy ovarian tissue cultures on the market has returned junk tissues, the real ones never having been sent or having been stolen along the way. Ethan Urquhart, a senior reproductive doctor, is sent out into the galaxy to buy new ovarian cultures. Kline Station is the first stop on the route from Athos to the rest of the galaxy.

Dendarii Commander Elli Quinn follows Cetagandan agents from Jackson's Whole to Kline Station in pursuit of something biological but she doesn't know what. The Cetagandans are pursuing tissues that are a result of a decades-long research project to develop spies who are telepathic. Losing the cultures might lead their enemies to develop telepathic spies. They think the valuable samples have been sent to Athos, so they capture and question Ethan.

Tiny electronic bugs and tracers are used by the spies in the story, including Quinn. The Cetagandans use fast-penta and other interrogation drugs. One produces high firing rates of sensory nerves and another, applied to the skin, produces agony but leaves no marks.

Kline Station is in an otherwise empty solar system with six wormholes. The station is a transshipment and trading center with over a hundred thousand permanent residents and sometimes a quarter that many transients.

Safety is paramount. Quinn quips that some places have religions, we have safety drills. The biocontrol cops have immense power to make break-in searches and decontaminations as they see fit.

Oxygen comes from aquatic plant life in tanks, which grows, requiring something to eat the excess growth lest it overrun the tanks. Newts eat the plants and something must be done with the newts. Among other uses are fried newt legs, cream of newt soup, newt creole, newts 'n' chips, bucket of newts, newt nuggets, ad infinitum.

Everything is recycled, from water to the bodies of the stationers who've died (though bodies are broken down to the molecular level and fed to plants). Some organic materials are broken down to a lesser degree and fed to food products growing in vats. All meats (except newts) are vat-grown tissues with no (ugh!) live animals to be killed.

"How could I have died and gone to Hell without noticing the transition?"
is the perfect opening line of "The Borders of Infinity," describing the Cetagandans' torture chamber for the Marilacan prisoners of war.

Rather than building walls, roofs, and floors and posting armed guards, the Cetagandans simply generate a force sphere, showing above ground as an opalescent force dome, perfectly circular, a half-kilometer wide.

With the force dome, the Cetagandans meet the treaty requirement in the cruelest way.
So many square meters a person
—make the dome just big enough.
No solitary confinement—
everyone is together with no privacy of any kind.
No dark periods longer than 12 hours
—no dark periods at all, just the same light, twenty-four hours a day forever.
No beatings
—with no guards in contact with the prisoners the guards can't beat the prisoners.
No rapes by the guards
—no contact with the guards handles that, but since the captors don't enforce any rules, if a prisoner rapes or beats another, too bad.
No forced labor
—no labor or work or occupation of any kind—nothing to do, forever.

Even the rule requiring
access to medical personnel
can work as torture if you confine the medically qualified prisoners with all the others, but don't give them
any
equipment or supplies.

Food is delivered when the Cetagandans bulge one side of the force dome. When the bulge disappears there is a small stack containing exactly one ration bar for every prisoner.

Arrayed against the Cetagandan technology is Miles, who starts out naked, and two spies among the Cetagandans, Elli and Elena, who have some means of burst-transmitting data to the Dendarii fleet.

Then, there's the final problem technology—the mechanics of the combat drop shuttle's ramp. With the recessed slot for the ramp
inside
the door, if the ramp gets damaged and jammed, the door can't close and that's not good for a combat shuttle taking off for space under combat conditions with pursuit.

As Miles arrives for his first visit to Earth, in
Brothers in Arms
, he can contemplate taking a submarine tour of "Lake Los Angeles" or visiting New York behind the famous dikes. London, his destination, has either settled or the ocean has risen—it is protected from the Thames and the ocean tides by a huge set of tall dikes.

While Miles is stuck in the Barrayaran embassy on Earth, he "gets" to attend ambassadorial receptions. One reception, with planetary representatives who speak no English, suffers because the keyed translator earbugs are misdelivered somewhere else in London, leaving them all just smiling and pantomiming. Alas, the replacements arrive
before
the interminable speeches.

Miles encounters body laser mapping and computer-controlled garment creation. An expensive store in the mall gives him a chance to buy a cultured "live" fur that seeks warmth and purrs. It's blended from the very finest assortment of
Felis domesticus
genes. It doesn't eat, shed, or need a litter box and is powered via an electromagnetic net at the cellular level, which passively gathers energy from the environment. If it seems to run down, the salesman points out, just put it in the microwave for a few minutes on the lowest setting, but "Cultured Furs cannot be responsible, however, for the results if the owner accidentally sets it on high." It makes an excellent blanket, spread, or throw rug.