So in the past couple of weeks, I chugged all the way through Bujold’s entire Vorkosigan saga. I’d never read any of them before, even though I’ve been seeing them in bookstores for decades and I knew their reputation. I never read them BECAUSE I knew their reputation.
I think I’d been saving them, all these years, because it’s a rare gift to have a book that you know, whenever you pick it up, you will love it and cherish it in that “I wish I could read it again for the first time” way. And here was an entire series! But the time finally came.
They were lighter-weight than I expected. In a way. Fast-paced adventurey space opera without too much bogging down in characters’ motivations and feelings and inner lives. But then a funny thing happened as I got toward the end of the series. I found myself lying awake thinking about the implications.
It’s a pretty horrifying world, actually, once the nuances soak in. Bujold never really fakes that it isn’t. In the first two books, Cordelia is horrified by the idea of what the culture of her adoptive planet is likely to do to her children. Quite rightfully so, because in the rest of the series we see the way it chews people up and spits them out, or drives them off. As more Barrayarans travel to other worlds for higher education, we’re told at one point, less than half the Barrayaran women who leave bother to come back. And then there’s Miles… Disabled Miles, in a world that still practices infant exposure when he’s born. “Win or die” is his motto for the first two decades of his adult life, because failure, for him, means destruction at the hands of people just waiting for a shot at him.
But it’s not till Mark comes on the scene, and we see Miles through his eyes, that we entirely understand the mark that’s left on Miles. That he’s grown up sucking down his parents’ unvoiced expectation that he will be the poster child, the one who paves the way to prove to his world that people like him deserve the right to survive. Is he crazy? In Miles’ head you never quite notice, but once you come out of it and see him through someone else’s eyes, yeah he really kind of is. And with that kind of burden on him, you can hardly blame him. He’s a sacrifice, and he and his entire family have always known it. He even says it, near the end. That this is what his family is for. This is what his social caste, the Vor, are for. They’re the historic caste of warriors, and at the bottom that means they’re the ones who sacrifice when their world needs it from them.
And even though he spends a fair amount of his time in space, far away from that entire world, the people who know him best repeatedly accuse him of being “incredibly Vor.” I suppose they’re right. Seen from one perspective, Miles’ life is terribly unjust. From another, it’s a life full of incredible, even unearned privilege. But from the perspective he chooses, it’s a sacrifice that was asked of him, and that he chose to fulfill (and not without ego, either; he doesn’t think some fame and glory for his achievements in this service is too much to ask).
I admire the lurking, haunting subtlety of world-building and character-building like this so much. The way that, even though Bujold tells you these things, in passing, so casually they barely register, it’s not until days later that you find it keeping you up at night.
Even now I’m thinking of more. There’s a loneliness to Miles that’s never really assuaged. He straddles two worlds in a way that means almost everyone around him really only sees half of who he is. Even the people closest to him underestimate him, taken off-guard in key moments by choices he makes which aren’t nearly as much of a surprise to us. It’s no wonder that when his clone-brother Mark comes along, Miles clings so hard to him. Someone who can, theoretically, know him at least a little from the inside. (Mark has a Thing about Miles, we’re told, and this seems true, but what never really gets mentioned is that if that’s true, then Miles seems to have just as much of a Thing about Mark. I’d give a lot to be given a better sense of what shape these Things take.)
What seems saddest and loneliest of all is how often Miles’ closest friends and family hesitate to tell him personal things, because they worry he won’t accept them for it.
And something that no one in the stories, ever, brings up is how, if the old traditions of Vor and Barrayar are so important to its people, if the Old Vor are something they feel a melancholy loss for, then Miles is a shining example of what the New Vor could be. A galactically-educated cosmopolitan with an enduring loyalty for his world, respect for its histories and people and willingness to sacrifice for its well-being. Not to mention a wide streak of crusading knight errantry that brings him to the aid not only of his own people, but also to its neighbors. I wonder if anybody will notice. I also wonder what kind of world Barrayar will look like after another few decades with people like Miles and Gregor steering it.