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Rereading the Vorkosigan Saga: Komarr, Chapter 6

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Rereading the Vorkosigan Saga: Komarr, Chapter 6

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Rereading the Vorkosigan Saga: Komarr, Chapter 6

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Published on January 22, 2018

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Chapter five ended with the announcement that an unexpected corpse had been discovered associated with the wreckage of the cargo ship/soletta array collision. Our mysterious male space corpse was in a position and on a trajectory that suggests that he was on one of those things at the time of collision. His origin and identity are unknown, and his clothes—the remains of his entirely unexceptional ship knits—have been mostly destroyed by exposure to hard vacuum.

I know I’m supposed to be intrigued by the mystery of the corpse, and I am! I am dutifully intrigued, or I was, the first time I read Komarr, when I didn’t already know who he was. For first-timers, the corpse is a frozen enigma. Is he someone we’ve heard of? Is he someone entirely new? Will he blow Miles’s case wide open? All intriguing questions! After the first time you read a mystery, you know the answers to questions like this and you get to focus your attention on the details.

On this round, I’m focused on the SHIP KNITS. Miles has worn ship knits approximately one gajillion times in the course of the Saga. He practically lives in them. Or in uniforms of some sort, or in suits that subtly reflect the uniforms he used to wear. He also has a collection of backcountry-style shirts, which is an admirably non-descript description, revealing the impression conveyed by the shirt while providing no information about the shirt itself. Komarr clarifies that ship knits are the everyday wardrobe of spacers who might need to don pressure suits on a moment’s notice. The closest thing we have to this in contemporary fashion is athleisure, which at it’s best, subtly suggests that the wearer has, or has had, the earnest intention of going to the gym at some point. I don’t know what ship knits look like, but I don’t care, because what I need in my life—what I think EVERYONE needs if they’re being honest—is a garment that says “I might put on a space suit today, or alternately, I might stay in.”

Miles is perusing the reports on our previously ship-knit clad corpse and hoping that Ekaterin will deign to speak to him, when Nicolai Vorsoisson stops by Ekaterin’s workroom for a chat. It’s a small thing, but I’m grateful that the Vorsoisson’s Komarran flat is so large—kitchen, balcony, spiral staircase, dining room, living room with sunken conversation pit (Komarr may be Space Venice but its domestic architecture is mid-century modern), master bedroom with bath, bedroom for Nikki, guest bedroom, home office for Tien, workroom for Ekaterin, second bath. I’m glad they have room to get away from each other. I don’t think they would have made it for this long if they lived in an NYC-style tiny walkup. I’d be happy to see Tien succumb to a series of acute untreated foot injuries from Nikki’s toys, but I’m afraid Ekaterin would be the first to die. Nikki has left his designated domestic zone to come to stare at Miles, who he has been informed was once a spy. Miles is also interesting because he’s a child-sized adult and an obvious mutant. Miles denies having been a spy, and sticks to the official cover story about having been a courier officer. He travelled a lot, and went on a lot of jump ships. Nikki wants to be a jump pilot when he grows up. Of all the people who have reasons to flee the Barrayaran Empire screaming, only the ten-year-old has a plan to do it.

Nikki’s plan is very Vor—he’s going to join the military and get his pilot’s training and his implant that way. Miles, sensitive to the looming tragedy of lost childhood dreams, proposes that he consider a civilian route to his goal. Having Vorzohn’s Dystrophy is a bar to being a jump pilot in the Barrayaran military, even if the condition is cured.

This is not the first time that qualifications for service in the Barrayaran Military have come up on this blog. We had a memorable and heated conversation about this issue when Miles plunged off a wall during the Imperial Military Academy’s physical fitness testing in the opening chapter of The Warrior’s Apprentice. In that case, I asserted that servo-assisted armor and other technologies meant that Miles’s disabilities were irrelevant to his ability to serve as a combat officer. A vocal dissenting contingent among the commentariat strongly implied that anyone not capable of storming the battlefield in a leather kilt like the ancient Romans shouldn’t be considered fit for service in anyone’s army. A reasonable reread blogger would never bring this topic up again. But why hone the comment guidelines if I’m not going to take them out for a spin?

The Vorkosigan Saga takes place a long time in the future—the Komarran terraforming project has been in progress for a thousand years. Over that time span, Horace’s notion of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori might have been sufficiently faded and tarnished in its popularity at several points that a prudent planetary government would look for ways that individuals can serve, rather than sticking to exclusionary traditions that dictate that a large number of possibly willing individuals cannot. If treated in a timely fashion, Nikki’s mutation will only be relevant when he has children of his own.

Most Barrayarans feel that the life of the Emperor is more important than a lot of trade goods not getting stuck in a wormhole. However, there are a number of organizations that see the trade goods as more immediately vital to their survival, and in some circumstances, I think those organizations have a valid point. Nonetheless, outside of the Barrayaran military, neither Miles’s nor Nikki’s condition excludes an individual from jump pilot training. In The Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles disguised himself as a jump pilot in order to return to Barrayar incognito, and his mother was excited that he had chosen to take pilot’s training. The trade organizations of the Galactic Nexus would not hesitate to have a mutant like Nikki pilot their goods around. Barrayar should consider loosening up.

If Barrayar says people with cured mutagenic disorders can’t be jump pilots, Tien can’t imagine why they should. As Miles and Nikki bond over Nikki’s collection of jump ship models, Tien drops by to disapprove. Unwilling to take an open and honest approach to the problems posed by Vorzohn’s Dystrophy, Tien instead attempts to dis his son’s dreams to death. Miles’s assertion that some people grow into their dreams instead of out of them comes very close to being blatantly rude to the man who is, nominally, his host. Miles thinks wistful thoughts about relocating to a hotel over dinner.

Miles is never going to a hotel. Tune in next week to find out why he’s still sleeping in a grav bed in Ekaterin’s workroom.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the comment thread. The comments are a place for interesting, vibrant and respectful conversations. Posters should please observe the following guidelines:

  • Spoilers are welcome in the comments if they are relevant to the discussion at hand.
  • Non-spoiler comments should also be relevant to the discussion at hand.
  • Like Earth, Barrayar and other places in the galactic nexus live out sets of cultural practices that range from beautiful to genocidal. Regardless of what may be commonplace as a cultural practice in any place at any time, comments that question the value and dignity of individuals, or that deny anyone’s right to exist, are emphatically NOT welcome.
  • The comments on this blog are not an appropriate place to debate settled matters of fact, history, human rights or ethics.

Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.

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Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer

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Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.
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6 years ago

It’s a bit unclear in the series, but I think that jump pilots have a different neurology than other humans, which lets them interact with the jump headsets and implants.  When Taura is recruited, Miles questions her carefully after her first jump, to ask if she had any visual or time-stretching effects from the jump, and when she says she didn’t, he’s glad, because he’d hate to loose someone so suited to combat to Nav&Com.  

Which would suggest that the physical qualifications for ordinary military service might be waived for someone physiologically capable of being a jump pilot, and being quite suited to other tasks  and preferring those tasks might not get one assigned to those tasks, as jump pilots are more needed.

Of course “jump pilot” is far from the only task on a jump ship, and if Nikki wants to travel, being a navigator, or engine technician, or other such tasks might be options.  

Of course, half the job of the Barrayan military is to be the Emperor’s enforcers.  For that, looks matter, as Miles considers that physical attractiveness was one reason for the Kosti brothers to be considered as Palace guards, in addition to the brains and skills for the task.  

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6 years ago

There’s a also a bit of a continuity glitch as Miles neglects to mention the Trade Fleet escorts which mitigates at least some of the disadvantages of being a military pilot. Though if the goal is to get far away from “here” then Miles is right about the superiority of commercial piloting.

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6 years ago

@2, I’m not sure if that is a continuity glitch or canniness on Miles’s part.  He knows that the mutation will disqualify Nikki from military service, so he plays up the most boring military option, and contrasts it with the glamour of the more viable non-military option. 

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6 years ago

It’s been pretty much established that Barrayar and Barrayarans are totally irrational about ‘mutations’. Untreated Vorzohn’s Dystrophy would be a disabling condition. Cured VD isn’t. Barrayarans need to grasp emotionally that dreaded mutation is completely curable with modern medicine. 

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6 years ago

The argument is probably hand-waving that most people with VD wouldn’t get it treated until after symptoms had manifested which might spontaneously manifest in unpleasant ways. The argument is probably garbage but they just need a fig-leaf of medical justification. Or they didn’t change the rules when galactic medicine became common enough to assume that anyone who knew they had VD was also cured. Why change the rules just to let mutants take jobs from normal people, eh?

It is slightly horrific that it’s so easy to come up with justifications for Barrayaran bigotry.

 

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LordVorless
6 years ago

Tien’s right about the things that are stumbled upon in the night.   They are deadly dangerous.  Nikki’s recounting of the varied details of his collection is on-point, the same way it could be dinosaurs, trains, sports cars, or planes today.   

Miles’s handling of Tien’s disease is leaving out the matter of how his own denial went bad.   He really should have thought of that.

1-5, I see that the matter of Jump Implants is taking center, not surprising, but we don’t really know the details of selection, let alone insertion, or the particulars of Barryarran enlistment.  It may be that the military simply isn’t interested in taking the risks, they have a pool of candidates that’s large enough to justify not going to an expense, or perhaps the age would increase the risk of some damage that would be an impairment in itself,  and there may be some real and serious concerns that a civilian surgeon would also balk at, except maybe on Jackson’s Whole where the money talks.  (Or maybe Beta Colony, they have a profit motive too.) Really, whatever decision LMB wants to make will be the determining factor.  

 

 

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6 years ago

I’m voting for the ‘stick up their ass’ version.  Miles could also be worrying that even if the military allowed Nikki to serve, the knowledge that he was/had been a mutant would make life tough for him.

We do know from CVA that many people have side-effects beyond space sickness from wormhole jumps.  Ivan sees everything as green.

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6 years ago

@6, Alternatively, some things stumbled on in the dark are serendipitous and wonderful. Tej and Ivan’s romance, for example. I do not think that Tien is particularly correct here, in any overarching or metaphorical sense. He happens to be correct that stepping on toy vehicles hurts like a bitch.

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LordVorless
6 years ago

7, 8, on the other hand, bad things can happen when the military isn’t sticklers for the rules, but given that it remains indeterminate, after all, it’s a future that hasn’t been written, it could be portrayed either way by authorial fiat.   And it’s entirely possible that a lifetime(for a nine year old) away, Nikki might want to make other choices with his life than the military, or even jumpship piloting.     Could be a most enjoyable story.

9, well, I don’t think that the two are related, so I’m sticking to the reference in this book, and while I suppose it could have some figurative meaning, I think it’s just an experience added for verisimilitude.   Perhaps in the future, however, they’ve come up with a way to avoid the most dreaded of all, the cruelty that is the upturned Lego Block.

Sounds like a project for the Haut anyway.   

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