Chapters 1 and 2 are really just barely dipping our toes into Mirror Dance. These opening chapters are simple—almost gentle. Nothing clearly bad has happened yet. Mark gets on the Ariel and no one gets tortured or dies. That’s it. We’re OK. Everyone is OK except Mark.
This reread has an index, which you can consult if you feel like exploring previous books and chapters. Spoilers are welcome in the comments if they are relevant to the discussion at hand. Comments that question the value and dignity of individuals, or that deny anyone’s right to exist, are emphatically NOT welcome. Please take note.
Mark is not OK. When we last saw him, he had killed Ser Galen, and was in possession of a credit chit for half a million Barrayaran marks. Three years later, he’s arrived on Escobar with only three hundred Betan dollars, his righteous anger, and the contact info for the Dendarii. Posing as Miles, Mark calls in, announces a new contract, and tells Bel Thorne about the plan to take down the House Bharaputra for an unnamed client.
I’m sure you all remember how much fun Bel and Miles had on Jackson’s Whole back in “Labyrinth,” when they sprung Taura and Nicol and destroyed House Ryoval’s gene bank. At the time, Baron Bharaputra had expressed a great deal of interest in obtaining a gene sample from Miles, although of course, he already had one. He also requested a sample from Bel. Both declined the honor. Castles were stormed, princesses were rescued, and relationships between certain of the Jacksonian Houses and the Dendarii Free Mercenary Company were destroyed. Bel wanted to do more. They’re excited about the opportunity to do good in the universe. Mark boards the Ariel, has Miles’s kit transferred over from the Triumph, and takes Green Squad off to Jackson’s Whole to set the world to rights. Three days later, Miles shows up and finds one of his ships and all of his stuff missing.
These two chapters are all about who Mark and Miles each are. In a sense, they are twins separated at birth, something usually interpreted to mean that they have a special connection whose nature will tell us something amazing about the forces that shape identity. Twins trading places is also a trope with which a great deal of fun has been had. It’s the premise of The Parent Trap, and although they were not separated at birth, Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield did it in more than one Sweet Valley High novel. These works imply that identity is performative, and that twins’ identities can be traded and borrowed like clothes. This idea has many shortcomings. For example, it fails to encompass a meaningful understanding of what it can be like for twins to borrow each other’s clothes. Some days it’s no big deal and other days it’s swords drawn. Sometimes they’re the same day! Furthermore, unlike clothing, no one has property rights to personality traits. There is no meaningful yours/mine/ours—they just are, and people either have a trait or they don’t without in any way impacting anyone else’s ability to have and express that same characteristic. Unless you’re a twin and the world is looking to figure out who’s the artistic one and who’s athletic one and no I don’t have any childhood issues at all, thanks for asking, I AM THE UNCOMPLICATED ONE. In my reading experience, the literary work that does the best job with twin relationship and identity issues is Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl. Even Rowell collapses a lifetime of conflicts and experiences into a single year of college, which seems a little excessive, although there are valid plot reasons.
Miles and Mark are an unusual kind of twins. They have the same genes and many of the same mannerisms. They aren’t the same age, and many similarities that might seem like Separated Twins OMG stuff are a result of Mark’s torture. Left to his genetic destiny, Mark would have had normal height and normal bones. Behavioral similarities were forced on him as well, to facilitate Ser Galen’s plan. Mark’s ability to imitate Miles is a result of years of careful study, enforced by abuse. Miles and Mark are also about to work out their emotionally fraught lifetimes’ worth of conflicts and experiences in a very short period.
Those issues are urgent for Mark because he is surrounded by people who at least pretend to believe that he is Miles. I’m a little skeptical about Bel—I think Bel’s excitement about the mission is encouraging them to turn a blind eye. If this is what Bel is doing, it’s exploiting identity conflicts for Bel’s own purposes, and it’s a low and slimy thing to do. If Bel is genuinely mistaken, well, Mark’s a good faker because he’s had to be. For the Dendarii, Miles is a source of excitement. Opportunity flows in his wake. Mark fends off multiple questions about Elli’s absence from mercs interested in his company. He turns down a volunteer who offers to be his batman. Mark isn’t just pretending to be Miles here, he’s trying on Miles’s life and noting which parts do and do not fit. Miles’s wardrobe fits, because of Mark’s recent crash diet. His meal trays don’t. Mark is comfortable with the idea of command, although he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s terrified of Miles’s lovers. Mark is also afraid of Miles’s commitments. The Dendarii are a huge commitment, and Mark’s mission is poorly planned. Bel has made the logical call, and brought in Green Squad, led by Sgt. Taura, for the creche raid. Mark doesn’t know her or her personal history with Miles, so he’s surprised when she kisses him.
I think I made it clear, in our last discussion about Taura, that saving the children should be work that we do with our pants on. This is more than three years since that incident, and neither Mark nor Taura are children anymore. I think they would make an interesting couple. They have a lot in common. They might understand each other well. We don’t get to see that in these chapters, because Mark isn’t himself. Taura is excited about the Jackson’s Whole mission. If Miles were actually leading it, I would be excited for her.
I’m gravely concerned about Mark. Part of this is because I’ve read the book before. But part of it is because he spends his chapter waving a series of red flags. His history of abuse explains the intensity of his self-loathing. I have no idea how he ran through his money, but it seems to have gone away and not bought him a direction in life. I suspect that Mark had difficulties using his identification documents, if he even had any, and that this had a significant impact on his finances. I think he may also have been self-medicating. In stealing Miles’s identity (and also a number of Miles’s personal affects and part of his mercenary fleet), Mark is falling back on a plan his abuser imposed on him. Even in less intense circumstances, I don’t think it’s healthy when a person takes on someone else’s identity and tries to live in it.
Miles arrives on Escobar three days later. He seems very comfortable in his Miles-ness, awash in the confidence that comes with being certain that one’s gene scans match one’s legal identity documents in several star systems, and that they all assert that you are someone awesome. Miles and Elli are in the midst of a conversation about his multiple identities when we first see them; They’re repeating the discussion they had the first time Miles proposed. It’s clear that whatever the outside world may see, Admiral Naismith is one of Lord Vorkosigan’s useful possessions. I think in another world—in a much lower quality story—it would have been possible for Miles to hand Naismith over to Mark. Miles would then have time to be Lt. Lord Vorkosigan and grow along his own trajectory, leaving the Dendarii with their tenuous connection to Barrayar, now more effectively buried in a way that is perfectly in keeping with the cover story Miles made up for that reporter on Earth. The only problem is that Mark would never be able to be Mark. There’s a lot of horror associated with Mark growing into himself, but the alternative is a kind of death for him. I don’t think anyone but Miles can be Admiral Naismith and live. Whether Miles can be Admiral Naismith and live is also an open question. Admiral Naismith is a cliff, and Mark appears to be throwing himself off it.
Join me next week as we contemplate the illusion that Mark is doing a good thing, and try to glean some evidence about his childhood.
Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.
Turn Mark into Naismith? That’s horrible. That’s, like, Penric on a hillside at dawn levels of awful. How did that even occur to you?
Bel realizes it’s Mark when Mark correct “clone” to “brother.” Having skipped the first chapter (is it only one chapter? It feels longer.), I don’t know when that is but Bel is totally on-board with Mark’s crusade by the time they reach Jackson’s Whole.
Mark probably goes through the money dodging Impsec two or three times after Miles makes contact. Nor do I think he has much experience with managing money. Between that and Mark notable difficulty with people, it’s easy to see why it all disappeared.
I remember having quite a bit of whiplash when I read this one after “Brothers in Arms” – Mark’s head is a much different place than I was expecting it to be, so Mark seems to be a completely different character than the fellow imitating Miles in BiA. One thing to remember is that Mark received thorough training on how to be Miles Vorkosigan, so a lot of the background information that Galeni stuffed into Mark is useless for this task. Given Mark either of Miles’ identities would be an awful idea, but at least the Vorkosigan identity was something he had a lot of preparation for.
That brings back memories of my twin cousins, who had a dispute about a preferred bathing suit one day.
I also think that Bel has his “blind eye to the telescope” in the tradition of Lord Nelson. He saw through Mark, but Mark was offering him cover to do something he had long wanted to accomplish.
@1. noblehunter
Bel realizes it’s Mark when Mark correct “clone” to “brother.”
I think you mean “doesn’t correct”, because he doesn’t, but that’s in chapter 3. It’s unclear how much Bel knows in chapter 1. In chapter 3 Bel very clearly knows, and yes, this is unethical and is why Miles asks for Bel’s resignation in the end.
Heavy foreshadowing for Memory starts here: “Someday, Miles, you are going to run out of hairs to split with these people”.
IIRC, Mark spent a lot of money on collecting some of the intelligence for the raid (e.g., a current map). However he also probably spent a lot on dodging ImpSec.
Galen taught Mark how to be Miles Vorkosigan (though not Naismith) but also spycraft and assassination. The former in part to connect with Galen’s network in places like Vorbarra Sultana (Mark will later consider whether it was still there) and he is apparently good enough to lose ImpSec for significant bits of time. The latter for dealing with various high officials in the Barrayar government (starting with Aral and almost certainly including Gregor) or those who might twig that Mark wasn’t Miles. Mark’s intellectual education has not been stunted (he needs to be able to be Miles), even if he doesn’t know Ghem face markings by heart; however, his education on personal interactions has been.
Don’t forget that Miles also takes a side trip to find out what happened to Red Squad members who had been frozen for possible revival. It is an intro to the readers for what will be a big plot point but also an intro on Miles’s fears.
All in all Miles feels on top of the world. His always breaking, painful bones have been completely replaced, he knows how to run a mercenary fleet and is doing so successfully, he loves and is loved by an intelligent and beautiful person, they have a completely safe mission ahead. There are the grey clouds that one day Barrayar may yank him out of this but that is in the distant future.
Also relevant: when has Mark ever learned to legitimately negotiate government offices?
He has a fat bankroll and a childhood spent with terrorists on the run… I’m sure he can get his hands on something that passes for identity documents, but I’m equally sure he isn’t equipped to negotiate aboveground life.
In a way, it speaks well of him that he’s arrived tapped-out. He’s got a lot of training, he could likely have found paying work. He could probably even have made sure it was paying work killing bad people rather than just anyone the fellow with the Betan dollars pointed him at. Miles, at the same age… joined a war he knew nothing about. Mark doesn’t. He keeps his eye on the target.
Cordelia later identifies his need to go back for the clones as a Milesian quality, and in some aspects it is*, but there’s a Markish spin on it as well. I think maybe Mark learned to play a long game earlier than Miles? He’s not perfect at it (“commando raid on a hospital” is not exactly the slow and patient solution) but I think he’s showing leanings in that direction that Miles wouldn’t have.
*Even in some subtler aspects. Miles, after all, has deep roots in a family member who was his avowed enemy and who was positioned to kill him. Mark has now made of Miles his own Piotr-figure.
I think Bel is not so much turning a blind eye (until, as noted, Chapter 3) as they are simply “happy and not looking too close.” Do they know something’s not quite square? Yeah, probably, at some level. Is that morally compromising? No, not yet.
I was once romantically interested in someone who was… probably not a good fit for me. I had reason to suspect she saw the situation similarly, and thus it was a bit of a surprise when we did, ah, fall into bed. There were signs, in hindsight, that my initial assessment was the correct one… But I wasn’t looking too close. The relationship didn’t end well. (Nothing tragic, and in fact I don’t regret it: she’s good people and I’ll take what I learned from it as worth the emotional wringer at the end. But still.)
I think Bel’s in a bit of a similar place at the outset: they’re not actually suspicious and deciding to ignore it, but they do kinda have an itchy feeling like something’s a little too good to be true. (After all, one clone/brother mixup could be papered over, even Miles gets tired sometimes…) And you might reasonably say “Sure, when you’ve just gotten together with somebody real hot you might not be looking for reasons to kill it, but this is a mercenary contract, not a love affair,” and you’d be right, but on the other hand, Miles’s missions often don’t quite bear scrutiny, and Bel is pretty used to not poking in those dark corners.
“the last two years had been one continuous disaster”. Mark has not spent the years and his money carefully preparing the attack on Bharaputra, this sounds more like a last-ditch effort to get something done before his funds run out.
Unlike a real twin, Mark has not studied the same subjects Miles has, lived much the same experiences Miles has had. He has studied Miles. But you don’t become a physicist by studying Einstein. Mark can impersonate Miles and get close enough to Aral and Gregor to kill them. He cannot step into Miles shoes and run a successful military campaign. As we will see.
Ola @8
You may have answered your own objection there: perhaps the last two years been a disaster because Mark lacks the training to be successful in carefully preparing his assault. That doesn’t mean he was just bumbling around looking for disasters to stumble into. It seems highly plausible that he was instead bumbling around trying and failing to carefully prepare an attack on Bharaputra.
One imagines if you had half a million marks and Ser Galen’s training, and you just wanted to keep your head down, you could make it last a lot longer than two years. We don’t have an exchange rate, but that’s a considerable sum of money: Vordrozda made political hay out of a missing 275,000 marks by suggesting it was financing a coup. Can you imagine someone standing up in the Senate and suggesting that anything less than, oh, a million or two US was plausible for a coup attempt, even if it’s just a down payment?
@5 is right. It’s stated later (just before the raid, IIRC) that Mark spent the bulk of his money on a detailed map of Bharaputra’s in preparation for the raid.
One detail that I noticed in this book upon reread: Mark is never referred to by the name “Mark” until Bel outs him the moment the raid goes south. Part of this book’s genius is the way Mark can’t accept that name until he touches down in Barrayar, without Miles, and understands it wasn’t a name given to him by Miles, but by Barrayar.
@10 Thanks for the detail about the name. I was wondering when he properly became Mark rather than just being not-Miles. Good catch that Mark has issues with his name because he sees it as something given by Miles. I think it’s a nuance that’s easy for readers to miss because we know where the name comes from (especially if we’ve read Barrayar).
@3 I also think that Bel has his “blind eye to the telescope”
“His”?
@2: speaking of whiplash – The publication order of the story is enough to cause some mental confusion. The growth and changes of Miles as he is here then to visit 20 year old Miles? Ouch.
Brothers in Arms (1989)
The Vor Game (1990)
Barrayar (1991)
Mirror Dance (1994)
Cetaganda (1995)
Memory (1996)
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t LMB on record for saying she wanted to something with Simon’s memory chip, then revisit Mark? But that her editor (or friend) said she should do something with Mark first?
If so, bless that person. The flow of the books since Memory has been wonderful. Memory is such a powerful book, in part because of the actions of this one.
So the foreshadowing @@.-@ mentions is very possible.
I didn’t pick the books up until around 2008, so I’m lucky in having the whole flow right away.
@13 – Brother in Arms also has some stuff about what happens when you’re cryo-revived. It seems like Bujold kicked that idea around for a while.
@14: True. But Miles might not have been her intended target. Just another example of how technology could affect biology and the life / death cycle.
Thankfully she slips these things into the world building, then gives the room to grow.
And for that matter, Warrior’s Apprentice establishes the existence and some of the rules for cryo-pods. This gun has been on the mantelpiece a while.
@13 At the end of The Vor Game, Simon mutters something to the effect of, “And maybe then they’ll let me get this damn chip out of my head.”. So that’s nicely foreshadowed, though arguably, the real hint lies in the chain of Terrible Things Happening to all of Miles’ commanding officers. (One wonders Gregor really thought through putting himself in sole charge of Miles.)
@13 Actually, it was Patricia Wrede, she of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles I believe. I just picked up the Vorkosigan Companion and she convinced LMB to do the Mark book first.
@12 Didn’t even realize I had made that mistake until you had pointed it out. Good catch.
Shall we have a party in Monday’s thread, to celebrate that this is now a double Hugo winner, on its own and as part of the Vorkosigan series?
I think Mark not being named let’s us turn our blind eyes to the telescope as well.
@20 – OMG, yes! Monday’s post is already in, and it doesn’t deal with the Hugos which had not been announced when I wrote it. But it definitely does address a reason that the series is Hugo-worthy, and I’m so excited that it won! (The other nominated series were also very worthy, but I’m rereading this one, and I feel attached.)
@21
Not sure about that. Not-yet-Mark isn’t playing coy with the reader: the book is pretty honest that this fellow is taking on a role other than his own. And then you hit Chapter 2 and are outright told that Miles is somewhere else at the time. A reader coming here from Brothers in Arms is clearly meant to identify the main character as Mark quite quickly. I think the coyness about who this guy is when he isn’t playing Miles is meant to point, as SoupDumpling suggests, not to narrative sleight-of-hand but simply to his own lack of identities he’s willing to live inside: he’ll be Miles for a good enough cause, he sure as hell won’t be Ser Galen’s son even a little… but what else could he be? He clearly doesn’t know, and “just some guy, try it out and see how it goes” hasn’t worked for him. Even at this close remove, he’s pretty clear in identifying his post-Earth identities as unsuccessful, that line about “Jan Vandermark” being his “closest sideways skittish approach to identity” wraps up “having an identity” with “claiming the name he’s been given.”
I don’t think he’s confused as to whether “Mark Pierre” is just some name Miles decided to hang on him or something he has a right to: he seems to know it’s his in a broader sense. (He was taught Vor dynastic history, after all, of course he’d recognize the pattern. It was a shock because he’d never thought of himself as having parents or being a second son or anything, not because he didn’t know where the names came from.) I’m not totally solid on what it is that (I think) enables or causes him to accept the name, but I don’t think it’s information. At a guess, it’s being around people who know he isn’t Miles and accept him for a real, different person: he’s never had that before (sure, between books, but those were people who didn’t know Miles, so how can he tell whether they accept him as Mark or just as the closest they’ll ever get to Miles?). That’s Aral and Cordelia, sure, but Bel and Elli and Elena too. In some sense, it’s Bel first, before anyone else.
Worth noting: “Jan Vandermark” is the Dutch form for “John” as in “John Doe” and “From the Mark.”
Even Mark’s pseudonym points to both his lack of identity and his “Mark” identity.
In which Mark meets the most harrowing of the Harrowing Harem and Miles says ‘Some people have an evil twin, I’m not so lucky what I have is an idiot twin!’
We also see what a psychological mess Mark is and his ferocious jealousy of Miles.
Miles on the other hand has grown into Naismith and we see the complex and multifaceted nature of that identity and his job as a leader of men and women and we get a sinking feeling realizing that there is NO WAY six year younger and much less experienced in the Real World Mark will be able to fill that role even temporarily.