We’re still wading slowly into the shark-infested waters of the Doppelgangening. As of the end of chapter four, no one has been killed. Things are getting darker, though, because chapters three and four explore Mark’s childhood. Miles’s childhood involved a lot of fractures and medical procedures, a school that taught him to recite entire plays, and ponies. Mark’s did not.
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.
If you can use a uterine replicator to replace a woman for gestational purposes, it makes sense that you could then have a number of children who are functionally motherless. They can lead lives completely separate from any woman who has a biological connection to them from the earliest stages of fetal development. And in most cases also from any man who has a biological connection to them. (Athos is a major exception here—I’m not allowed to live there, but I like Athosian attitudes towards parenting. Dear Athos, Go You! Please get over your thing about women. Thx, Me.) Like Terrence Cee, children can have so many genetic contributors that it is impossible to identify two biological parents.
This world of amazing potential is great for everyone but kids. In fairness, the story of the kid who might have had a terrible genetic illness but didn’t, because doctors patched up his genome with some spare donor genes around the time he was conceived, is not the stuff that space opera is made of. Nicolai Vorsoisson’s story might come the closest, and that part of it is fairly pedestrian—far less dramatic than his father’s murder and his mother’s role in saving the universe. Uterine replicators offer great options for parents looking to facilitate prenatal medical treatment, or address maternal risks associated with pregnancy, and that is their most common use. They also make it possible to create children who are completely alone in the universe. They are the very most orphaned of orphans. I wrote my thesis on orphans, so I have a lot to say about this.
Now, today, in the world we live in, children who are separated from their families and communities are incredibly vulnerable. They are easy targets for human trafficking—sources of sex and labor that no one cares about. Not only do most of the institutions that care for these children fail to do anything about this, some of them are trafficking children themselves—worldwide, over 80% of children in institutional care have family members who would care for them. But wealthy people feel good about giving large donations to orphanages, and they don’t feel good about giving handouts to needy families. So unscrupulous people build orphanages, and then use money or promises of education and medical care to persuade families to place children in them. Institutions collect money from donors and “voluntourists” and the kids get to be in a lot of selfies with people who think they’re doing some good in the world. Education is limited, supervision is poor, resources are scarce. Eventually, children get too old to be appealing to donors and visitors anymore. Then they get a job, or they leave the orphanage one day and don’t come back. They go further and further away from their families, becoming more vulnerable every step of the way. Separating children from families is dangerous.
When Bujold writes about children, these dangers are clearly on her mind. We saw this with the Quaddies. When someone cared about the Quaddies, being owned by a corporation and only able to live on a corporate-maintained habitat was OK. Mostly. The entertainment options were stultifyingly boring and the psychological manipulation was intense, but most human rights issues were mostly dealt with in accordance with reasonable standards of human decency. When those caring individuals were replaced by others who were more concerned with the corporate bottom line, suddenly the Quaddies were all post-abortion experimental tissue cultures instead of people. The only reason to create children without parents is to make sure that no one stands in the way when you want to exploit them. They have no families and no communities to protect them. Their entire lives can be controlled for other people’s purposes. That’s Mark.
So what’s up with Mark? He was raised until age fourteen in a House Bharaputra facility with clones intended for brain transplants. He was tortured medically so that he would be a physical match for Miles. He excelled at his programmed learning courses. At age fourteen, he was delivered to the Komarran resistance and to Ser Galen’s control. Galen abused him physically, emotionally, and sexually. Mark came to hate Miles, probably because hating Galen wasn’t particularly helpful. He had no experience of making decisions and only illicit opportunities to act independently.
The things that we see orphans as lacking are the things at the core of our beliefs about what families should provide. We want to believe that families make children safe and give them sources of strength. The intelligence gathering that provided the information about Mark’s like with Ser Galen was ordered by Lady Cordelia, who, like Miles, sees Mark as a family member who is worthy of protection. This is why Miles gave Mark the credit chit. Last week, I speculated that he spent it on drugs and ID. This week, we learn he spent a lot of it on the map of House Bharaputra that he’s using to plan Green Squad’s raid. Mark’s plan is incredibly misguided; He has no way of convincing House Bharaputra’s clones to believe him instead of the lies they’ve been told their whole lives. He can get to their dormitories, and he can get in, but he can’t get the clones to board the Ariel. He just wants to, because he’s twenty and he wants to save some lives and take down House Bharaputra. It’s too bad that this plan is doomed, because it’s really touching.
Join me next week, when Mark reaches Jackson’s Whole!
Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.
I had forgotten how much of this book was not on barrayar. I always focus on those sections where Mark is interacting with family for the first time and not the torture scenes or the poorly planned military ops beginning.
In fairness to Mark, he’s lived with kids like these and he knows their secret worries and doubts. He believes he can use those to make them believe.
@princessroxana: Mark is also not expecting kids like “Flowerpot” who has been brought up knowing about her fate, but led to believe it is a desirable one. The Bharaputrans have updated their techniques since Mark has been away, and he’s not a flexible in response to the unexpected as Miles is (for good reason).
Poor Mark has been weaponized, but no longer has anyone aiming him. And they never gave him the skills he needed to aim himself. I find it admirable that he has developed a goal in life that is so positive, despite his tortured upbringing.
I’m not sure how you make the jump from a child being functionally motherless to most of them also being separate from any man who has a biological connection to them.
The economics Ethan pointed out still apply – someone has to do the work of raising the child. And it will either be someone who is doing it for love, or someone doing it for money – which means someone willing to spend a lot of money raising the child. At least 3-5 years of 24/7 care before the child is old enough for the classroom or to start training for simple productive work. A skilled kindergarten teacher can manage 20-25 five-year-old children on their own, but younger kids require a much more labor-intensive caregiver-to-child ratio.
Even in your example of orphanages taking in children who might have relatives as potential caregivers, they’re generally taking in older children, of school age, not infants. (While called orphanages, they seem rather like boarding schools – with the same potential for exploitation that was seen with residential school programs targeted at Native Americans.) Orphanages that take in infants seem to do so with the goal of adoption, which can also be financially lucrative. Either way, they rely on someone doing the work of the most labor-intensive infant years to do so for love (parents before school age kids, or those who adopt infants.)
Creating and raising children from infancy, for nefarious purposes once they are older, is just too expensive to be a common form of exploitation.
For historical comparison it might be instructive to look at the social patterns of slavery. In particular, at what age were infants considered old enough to sell away from their mothers, or from the care of older women who couldn’t do other work, such as grandmothers? That would be the age at which it began to be profitable to have the child on its own, and put in the labor for caring for it, as opposed to leaving someone to do the labor for the sake of love.
***
I would think that the most common “motherless” children would be those born to male same-sex couples, or to single men wanting children, and then raised by a parent or parents who want them. People who will put up the money for the cost of replicator gestation, and do the work of raising an infant, for the sake of love. Men like Ethan, or like Oliver Jole, or like the many male couples who adopt and raise children today.
Children might sometimes be created artificially for reasons other than love (the Quaddies, Jackson’s Whole) but it would be rare, due to the expense.
This isn’t quite the expense you think it is. You just have the older kids take care of the younger ones. You’re already paying for their room and board, and it eliminates the need to pay caretaker salaries. This was Vormuir’s plan in A Civil Campaign.
If you had the kids not on caretaking duty making piecework, you could market their goods as a socially progressive way to support underprivileged kids and make further profit that way. As long as you’re willing to compromise on quality of care, there are all kinds of ways to save expenses and make money off of running orphanages.
Just because it was Vormuir’s plan doesn’t mean that it is a good plan, or one that makes economic sense.
If that was economical, you would have seen slave societies with kids raising kids, taken from slave women assigned to work not compatible with childcare.
If you’re in this scheme, you don’t just want a bunch of to kids to reach adulthood. You want these particular kids, for a particular goal. Which means training, and therefore labor costs.
If any adult person, or even child, would do, you’d leave the costs of childcare to someone else, and just hire an adult (or child) for the work.
Vormuir was willing to eat the childcare costs, for the imagined potential of male immigrants to his district in the future. If he thought that a bunch of girls, raised by other girls, would make skilled, attractive, interesting wives, without costs for education and childcare to help them learn the life skills of an ordinary Barrayan, he was delusional. We hear of his scheme secondhand, through Mile’s words to Ekatrin, but Miles has no experience in raising a child, and what he sees as reasonable ignores a lot of things that Ekatrin, as an experienced parent, might notice as missing.
If Vormuir wants to attract educated, ambitious high-status men to his District with his clan of daughters, they need to be potential wives to match such men. Well-educated themselves. Trained in social graces. Excellent hostesses of business and political gatherings. Able to follow political nuance. Captivating conversationalists, a keen eye for fashion, a good understanding of Vor and upper-class Barrayan customs, etc. Not something you will teach a girl to be by having her raised by her adolescent half-sister.
Just as Galen, in trying to raise Mark to be a substitute Miles, could not leave Mark in the hands of the cheapest possible caretakers, but had to try to match, and beat, the best education the Vorkosigans could get for Miles, to get Mark to catch up with his older clone-brother. In the end, while Mark could match a few skills, he couldn’t maintain the whole. The years spent in a Jacksonian crèche probably didn’t help, as while they addressed the basic needs of care of a younger child, they did not help Mark match Miles’s education and experience at the same age.
And I do hope that the high dowries were not simple dowries, but rather would be paid to the girls at a certain age, even if they hadn’t married yet. Because his punishment shouldn’t be a trap forcing the girls to marry to get their birthright.
When someone cared about the Quaddies, being owned by a corporation and only able to live on a corporate-maintained habitat was OK. Mostly. The entertainment options were stultifyingly boring and the psychological manipulation was intense, but most human rights issues were mostly dealt with in accordance with reasonable standards of human decency.
That isn’t the message I took away from Falling Free. What kind of reasonable standards of human decency permit forced breeding programmes?
Mark wants to justify his existence – and his individuality – by doing something great and good, something that is all HIS. Totally understandable and totally disastrous.
I don’t think there’s any question but Bel has guessed the truth but it wants to take down the Clone factory too so it closes its eyes.
Miles sets out in pursuit. We are in trouble now!
The Quaddies say that things got much worse after Cay died. Including much more pressure to breed as assigned. The first few matches (e.g., Claire and Tony) seem to have been carefully planned, almost a matchmaking process. But as the process became routine, and lost Cay’s guiding utopian vision, it became a problem for the Quaddies.
Correction – If I remember correctly, the Quaddies were not “post-abortion experimental tissue cultures” they were “post-fetal experimental tissue cultures.”
A post-abortion tissue culture would be a cell line in a petri dish, not a human (or Quaddie) being.
@7 Ursula
Vormuir isn’t planning to marry the girls to high Vor or other members of the upper class so they don’t need upper class social skills. He is looking at the huge disparity between the number of men and the number of women due to much of Barrayar choosing to have boys instead of girls for the last 30 years or so. His aim is to attract skilled men (artisans, technicians, engineers) from other districts to boost his district’s _middle class_; men for whom the women of their class don’t exist or have married up due to the female shortage in the middle and upper classes. As District Count he can use an already existing school system to do the standard education. If he had some foresight his district may already have a university for him to send them (and use Count’s privilege to send them there on taxpayer money not his own personal funds [the dowries though have to come out of personal funds]). Though you are right the socializing is the tricky part (and still is); these girls need some adult figures who they can trust will be there. However the men he’s looking for have a choice between these women or uneducated peasant class (and class still matters on Barrayar).
Wait, are you saying that Big Orphanage is an actual thing?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2016/07/14/subsidiarity-policing-was-never-meant-to-solve-all-those-problems/
(Reference)
I believe we’re mostly past that in the US, although it was definitely a thing in the past. Take a look at what happened to Native kids for a horrific example.
Here’s an article that sources some of the things Ellen is saying in her post.
@12 – if the older girls are going to school and university, and paying proper attention to their studies, they are not going to be able to care for the younger girls, and Vormuir was planning. If they were caring for the younger girls, they would not be paying proper attention to their studies. Even if they are not supposed to be “Vor brides” they do need to be socially, psychologically and academically skilled enough to be attractive companions to skilled and ambitious men.
And in any case, these are kids being raised in an institutional environment. Which is inherently damaging, as documented in the Washington Post article @14 AlferdPacker linked to. Which points to every three months of institutional life meaning a loss of about a month of child development. For a Vormuir girl raised eighteen years that way, it would be about six years of developmental lag.
Vormuir’s plan was idiotic, and would not have worked out well, even if he’d been allowed to continue it. He would be raising a generation of psychologically and developmentally crippled young women, not skilled women ready to be productive subjects of his District and wives.
Bujold’s consistent theme through the Vorkosigan has been about exposing the hidden costs of raising children. Vormuir, in imagining the older girls could simultaneously raise younger children and learn the skills for adult life, was mentally zeroing out the labor costs of raising children, without attention to the consequences.
I acquit Vormuir of being malicious. He didn’t want to do harm to his daughters. He was just an ignorant fool who had no conception of the consequences of what he was doing. He seems to have grasped the importance of providing sufficient caregivers and we don’t really know how he envisioned using the older girls to take care of the younger, proctors and assistants to the adult caregivers? Hiring them on as adult caregivers? What he wanted was well adjusted and reasonably accomplished potential wives to attract desirable male immigrants. Whether he had the slightest conception of how to achieve that result is more than questionable.
Vormuir’s plan is malicious in that it dehumanizes the children, from being little baby people right now, with certain needs, to being valued primarily as future husband-magnets. Galen’s plan was malicious in that it dehumanized Mark into a Miles-substitute. Milnsor’s telepathy program dehumanized Terrance Cee and Janine. Galactech dehumanized the Quaddies.
All relied on dismissing the importance of a parent’s love and care in raising children, changing the motivation for caregiving from love to money. And then applying capitalist principles and efficiencies to to the provision of care, including treating hired caregivers as interchangeable.
(Consider the emotional chaos for Quaddie children, with Downsider caregivers being constantly rotated to ensure that they had their time in gravity for their health.)
The caregiving of parents (particularly mothers) is a huge chunk of labor not formally counted in most economies. Yet it defies reduction into straightforward capitalist costs and motivations.
@16 – I cannot acquit Vormuir of malice. His plan, such as it was, was badly thought out and would indeed have caused great harm (may still, in some Heinlein-esque pocket universe be causing great harm, as he had quite a collection of daughters before Gregor smacked him with dowries). The slightest thought or research or conversation with a female person would have disabused Vormuir of his thrilling idea. Generally speaking, we do not approve of people who create children and do not personally contribute to their needs (both emotionally and practically), we do not approve of creating people in order to use them as bait, we not approve of government officials taking shortcuts in attracting resources (i.e., creating a population of marriagiable women one intends to keep in-district, instead of creating enlightened policy that would attract people for their own reasons). The only way Vormuir’s plan works at all is if he somehow keeps those women in-district, and in fact, they would have every right to walk away. Furthermore, using someone’s reproductive cells without their permission is also not a thing we approve of.
Good point. The dowry scheme punished Vormuir financially for his actions, but did not do anything to address the deficits in his care of the children, which Miles didn’t even really notice.
I meant intentionally malicious. He failed morally big Time by not seeing the wrongness of it all. And he has no excuse because everybody around him, including his countess, could see it.
@19 Miles said the girls seemed fine. There doesn’t seem to be any immediate deficit in the children’s care.
@21 This is early enough in the project that it’s quite possible they were doing all right, I don’t think we need to invoke Miles’ obliviousness. I mean, it was a stupid and ugly scheme, it just hadn’t gone far enough yet to do as much harm as it could have.
Miles is also now aware of potential issues there and being Miles I am sure he will do something about it.
It may be necessary for Gregor to declare the girls Imperial wards to make sure they’re taken care of. Is adoption a possibility?
But maybe we should save this discussion for A Civil Campaign.
Actually, Miles gives us the information that tells us that the girls are in a bad situation. They’re being cared for by workers in shifts, which is an institutional setup, which is bad. The younger the child, the harder they take the effects of institutional care – they’re not doing okay “for now.”
But Miles doesn’t recognize that the situation is bad, because he only sees that their physical needs are being nominally met, and doesn’t consider the psychological, social and developmental implications. He tells Ekatrin that the girls are being well cared for, which is not true.
So, unless Ekatrin or someone else stepped in, off stage, and drew the attention of Miles or someone else in power to the dangers of institutional care, particularly for very young children, we’re left with Vormuir financially punished, but the children left unprotected.
To bring it back around to the current book, Vormuir is just an example of they ways in which children without parents are taken advantage of. They are viewed as a commodity rather than people. They might be receiving education where the clones in House Bharaputra aren’t, but they’re no less regarded as a resource for the customer.
While uterine replicators are undeniably a good thing, they have the potential to create a class of children that no one is emotionally invested in.
Exactly right, Alferd. All technologies have their downside. Look at the abuse of cryonics on Kibou Dani.
Ursula, Mark got Miles worrying about the girls’ well being and doubting his first impression that they were fine.
@@@@@ Ursula, while you are properly observing the real costs of childcare, you are backing into the problem again by dismissing the “older” girls’ learning of childcare as being of no merit or value, compared to other forms of education. I’m not sure you can have it both ways.
(As youngest in my family, I didn’t get such experience at home, nor of course in my outside-the-home learning, so my first child was pretty much a learn-on-the-job adventure for us both. Which helped prime me for my subsequent writing career, I suppose. We did all survive, but sometimes I wonder how. And no, “maternal instinct” doesn’t cover everything.)
@@@@@ 25 “While uterine replicators are undeniably a good thing, they have the potential to create a class of children that no one is emotionally invested in.”
Except we can do that now, too, without the aid of technology, and always have. (For that weird value of “we” meaning “other people, most of whom existed before I was born.”) It’s interesting to try to think through what abuses are more of the same in techie dress, and which ones are truly dependent on the existence of the tech and have no prior analogue.
Ta, L.
Athos’ ability to create a self sustaining single sex culture and demonize half the human race comes to mind as an abuse of new tech.
As for the Vormuir girls in the first step should be to notify the ‘mothers’ and give them the opportunity to claim their daughters. Some undoubtedly will wish to do so. Others will not want the intrusion on their planned families. Gregor will probably have to declare the remainder Imperial wards to eliminate any rights Vormuir may have as their biological father. Bothari hired a caregiver for Elena who looked after her in her home it’s probable that similar arrangements could be made for the Vormuir girls. The doweries can be saved for their education.
@27 – I think we’re talking about two different things. I agree that learning about safe and appropriate childcare in your home and school setting is a proper part of every child’s education.
That wasn’t Vormuir’s plan as Miles described it. He seemed to want to have older children taking responsibility for the care of younger children in an institutional setting in order to increase cost efficiency, which is a childcare disaster. Starting with the fact that it is an institutional setting, and going downhill from there.
I understand Bel. Bel witnessed many unbelievable feats done by Miles. Now his genetic twin comes with a plan identically foolhardy as many of Miles (that ended up working) – and rightous. No wonder he adopted Gregors credo: let’s see what happens.
Re childcare: my grandmother grew up in a family with 11 siblings (quite common for farmer-families a 100y ago). It was family and not institutional care but being one of the oldest she had to look after the younget ones while mother and father were working. Certainly a hard life but not vile. I admit institutional care is worse but even there you can have emotional ties. … i eiuld never believe a simlpe math of 1y meaning x mt of developement lag as stated above.
@30 Bel probably also thought he could fill in where Mark fell, um, short.
@30 I understand Bel. Bel witnessed many unbelievable feats done by Miles. … No wonder he adopted Gregors credo: let’s see what happens.
@32 Bel probably also thought he could fill in where Mark fell, um, short.
I think you’re right about Bel’s motivation, but Bel still isn’t “he”. Sorry to be a nag.
Super late to the discussion, but…
We later learn that Bel knew it was talking to Mark when it referred to Miles’ “clone” and there was no quick correction to “brothe. But *after* that, Bel kisses Mark, knowing that it’s kissing Mark. That seems problematic.
Bel clearly knows who Mark is. Trapping him in a kiss when it knows he has to keep playing the role? Not cool.
@34, Maybe not. Bel has a long-standing crush on Miles who isn’t interested. I see Bel as trying to see if Mark is more flexible. He isn’t and Bel backs off. It is perhaps a pity that Mark wasn’t feeling more experimental. Bel might be experienced enough to help him with his issues. At least it wouldn’t panic when things go bad and react constructively.