Miles whistled, behind his mask. “Huh.”
Enrique didn’t look any less doubtful. “So what should I tell those kids?”
Ekaterin massaged her tight temples. “For tonight, just tell them that she’s being treated. I don’t think we’re going to be able to unravel all these years in an hour.”
Or at all, possibly. Ma Roga was a district woman to her hot bones, but of Piotr’s era, not Miles’s; a relict of grim resistance. Ekaterin could better picture her walking back to her beloved hut on her own two feet than adapting to modern Hassadar; slyly returning to being a sinister legend among the local folk, terrorizing the occasional tourist who stumbled across her. Boris might even choose to visit his aging mother on occasion, dutiful if wary. Hadn’t Count Piotr himself given way in the face of that determination? Maybe the old man had called it right the first time.
Enrique smiled acknowledgment, wished Ekaterin a quick recovery, and went out.
She gave Miles’s gloved hand a little shake. “You should go home to our own kids.”
“Yes.” But he didn’t release his grip. They sat that way for a minute.
Ekaterin sighed. “Is this all going to work?” Her harassed gesture around encompassed everything: the zone, the radbug project, the district, far too many decades of inherited history.
Miles vented a mask-muffled noise, not quite a laugh. “It’s not as though we can stop trying.” He let go of her hand to roll his own shoulders, the only knots he could shake out so simply. “‘S funny. Piotr, toward the end of his life, looked at our district and only saw how much better it was. All the backbreaking, heartbreaking work he did cleaning up the messes after the war is taken for granted now, or mostly just forgotten. Instead, we look around and only see how much better it could be. And neither of us is wrong, exactly.”
Ekaterin’s lips bent in a wry smile. “I wonder if all the work we’re doing will suffer the same forgetting?”
“Vashnoi has always been a garden, right?” Miles quoted some imagined child of the district’s future. “Is it still a victory if you don’t get the credit?”
“Hah. Welcome to my world,” she teased him.
“And welcome to mine. You’re not running away screaming yet, I see, Lady Vorkosigan. Good sign.”
“I’m in isolation. Running away would be medically disapproved.”
“There’s one upside.”
She shoved at his hip to dislodge him from his perch on her bed. “Go home, Miles. Tell Nikki I’m fine. Don’t stir up the twins just before bed.”
“Yeah, yeah. Love you, too.” He leaned over and bump-kissed her on the forehead through his mask, then, reluctantly, let himself out. Shortly, de-gowned, he leaned up to her window and waved farewell through it. She made shooing motions. Roic gave her a devoted half-salute and herded his lord off.
Freed of her audience, Ekaterin lay back and permitted her weariness to surface. She tried and failed to keep all of today’s wild events from scrolling through her memory with her every mistake highlighted. Maybe she needed to copy Enrique’s approach, with all negative results recorded as diligently and enthusiastically as the positive ones, continually studying how to do better.
Yes, the next generation of radbugs should be more robust, like dung beetles, built to burrow down into the subsoil like little six-legged shovels. And very bad-tasting. But should they port over their current color-and-light scheme, or not? Was the misadventure of the first test plot a unique outlier, or a key insight?
For once, she might need a survey on an aesthetic matter. You might still be wrong, but at least the blame is distributed, ran Miles’s sardonic quip on surveys. Or maybe not. So many factors to juggle…
When she slept at last, she dreamed of gardens of moving lights, molten with color, where children, their future-faces as elusive as butterflies, played and were not poisoned.
Author’s Note:
A Bujold Reading-Order Guide
My fantasy novels are not hard to order. Easiest of all is The Spirit Ring, which is a stand-alone, or aquel, as some wag once dubbed books that for some obscure reason failed to spawn a subsequent series. Next easiest are the four volumes of The Sharing Knife—in order, Beguilement, Legacy, Passage, and Horizon—which I broke down and actually numbered, as this was one continuous tale divided into non-wrist-breaking chunks.
What were called the Chalion books after the setting of its first two volumes, but which now that the geographic scope has widened I’m dubbing the World of the Five Gods, were written to be stand-alones as part of a larger whole, and can in theory be read in any order. Some readers think the world-building is easier to assimilate when the books are read in publication order, and the second volume certainly contains spoilers for the first (but not the third.) In any case, the publication order is:
The Curse of Chalion
Paladin of Souls
The Hallowed Hunt
In terms of internal world chronology, The Hallowed Hunt would fall first, the Penric novellas perhaps a hundred and fifty years later, and The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls would follow a century or so after that.
The internal chronology of the Penric novellas is presently
“Penric’s Demon”
“Penric and the Shaman”
“Penric’s Fox”
“Penric’s Mission”
“Mira’s Last Dance”
“The Prisoner of Limnos”
The short story collection Proto Zoa contains five very early tales—three (1980s) contemporary fantasy, two science fiction—all previously published but not in this handy format. The novelette “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma” may be of interest to Vorkosigan completists, as it is the first story in which that proto-universe began, mentioning Beta Colony but before Barrayar was even thought of.
Sidelines: Talks and Essays is just what it says on the tin—a collection of three decades of my nonfiction writings, including convention speeches, essays, travelogues, introductions, and some less formal pieces. I hope it will prove an interesting companion piece to my fiction.
Many pixels have been expended debating the ‘best’ order in which to read what have come to be known as the Vorkosigan Books (or Saga), the Vorkosiverse, the Miles books, and other names. The debate mainly revolves around publication order versus internal-chronological order. I favor internal chronological, with a few adjustments.
It was always my intention to write each book as a stand-alone, so that the reader could theoretically jump in anywhere. While still somewhat true, as the series developed it acquired a number of sub-arcs, closely related tales that were richer for each other. I will list the sub-arcs, and then the books, and then the duplication warnings. (My publishing history has been complex.) And then the publication order, for those who want it.