The Flowers of Vashnoi Read online

  “Does Martya have time for home schooling? Or interest?” asked Miles cautiously.

  “We’ve dozens of employees. Nothing says it all has to fall on one person,” said Enrique.

  It was a encouraging vision, Jadwiga and Boris in a sort of ad hoc sheltered workshop, gainfully employed as much for their own pride as any independence. Ekaterin knew all about that. And the labs were nothing if not flexible. Ingi, she suspected, was capable of much more, and in Enrique’s wake would most certainly find out what. The albino boy’s halfway house could well become not destination but launch pad.

  Which left one—victim, perpetrator, it was hard to decide, maybe perpetuator—notably uncompensated. Ekaterin blew out her breath. “Should that invitation extend to Ma Roga? She can’t go back to the zone.”

  Enrique’s face scrunched up. “I don’t think she should be left with those kids, do you? After what happened?”

  “I’d guess that was temporary insanity brought on by her not being able to think past her current horizons, but… no, something seems broken there. I don’t know if it can be mended.” When rehabilitation was rejected, and punishment was pointless, what was left?

  “Incarceration for rad poisoning could segue pretty readily into incarceration for attempted murder,” Miles observed.

  “It seems circular. Oh.” That was right, Enrique hadn’t heard Ma’s story about how she’d come to her self-run house arrest in the first place, and therefore he could not have told Miles. Ekaterin pulled back her shoulders and recounted it now to both of them—a synopsis of a synopsis, so leaving out who knew what devilish details? She wasn’t sure it helped.

  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.

  ~FIN~

  Author’s Note:

  A Bujold Reading-Order Guide

  The Fantasy Novels

  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”

  Other Original E-books

  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.

  The Vorkosigan Stories

  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 Vorkosivers
e, 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.

  Shards of Honor and Barrayar. The first two books in the series proper, they detail the adventures of Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony and Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar. Shards was my very first novel ever; Barrayar was actually my eighth, but continues the tale the next day after the end of Shards. For readers who want to be sure of beginning at the beginning, or who are very spoiler-sensitive, start with these two.

  The Warrior’s Apprentice and The Vor Game (with, perhaps, the novella “The Mountains of Mourning” tucked in between.) The Warrior’s Apprentice introduces the character who became the series’ linchpin, Miles Vorkosigan; the first book tells how he created a space mercenary fleet by accident; the second how he fixed his mistakes from the first round. Space opera and military-esque adventure (and a number of other things one can best discover for oneself), The Warrior’s Apprentice makes another good place to jump into the series for readers who prefer a young male protagonist.

  After that: Brothers in Arms should be read before Mirror Dance, and both, ideally, before Memory.

  Komarr makes another alternate entry point for the series, picking up Miles’s second career at its start. It should be read before A Civil Campaign.

  Borders of Infinity, a collection of three of the five currently extant novellas, makes a good Miles Vorkosigan early-adventure sampler platter, I always thought, for readers who don’t want to commit themselves to length. (But it may make more sense if read after The Warrior’s Apprentice.) Take care not to confuse the collection-as-a-whole with its title story, “The Borders of Infinity”.

  Falling Free takes place 200 years earlier in the timeline and does not share settings or characters with the main body of the series. Most readers recommend picking up this story later. It should likely be read before Diplomatic Immunity, however, which revisits the “quaddies”, a bioengineered race of free-fall dwellers, in Miles’s time.

  The novels in the internal-chronological list below appear in italics; the novellas (officially defined as a story between 17,500 words and 40,000 words) in quote marks.

  Falling Free

  Shards of Honor

  Barrayar

  The Warrior’s Apprentice

  “The Mountains of Mourning”

  “Weatherman”

  The Vor Game

  Cetaganda

  Ethan of Athos

  Borders of Infinity

  “Labyrinth”

  “The Borders of Infinity”

  Brothers in Arms

  Mirror Dance

  Memory

  Komarr

  A Civil Campaign

  “Winterfair Gifts”

  Diplomatic Immunity

  Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance

  “The Flowers of Vashnoi”

  CryoBurn

  Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

  Caveats:

  The novella “Weatherman” is an out-take from the beginning of the novel The Vor Game. If you already have The Vor Game, you likely don’t need this.

  The original ‘novel’ Borders of Infinity was a fix-up collection containing the three novellas “The Mountains of Mourning”, “Labyrinth”, and “The Borders of Infinity”, together with a frame to tie the pieces together. Again, beware duplication. The frame story does not stand alone.

  Publication order:

  This is also the order in which the works were written, apart from a couple of the novellas, but is not identical to the internal-chronological. It goes:

  Shards of Honor (June 1986)

  The Warrior’s Apprentice (August 1986)

  Ethan of Athos (December 1986)

  Falling Free (April 1988)

  Brothers in Arms (January 1989)

  Borders of Infinity (October 1989)

  The Vor Game (September 1990)

  Barrayar (October 1991)

  Mirror Dance (March 1994)

  Cetaganda (January 1996)

  Memory (October 1996)

  Komarr (June 1998)

  A Civil Campaign (September 1999)

  Diplomatic Immunity (May 2002)

  “Winterfair Gifts” (February 2004)

  CryoBurn (November 2010)

  Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (November 2012)

  Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (February 2016)

  “The Flowers of Vashnoi” (May 2018)

  … Thirty years fitted on a page. Huh.

  Happy reading!

  — Lois McMaster Bujold

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Photo by Carol Collins

  www.goodreads.com

  www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/bujold.htm

  www.dendarii.com

  Lois McMaster Bujold was born in 1949, the daughter of an engineering professor at Ohio State University, from whom she picked up her early interest in science fiction. She now lives in Minneapolis, and has two grown children. She began writing with the aim of professional publication in 1982. She wrote three novels in three years; in October of 1985, all three sold to Baen Books, launching her career. Bujold went on to write many other books for Baen, mostly featuring her popular character Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, his family, friends, and enemies. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages. Her fantasy from Eos includes the award-winning Chalion series and the Sharing Knife series.

  Books by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The Vorkosigan Series

  Falling Free

  Shards of Honor

  Barrayar

  The Warrior’s Apprentice

  “The Mountains of Mourning” (novella)

  “Weatherman” (novella)

  The Vor Game

  Cetaganda

  Ethan of Athos

  Borders of Infinity

  “Labyrinth” (novella)

  “The Borders of Infinity” (novellas)

  Brothers in Arms

  Mirror Dance

  Memory

  Komarr

  A Civil Campaign

  “Winterfair Gifts” (novella)

  Diplomatic Immunity

  Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance

  “The Flowers of Vashnoi” (novella)

  CryoBurn

  Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

  The Chalion Series

  The Curse of Chalion

  Paladin of Souls

  The Hallowed Hunt

  The Penric novellas

  “Penric’s Demon”

  “Penric and the Shaman”

  “Penric’s Fox”

  “Penric’s Mission”

  “Mira’s Last Dance”

  “The Prisoner of Limnos”

  The Sharing Knife Tetralogy

  Volume One: Beguilement

  Volume Two: Legacy

  Volume Three: Passage

  Volume Four: Horizon

  Other Fantasy

  The Spirit Ring

  Short Stories

  Proto Zoa

  Nonfiction

  Sidelines: Talks and Essays

 

 

 
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