THE GREGOR & LAISA TOSCANE VORBARRA INSTITUTE
FOR CETAYARAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
VOR AND PEACE
A Lecture to celebrate the Fifth Anniversary of the
Barrayaran–Cetagandan Alliance.
Delivered on the Emperor's Birthday, 2809
by
Lord Auditor Miles Naismith Vorkosigan
IGS***, VC*, HHC, XC*, OM, MM, VGC, GCM, PC, GKA, &c.
To read this copy of his lecture, annotated by Ld Adtr V'kosigan after unwisely drinking a third glass of maple mead, requires explicit written permission from His Imperial Majesty.
VOR AND PEACE
Your Imperial Majesties, of all persuasions, my Lords Viceroy and Ladies Vicereine, my Lords Count and Auditor, Ladies and Gentlemen, honoured haut and honourable ghem, Professoriat and students of the Institute. And Ivan, you splendid ex-idiot, with your ghem-brides all a-flutter to be in Vorbarr Sultana again, with no apologies owing this time and charming the shoes off Grandma Alys with your babies. All three of them, O frabjous day, and six more in the cans. And I so wish I could have said all that aloud. And why on Barrayar is this pen of Helen's filled with green ink? Shouldn't it be red? Oh well. I think none will be surprised, after yesterday's very interesting session of the Council of Counts, if I add two special welcomes, first to a woman I will, despite the Council's face-saving redetermination of her gender purely for purposes of legal inheritance, call Countess Vorhalas. But not Countess Midnight, though that unkind joke is already making rounds, because she won't be voting 'neigh'. Ha! Wonders never cease, especially where the Council's concerned. Idiots. Except Vorkalloner. And second to ghem-General Lord Benin, an old and most valued friend, and to Lady d'Benin, whom it is our special pleasure to welcome for the first time to Barrayar. But not the last, by golly! Pel says slyly it's genuinely a love-match, which any fool can see, and I say if the haut Mirana isn't Pel's full daughter she's damn close, for all their colourings are different. A toast to Lord Dag!
It would be traditional for me to begin by thanking the President of the Institute, Madame Professora Vorthys, for the privilege of the invitation to lecture on such an auspicious and nobly attended occasion— but she would tell you that it took her five years and a succession of ever-larger clubs to beat me into agreeing. It took Gregor. Since finally surrendering to force majeure my greater desire by far has been to beat her back and run away. If I do not, it is only because I accept, reluctantly, that after five years it is possible to make some half-way sensible assessment of where we and the Institute find ourselves. Anything earlier would have been premature. A condition I have experienced before in all its glory, and have no wish to repeat.And even so, I remind you of the pre-diasporan Terran scholar who was asked about the significance of the French Revolution, two centuries earlier, and after a little thought replied that it was still too early to tell. The old fence-sitter. Bet he never got anything useful done.
Equally traditionally, though very much more oddly, I can instead thank the patrons of the Institute who are present, Their Imperial Majesties the Emperor Gregor and Empress Laisa Toscane Vorbarra, and His Imperial Majesty the Emperor the haut Fletchir Giaja. In a real sense this occasion is part of a most imperial birthday and treaty-day gift, five years ago, and I do most sincerely thank you for it, Celestial Lord, for it has borne rich fruit already. And for the great labour, brutal and subtle, of its establishment and organisation I thank Madame Professora Vorthys, for she has donewonders, while still regretting that she saw fit to hound me to this podium tonight.
What I cannot regret, and wholly rejoice in, is all you who are gathered to hear me. All here remember the state of the nexus six years ago, and if any had then suggested that this audience could be gathered anywhere today, what odds would any of us have given? Much history writing shows how long and slow its processes must be, and most humans still live lives on one planet, in one place, never consciously experiencing the force of history as distinct from the passing of time. But we know also of history that it can, like evolution, convulse ; as if time becomes folded, and we leap catastrophically ahead in one dimension while in another our movement is by its scale smooth and untroubled. Daring rescues a speciality. And it has been our fortune, our privilege and terror, to live through such a moment in history and find ourselves both where we ought to be and somewhere entirely strange ; fresh-made explorers of our own lives and cultures.
Having attended the Imperial Military Academy rather than the great university of which this Institute is a part my academic qualifications to stand here tonight are negligible, but I do have some qualifications as an explorer. Heh. A few. Perhaps it runs in the blood, for you will recall that the Vicereine-my-mother was before her marriage a leading Captain in the Betan Astronomical Survey, charged with establishing where newly discovered wormholes went by boldly going where no Betan had been before. Alright, Enrique? So at least the Professora suggests in her Vorkosigan Reportand I confess I have from time to time conceived of this lecture as a response to that embarrassing thesis about my forebears and living family. But when I began some weeks ago, with gritted teeth, to re-read the Report before beginning to write myself, I got no further than its opening sentence.
The Barrayaran Vor are by origin not simply a feudal military class but an imperialist fusion of military and bureaucratic castes.
Despite the many books that state the Vor once to have been a purely military class it is not that I doubt any part of this, but that I wonder how unusual are such a fusion and such need for historiographical correction. Well before the diaspora the armies and navies of old Terra were, before they could be anything else, exercises in logistics ; as all effective forces still are, and must be. The purpose of caste structures is the provision in imperial extent of trained and competent specialist personnel, and there have often been distinct bureaucratic castes—but not on Barrayar, where that task, for all they were also mounted cavalry, belonged to the Vor. Our counts were once accountants, and they still are—accountable for themselves, their kin, and their liege-sworn to our Imperial Master ; their strictest charge, after keeping the Emperor's Peace, is to render unto Vorbarra that which is Vorbarra's, the full tithe of their Districts to the coffers of the Imperium. I am as a Lord Auditor not only a listener and Imperial Voice, but thereby an appointed scrutineer whose task is always the adjustment of double entries when their necessary balance has somewhere been lost. Usually through sheer idiocy by someone who can't tell up from down. Like any Vormoncrief you care to mention. For example.
The Vorkosigan Report having blown the gaffe even more throughly than I managed myself, I am at liberty to take myself as an example a little further. Oh joy.My twenties were largely spent in the role of Admiral Naismith, leading the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet—quite plainly an expression of my military paternal inheritance ; but as all commanders know, command is far more staffwork and planning than execution, and if the Dendarii afforded me an executive arm, it had always a body attached that needed feeding and transporting. And how! Not that I begrudge them an iota of it (whatever that is or was). Most unexpectedly and improbably, as almost all Barrayarans have insisted, my thirties have so far largely been spent as a Lord Auditor, a role for which I have no familial precedent whatever, which is quite explicitly bureaucratic and diplomatic, and in which I have found myself ordering, though not commanding, far greater fleet deployments than I ever did as a military man. Heh. At the time of my investiture friends and strangers alike were surprised by this turn in my career. I was myself entirely astonished ; yet if Professora Vorthys is correct about the Vor, as I make no doubt she is, a military-to-bureaucratic transition by a scion of the Vor should no more surprise us than a bureaucratic-to-military one. And this prompted a thought, for—with remaining sorrow but, in this venue, no apology for speaking of the past after we met—the people who were once most surprised by that transition reversing my own were the ghem-forces and commanders in occupation here.
It is a part of the virtue of this Institute that I can today support that belief by citing a distinguished historian of the ghem nation. A badly painted old scoundrel, according to Dag, who sounds as if he'd have got on with Gran'da like a house on fire.The late ghem-Scholar General Lapassanin, in his classic study of The Abject Humiliation of Clan Erth, Clan Varrak, Clan Hasman, and General Staff Intelligence Analysis and Strategy on Barrayar, is as uncompromising as his title. And you gotta hand it to the ghem ; they really don't pull punches when they're beating up on themselves.
The only possible conclusions are that there was, primarily through an arrogance that denied its own ignorance and seized greedily on untested assumption, a comprehensive and fatal misjudgement of Barrayar before its invasion was first planned ; and that this misjudgement did not concern Barrayar's relative lack of technology following their 'Time of Isolation', but the martial and logistical capacities of the Barrayarans who had survived it.
You stuck your collective head into the Dendarii, painty-face, and we ate it. That paragraph was written four decades before my own birth, by a man who had seen much of what he analysed first-hand, and his martial and logistical capacities are expressly the business of the Vor. Yet from a Barrayaran perspective one might refine a little on his formulation by adding that the principal, unforeseen effect of the Occupation was the progressive psychosocial fusion of our traditional Vor capacities and imperial duties with the non-Vor classes who form the mass of the imperium. Damn but I'm good. That sentence took me a whole morning, y'know.
Now, one might suppose that fusion to have been military, but while it rode military discipline, and in the mountains had a more formally military character than in the urban resistances, it would be truer to say that while a militaristic vehicle was inevitable, the tenor of the change was always much more than military. You bet. It is only four years since my Imperial Master declared recruitment to His uniformed services open to all, but our imperial deployment of women, and of children, cannot be dated later than the Occupation however one judges their fighting roles during the Bloody Centuries. Who is old Vorlenski trying to kid anyway? Idiot. A blind Athosian could see it started during the Isolation. Who carried vorfemme knives, and used them?Nor should the traditional relations of gender and domestic logistics be thought irrelevant, even to guerrilla and urban resistance forces, which may not have to march as such but still live on their stomachs. What drove our resistance was pride and survival, but what determined its character was from the first vastly more ambitious. Just slightly.
Barrayaran neo-feudalism often puzzles galactic observers, who suppose a parasitic, managerial, plutocratic, and violent aristocracy should have been swept away by renewed contact with better examples. Idiots. But Barrayarans have long memories, and learned in Isolation that civil order was come by the hard way, so when the Occupation began they clung more, not less, tightly to the received ways. Like catatonic gripweed. The early, misguided battles of the foolishly valorous cleared the imperial command of deadwood and heroes ; the rest set to work, and what emerged over a decade was a socially embedded leadership caste with military and logistical training who were with almost complete popular support fighting for the survival in full civil measure of the imperium. Actually true, whatever anyone thinks. Uncoerced collaboration was remarkably rare. Put another way, the army, the imperium, and the population became effectively one in sober fact as well as pleasing theory, an unspoken government of all, for all, by most, freed in substantial measure by the Occupation Authority from the usual civic burdens of daily governance, and so able to concentrate on a medium-term goal of maximal victory.
The process was not, of course, smooth, though in certain respects it was always controlled. This was Grand'da, remember? Since the Bloody Centuries Barrayaran law has most strictly controlled ownership of arms, which may be held by lesser and non-Vor only at their Count's invitation-as-command, and which remain always possessions of the Vor. Even today, in the imperial services your uniform is your own, but all your weapons are, strictly speaking, Count Vorbarra's personal possessions. Good thing too. Not that Gregor wants them, poor dear.One would think the Occupation an immediate knell for such a tradition, and I do not suppose that knives and the like were not illegally borne in many boots ; but the surviving records of more serious beam and projectile weapons, from small arms to field-pieces, show surprisingly strict adherence to the necessary law as well as, in most districts, remarkably swift dispersal to non-Vor households of what extrapolates to something close to 90% of such weapons known to have been on-planet in 2713. If you squint, but it's in the 80s any which way. Fewer than 5% were ever found by the ghem authorities, and it is very largely these weapons, in both Vor and non-Vor hands, that account for the enormous and critically demoralising losses suffered by ghem forces during the initial phase of the Expulsion—the coordinated urban strikes in 2732 that both decapitated local commands and decimated ready-response forces, delaying their deployment until Emperor Dorca's and General Count Vorkosigan's armies were in control of all urban infrastructure, including the comnet, the Cetagandan orbitals had been taken, crippled, or destroyed outright by Prince Xav's galactic weapons, and central command found itself isolated, besieged, and receiving only holovid feeds showing complete military and political disaster. Hah! You could say that the weapons were hidden until the time was right, but you could also say, for it is true, that the weapons were issued, and the paperwork hidden with them ; that those to whom they were issued held themselves accountable without scrutiny or active supervision for nearly twenty years, concealing and maintaining their charge while the guerrilla war was fought out, additional galactic weapons procured and positioned, military attrition and demoralisation achieved, and domestic Cetagandan political support for the Occupation eroded ; that, when the word came at last, with detailed instructions, they uniformly used them as directed, to remarkable effect ; and that relatively soon thereafter, if not quite to a man and woman, they surrendered them again to their counts, that paperwork also being filed, this time less surreptitiously. Also true, however improbable. Even I find Barrayarans weird, y'know? And the list gave me a chance to count on my fingers, which always looks good.
Is this a military tale or a bureaucratic one? A Vor story, a war story, or an office-bore story? What does Riahir make of puns like that, I wonder? I swear Fletchir had to suppress a grin. Whichever tag you prefer, it speaks to what has become the civil militarism of our imperium, an infinitely deeper thing than militarised civilities that I insist on because I believe it is, ultimately, that quality that led us here today. Even to this audience, where some will be able to fill in any blanks for themselves, there is much of which I neither can nor will speak, but it is permissible to say that the Alliance turned in the first place not on personal trust as such, for that could not be earned in advance, but on the extension of military trust. In the years since the end of the Occupation our encounters mutually confirmed reliability ; if either said we would, we did, logistics always serving honour, not to excuse its breach. I could say also that there was a military medal involved, for your earlier grant to me, Celestial Lord, of membership in Your Order of Merit—an honour wholly in Your gift—served Your purposes well. It took me in my outlandishness some years to understand the nature of Your benediction, the bread You cast on the waters, but my slowness did not matter for I did understand that, whatever its mysteries, a claim of honour had by Your grace been born between us ; and when occasion so suddenly arose, five years ago, I was able to bring together Your Imperial and Celestial Majesties, that You might decide if mutual trust now offered Your imperia not only a better but a sustainable way forward. And I get an A+ for pronouns, Helen.
And so it has proven, for there are very few accounts offered by any not in prison by which the last five years have not been extraordinarily good. Not only here on Barrayar, and on Eta Ceta, but throughout the imperia and wider Nexus the enormous economic boom and cultural flowering prompted by frame, nanoforge, and wormhole technologies has almost everyone busy and prospering. The antigeriatric and post-traumatic medical package licensed by the House of Giaja is even more fundamentally transforming lives and expectations across the Nexus. Their Imperial Majesties' Joint Fleet, after disposing once and for all of the grotesque Jacksonians, has established itself as a most formidable and efficient presence, with a headquarters whose planet-wide reconstruction as Aralyar Ceta has attracted architects and admiration from every corner of the Nexus. Ekaterin likes it too. And in those works and buildings, establishing harmonious efficiency, as in explorations of newly viable space that have already yielded beauty to amaze and resources for which to give thanks, the officers and ratings of the Joint Fleet have—with notably little serious dispute—begun to establish a new tradition, securing the best of each of its progenitors. And everyone should be thanking you, Da and Heras, for an amazing job on the Fleet Regs, especially with the marriage-codes. Heh.
Judicious licensing of wormhole termini to assorted galactic polities has forestalled any excessive migration towards our allied imperia, while we have still been able to attract exactly and in the fullest measure the external investments we most desire. This strategy, with occasional licensing of bubble-technologies to elected planetary governments, has also, by the accounting of the Institute's Statistical Committee, reduced military and security-force inflicted fatalities across the Nexus by more than 70% measured against any previous five year period on record ; while combat fatalities among uniformed military and security forces themselves have fallen by more than 95%, for in the thirteen sectors of the Nexus dominated by or adjacent to the Alliance there has been no combat. Except for that short, sharp, and very satisfactory little mopping-up operation late last summer. Everyone gave me endless grief, but how was I supposed to know Elli would actually manage to run into some genuine pirates using an uncharted wormhole — and led by Cavallo, of all people, smack in the middle of Fletchir's new volumes? The Emperor's Own did just happen to have three Princess-Kareen class ships (with complete escort-groups) in company on exercises for that leg of the survey, so there really wasn't a problem, let alone any casualties on our side. And I tell you, Riahir wasn't complaining about it, whatever Rian said. Heh.
Let me repeat that. There has been no combat. In no two consecutive years before 2804 was there no reported governmental combat in any accredited polity of those sectors ; since 2805 there have been three of them. Piracy, of course, continues to flourish where it may which isn't very many places ; see above! ; but no government within the frame-net has ordered shots fired in anger against another government. Because they wonder what we'd do if they did. Who knows? I do not expect it to last! but it is another of the virtues of this Institute to have facilitated and supervised at the levels of central and imperial governance a mutual exchange of less restricted information, so while I will enter into few details I am able to say that an increasingly profound condition of peace exists also within both imperia. For You, Celestial Lord, there is the high satisfaction of knowing not only all Your satrapies of five years ago, but also all the new foundations, report prosperous and busy contentment ; as for You, Sire, for Her Imperial Majesty, and for Your First Viceroy and Vicereine there is the pleasure of seeing Sergyar prosper mightily, the excitement of establishing Toscanyar and Dorcayar, and the joy of seeing the virtual extinction, in all generations and sectors, of Komarran resistance and objection to its full imperial place and identity. Feel Duv, Gregor, Da, and I dancing on your grave, ser Galen? You should. Duv's and Olivia's children do.
Can there be a more satisfying prospect for a bureaucrat, or a more terrifying one for a soldier? My Lady Vorkosigan and Captain Illyan, who bore the burden of commanding me in my naval incarnation, are familiar with my theory of vertigo at apogee, the problem of achieving new heights being how much further one necessarily has to fall. But this apogee has proven a plateau, a new state and status we explore together, and it is here that I mean my title, for the Vor face a situation I believe to be unique. History affords plentiful examples of armies and nations who existed only by necessity of defeating their opponents ; who in the words of an old Terran anthem needed "the rocket's red glare", the chemical flares of a primitive artillery system once used against them by their enemies, besieging a fort, to assure them during their night of trial that their own flag still flew above them. Such armies and nations often lose their identities with victory, and if they do not dissolve altogether lose purpose. From the outside, the Vor's present situation may seem like that, but if the future remains in infinite ways uncertain, I do not fear a Vorish dissolution any more than a renewal of the Vorlordism ended by Dorca the Just, for the situation is not that of the history books, and the Vor are no more defined by their previous military relations with Cetaganda and Komarr than the imperium is intrinsically dependent on war for its definition. And that sentence took some breath-control, let me tell you.
It seems a paradox that the instinctive and forced extension of the Vor as the sinews of imperial, and therefore collective, resistance, an extension plainly driven at a gross level by contradefinition with our Occupiers, should have taken what ultimately proves a civil form, but I think it is not. The purpose of the Vor was always administrative, militarism a necessary means of enforcement in the forge of our Isolation, not the other way around, and in a deep historical sense this plateau of peace is for us not new but restored territory, and as much a reclamation as our reconnection with the Nexus in 2703. Historians of many schools have long agreed that modern, neofeudal Barrayar, though grown of our Komarran necessity and coming of age after our destructive Escobaran folly, was conceived in the Time of Isolation and born under Occupation. That being so, the Occupation was also the cradle of the modern Vor.
We grow because we have to, and because it is demanded of us by all, including ourselves. And if we of these imperia have grown more, and more marvellously, it is because we have learned better than others the ambitions and the limits of our selves. With the permissions of our Imperial Masters, I may tell you that when I first began to address His Celestial Majesty, during the very first direct contact by frame between imperial cousins, my most fundamental contention was that we would all have peace because we had both tired of contention ; that we went forward because we would leave something behind. It was not, and is not, untrue. But it is, as I hoped in saying it, unfair, for neither Your Imperial Majesties—nor any present that day—would have given consent as You did, and all did, to an ending that lacked a beginning ; nor Your hearts to a future that lacked growth ; nor Your hopes to an aspiration that could not flourish. And in the case of the Vor, considered either strictly as a nominal class or as those sinews of the imperium bonded to its flesh, blood, and bone, the assent peace commanded was the roar of comedy that peace needs, the celebration of survival.
I have myself been watching, very much in the spirit of comedy, some seemingly minor and incidental consequences for Barrayar of our Great Alliance—including the return en masse, uniformly desirous of serving in the Joint Fleet, of those many younger Vor scions who had with more or less unkind rhetoric decamped to Beta Colony and elsewhere ; and more recently the flood of interimperial engagements and marriages that has followed the romancing of Lord Vorpatril. Oh Ivan, you inspiring idiot. Though I don't think Nikki, let alone Dag or Fletchir, had any real clue what they were uncorking, for all they were as fast on their feet as anyone that day. Psychogenetic block be damned — it's fools rushing in where angels fear to tread (some sort of deist fairy-friend-mothers, I think ; must ask Ma). What is it running at now? A hundred couples a week? Mark says the nanolicensed maple mead is generating yet another fortune, and asks what he should do with it. (I told him to ask Lem and Harra.) And I know Pel's called in scores of junior haut geneticists from the satrapies, while the Imperial Guard's been recruiting like crazy throughout the Eight — much good may it do them all! Vorkosigans on the march! (And much as it galls and puzzles me I think I have to admit Fletchir and Pel were right, genetically speaking — Ivan keeps reminding me of me these days. Apparently casual lunacy with complete confidence, that works spectacularly well. It's AWFUL! so I am well punished for slighting him. The ex-idiot.) Additionally, certain unwise remarks by Madame Professora Vorthys in The Vorkosigan Report concerning my own sentimental attachment to the seal-dagger I inherited from my grandfather are believed to be responsible for what Master Tsipis tells me is at least a sixty-fold increase in sales of that licensed nanoforge pattern to Vor clients, an austere, practical design with a genuine blade—all the proper paperwork for which has, I assure you, been properly filed with and by the relevant Counts. To cut an amusing story short, Vor nobility has not only endured but is, it seems, again fashionable, and not as a relict but as a propagation—which brings me to my conclusion, and, Sire, a little fraternal revenge. And not before time, Gregor dear. Ekaterin is still not at all pleased by being a Deputy Speaker of the Imperial Residence, and even less pleased by the prospect of succeeding Aunt Alys now she's finally decided to marry Simon — Ha! serves him right — and wants to celebrate by spending a year drinking slightly vulgar cocktails in south continent. Hmmm. *brainwave* She should tell Ekaterin she'll be seeing a lot of Sasha and Violie. Ha! And stars know they could use some Alys-&-Illyanisation.
I should explain that the force majeure to which I eventually succumbed in agreeing to give this lecture was not Madame Professora Vorthys, despite her valiant efforts in cajolery and browbeating, but an imperial request and requirement for a Birthday entertainment. And a shocking abuse of imperial power, Gregor, you rat.So my conclusion to it is a fitting repayment, for what peace has truly made plain about the Vor is that a majority of them do not have that syllable in their names, and this raises a genuine problem. The Lady Vicereine-my-mother tells me that during the conversation my father had with Emperor Ezar before accepting the Regency, Lord Vorkosigan proposed, if Ezar would not abolish the Vor, that He instead ennoble everyone, extending Vorishness to all degrees. I don't believe it is quite what my father intended to do as Lord Regent, but I am not at all sure it isn't what he did, de facto—but not, of course, de jure. Ezar, I am told, was highly amused by the notion, not wholly as mere whimsy. And while it is not precisely the course I recommend we seek to follow now, I say in the gravest earnest that if the Vor are not formally to be extended then a new order of nobility is required. And better the devil you know ...
No record of which I am aware explains when or why the practice of Vorish creation ceased, and Your lawyers, Sire, are unanimously of the opinion that you can enVor whom and as You will. I suspect the limitation to existing grants is accidental, a product of the Bloody Centuries, of the initial fragility of our unification, and of distractions that followed reconnection with the Nexus. And I am sure that continuance of the limitation is indefensible. Which Gregor knows perfectly well — he just hasn't been doing anything about it. In one potent sense it is the logical corollary of the massive extension of Your planetary holdings, Sire, for land must be granted, if it is to be worked and governed, and its grant bears oaths and meaning. It is also where future fleets and volumes will find their officers, whose nurturing traditions must be looked to. But in more immediate terms it is also right for Barrayar, and an important part of the way forward the Vor must find.
The shape of action must be Yours to determine, Sire, and I doubt You will lack for suggestions. My own favour boldness, which cannot surprise you. Ha! It better hadn't! But before I make them I will make to both Your Imperial Majesties, one heartfelt plea—that whatever the eventual outcome, all the nobilities of both imperia be mutually recognised, with reciprocal privilege and duty. Much that matters may thereby be nurtured in the long peace we have barely begun to enjoy. And while a distinct order of nobility within the new volumes might offer many immediate attractions, I make my plea because I believe the harder road will prove enormously more advantageous to all. The extension with Barrayar of the Vor, and with Cetaganda of haut and ghem, demands that we all grow ; and as we have been equal to war, why should we fear being equal to peace?
An Escobaran friend told me a few days ago that for those who know their old Terran literature my title constitutes a terrible punfor the phrase 'War and Peace' was once strongly associated with a Russian novel of that name. Enrique said something intelligible straight off, for once. And unrhymed. I must think of a fitting present for Martya. The war with which its author was concerned was occasioned by a libertarian revolution and the subsequent rise of a very talented military strongman. Combat lasted a quarter-century, and included late in the day a devastating attack by the strongman on the author's country, that became with disease and severe winter a catastrophic retreat. The strongman's empire did not last much longer, and he did not long survive his empire, but what did last of his work, even in some traces today, were the uniform civil and legal codes that he imposed on the polities he conquered, erasing and overwriting the limiting disorganisations of the old in favour of rational coherence ; for after his fall the great majority of those polities never quite got around to repealing the changes, and quietly let the old lapse. The author's own polity, like that of the strongman himself, took slightly odder and wilder routes that both led, in the end, to Barrayar, as our dominant Russian and minority French inheritances tell us ; while certain provisions in Greek custom here speak to more direct adoption of those uniform codes. Yet the lesson that strongman's achievements and failures teaches students of history is worth heeding, and the analogy in general one I cheerfully commend to the Professoriat as well as to Your Imperial Majesties, for as You know better than anyone there can be no perfection without dynamism as well as balance.
There is an old and well-loved story of the Vor lord who leaped on his horse and galloped off in all directions at once. I love Fat Ninny, y'know, even if he is now older than Gran'da in horse-years and almost as stiff in the joints. We have now as great a freedom in our choices of movement as any mounted Lord has ever enjoyed, and the real moral of the story, I think whenever I can summon the courage, is that if you take yourself with you the direction doesn't always matter. And we Vor have found it so. In part, Sires, it was by Your grace, and in part by the Lord Viceroy-my-father's and Lady Vicereine-my-mother's ; but in full measure from first to last it was also the action of all, bringing with them through loss all that was essential. My title plays on Vor and war, but it is war alone that now suffers in our going Vorwards, and peace that in its nature holds no terrors but opportunity. Let us then strengthen ourselves peacefully in peace.
And so I first make a suggestion on the largest scale, that has been commending itself to me for some while now in its essential fairness. And that visibly stunned the entire Council into bug-eyed stupefaction when I dropped it on 'em yesterday, just as they were getting ready to leave in high (and highly confused) self-satisfaction. It was GORGEOUS! As all know Barryar has already found within its claimed volume, beyond the imperial plums of Toscanyar, with its massive, twinkling belt of pure metal asteroids, and the superbly fertile garden-world of Dorcayar, more than sixty inhabitable systems, some on the marginal side, to be sure, but many with at least one planet as welcoming to oxygen-breathers as Sergyar was when we began to colonise it nearly forty years ago. And I kept a straight face saying that, y'know? Ma and Da went pink.Still more sytems, of course, remain to be explored and classified, and with the Betan Astrological Survey as well as the Dendarii Free Mercenaries working closely with the Joint-Fleet teams it is no vague promise to say that substantial additional data is expected soon.
So there they all are: and what shall You do with them, Sire? Simple and obvious. Ha! Gregor's face was priceless. Every District gets a system. Not, please note, every Count. Do I look like an idiot? It would, of course, be the pleasure and privilege of each Count to nominate for Your approval a Governor and Planetary Council from among their liege-sworn and, as necessity will happily dictate, Your Majesties' subjects at large. And yes, that is a plural.And as the systems will become extensions of Districts, so both such District laws, customs, and usages as Counts may choose and all Imperial laws applying to their Barrayaran Districts, will also extend. Sensible modernising and guaranteed oversight in one stroke. Take that, Council of Counts! And it would naturally be Your privilege and duty, Sire, to decide which system went to which District ; as it would be to decide what imperial over-structures You wish to emplace, and whom You might wish to delegate as Your Viceroys and Vicereines of sectors. At which point I do solemnly swear I saw the eyes of Mrs Ivan, Mrs Ivan, and Mrs Ivan light up like those antique rockets launching into the night. Gah. How many Viceroy Vorkosigans does one Imperium need, whatever they're called?
There will of course be much else for every Count of your Council to do. So much that if any of the old goats have enough time for any domestic politicking in the next ten years I'll be very disappointed.But the idea is simple, and I believe all Barrayarans will grasp it eagerly: Every District gets a system. And that must mean that every system is now Vor, which brings me back to Vorish creation. Is there anyone here who has not heard one or another Vor say humorously that if there is one man or woman who deserves to be a Vor, it would be old, or occasionally young, so-and-so? And there is our first longlist. Request and require each and every one of Your imperium's sinews, as Your next Winterfair gift to them, to submit to You a list gathered from all in their Districts, by open public canvas as well as Count's Choice, of families as candidates for Vorhood. And, subject to Your approval after whatever advice You may choose to take, create them so. EnVor them for all our sakes. Hear that phrasing, Gregor? For thus, by Your grace, You may best lead us all peacemeal Vorwards. Those Vor puns are catching, y'know.
Finally, and quite apart from any list I may in the future find myself submitting to You in the Count-my-father's Voice, where such names as Vorcsurik and Vortsipis might most properly figure. And you should have seen their faces when I said that! I have also an Auditorial list to submit to you now, as suggestions for Count Vorbarra's own list with which I do not think he will have any quibble. And as will be clear from my other honorifics, I believe these should all be high Vor creations, conferring not only the acclamatory syllable in the surname but the noble designation of Vor-Lordship. The gods know You now have estates to bestow!
The first is also unexpectedly timely, and will solve the extremely interesting problem of a wedding gift posed, not least to Count Vorbarra, by the happy announcement in last month's Special Gazette of the engagement of Lady Vorpatril to Captain Illyan. Even a little thought will, I believe, persuade anyone that they can have no wish to address my most respected aunt as Mrs Illyan despite the fact that unless I miss my bet Simon is, under that snazzy shirt, wearing a tee that says Voracushla, military-nametag style — I can't wait to tell Ivan!; but to Lord and Lady Vorillyan there is a most pleasing ring, and none have ever served you better. Stone truth, and everyone knows it. And in an age of much increased longevity and truly superb replicator technology there is no reason to fear any confusions between the Vorpatril and Vorillyan inheritances. Cos Ivan's going to love his baby brother. And sister. I wonder when Alys will tell him her grand children nos 4–9 are going to have an uncle and aunt in company from the get-go?
The second is in the same vein, just as richly deserved for lifetimes as service. I will say only that you and I both know a story about the pleasure Your Viceroy once had in pinning a pair of red Lieutenant's tabs on a certain very brave and determined Ensign of his acquaintance, who has since with his equally valiant and determined wife gifted us all with a blonde commando—two of whom have made themselves Vor already, by the only existing means. What pleasure do you suppose Your First Viceroy and Vicereine might take in welcoming Lord and Lady Vorkoudelka to Sergyar House?
As a further most logical extension the third name can come as no surprise to any who understand the service he has given, and continues to give, in these last years with his wife, who is also Your most dedicated and efficient servant. But it has necessarily another aspect, and last month's other Special Gazetteallows me to say simply that it would be a most excellent thing, when General Galeni is installed as Imperial Councellor of Komarr next year, if he did so as Lord Vorgaleni. Doubtless some Komarrans will yet disagree that it would be twice as wonderful to have a Komarran Vor in that post as to have a Komarran at all, but I believe the emergence of a Komarran Vor class will be very good both for Komarr and for the Vor.
My fourth nomination is equally one You—and You, Celestial Lord—will readily appreciate, though with more recent cause. Vorishness is as much a matter of honour as of reputation, of duty as of privilege, and by whom have any of us lately seen the fine care of all four better undertaken then by Your Imperial Majesty's ambassador to the Court of the Celstial Garden? Not only every diplomatic Vor but every industrial ghem will welcome the re-appointment in that role of Lord Vorboulanger.
So that is my Vorth nomination. Told you. And my fifth, Gregor dear, is one I make not because Count Vorbarra would not think of it but because he would needlessly argue himself into a knot before doing it, a process I hope to forestall. Fat chance, but I had to try, y'know. And you'd think they'd all have realised by now what breaching protocol with love can do. Fletchir has — he didn't even twitch, just smiled minimally, the old fox. There was, of course, much discussion six years ago about Count Vorbarra's non-Vor marriage. Some was even quite sensible.But if Komarr has native Vor, as may appear, House Toscane is very plainly high among them, a great power of logistics and fabrication, and inevitably deep in our bureaucracies of military R. & D. and Fleet logistics. How Vor can you be and yet not have the syllable? Does anyone think Prince Aral's and Princess Kareen's maternal grandparents are not de facto Lord and Lady Vortoscane? Or suppose any reason why their son should not de jure make them so? The many fierce nods I can see around this room do not suggest dissent, and I fancy the tax write-offs when Vor invest in public service would stimulate eager acceptance of further Komarran creations, as You saw fit or Your Imperial Councellor recommended. Got you cold, Duv. Ha!
When He dragooned me into agreeing to give this lecture at Madame Professora Vorthys's request His Majesty was gracious enough to point out that I should have no difficulty in reaching a conclusion since His presence on His Birthday would require the traditional ending of gift presentations on that day. I am not entirely sure He foresaw what resonance it might have, but Count Vorbarra subsequently did, and has offered no countermand, so it is my pleasure now, Sire, to ask Madame Professora Vorthys to present to You a printed copy of this lecture, bound in Dendarii goatskin, no less, and to wish you a most happy Birthday and ever so many returns of the day.
As my gift prospers You, Sire, so may You prosper us all.
Thank you.
And I tossed back the glass of maple mead I'd stashed in the podium without so much as bringing a tear to my eye. Then winked at Ivan, who wanted to bite me. And that, thank the stars, was that, while the party that followed has been vastly entertaining, though I didn't know Lem and Harra had brought a pitcher with them, and sense I'm going to regret borrowing it tomorrow. Ah well. I feel moved to add, as the beast himself has just got through at least one locked door to find me, that what I really wanted to do (if only to goose Fletchir, who needs goosing from time to time, y'know?) was to ask Gregor to create Vorimpsec. He could use his own four-legged Count Midnight. Heh. And it seems only fair to add for the puzzled reader of my honest annotations that I'm currently hiding in Helen's office because a few too many of my nearest and dearest are wanting to complain about being made to grow. Ow! At ImpSec's prompting I'll admit also that the predatory looks Ladies Arvin-Vorpatril, Benello-Vorpatril, and even charming dh'Cahearn-Vorpatril acquired while I was speaking tonight make me really keen to avoid them and their babies just now, and quite sorry for Ivan. Though if Gregor has any sense at all he'll make Ivan's viceregal sector one that happens to cover all the worst conservative Districts, with Vorhalas's thrown in, if only to see Vormoncrief & co. dealing with the Lady Vorpatrils and Count/ess Vorhalas. And 'his' wife. I want a 'vid. And my bed.
V'Kosigan, Ld Adtr
Note by Professora Helen V'thys, Chair of the Institute, after classifying (with great regret) this (former) Presentation Copy of Lord Auditor V'kosigan's remarkable lecture as Highly Restricted, requiring the permission of H.I.M. to read.
Following a request from Lady V'kosigan (my niece Ekaterin), I discovered Lord Auditor V'kosigan (henceforth Miles, as I'm too tired for protocol) asleep at my desk. This volume was open before him, with the cat ImpSec (an imperial familiar in ways I do not at all understand but suspect are very bad for historiography) asleep on top of it. Both have departed to more appropriate beds, Miles making incoherent complaints about green ink that made no sense until just now ; and I am tidying up while Lord Auditor V'thys, whenever he can stop laughing, suggests from a prone position on my couch people for enVorment, should H.I.M. take Miles's advice. Which I find I feel strongly he has already done, or it wouldn't have been made public.
I find I understand the lure of writing in Presentation Copies, so I shall take opportunity to note, for my successors in office, whoever they may be, that dealing with V'barras, V'kosigans, and the haut Gars is extremely frustrating. The poor historian is subject to unrelenting revelations, great and small, of how the highest Vor and haut choose to dispose things ; one is even permitted glimpses of why they have done so, insights I invariably find heartening, even when inevitable murk lingers over profits turned on a decision. But besides discovering with most secrets why they must remain secret, every revelation proves a door opening to reveal a corridor stretching in both directions.
If my successors are the kind of historians they ought to be they will have no difficulty understanding my professional glee when I realised what had happened to my Presentation Copy. Handwritten annotation by Miles himself? "O frabjous day", whatever that really means. Having spent a vitally important working evening, the highest light of my professional career to date, hearing what must be (the more I think about it) an announcement of imperial policy that will shape everything for centuries (even millennia) to come, you will imagine how excitedly my historian's heart went pitter-pat. Yet, having read the annotations, while I cannot possibly say I am disappointed — the insights are invaluable, and the observations about the charming t.h. Mirana, Lady d'Benin, need rapidly to find their way onto the haut Study Group's agenda — I find I mostly desire, so badly it hurts, to know exactly how Nikki (whom I must begin thinking of as Lord Nikolai V'kosigan ; oh my!) was involved in Ivan's astonishingly consequential wedding. Grrrr. Even when still electrifying news last spring that astonishing triple marriage had 'imperial trigger event' written all over it, so I'm not surprised by the involvement of Dag Benin ; nor of the personal hand of H.I.M. t.h. Fletchir Giaja, who did attend, albeit as haut Gars. Miles told me of the Star Crèche's theory that Ivan managed to suppress his V'kosiganity ; but what has our Nikki to do with that? Or even Lord Nikolai? He carries Ekaterin's genes (and that nincompoop Tien's), not Miles's — but I'm damned if it's looking like that right now. I must ask Pel about this.
And, somehow, though it'll be tricky, about the haut Riahir. There were those odd stories last year from visiting ghem about his addressing Miles and Ivan as 'Uncle' at Ivan's wedding ; as well as very dry comments about Lord Vortalon!, that holovid series Nikki so likes that keeps cropping up — stories and comments I had tended to discount before this evening. But if Miles's cryptic reference here to the 'Emperor's Own' is, as it would seem from the mention of Admiral Quinn, a revelation about how he and ImpSec legally ran the Dendarii Fleet despite V'haropoulos's Law (and I have wondered, though never dared ask), there must indeed be secret processes of imperial pedagogy at what sounds like very constructive work. Miles and Gregor are great men, and Barrayar extremely fortunate in them. Poor haut Rian, though! She must have had conniptions. And 'Cavallo' is very intriguing, because it's the second time I've known Miles name him or her.
More importantly, we must cultivate as soon as maybe some younger imperial interests ; astonishing and long-lived as our current patrons are. I wonder … . Georg has collapsed into laughter again, merely because I asked if he thought Cecilessa V'balakleets (who is as innovative as her father is glued to prehistory, and has in recent weeks been driving me up the wall with requests for Institute seminars) would care to organise a conference on Lord Vortalon! Propaganda in Peacetime (or some such) ; and whether, were I to send invitations, Crown Prince t.h. Riahir and Lord Nikolai V'kosigan might care to grace it as keynote speakers? Count and Countess V'bretten might also be interested, their Cetagandan visit having gone so well, and General Galeni, of course — Lord V'galeni, as seems likely! And they'd all leap at a chance to put the scriptwriters, who could hardly refuse my invitations, to the sword. Proceedings could be framecast to schools. I shall speak to Miles tomorrow, once he recovers from his hangover, and to Cecilessa as soon as may be.
I must also ask Pel about that haut genetic historian I requested on permanent teaching-staff. The business of genomic history is very strange, and I need to understand more clearly this matter of Ivan's psychogenetic block. But I'm running out of Presentation Copy to vandalise and Georg is snoring. Time for bed, and well-founded dreams of a brighter future. Again. Vor new times' sake, as Miles would probably say.
HelenV'thys, Inst. Chair.