“These hill-folk are ignorant, lord.”
“These hill-folk are mine, Pym. Their ignorance is…a shame upon my house. Their continued ignorance anyway,” he amended in fairness. It still made a burden like a mountain. “Is this message so complex? So difficult? ‘You don’t have to kill your children anymore.’ It’s not like we’re asking them all to learn–5-space navigational math.” That had been the plague of Miles’s last Academy semester.
“It’s not easy for them,” shrugged Dea. “It’s easy for the central authorities to make the rules, but these people have to live every minute of the consequences.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Mountains of Mourning“Ordinary people need extraordinary examples. So they can say to themselves, well, if he can do that, then I surely can do this. No excuses.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Mountains of Mourning
CBR15Bingo: Into the Wild
This won the 1990 Hugo award and 1989 Nebula award for Best Novella.
The novella follows the first Miles Vorkosigan book, The Warrior’s Apprentice. Miles, son of the former regent and military strategist, and heir to the Vorkosigan district of Barrayar, has just graduated from the military academy and is spending his last few weeks of shore leave at his parents’ estate. Praying for an off-world assignment, his hopes are dashed when his father sends him on a mission in the most rural area of their district.
The bulk of this story is a mystery, with Miles traveling deep into the mountains to investigate the unexplained death of a baby girl. The local leadership claims it was an accident, but the mother is convinced that her husband did it. Her baby had been born with a harelip and a cleft palate – a death sentence for any local child born with any undesirable physical attributes. Although surgery to repair these conditions is standard practice on other planets, hill people believe these are signs of the devil. Infanticide is a crime, but it is a difficult crime to prove and prosecute.
Miles knows that this is a test from his father, but he doesn’t resent it. One day the people under his father’s protection will be his responsibility.
Without giving too much away, Miles’s assignment is not simply a test of intelligence and leadership, but it is an important touchpoint for him to connect with his people as well as allow them to see him for what he is: a capable and emotionally-intelligent leader, despite (and because of) his appearance and perceived weaknesses.
Miles cannot bring in the military and truth serum everyone until he finds the killer. He does not have the luxury of making a mistake. He learns as he goes but does so with extreme caution compared to how he behaved in the previous book. He cannot fly by the seat of his pants and hope it works out. He is most comfortable on a ship, following the inherent rules of the military and ruling class in which he was raised. But here, among his father and grandfather’s people, he must learn how to perform his duty even when he is completely out of his element.
The strength of Bujold’s writing is how nothing is ever black and white. There are deadly consequences and shocking discoveries, but the way she tells the story makes it feel as if the ending is inevitable. Not everything comes out as expected, but the disappointments are forecasted in such a way that there are rarely any actions that are out of character for our hero and his companions. Barrayar is still very patriarchal and, aside from the occasional appearance of Miles’s mother, this is an almost completely male-dominated story told about a specific mother and her daughter. While I don’t like that the delivery of justice was determined solely by a man without any input from the women he was set to defend, I do not hold it against the book.
The next book, The Vor Game, is supposed to be a wild ride.
Content warning for a description of infanticide.
