"Confronted with such a situation, I'd rather change the destiny. Or let it be the person's own choice, if the option is available. Failing both of those... I mostly wish it hadn't been such a trauma to the population that in some parts of the world they're still killing infants born with even the most harmless and easily corrected visible defects."

And the effects of that attitude on his own life have in many cases been as painful as his own actual personal health troubles, if not more so. But that's for later in the story; he still has at least two major wars to explain before he gets to the point of his own conception and birth. No, make that three or four. Barrayar has seen a lot of wars, it turns out.

"Go on."

"There's approximately six hundred years of Barrayaran history after that, much of which involves people killing each other for stupid reasons. Then in the year 2898 standard, Emperor Dorca the Just - Emperor is the English title of the ruler of Barrayar; it's like a King but more so - successfully united Barrayar under his rule to the point where for the first time in quite a while, there ceased to be a war going on."

This was not to last.

"Soon afterward, galactic explorers discovered a new wormhole route to Barrayar, from a planet called Komarr which was rich in wormhole routes and very little else. The eight-planet Cetagandan Empire," whose capital city and planet he can picture very vividly, having been there, "decided they liked the opportunity presented by this vulnerable new addition to the wormhole nexus. They bribed the Komarrans to let them take an invasion fleet through. The Komarrans unwisely agreed - I can't imagine what they thought they were doing, putting themselves on the sole route between two separate pieces of an aggressively expansionist power. Anyway, the Cetagandans conquered us. My grandfather Piotr," a remembered holo of his young face, "began his long-running career as a war hero during the initial twenty years of resistance against the occupation. We were stupidly outgunned and outnumbered - they had eight planets, we had one; they had atomics," a flash of Vorkosigan Vashnoi seen from the air, the blasted ruin too poisoned to touch where once there was a thriving city, "we had swords. But after twenty years, thanks to a combination of galactic aid and total unwillingness to quit, we threw them off our planet anyway."

"What are atomics?"

"A weapon capable of creating an enormous and devastating explosion by manipulating some of the fundamental forces of the universe in tricky ways."

He recalls the before-and-after of Vorkosigan Vashnoi in greater detail for illustrative purposes. It's his city now, this haunted ruin where none can safely walk.

"You have any?"

"Not with me, no. Or I'd have dropped one on Angband on the way out. I'm sure it's possible to recreate them, but on the long list of extremely difficult engineering problems presented by the reinvention of various things I've heard of, I'd put it somewhere at the far end. 'Might be easier than gravitics' is the best I can say for it, but unlike atomics, we have an example of gravitics to study; that's what I actually levelled Angband with."

He moves somewhat violently at that.

"...Um?"

"You want me to believe Angband is already leveled? Why?"

"I have no opinion on whether you should believe it. It's what happened, but from your perspective it's probably the least convincing claim I've made so far. Ignore it if you prefer."

Although if Maitimo would find the sight entertaining, he did take holos of the fortress imploding and can produce them on request.

"Hallucinations within hallucinations. No. Continue."

He snorts. "Sure. Where was I? Right, the end of the Cetagandan occupation. So old Dorca didn't last long after that; he died shortly after we repelled the invaders, and his son Yuri succeeded him. Yuri was the sort of person who believes everyone is out to get him, so a few years into his rule he tried to have every single one of Dorca's other descendants assassinated, including my grandfather's wife and their three children, all of whom he apparently suspected of plotting to overthrow him. My father was the only survivor of that attack. But Yuri didn't bother sending a death squad after Grandfather, which just goes to show how much of an idiot he was, since Grandfather immediately went to war against him and won, an event called Yuri Vorbarra's Civil War by the politer variety of history textbook and the Dismemberment of Mad Yuri by everyone else. Occasionally the fact that I'm related to Mad Yuri through two separate lines of descent keeps me up at night."

Much less lately than it used to, though.

"The next Emperor therefore was Ezar, a distant-ish Vorbarra relative who helped Grandfather pin down Yuri, and he brought order back to the planet and then launched the invasion of Komarr, a war which my father got to be the hero of because my grandfather was finally starting to get a little old for that sort of thing. Father's a brilliant strategist, he had the whole thing planned out perfectly. The objective was to get control of the planet so that we'd have anything resembling a defensible position if the Cetagandans came back and would generally not be dependent on people who clearly did not have our best interests at heart to guard our only path to the rest of the galaxy, and he accomplished that objective beautifully with astonishingly little violence. Unfortunately, not everyone agreed with his priorities. There were some people who thought that what the Komarrans had done to us should be punished with more than just the bloodless conquest of their planet. And, against my father's sworn word that any Komarran who surrendered would be spared, one such person among his subordinates rounded up two hundred high-ranking Komarran prisoners and killed them all."

"Charming," he murmurs.

"My father flew into a rage and killed him on the spot, an understandable if not exactly admirable response. The Komarrans were naturally very upset, and what could have been a mostly peaceful occupation got... substantially nastier than that."

How many wars is he up to now? Dorca, Cetaganda, Yuri, Komarr... just Escobar and Vordarian left, then. Six. Six wars before he was ever born that you need to understand if you want to understand the full context of Miles's life. Wow.

"My father has a lasting reputation with the Komarrans as an evil murderer, and there's been periodic unrest on Komarr since then, but it's getting much better recently. Anyway. Buoyed by what they perceived as an unqualified success at Komarr, a certain faction at home decided they might like to try their hand at galactic conquest. They got a lot of people on their side, including Ezar's only son, Prince Serg. And Barrayaran explorers found a new route to one of the richer and less well-defended planets in the galaxy, a place called Escobar, via a previously-undiscovered planet that had no name at the time. Prince Serg launched an invasion. I'm told it was supposed to have been very well planned, but they failed to account for a recent innovation in military technology that hardly anyone had heard of yet, and most of the invasion fleet was wiped out, Serg included. We named the in-between planet Sergyar in his memory, and I'm very happy to say that the warmongers seem to have permanently learned their lesson from that experience, because no one has seriously suggested we try to conquer anybody else since."

(Miles has strong feelings about conquering things just because you can. The feelings are: don't.)

"I'm also told my parents met at some point during that war," he adds, "though I can't imagine how, and no one's ever said - she's Betan, you see, from Beta Colony, the planet that provided the innovation with which Escobar won the war so dramatically. I do know that after the war ended, she moved to Barrayar to marry my father, and Ezar, who was dying of old age by that point, made Father the regent over Serg's five-year-old son Gregor, and now we're at the last of the six wars that are apparently necessary to understand the context of my birth."

"Men sound every bit as bad as the Enemy characterized you."

"I don't know how the Enemy characterized us, so I can't speak to that, but certainly I am not in the business of pretending there's nothing wrong with us. There's plenty wrong with us, individually and collectively."

The point of this exercise is absolutly not to paint a flattering picture of humanity. The point is to tell Maitimo everything Miles knows about his own life and the world he came from, and that definitely includes a lot of very unflattering things. He does think that people are more than their flaws, that there is value and goodness in the lives and hearts of Men. But he understands that someone listening to him describe Barrayaran history might reasonably come to a different conclusion.

"The Enemy says that you're all Kinslayers a thousand times over, that you do each other unspeakable violence with unspeakable weapons and fill the world with hungry and desperate and parentless children."

"Sure," says Miles. "That happens. Particularly on Barrayar, which is an especially violent and backward place by galactic standards. But on the other hand there's Beta Colony, where everyone has the right by law to food and shelter and all other things that Betans consider basic necessities - including education, by which I mean effective access to the collected published knowledge of all the hundreds of billions of humans in the galaxy - but any Betan who wants to have children has to apply for a parenting license and pass a course and a background check."

He can see the appeal of both systems, but personally he prefers Barrayar. Barrayar is home to him in a way that no other place will ever be. It's fucked up, violent, backward, uncivilized... and beautiful, and full of people who deserve better than what they've got, and when he thinks about how far they've come he aches with pride, and when he thinks about how far they still have left to go he aches with love and duty. More than anything else about being stranded probably-forever in this alien world, what gets to Miles is that he will never see Barrayar again. His heart hurts at the memory of the morning breeze off the long lake, but that's nothing to how much it hurts that his planet will have to go on without him. He wasn't finished! There are so many problems left to solve!

"...Sorry," he adds after that moment of emotion, "I didn't mean to get so distracted. I was about to describe the war of Vordarian's Pretendership."

"Your technology is infinitely more sophisticated than ours, but you are able to offer less to your people than Valinor offered us even as illiterate primatives. Yes, do tell me about another war."

Miles makes an amused noise. Maitimo is kind of delightful to talk to, which isn't at all what Miles went in expecting.

But if he thinks about what he'd expect himself to be like in Maitimo's position, he's going to get distracted again. Vordarian.

"So my parents were trying to have children, and around the time my mother got pregnant, someone tried to assassinate my father and she ended up poisoned. At first it looked like I was probably going to die; then it looked like if I didn't die right away, I was going to be born with no bones and die shortly afterward as a miserable blob-thing. My grandfather, child of the Time of Isolation that he was, said they should get rid of me and start over. My mother decided to keep me instead. She had me transferred to a uterine replicator and found the most brilliant doctors available to try their most brilliant ideas for how to save my life and make it worth living."

Rather than waste any time explaining what a uterine replicator is out loud, he just thinks the explanation. It is this thing. By no means common on Barrayar at the time, in fact nearly unheard-of, but very common indeed in the wider galaxy.

"It was going pretty well. Then an ambitious man by the name of Vidal Vordarian decided that, as the position of Emperor was at the moment held by a five-year-old child, it was his for the taking. So he tried to take it. His assassination of Emperor Gregor failed, but he did succeed in capturing Gregor's mother, Serg's widow, the Princess Kareen, and - by coercion, one must assume, it certainly wasn't by personal charm, not after he tried to kill her son - convincing her to marry him. This kicked off a lovely civil war."

By lovely, he means nasty and violent and horrifying.

"My father, as rightful Regent, led the Imperial side. Vordarian had enough political and military backing to make it a fairly even fight, especially since he captured the Imperial Residence as his very first move in the game, and of course there were a lot of people he could sway to his side or at least to neutrality by making it look like it was a foregone conclusion and they'd better not fight him if they didn't want to be executed for treason after he won. But he wanted a tighter grip on his power than that, so he kidnapped as many of the wives and children of opposing political and military figures as he could get his hands on, including raiding the research hospital for my uterine replicator. This turned out to be a mistake."

It's kind of funny, in a horrible sort of way. A lot of Barrayaran history is like that.

"My father, very reasonably under the circumstances, said that he couldn't launch a raid to retrieve me after he'd let the kidnappings of his subordinates' families go uncontested; it would be the worst kind of favouritism and would undermine morale horribly. My mother pointed out that, unlike the wives and children of his subordinates, I needed regular maintenance and experimental treatments that the kidnappers would have no idea how to provide. He said he still couldn't do it because they didn't actually have the resources to pull it off. She - you may begin to notice that this is a pattern with my mother - decided that wasn't good enough for her, took a couple of her close friends, and launched a secret raid all by herself, coming back in the end not only with my uterine replicator safe and sound but also with Vordarian's head in a bag. The story goes that when she walked into a conference where my father was attempting to talk some recalcitrant generals around and one of them asked her where the hell she'd been, she held up the bag - it was originally from some clothing store - said 'Shopping', and then dumped the contents on the table."

Despite not having been there, he can imagine this scene pretty vividly. God, he misses his mother.

"This is not how we typically settle disagreements over kingship, and I thought we were quite bad at it."

"It's not my favoured method. Civil war is bad."

"Could Barrayar have given him half the country? Lived civilly side by side? Or was it only going to end with either Vordarian or your father dead?"

"He wouldn't have settled for half, because he thought he could have the whole thing. His attempt was prompted by a desire for power, not any belief in a legitimate right to it, because he had no such right. That sort of person - someone who'll try to kill a five-year-old because they want his empire - generally makes a poor ruler if they succeed. Father could technically have pardoned him for treason, if Father had managed to win the war without killing him, and at that point it would've been stupid for Vordarian to try for a second round, but trying for the first round was already stupid, so that's no guarantee. All in all, no, I think once Vordarian started the war the only practical course was to fight it out."