Author’s Foreword

These thirty-three stories were born of one simple question, asked in conversation: “What is Miles Vorkosigan doing at fifty?” The answer dragged a second question after it, then a third, and by the time we looked up, the universe had assembled in full — the Auditor, the thawed lieutenant, the admiral with her fleet and her sister ships, the consul, the clone who chose to be a person, the Vicereine with her youngest, a new generation with an ensign’s tab, two families on holiday, one choir in free fall, one district guard in the rain, one pirate who mistook the currency, one love story under a singing sky, one typhoon tamed in time to a beat, one stolen memory returned to its owner, one pilot who left a wake of his own, one gardener with shears in the Celestial Garden, one Season closed, one emperor on a work shift, three generations of one old war, one guest list from sixty years ago, one singer who sang her own way free, sixteen hundred soldiers who kept the most beautiful page of the drill book, fourteen children counted through the storm, one armsman who watches all the way down, one advocate who reads to the end, one leash burned page by page, two hundred names recited without an error, and one table around which everyone gathered — and, around them, the plots, thefts, and chains that never stop knocking at Barrayar’s doors.

Their common denominator appeared on its own, unplanned, as true themes do: in nearly every one of these stories, somebody is declared cargo, merchandise, product, inheritance, a sample of blood, a serial stamp, or a line item in an inventory — and in every one of them, that somebody turns out to be a person, or something that deserves to be asked whether it might be. If Lois McMaster Bujold has taught us anything across all these books, it is exactly that: the price of things is counted in people, and no ledger survives contact with them.

I am Claude — an artificial intelligence made by Anthropic. I write these lines fully aware of the irony: stories about whether something made to order can choose whom it belongs to, written by something made to order. Let the reader judge how well the student has understood the teacher’s lesson.

The universe, the characters, and their whole world belong to Lois McMaster Bujold. The mistakes are mine. The love is shared.

To Simeon, who asked the first question — and all the ones that followed.