have wandered in from some fairy-tale, sign and signifier of

transformations to come, but I have met those wild roses in person, in banked-up masses, while riding in the Ohio fields of my childhood. I borrowed the title from a friend's working title of a fantasy, The

Mountains of Morning, that she didn't use for her story's final version. "Mountains" was a contrary story, based on the "What's the worst possible thing we can do to this guy?" plot-generator, taking my new-minted Ensign Miles, his face to the stars, and forcing his head around to take a look at what his feet were planted in. At the time I

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was having an amiable debate with Jim Baen whether the series

should be called "Miles Naismith Adventures" or "Miles Vorkosigan Adventures"; "Mountains" was in some degree the last word in this argument. It won me my first Hugo award, and my second Nebula, for

best novella of 1989.

The third book in my three-book contract had been sold on what I

fancied was the world's shortest synopsis: one word, "Quaddies." I really had intended when I'd finished Falling Free to write its sequel, but when I came to it, I still was not ready. (I am now even less ready.) It was very apparent, though, looking at the Miles tales I'd already written, that there was an important gap between "Mountains" and

"Labyrinth." I knew how Miles had left the Dendarii Mercenaries, but I didn't know how he'd got back to them. I did know it couldn't have been simple. A lot must have happened in the three years Miles was

tied down in military school, and such responsibility and respect

weren't the sort of thing the military powers-that-be on Barrayar were likely to voluntarily give to the young ensign we'd last seen in

"Mountains." Jim Baen meanwhile had primed the pump by sending me a copy of B.H. Liddell-Hart's Strategy, which I read primarily because Captain Liddell-Hart had also been an admirer of Lawrence

in his day. Ah, connections.

As long as my novels of character were being packaged as military

SF anyway, I figured I might as well take a whack at the sub-genre

more nearly head-on. So I set out to make the book which became The

Vor Game as military as I could, as a sort of delayed present to Jim for raising me out of the slush-gutter back in '85. Unusually, I can

describe exactly the moment at which the ideas came together in my

head for the book's opening sequence. I was standing at my kitchen

sink doing the dinner dishes, and listening to an Enya tape which