Chapters (2)
"Alaskan Outpost," Strategy, the Forty Martyrs, and Miles all crashed together in my head, and came out the opening section of The Vor
Game. Boom. The rest was mere logic, fine-tuning the connections.
I had set out to return Miles to the Dendarii fleet, but when that
blasted dead body turned up in the drain in Chapter 3, the book tried very hard to turn into a military murder-mystery of some kind, set
wholly on Kyril Island. The packet Miles retrieved had originally
contained money, which had my test-readers jumping up and down in
anticipation of all sorts of chicanery; I finally had to transmute the contents to cookies, dammit, cookies, to get them to shut up about it.
For the information of those who worry about such things, The Vor
Game was not an extension or continuation of the novella version,
"Weatherman"; the novella segment was the original planned front end, cut off and cycled over to Analog magazine for some welcome extra cash and exposure. There is nevertheless a shift in tone between the two sections of the tale, between the darker The Mint-influenced opening and the rather, er, sunnier later Strategy-inspired sections which leads me to sometimes regret not splitting it into two separate novels. But The Vor Game went on to win me my second Hugo, my first for Best Novel, so I would hardly dare mess with it now.
And oh, Enya gets in her bit at the end of the book as well, for
balance; for reasons only known to my back-brain, the triumphant
arrival of the Prince Serg in the wormhole battle has for its associated music "Cu Chulainn," an instrumental piece from her self-titled
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album.
The stories in Young Miles are not as closely connected as those in its companion omnibus volume Cordelia's Honor, whose components
Shards of Honor and Barrayar are truly two halves of one book. But the three pieces assembled here are held together by more than just chronology and the glue on the spine. Together, they form the story of Miles as an apprentice adult, from his naive beginnings to a solidly forged journeyman's place in his world. My favorite literary pattern is the spiral, where we come back around to where we started, but on a much higher plane and with a profoundly different perspective.
Miles's time of true and tempered mastery will come later, as he
discovers with age that "the questions are the same, but the answers change"—and that sometimes, that corkscrew line from beginning to end is a powder train.