Miles Vorkosigan

Did You Know?

• Miles has been discussed as an example of an atypical space opera hero, short and handicapped, unlike the traditional tall, dark and handsome heroes of popular space opera.
• Miles wins against adversity because of his skills, including rhetorical ones, rather than physical prowess.

Personality

Miles Vorkosigan is a tactical genius with a restless, hyperactive mind; one of his former partners calls him an adrenaline addict. He constantly pushes against every boundary, often with chaotic results, but his intellect usually compensates for his physical limitations. Simon Illyan once warned Ekaterin during Miles's courtship never to set him three impossible tasks like in the old folk tales, because it simply would not work. He is a master manipulator and an expert bluffer.

The entire Dendarii Free Mercenaries force started as a complete fabrication, which he sustained through frantic improvisation until the unit's real achievements made the lie true. This "lie first, fix later" approach, however, forces him into a frantic balancing act of deceptions that frequently backfires. For example, he is caught hiding his seizure disorder, and later the widow he loves is furious to learn he was secretly courting her during her official mourning period.

As a child, Miles had a crush on Elena Bothari, the daughter of Sergeant Konstantin Bothari, but she did not return his feelings. In Cetaganda, he nurses an unrequited crush on Rian Degtiar, the Handmaiden of the Star Crèche who eventually becomes Empress. Under his alias Admiral Naismith, he has relationships with Admiral Elli Quinn of the Dendarii and with Taura, a sergeant in the same mercenary group who was created as a military experiment before Miles rescued her in the story "Labyrinth." In the long run, Miles seeks a wife who will become the future Lady Vorkosigan, a prospect that scares off his non-Barrayaran lovers. He eventually falls in love with and wins Ekaterin Vorsoisson in the novel Komarr. Though he is primarily attracted to women, in Diplomatic Immunity he is forced to acknowledge his attraction to Betan Bel Thorne, a non-binary and intersex character.

Fictional character biography

Miles Vorkosigan is the son of Aral Vorkosigan of the planet Barrayar and his Betan wife Cordelia Naismith. He has several physical impairments due to an assassination attempt directed at his parents. A poison gas grenade was thrown into their bedroom during Cordelia's pregnancy with Miles but the couple's lives were saved by quick administration of the antidote, a violent teratogen that destroys skeletal development in a growing fetus. The only available treatment for the fetus was experimental at best, and would have been fatal to the mother.

Miles was therefore transferred to an artificial uterine replicator in an effort to salvage his bone development. While in the replicator, Miles was kidnapped from the hospital and used as a hostage against his father by Vidal Vordarian, the leader of the Vordarian pretendership, putting a temporary halt to the treatments. He was ultimately born with chalk-stick bones, friable as talc, and is described as wizened as an infant homunculus. Despite repeated corrective surgeries, Miles's height only reaches four-foot-nine at maturity.

He has his mother's sea grey eyes and his father's dark hair. Miles is described as winter pale with laugh lines around his eyes and pain lines around his mouth. Miles was slightly hunch-backed, but after his death and cryo-revival, a surgeon managed to straighten his spine a bit, giving him a valued additional centimeter of height. Miles has fine scars running all over his body from having his easily broken bones replaced with synthetics in his twenties.

Many people on Barrayar are prejudiced against him because they incorrectly believe him to be a mutant. Mutants (real or perceived, which are common on Barrayar due to a small population at the beginning of the Time of Isolation) are highly undesirable on Barrayar, and children visibly carrying a mutated gene are often killed by their families. Though the Time of Isolation is over, prejudice against mutants and the physically disabled is still very high.

Admiral Naismith

Admiral Naismith was a false identity Miles Vorkosigan created in his youth, one he maintained as a working cover until the events of the novel Memory. Under this alias, Miles commanded the Dendarii Mercenaries, a force originally known as the Oseran Mercenaries before he took control from Admiral Oser. What started as a fabrication eventually became a genuine operational persona. The whole arrangement was an improvisation: Miles faced treason charges for assembling a private army, so he offered the Dendarii to Emperor Gregor as a Crown Troop, a unit serving Barrayar.

To keep Barrayar’s involvement secret, Miles had to remain Admiral Naismith, allowing the Dendarii to undertake missions without linking them back to the Imperium. The contrast between a Vor lordling’s constrained life and Naismith’s galaxy-wide freedom grew so stark that Miles began to prefer his alter ego’s existence over his own birthright. His mother Cordelia observed that Miles invented Naismith because Barrayar inflicted so much stress and pain that he crafted an entire second personality to flee into, then convinced thousands of galactic mercenaries to support his delusion and tricked the Barrayaran government into funding it.

Miles himself told Emperor Gregor that Naismith was essentially himself with no brakes and no constraints. This lack of inhibition made him a particularly dangerous adversary, willing to take risks most people would avoid. He was also a brilliant improviser. On a mission to extract a single Marilacan guerrilla leader from a Cetagandan prison camp, he turned the operation into a mass breakout of nearly all the inmates.

He accomplished this using only his commanding personality, a bizarre religion promoted by one prisoner, and coded messages picked up by his support team, who had infiltrated the Cetagandan garrison to observe. The mission’s success and the subsequent rebellion on Marilac led the Cetagandans to place a bounty on Miles’s head.

Mark Vorkosigan

Mark Vorkosigan is the clone of Miles Vorkosigan, created six years after Miles’ birth. He was engineered by Ser Galen, a Komarran terrorist, as part of a scheme to impersonate Miles, murder Miles’ father Aral Vorkosigan and Emperor Gregor Vorbarra, seize the imperial throne, and trigger chaos and revolution. Miles, shaped by his mother’s Betan values, refuses to kill Mark or even obstruct him, wanting only for Mark to come to Barrayar as a true Vorkosigan. After killing Ser Galen—who had been both his abuser and a father figure—Mark declines and goes his own way. He looks somewhat different from Miles due to crude attempts to replicate the effects of the chemical Miles was exposed to in the womb, which stunted his bone development.

Years later, Mark resurfaces and infiltrates the Dendarii Mercenaries by pretending to be Admiral Miles Naismith. His plan is to send them on a mission to free over forty clones slated for body harvesting. The operation partially succeeds: the clones are rescued, but Miles is apparently killed by a needle grenade. Miles’ body goes missing (it is actually in cryogenic stasis, found by people unaware of his identity), and Mark is brought back to Barrayar, now uncomfortably positioned as Count Vorkosigan’s heir if Miles is dead.

Mark persuades Countess Vorkosigan to let him lead a rescue mission for Miles, much to Illyan’s dismay. On this mission, Mark is captured by Baron Ryoval, who subjects him to physical, sexual, and mental torture. During this ordeal, Mark develops a peculiar psychosis he later calls the Black Gang: a set of specialized sub-personalities. These include Grunt (representing Mark’s sexuality), Gorge (his gluttony), Howl (his masochism), and Killer (his assassin persona).

The Black Gang shields a fifth personality, Lord Mark—Mark’s own fragile, newly formed identity—from Ryoval’s tortures. After Killer kills Ryoval, Lord Mark takes control, as he is the only one capable of thinking beyond a single purpose. The Black Gang serves Lord Mark well: using his split personality, he kills the Baron, sells ninety percent of Ryoval’s assets to his rival Fell for a substantial sum (about two million Betan dollars, or eight to ten million Barrayaran marks), and gains ownership of a bioresearch firm. Mark subsidizes this firm to fight the clone chop shops on Jackson’s Whole.