Young Miles (93 page)

Miles produced proper passes for the door guards. Their faces were familiar, they were the same crew he'd helped supervise for that interminable period last winter—only a few months ago? It seemed longer. He could still rattle off their pay-rates. They exchanged pleasantries, but being good ImpSec men they did not ask the question alight in their eyes,
Where have you been sir?
Miles was not issued a security escort to Illyan's office, a good sign. It wasn't as if he didn't know the way, by now.

He followed the familiar turns into the labyrinth, up the lift tubes. The captain in Illyan's outer office merely waved him through, barely glancing up from his comconsole. The inner office was unchanged, Illyan's oversized comconsole desk was unchanged, Illyan himself was . . . rather tireder-looking, paler. He ought to get out and catch some of that spring sun, eh? At least his hair hadn't all turned white, it was still about the same brown-grey mix. His taste in clothes was still bland to the point of camouflage.

Illyan pointed to a seat—another good sign, Miles took it promptly—finished whatever had been absorbing him, and at last looked up. He leaned forward to put his elbows on the comconsole and lace his fingers together, and regarded Miles with a kind of clinical disapproval, as if he were a data point that messed up the curve, and Illyan was deciding if he could still save the theory by re-classifying him as experimental error.

"Ensign Vorkosigan," Illyan sighed. "It seems you still have a little problem with subordination."

"I know, sir. I'm sorry."

"Do you ever intend to do anything about it besides feel sorry?"

"I can't help it, sir, if people give me the wrong orders."

"If you can't obey my orders, I don't want you in my Section."

"Well . . . I thought I had. You wanted a military evaluation of the Hegen Hub. I made one. You wanted to know where the destabilization was coming from. I found out. You wanted the Dendarii Mercenaries out of the Hub. They'll be leaving in about three more weeks, I understand. You asked for results. You got them."

"
Lots
of them," Illyan murmured.

"I admit, I didn't have a direct order to rescue Gregor, I just assumed you'd want it done. Sir."

Illyan searched him for irony, lips thinning as he apparently found it. Miles tried to keep his face bland, though out-blanding Illyan was a major effort. "As I recall," said Illyan (and Illyan's memory was eidetic, thanks to an Illyrican bio-chip) "I gave those orders to Captain Ungari. I gave you just one order. Can you remember what it was?" This inquiry was in the same encouraging tone one might use on a six-year-old just learning to tie his shoes. Trying to out-irony Illyan was as dangerous as trying to out-bland him.

"Obey Captain Ungari's orders," Miles recalled reluctantly.

"Just so." Illyan leaned back. "Ungari was a good, reliable operative. If you'd botched it, you'd have taken him down with you. The man is now half-ruined."

Miles made little negative motions with his hands. "He made the correct decisions, for his level. You can't fault him. It's just . . . things got too important for me to go on playing ensign when the man who was needed was Lord Vorkosigan."
Or Admiral Naismith.
 

"Hm," Illyan said. "And yet . . . who shall I assign you to now? Which loyal officer gets his career destroyed next?"

Miles thought this over. "Why don't you assign me directly to yourself, sir?"

"Thanks," said Illyan dryly.

"I didn't mean—" Miles began to sputter protest, stopped, detecting the oblique gleam of humor in Illyan's brown eyes.
Roasting me for your sport, are you?
 

"In fact, just that proposal has been floated. Not, needless to say, by me. But a galactic operative must function with a high degree of independence. We're considering making a virtue of necessity—" A light on Illyan's comconsole distracted him. He checked something, and touched a control. The door on the wall to the right of his desk slid open, and Gregor stepped through. The emperor shed one guard who stayed in the passageway, the other trod silently through the office to take up station beyond the antechamber. All doors slid shut. Illyan rose to pull up a chair for the emperor, and gave him a nod, a sort of vestigial bow, before reseating himself. Miles, who had also risen, sketched a salute and sat too.

"Did you tell him about the Dendarii yet?" Gregor asked Illyan.

"I was working around to it," said Illyan.

Gradually.
"What about the Dendarii?" Miles asked, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice, try though he might for a junior version of Illyan's impassive surface.

"We've decided to put them on a permanent retainer," said Illyan. "You, in your cover identity as Admiral Naismith, will be our liaison officer."

"Consulting mercenaries?" Miles blinked.
Naismith lives!
 

Gregor grinned. "The Emperor's Own. We owe them, I think, something more than just their base pay for their services to us—and to Us—in the Hegen Hub. And they have certainly demonstrated the, er, utility of being able to reach places cut off to our regular forces by political barriers."

Miles interpreted the expression on Illyan's face as deep mourning for his Section budget, rather than disapproval as such.

"Simon shall be alert for, and pursue, opportunities to use them actively," Gregor went on. "We'll need to justify that retainer, after all."

"I see them as more use in espionage than covert ops," Illyan put in hastily. "This isn't a license to go adventuring, or worse, some kind of letter of marque and reprisal. In fact, the first thing I want you to do is beef up your intelligence department. I know you're in funds for it. I'll lend you a couple of my experts."

"Not bodyguard-puppeteers again, sir?" Miles asked nervously.

"Shall I ask Captain Ungari if he wants to volunteer?" inquired Illyan with a suppressed ripple of his lips. "No. You will operate independently. God help us. After all, if I don't send you someplace else, you'll be right here. So the scheme has that much merit even if the Dendarii never do anything."

"I fear it is primarily your youth, which is the cause of Simon's lack of confidence," murmured twenty-five-year-old Gregor. "
We
feel it is time he gave up that prejudice."

Yes, that had been an Imperial We, Miles's Barrayaran-tuned ears did not deceive him. Illyan had heard it as clearly. The chief leaner, leaned upon. Illyan's irony this time was tinged with underlying . . . approval? "Aral and I have labored twenty years to put ourselves out of work. We may live long enough to retire after all." He paused. "That's called 'success' in my business, boys. I wouldn't object." And under his breath ". . . get this hellish chip taken out of my head at last. . . ."

"Mm, don't go scouting surfside retirement cottages just yet," said Gregor. Not caving or backpedaling or submission, merely an expression of confidence in Illyan. No more, no less. Gregor glanced at Miles's . . . neck? The deep bruises from Metzov's grip were almost gone by now, surely. "Were you still working around to the other thing, too?" he asked Illyan.

Illyan opened a hand. "Be my guest." He rummaged in a drawer underneath his comconsole.

"We—and We—thought we owed you something more, too, Miles," said Gregor.

Miles hesitated between a
shucks-t'weren't-nothin
speech and a
what-did-you-bring-me?!
and settled on an expression of alert inquiry.

Illyan reemerged, and tossed Miles something small that flashed red in the air. "Here. You're a lieutenant. Whatever that means to you."

Miles caught them between his hands, the plastic collar rectangles of his new rank. He was so surprised he said the first thing that came into his head, which was, "Well, that's a start on the subordination problem."

Illyan favored him with a driven glower. "Don't get carried away. About ten percent of ensigns are promoted after their first year of service. Your Vorish social circle will think it's all nepotism anyway."

"I know," said Miles bleakly. But he opened his collar and began switching tabs on the spot.

Illyan softened slightly. "Your father will know better, though. And Gregor. And, er . . . myself."

Miles looked up, to catch his eye directly for almost the first time this interview. "Thank you."

"You earned it. You won't get anything from me you don't earn. That includes the dressing-downs."

"I'll look forward to them, sir."

The Warriors Apprentice
was my second novel. I began it in the fall of 1983, just six or so weeks after sending the manuscript of my first novel, eventually named
Shards of Honor,
off to a New York publisher, in blind hope and without a literary agent, in what is called, variously for unpublished writers, "on spec(ulation)," "over the transom" or "into the slushpile." The character of Miles Naismith Vorkosigan was a gleam in my eye when I began the story of his parents in that first book; by the time I had finished it, he'd already begun to take more substantial form. In the beginning I knew only three things about Miles: he was born crippled in a militaristic society, he was very bright, and he was extremely energetic. Since one of my own chronic complaints is that I never have enough energy, this last aspect of his character can legitimately be classified as author's wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Miles's first name was stolen from the character of Miles Hendron, in Mark Twain's
The Prince and the Pauper. I
was at the time innocent of the fact that "miles" means "soldier" in Latin, but I'll bet Twain wasn't. Miles's vaguely posited physical handicaps acquired a real-life template from a certain hospital pharmacist I used to work with; the height, the hunch, the head, the chin-tic and the leg braces were all lifted from this brilliant man. I took at least one of Miles's subtler psychological qualities from T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence had to a marked degree what one of his more prominent biographers, John Mack, described as a power of "enablement"; somehow, people around him in many different contexts found themselves doing more and better for the strength of his example and encouragement than they might have on their own. On a still deeper level of characterization, Miles's "great man's son syndrome," the fountain of so much of his drive and therefore my plots, owes much to my relationship with my own father. It is a curious comment on our culture that this particular psychological profile, which to my observation appears in both genders, is never called a "great man's daughter's syndrome." I wish that were only an artifact of the power of alliteration.

By the time I'd finished
Shards
I'd also developed the much more unexpected character of Konstantine Bothari. Bothari and Miles were a magnetic pairing. The very first image I had for the book that eventually became
The Warrior's Apprentice
was the death of Bothari, initially visualized defending Miles from some yet-to-be-conceived enemy on a shuttleport tarmac, far from home. The subsequent challenge to Miles, to survive without Bothari's quasi-parental support, was inherent in that initial vision. So while the book was written, largely, from beginning to end (a method I'd learned to prefer while writing
Shards),
it was generated from the inside out. I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak of inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better—when you can get it.

I began
Warrior's
exactly where it starts now; I made very few revisions to that first scene later. In the very first draft, however, Miles had a younger sister. Elena Bothari was originally named Nile, after the character of Nile Etland in a couple of James H. Schmitz stories I'd read back in
Analog
magazine in the '60s. The sister was deleted before I got to Chapter 3, as I realized she and Elena/Nile occupied the same ecological niche. Test readers eventually convinced me that the name Nile for my heroine and Miles for my hero would be a copy-editor's nightmare later, if I ever achieved publication, so I regretfully gave up the name. Elena was never quite the same after the change, though. I'm still saving the name Nile.

Over the years I've found my book titles sometimes appear simultaneously with their book ideas, sometimes partway through, and sometimes, worst of all, never—books arrive at publication still sporting some dippy working title which then must be hastily changed. I've had two or three different books with the working title of
Miles to Go
over the years.
The Warrior's Apprentice,
happily, is one of the first and best category. It is, of course, a pun on the old folk tale "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," so title, plot, and theme were all there from the first.

So I had set myself a comic plot structure with a tragedy at the heart of its maze. How many screwball comedies have the sequence of the little white lie that grows and grows out of hand? It was also, I discovered shortly, a theological romance, since sequence by sequence Miles was challenged by his then-three besetting sins: pride, imprudence, and despair. With these maps and compasses to guide me through the foggy valleys, I began writing my way to the shifting center.

Writing
Warrior's
also taught me some important lessons about how to both use and ignore critique. I have some strong ideas about the importance of the reader in the story process. I've always used test-readers; I write to communicate a vision, and I always like to check and try to see if the message-received sufficiently resembles the message-sent. I twice earnestly re-wrote my way down wrong turns, when two trusted professional-level critiquers made suggestions which, in both cases, would have been fatal to the book and the series that eventually followed it. One, under the impression that I was writing standard commercial space opera, suggested I get rid of the entire opening sequence, including Miles's grandfather, and "start with the action" of the Beta Colony encounters; another had for personal reasons a view of the character of Bothari that was utterly hostile, and wanted a different version of his death. Trying to be a good little reviser, I finished these, sat back, and twitched for days. Then tore them both out and put back my first visions.