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Every biography of my gran'da has the same holo on the cover, even the awful ones that call him a deviant or a coward or a traitor. He was none of those things, though I will give you devious in trade for deviant. Everyone knows the holo – it passed ubiquitous a long time ago and went straight on to iconic. Fewer people know that my grandfather Emperor Gregor took it himself. He was just beginning to develop his talent as a holographer. It started as a casual hobby, but over the years he amassed thousands of stills. He was really very good, in my inexpert opinion. There's a series of graduated shots of Barrayar, taken through an observation bubble as his flagship pulled out of orbit. The planet is huge and rust-brown, fingerpainted in blots of green terraforming. It shrinks throughout the series until you can see it hanging unsupported against the stars, one moon trailing and a twinkling belt of orbital traffic lighting up the night. He'd studied a fair amount by then; he knew about lighting and framing and composition and all that.
Still, it's the holo of gran'da Miles, taken back when he was just starting to dabble, that everyone remembers. Gran'da is forty four in the picture. He's going gray at the temples, you can see. It's been said that the backdrop is the border of the small orchard in the Imperial Residence gardens, but that isn't true. In reality, the tree behind Gran'da still stands in the graveyard at his old family estate at Vorkosigan Surleau. And it's a wall he's standing on, not a stone bench. I don't know what he's talking about, why he's smiling in that grim sort of way that's also truly amused. He's wearing what was, before him, the Empress's seal, which I'm told was transformed before their wedding from a delicate feminine ornament to something that looks more like a rank insignia worn on a heavy chain. I'll leave the real historians to comment on the symbolism. It's puzzling why he'd be wearing it on vacation, and I don't know the answer to that, either. I wasn't there, of course, and my mother, who was six at the time, doesn't remember. I do know that Grandfather Gregor caught him perfectly, chin ticked up, hands out, like he's asking for something enormous, or maybe trying to give it to you. That's him in the popular consciousness, to supporters and critics both, and I think he couldn't have chosen better if it had actually been up to him.
He might not have chosen it, though. One reason I like that holo so much is that it's a full-body shot, taken nearly straight on, and the perspective and the scaling make his disability obvious. There are surprisingly few holos like it; in all the formal ones he's on horseback or sitting behind a desk. Even in candids he has a tricky talent for standing on the steps behind grandfather, or leaning only his head and shoulders into the frame. I don't think he was doing it on purpose, posing for the camera. That doesn't preclude the possibility that he was posing for everyone, including himself.
This book discusses his disability with more complexity and candor than any biography has before. It neither indulges in platitudes nor becomes unknowingly complicit in the conspiracy of silence that Gran'da and his advisors and handlers allowed. I would like to mention one passage quoted later here, in a brief note Gran'da gave his personal assistant, apparently carrying on a conversation begun in person. He said, "I don't know if I'd say there's no good answer. You're right it's a nasty spot to be in, though. If I wear lifts in my shoes and never let myself be videoed standing next to Gregor, I bend to shame. But if I let Gregor give me a boost in full view of everyone so I can see over the parapet wall at Vorhartung, it can't just be a boost. At worst it's a sign of weakness, at best a subtle political act. Either can scour you to raw nerves, over time. I would give anything for complete unself-consciousness most days. Give me that, over a whole undamaged body."
I think it's pure psychological crystal gazing to try to reconstruct now exactly when Gran'da's elaborate revelation-concealment dance with his disability was political and when it was personal. He minimized it, to spare Grandfather reflected prejudice, but waved it like a flag on a few occasions, in service to better veterans treatment or another cause. And crossed with those necessities, on the personal dimension, was a man rightfully confident in his abilities and entitlements who nonetheless carried the marks of unknown childhood torments. We can only guess, because he never said. He engineered that aspect of his life with the same ruthlessness to himself that he did most things, though I think the holos at least show us that he didn't always know it.
By the time I knew him, he limped painfully and used a cane. My memories of him are scattered but vivid. He was one of those adults who could be a genuine friend and confidante to a young child. There was rarely that feeling that you were playing on opposite teams, even though he lived and breathed that mysterious grown up thing called politics. At least that was my experience. I think my oldest uncle would disagree, perhaps explosively. But by the time he got to his first granddaughter, I guess he'd had plenty of practice at it.
My clearest memories are the long afternoons he took me with him to sit in the gallery and watch the Council of Ministers. It should have been boring, but we'd sit close, our heads together, and he'd whisper explanations of what was happening below, adapted to a child's metaphors. He took me to the Council of Counts once – it met then almost as rarely as it does now – but he was quieter that day, no explaining the economy as a balloon expanding and contracting with the hot air blown by the Minister of Trade. In retrospect it would be easy for me to conclude he was brooding over the Vorkosigan District desk, empty again with Lord Aral off-planet. Gran'da himself couldn't go down, of course – informally renouncing that honor was one of the things he sacrificed in service to his marriage. It's clear that never stopped bothering him, but I don't think it was on his mind that day. He would be dead within a year. I didn't know that, of course – none of us did. Except I wonder, because he leaned over to me while they were conducting a voice vote and said, "my God, girl, but I envy you. The things you'll see in ten years, or in fifty." I was young and confused, but he just put his arm around me and petted my hair. "Never mind me," he said. "Only, I've spent all my momentum. It's going to be up to you to go forward with it."
This isn't a tell-all book. That would be an awful lot of all to tell, you know. There are secrets revealed to the public eye for the first time here, certainly. The unprecedented access allowed to parts of the archived imperial papers ensured that. I learned things about him that I never would have guessed, reading the first draft of this book. You think you know your intensely intellectual, worldly gran'da, only to discover he was a mercenary fleet admiral in his youth. I think I was the last to know on that one, though.
Given its subject, this is by necessity a book of controversies: the Vadran Shipping scandal; Gran'da's friendship with Roz Bouvin and her dissident contemporaries, as well as the rumors of his infidelity with her; the Barrayaran Constitution he dashed off as a joke one night that later made its way to the press. For what it's worth, I think this book handles them with clear eyes and even hands. Also for what it's worth, the shipping scandal was three-quarters malice, and there was no affair with Roz Bouvin. And, when it comes right down to it, half the problem with the Constitution was that it was actually a pretty good one, as these things go.
The greatest scandal of them all, of course, was his marriage. According to some, the wellspring from which all and many outrages flowed. Being one of those outrages myself, I have to admit I see it rather differently. I'm told there are still people who maintain it was a marriage of convenience. There's an old interview where someone actually said that to Grandfather Gregor's face, and he just cracked up laughing right there on camera for probably the first and only time, and when he could breathe again he said that Gran'da was the single most inconvenient person he'd ever known. It's harder to deny that theirs was a political marriage. Of course it was – that's who they were. At their best, they were a monolithic power that rolled Barrayar on before them into a better future.
But beneath that, there was a passionate romance, all the more startling to us now for being so taboo and daring then. They loved each other. It wasn't an untroubled relationship, of course – the volumes of their correspondence not lost or still sealed reveal disagreements on everything from intergalactic trade policy to my mother's name. They managed near-perfect serenity for the public eye, but in a handwritten note Gran'da once thanked his own father for saving his marriage. The incomplete set of what the authors of this book have called the Komarr Letters are a hint at that crisis, what Gran'da called "our cataclysm." Anyone who might have known what happened between them is either long dead or keeping respectfully silent. I will do the same, except to note that even in the Komarr Letters, with every intimacy questioned, the place they began from to come back to each other was the depth of their feeling.
Gran'da was called many things, in his time, most of which I won't repeat here. I do admit a certain guilty fondness for the political cartoon that popularized one of his least favorite nicknames. It's reproduced here, on page 405. I spent a handful of afternoons in my Grandfather's office when I was young enough to curl up on the sofa and be overlooked, and the way the cartoonist has Gran'da perched on Grandfather's desk to conduct some meeting or other is eerily accurate. Still, woe betide the man who actually called him 'the Emperor's paperweight' within either of their hearing.
I never knew him as an adult in my own right. I like to think I know some things about him, though, constructed from my child's perceptions and the memory of him that Grandfather Gregor carried with him for the last fourteen years of his life. And layered over that are the previous biographies I've read, the thinly-veiled holovid fictionalization of him in Admiral Foresmith, the fingerprints he left across the entire empire. He exploded the educational prospects of an entire generation of young Barrayaran women, just because he wanted my mother to grow up with a thousand female entrepreneurs and scholars and doctors to look up to. The doors he opened for them, and the millions he spent on scholarships, changed the face of the world as they knew it. Which was also his goal, I'm sure.
He was like that, living a sort of double life in service to us, his family, and also to the empire. Traditionally, the Emperor's wife was his hostess and the mother of his children, and secondarily his social proxy for ceremonial occasions. Gran'da stepped into that role, and he brought with him his Auditor's chain and political awareness in his own right. He took up the Empress's privilege, twisted it up with his own as a man, and turned them into power. It was such careful work – he had to appear to be nobody, just to protect himself and, by extension, Grandfather. But behind that polite fiction, well. He was Grandfather's host, true enough, in the sense that he gathered around them some of the best and brightest minds of their generation, nurtured them with his patronage. And he raised Grandfather's children, and he presided over more ribbon-cuttings and awarded more medals than anyone should ever have to. He was also Grandfather's envoy on many occasions, and it was his friendship with Betan President Jones that led to the Arcini Accords. And if you read between the lines, it's clear that he took personal command of the Imperial Military on several occasions during the Thirty Days War. He was supposed to be nobody, and in that he could be anything Grandfather needed him to be.
There's a great deal of footage of him. One of my favorite clips is from a talk he gave at the Imperial Military Academy. He took questions at the end, and this adorable gangly kid stood up and asked him who his greatest role model was. And without missing a beat, Gran'da skipped over General Vorkosigan and Admiral Vine and Vorthalia the bloody Bold and said, "my mother." It's hard for us to imagine now what a shocking thing that was for him to say. I have a number of theories about what he meant, but suffice it to say that she is a fascinating figure in her own right. She was a woman displaced into a new life because she fell in love, and she quietly created a place for herself at the heart of Barrayaran politics. Gran'da was quite a bit noisier about it, but the parallels are unmistakable.
I'm neither a politician nor a historian. My training was largely in literature, so I do think I can venture a fair opinion on storytellers. That's what Gran'da was, when it's all said and done. He was shaped by the early alienation that accompanied his physical disabilities. He was driven to grasp his personal narrative and use it for his own ends on the world around him and, sometimes, on himself. He reimagined himself again and again – young Vor lordling, mercenary commander, imperial officer, civilian, consort, father, political lightning rod, galactic diplomat, Gran'da. He was very good at it. And in doing it he gave much of his story over into public keeping, to be appropriated and recycled for drama and transformed to serve any given cause. That story is retold again here, with the added gloss of hindsight. Gran'da's way of imbuing truth into his many successive narratives still works, even in other hands. This story of him is as true as any he ever told of himself.