The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [10]
Memory was pretty much a direct result of Mirror Dance. I didn't think a person should undergo so profound an experience as death and a return to life with no consequences or without learning anything, although I downplayed these at the end of the prior book so as not to alarm my publisher.
In Mirror Dance, Miles gets killed—and cryonically frozen, and eventually revived and repaired. But the cryo-freeze does him subtler damage than brittle bones, resulting in an idiosyncratic (i.e., literarily convenient) form of epilepsy. The reward for a job well done is another job. After watching Miles overcome every physical setback in his passionate pursuit of his military career, in Memory I set him a problem that really would throw him out of the military, one inside his own brain, one he couldn't get around—and then sat back to see what would happen. What happened was that he grew up, in some extremely interesting ways. The epilepsy is surely a metaphor for something, in Miles's life; that his handicap has mutated from something external to something internal as he matures surely has significance, and if I ever figure out what it is, I'll let you know.
I had my eye on the reintegration aspect of Memory, in its essences if not in its accidents, since at least Brothers in Arms; in fact, it was inherent from the moment Miles popped out his desperate creation of Admiral Naismith back in Chapter Seven of The Warrior's Apprentice. I knew that Miles's eventual destiny was to reassemble himself whole, sometime before age forty. How this was to come about was much less apparent.
Somewhere I have a penciled outline of about seven chapters of a book involving Miles dealing with Simon Illyan's memory chip going glitchy. It was the oblique result of encounters with my sister-in-law's aging mother, who was undergoing a protracted Alzheimer's-like debilitation. While visiting, I stayed with her one afternoon while my brother and his wife ran errands. I found it was possible to carry on an oddly satisfactory conversation with her, if I didn't care where the conversation went. She still had interesting things to say, in a fragmentary sort of way; they just weren't in any order, and I had to take them as they came up, and maybe string them together later.
To me, whose identity is so bound up with intellectual achievement and value, Trudie Senior's situation seemed boundlessly horrific, and Trudie Junior's unfailing day-by-day care of her rather more heroic than anything I'd ever put one of my fictional characters through. And so the idea came to me in techno-metaphor of Simon Illyan's eidetic memory chip failing, and Miles somehow coming to his rescue. One of the deep appeals of fiction is the ability, as my friend Lillian here once put it, "To heal with the stroke of a pen."
I had a choice between starting that book, or doing the one where Miles reencountered his clone-brother Mark. Patricia Wrede, after listening perhaps once too often to my set speech about prequel determinism versus sequel free will, talked me into doing the Mark book first, rather than writing it as a prequel later, even though I was rather excited about the memory-chip idea. I am exceedingly grateful to Pat for that. Because the book that resulted changed Miles and his world.
It had been plain to me, if not to my chief protagonist, that for a long time Miles had been getting along by living a lie, and at some point in his life, this ought to turn around and bite him. Miles was living his adolescent dream, which once had given him vital growth, but now was proving increasingly sterile; it was time for him to grow up and move into a more fully adult, fully rounded life. But he was also getting an enormous amount of validation out of his Naismith persona; it was equally clear that he would not willingly give that up, even if another part of him was, almost literally, dying to move on.
Mirror Dance supplied the missing pieces for both plot and theme in