The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [60]
"Winterfair Gifts," the wedding story of Miles and Ekaterin, manages to stay firmly within the normal home environment of Vorkosigan House and Vorbarr Sultana. The Jacksonian neurotoxin and ImpSec's forensics lab are the only exotic technologies used—along with Sergeant Taura's bioengineered, enhanced vision, which saves the day.
Listed last though it takes place two hundred years before Shards of Honor, Falling Free has no Vorkosigans—it's about the origin of the quaddies.
Before the development of artificial gravity, space workers may only spend limited time in zero-gee. Their bones weaken and their bodies degrade. To eliminate this extra expense, GalacTech has bioengineered a stable race of four-armed humans who are biologically adapted to free fall.
Just as the oldest group is ready for their first job, artificial gravity technology is announced. GalacTech wants to cut their losses by stranding the zero-gee adapted race on the planetary surface, but the quaddies decide to flee.
The habitat is modular and the quaddies disassemble it even though it takes tiny explosives to break the decades-long vacuum welding of the clamps holding it in the old configuration.
The solar panels are folded and the modules are reconfigured to fit the tubular volume that will fit inside a "super-jumper." The super-jumper is a ship capable of traveling through the wormholes between stars. It has four arms arching back along the cargo. Two are for normal space engines. The other two house the Necklin rods to generate the fields allowing the ship to drop out of normal space into the wormhole.
Laser soldering guns have the safeties removed to make real guns for the hijacking of the super-jumper.
An accident damages a vortex mirror which reflects the field at the end of the Necklin rod, ruining the entire ship. The titanium vortex mirror is made in a complex shape to angstrom tolerances.
Leo Graff, the engineering instructor, has read about the crude method used to make trial units—explosive forming. All of the habitat's titanium is melted using laser units and then zero-gee splat-cooled into almost the right shape to make the metal blank for the final forming. Using the identical mirror from the other Necklin rod arm, they make a meters-thick mold out of ice. The large titanium blank is explosively molded to it using a common chemical mixed with gasoline. The resultant shaped blank is made angstrom-perfect with a final laser polish.
Lois writes stories about people, their interactions, their problems, and their heart-tearing striving to overcome their faults. Her Vorkosigan stories are the best of science fiction, as she uses science and technology as the environment and often the cause or solution to the truly human problems of her characters. And besides, she likes to torment the living daylights out of her victims.
APPRECIATIONS
Through Darkest Adolescence with Lois McMaster Bujold, or Thank You, but I Already Have a Life
Lillian Stewart Carl
It was simple clerical chance that assigned Lois and me to Section 7-2 at Hastings Junior High School in Upper Arlington, Ohio—a suburb of Columbus.
Perhaps we were attracted to each other because we had both already achieved our adult heights—the breathtaking altitudes of 5'5" and 5'7" respectively—and compared to the other seventh graders felt as though we were dragging our knuckles on the linoleum floors.
At first I was in awe of Lois. She had attained little-girl apotheosis: she owned a pony, alas soon to be outgrown. At the riding school just down the road from her home she acquired the equine knowledge that would lead in time to Fat Ninny and the other trusty steeds of Vorkosigan Surleau. The first award I saw Lois win was a blue ribbon and silver bowl in a riding competition. When the judge called her number, she sat disbelieving for a long moment, then reached around to pull the number off the back of her shirt and make sure it was really hers.
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