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It found its place in Betsy's novella collection series in Free Lancers, along with tales by Orson Scott Card and David Drake, which may well have served as the first introduction of this new writer Bujold to some of their readers. After a few months, I was able to return to work on Falling Free and, my confidence boosted, send it to contract.

I then turned for technical research answers to my brother, and through him, to an engineer friend of his named Wally Voreck, who sent me the fascinating material on ice die formation, which is a real industrial process. With such a cool (literally) gimmick, I reasoned my way backward to a plot development that would use it as a solution. (Writers cheat with time, you know. We can run it both ways.)

But I did manage to sell the novel to Analog magazine as a four-part serial, which ran from December 1987 through February 1988. This brought my work to the attention of a whole pool of new readers who might not necessarily have picked the paperback (which came out in April of 1988) off the bookstore shelves. This was the first of several happy sales to Analog, one of my dad's favorites back in the Fifties and Sixties, and one of the first SF magazines I'd read when I was discovering the genre in my early teens. Since Falling Free was very much a tribute (if slyly updated) to the science fiction of that era, it felt much like coming full circle. The serial also was splendidly illustrated by Vincent di Fate; I still have five of the scratchboard originals, my first real art purchase. (He kindly adjusted his rates to my budget.)

Back in The Warrior's Apprentice, Miles was forced to split himself into two personas, the constrained Lord Vorkosigan and the active Admiral Naismith. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how this relates to Mrs. Lois Bujold, housewife, and Lois McMaster Bujold, successful science fiction writer.) When in Brothers in Arms it became apparent to outsiders that there was going to be more than one of these books, I had a conversation with Jim Baen over what to dub the series in the little red banner on the front cover. He was voting for "A Miles Naismith Adventure," correctly identifying the admiral as by far the more charismatic of the pair. I held out for "A Miles Vorkosigan Adventure," and then wrote the novella "The Mountains of Mourning" to demonstrate to him why. I heard no complaints about the choice thereafter.

That novella was also a chance to explore mystery elements with an SF setting, in which Miles, a new-minted ensign, is sent up to his own District's backcountry to investigate a case of infanticide for mutation. This brings him face-to-face with those uglier aspects of Barrayar that he would most like to avoid, and foreshadows his future need to reintegrate himself, and, through himself, Barrayar's past and future.

Inherent in Miles's split into his two sub-personas—something that was vital for his growth at the time (and most useful for my adventure series)—was the necessity for his ultimate reunion into an integrated maturity. In Brothers in Arms, which may otherwise appear a mere adventure series sequel, I began my first halting exploration of these ideas, where Miles, trapped on Earth, meets the clone who was made to replace him in a political plot aimed against his father. Miles's clone-brother Mark represented yet another mirror-split, of the dark and light aspects of a fully rounded person, as is traditional for doppelgänger suspense tales, but those were precisely the traditions I wanted to explode. In one of the many triumphs of the personal over the political in my books, Miles instead frees him.

"Labyrinth" was the last-written of the Miles-adventure novellas collected in Borders of Infinity. With two rather dark tales already in the bag, I decided to make this one something of a comedy, for balance.

The novella allowed me to ring changes through still another social milieu: in this case, Jackson's Whole, and what it might do with the new