The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [8]
In every society, no matter its response to technology, the test of humanity comes out the same, and it has nothing to do with genetics. No one can be guilty of their own birth, no matter what form it takes. We need not fear our technology if we do not mistake the real springs of our humanity. It's not how we get here that counts; it's what we do after we arrive.
The character of the quaddie Nicol in "Labyrinth," though a rather minor player, got me thinking again about the quaddies and my lost promise to complete their saga, and how their exodus might have come out. But other stories were crowding for my attention, and the impulse slipped away yet again.
Usually, I can't reliably trace where my story ideas arise from, but in one case I can. The first element to trigger the "Weatherman" sequence that opened The Vor Game was a memoir. T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), after his WWI adventures left him with what we would nowadays call a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder, attempted to change his identity and life by enlisting in the British air corps as a grunt under a pseudonym ("Aircraftman Shaw"). He wrote a memoir about going through enlisted basic training, titled The Mint, which pretty much summed up the dismal horrors of army basic upon a nervy, intelligent man. I read this, heavens, sometime back in the early Seventies; it went into the bag of authorial data and lay there pretty much dormant.
The second element was a story from Roman times. A Roman legion was deployed in, I believe, Dacia, somewhere off the Black Sea that had horrible cold winters. The high command was going through flip-flops over whether Christianity was to be an allowed religion among the troops. They decided it wasn't, and the order came down that everyone who had become Christian must recant. Forty men refused. To punish them, they were sent to go stand on the ice of a frozen lake naked until they changed their minds. One man broke, and decided to come back in. The other thirty-nine stood out on the ice, and one of the watching Roman officers was so impressed with their fortitude that he went out to join them, to make up their numbers. They all died together, and so became the early Christian martyr story known as "The Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani."
The third element goes back, again, to my father. He had a moonlighting job as a television weatherman in Columbus, Ohio, when I was growing up. And he was very good at this. His weather reports—analyses and predictions—were better than the military weather reports that the Strategic Air Command pilots at the local Air Force base were getting, as he discovered when they began to call him for forecasts. In addition, one of the things I had from my father was a picture, which hung on his home office wall for years, of an arctic weather station. It was a stylized watercolor print of a man in a parka who has come out into the snow and is checking his instruments. (I still have this.)
I was doing the dishes and listening to music, a tape by the Irish singer Enya, and on the tape was a song she sang in Latin. Now, I don't understand Latin, and I really have no idea what the song is really about, but somehow the sort of military- ecclesiastical rhythms made all the ideas cross-connect in my mind for the first time. And so I thought, "Ah, I know! I will send Miles to a miserable arctic army base as his first assignment, where he'll be assigned to be a weatherman and get in all kinds of trouble and replay 'The Forty Martyrs of Sebastiani' and he'll be the fortieth man." That would