The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [94]
Yenaro—yeh-NAH-roh—Cetegandan grandson of ghem-General Yenaro, the last of five leaders of the Barrayar invasion, wishes to be an imperial perfumer. (C)
Yuell—YOO-ehl—Doctor, math professor, colleague of Doctor Riva. (K)
Zamori—zaa-MOH-ree—A major working in the Imperial Military, found excuses to call on the Vorthys residence to see Ekaterin. (CC)
Zara—ZAA-rah—Quaddie pusher pilot, her skill got the strike team docked with the D-620 superjumper. (F)
An Old Earther's Guide to the Vorkosigan Universe
Denise Little
Worlds of the Imperium
The Barrayaran Imperium consists of three planets, a number of space installations, and roughly fifty million people scattered across its various components.
Barrayar
Barrayar is the homeworld of the three-planet Barrayaran Imperium. Barrayar was originally founded as an Earth Colony long ago, by what are known in Barrayaran history books as the Fifty Thousand Firsters. These settlers descended from several Earth cultures, with the result that Barrayar's official languages today are various dialects of English, French, Russian, and Greek.
But what should have been an orderly colonization and terraforming job for these settlers soon turned into a voyage back into the Dark Ages. The interstellar wormhole through which they had transited from Earth vanished just as mysteriously as it had appeared. The colony cascaded back into a near-Stone Age without the aid of support ships from their home planet. Most of the technology of advanced civilization vanished on Barrayar.
And so the colony was lost to galactic civilization for several hundred years, a period known as the Time of Isolation. The colonization of Barrayar—unlike those of Beta Colony or Escobar—degraded into a ragged fight for survival, as the world descended into chaos.
But humans are stubborn, and the settlers managed to hang on and multiply despite hostile native flora and the constant threat of mutations cropping up among the descendants of the original settlers. A new civilization was born. A feudal aristocracy developed among the contentious settlers as factions among them fought for power over their world. The warring elite were eventually united and merged into a real unitary government by Dorca Vorbarra. His central government restored a rough and ready order planet-wide, though one that strongly favored its elites.
Ruthless customs, including infanticide, sprang up among the population to keep human mutations at bay and the colony healthy and growing. As the population grew, the canny use of all the planet's resources—native and Earth-derived—helped the colony thrive, though hardly in the ways foreseen by the initial settlement plans. Among the many problems tackled by the early colonists was how to aggressively make Barrayar hospitable to Earth-descended agriculture and animal husbandry before they all starved to death. They succeeded, but much of the original planetary ecology was irrevocably lost in the areas so cultivated.
During this Time of Isolation from galactic civilization, the basic political structure on Barrayar settled down into a single government headed by a hereditary Emperor, supported by an equally hereditary aristocracy known as the Vor. The word Vor implies an obligation of duty and service to the Emperor. The Vor were originally the planet's warrior caste.
More than a hundred years prior to the present galactic civilization, Barrayar was once again rediscovered by the larger human community. The planet rapidly absorbed newly available galactic technology, but the habits acquired during the Time of Isolation died hard. To this day, the planet remains an archaic society in the eyes of galactics, who view it as both fascinating and primitive. But its unique issues also give rise to unique virtues.
The opening of the planet to the galaxy had consequences far beyond the importation of lightflyers and computers and the