Yeah, if nothing else, it was completely clear when Thorne was briefing “Naismith” on how to use the command helmet.
But my initial surmise was based on, first, Thorne knows Naismith very well, and would be difficult to actually fool (especially now that it knows of the existence of the clone), and second, It’s already been established that it really doesn’t like any of the many forms of Jacksonian slavery, and would really like an excuse to burn down the whole lot of them.
(and I’m using “it” for Thorne, even though standard 21st-century usage would be “they”, because that’s Thorne’s expressed preference)
It also occurred to me that the Dendarii (well, mostly Thorne, but Naismith considered it valid) have already established their standard price for smuggling slaves off of Jackson’s Whole, and so, if Mark could accept not being the Big Damn Hero, he could have just hired them to do the job for him for 50 bucks.
Except we’re not dealing with any “Galactic Standard” laws about inheritance, we’re dealing with Jackson’s’ Whole. These kids wouldn’t be in a position to inherit anything, unless they were already on the scene, with a sufficiently powerful force to prevent any other interested parties from dividing up the assets of the dead person as they see fit.
As it stands, as soon as one of them dies, either someone just below them in the organization takes over, or the organization collapses, and the various bits of it end up owned by whoever was on the ball enough to grab them.
It was a very interesting prediction, and at the awkward point of how well do I remember the details as much as not wanting to give you any hint of spoiling whether you were right or not.
Does it actually state that anywhere? The only clones mentioned are all of Jacksonians, I think.
I would assume that a ban on clone-brain transplants would include some kind of ban on getting one done while elsewhere, in any half-decent planetary legal system. It’s not as though you can hide it or pretend it was an accident, so it would be easy enough to enforce a crime of Coming Back From A Trip From Jackson’s Whole With A Body 50 Years Younger Than The One On Your ID.
I think that, most likely, it’s an open secret just how the “experimental Jacksonian rejuvenation treatment” works, and that most governments just pretend that they don’t know. But a gazillionare who comes from a planet with a sensible government would probably just avail themself of Jackson’s Whole’s identity laundering services, as well.
Even if they are all Jacksonians, though, it’s simply not possible to be a gazillionaire in any society without having serious holdings in multiple nations. If the “civilized” worlds really wanted to crack down on the clone-killing business, there’s bound to be plenty of assets of those gazillionares that are within their reach to seize.
I also noticed what seems to be an inconsistency in the worldbuilding… When Mark is doing his whole woe-is-me-I’m-not-a-real-person spiel for Cordelia, one thing he says is that he doesn’t even have a birthday, and asks what you call it when you take someone out of a uterine replicator, to which Cordelia of course replies that you call it a birthday. But when Kareen asks him her husband-material-filter question of whether he would want his hypothetical wife to be able to use a uterine replicator, he says “of course, why would anyone not want that?”. The former seems to imply that (outside of Beta Colony), use of uterine replicators is still something exotic and unusual, but the latter seems to imply that they’re mainstream and taken for granted.
Mark is feeling very sorry for himself, so he’s piling on everything he can think of that makes him feel pathetic and less-than-human, even if it doesn’t make much sense - and/or - on Jackson’s Whole, Mark was indoctrinated with Old-style Vor prejudices as imagined by an old Komarran terrorist, including one against uterine replicators.
It’s not portrayed as a secret at all though, it’s just described as illegal- everywhere except Jackson’s Whole, who don’t care who knows they do it.
Even there it sounds like a very specialist thing, there’s no other facilities doing the same thing mentioned, and they only do about one transplant a week. That sounds a reasonable number for Jackson’s Whole, which does not have a short supply of rich bastards.
I seem to recall they mention that, even on Jackson’s Whole, it is a pretty risky time for the rich bastards, as, by necessity, it is when they are most vulnerable to assassination plots or a coup by an ambitious underling. Even with bodyguards around, it would be pretty hard to protect someone who is spending at least some amount of time as a disembodied brain being passed around a surgical suite. One wrong (or right?) move by even one person on that team, and the brain is finished.
They’re sufficiently established on Beta Colony to the extent that not only was Cordelia herself gestated in one, but she finds the idea of not using a replicator for her first kid to be exotic and kind of romantic. I don’t know if it’s been established where they were invented, but Beta Colony’s economy is based around selling/leasing new tech they’ve developed, so if it was invented there, they’d be selling them as far and wide as possible.
When the Betans drop off the Barrayaran “orphans” after the war, they just wheel in a bunch of uterine replicators and leave them there, forcing the Barrayarans to scramble to figure out how they even work. There’s no talk of payment for the replicators, or any awareness that the Barrayarans wouldn’t be familiar with the tech, which suggests its pretty common on the galactic stage.
Mark’s incredibly abusive childhood would have left him with a weird hodgepodge of social knowledge and biases. Assuming URs are common on Komar, he’d probably have picked up from Ser Galen the idea that they’re a good thing to use, but his conditioning would be all about how a Barrayaran customs around them, not Komarran or wider galactic customs. And Mark’s own birthday is almost certainly not known to him at the point he’s having that conversation - the only birthday he’d ever have been allowed to observe in any way would have been Miles’ birthday, and it probably wasn’t a pleasant occasion for him.
Yup, it is stated that they were invented on Beta, and also stated that Mark didn’t know his own birthday until Cordelia told him (because of course she’d read over his medical records, and of course, having learned his birthday, she made a point to remember it).
I imagine that the ones the Betans left after the war came with an instruction manual. But they seem to have been the first uterine replicators on Barrayar, even though it was plenty long enough after the Time of Isolation for them to have imported other galactic technologies. Presumably they just didn’t consider them a priority, until Cordelia gave them a kick in the pants.
At one point she says there was a fad on Beta among some women to do gestation/birth the old-fashioned way. Probably only a very small minority of women choose to follow this fad and some likely bail on it part way through.
Yeah, invented on Beta, but they were ‘new tech’ 200 years ago, so presumably pretty established everywhere bar Barrayar and maybe a few other weird or isolated places not mentioned.
It’s not even exotic for Barrayar in the modern era. During the novel Komarr (using vague language to avoid possible spoilers) a Vor woman of not particularly high rank or wealth describes having a child via body birth as a slightly strange/old-fashioned/possibly cheap choice. This would be referring to a birth when Miles would have been very roughly 20-30.
If I have time (ha) I’ll go snag my copy off the shelf and search for the exact language in the text.
Yeah, the instruction manual was explicitly called out when the Barrayaran scientists were trying to figure them out, IIRC.
Barrayaran misogyny is certainly a huge part of if - what is the ruling elite of Barrayar more like to invest in? Technology that makes life easier specifically for women, or a fancy new type of gun? But the combination of Barrayar’s fear of genetic mutation with being occupied by an empire that’s actively trying to become post-human probably put a lot of suspicion on any off-world tech related to pregnancy and child-bearing.
Yeah, there’s mention of the younger two Koudelka girls being paraded round as evidence of how successful it was, as they were one of the first ‘normal’ families to use one. They’re what, late teens, early 20s at the point Mark said that? If they remember being unusual, then it’s only been about 15 years or so since it really was exotic.
There’s probably no family that’s had 2 generations gestated in one at that point, lots of older folks object to them. And no-one in Silvy Vale is gonna be using one…
So when Aral met Cordelia, uterine replicators were something that Aral didn’t recognize at all (though he apparently recognized or understood the term).
And a few minutes later (in the book), Aral orders a military doctor to take charge of the replicators - which the doctor isn’t sure he’ll be able to do, and which apparently required the resources of the top doctors on the planet to handle (at the top military hospital) (Aral was very convincing!). So just before Miles’ conception, that tech was completely new to Barrayar, and Ser Galen might not be completely up to date a few years later about how fast the tech has been adopted there.