Probably the same women who, in our age, favor childbirth without any anaesthesia.
Y’know, that’s probably fair.
OK, I can buy that… Mark originally thought that it was some exotic mad-science thing, but Cordelia assigned him some homework on them off-screen, and by the time of the dance, he’d realized just how much sense they made.
Another thing I’m wondering about… Is the clone-transplant thing even needed? It’s established that they can custom-grow individual organs, presumably matching their recipients, and they can even completely rebuild an entire torso, including (at least) a new heart, lungs, and stomach all at once. And they can also do complete bone transplants. Why does anyone need a complete new body, when they can ship-of-Theseus the old one?
Huh, I never thought about that … although the opposite problem had occurred to me, namely, that the procedure involves transplanting your old brain into a new body, but brain degeneration is the really scary part of aging, and this wouldn’t seem to do anything about that.
Given it’s Jackson’s Hole the cruelty and power-play may well be part of the point. And I suspect (no information in universe AFAIK) that many, many operations to regrow and rebuild systems on a piecemeal basis takes longer and puts you at more risk (multiple opportunities to be usurped) than the one-and-done swap.
And more pain. Certainly young Miles experienced a lot of pain when they replaced his bones.
Although… I wonder if you couldn’t just inject the right stem cells into the blood and let them find bits to repair on their own. That doesn’t work for the brain, or parts of the eye, but i suspect it would work for most issues with most body parts.
That’s at least somewhat addressed in a later book in a throwaway line, so answering is arguably minor spoilers.
Mark mentions his intent to fund the Duronas’ research into life extension methods that would be “safer, nearly as effective, and cheaper”.
I suspect that the clone technique is simply a quick-and-dirty method that Jackson’s Hole monopolized because they are who they are. And that it actually slowed down life extension research in general by association.
That’s actually in this one, too: He takes the seed money he got from his deal with Baron Fell, and invested it 2/3 local, 1/3 galactic, and the 1/3 galactic was with the Duronas for life extension research.
You have to wonder what the Cetagandans could have done, if they’d gotten their hands on Miles at a young age.
It’s discussed in Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance.
His grandmother was a princess so his grandfather was named Lord Vorpatril. Hereditary, but not at the level of a Count.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the only such situation in the books - Lord VorWhatsit is always the son of Count VorWhatsit. Doesn’t mean there aren’t others, just none of them appear in the books.
Presumably Simon Illyan could have been ennobled - Lord VorIllyan, I guess, but we get the impression he’d not have wanted that.
The one I was most recently reading, Mirror Dance.
And from what I understood, it’d been centuries since anyone had officially been made a new Vor, and that nowadays, respected veterans were regarded as having nearly the same status, so the official Vor-dom was mostly irrelevant.
A point made in one of the first books, when Miles is trying to be accepted into the academy. The drill instructors dropped the “vor” from their names to encourage equality. Miles takes a second to realize they meant him when they called out “Kosigan!”
Not so much irrelevant as unattainable, which in some ways made it less relevant.
You could be of great service to the Imperium and still not get a Vor prefix, but at the same time the fact that someone who could give that service was not a Vor made the prefix less relevant.
It’s never quite clear whether all Vor names have a corresponding District, or not - Lois names 50-some Vor families, and there are known to be 60 districts, so either possibility is open. With the colonization of Sergyar, it would be possible to create new districts (as I think was done with the Southern continent), but Aral Cordelia wouldn’t like that.
I think it’s at least strongly implied that there are thousands of Vor and only 60 districts, now they may all share only 60 surnames but that’s also not established in the books.
Miles says, several times, that the Vor are a warrior caste like the samurai, not feudal nobility.
That certainly could be - there are certainly (tens of) thousands of people in Vor families, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are thousands or even hundreds of Vor-names. Like I said, I’m open to either interpretation. We’ve never heard of a Count Vorsoisson, so maybe there isn’t one.
As a side note: Lois made a continuity goof. In A Civil Campaign, she mentions Count Vorvolynkin. In Cryoburn, Vorlynkin is a main character. The latter seems more reasonable.
