Thinking the same
And, finished. I was wondering how long it would take Miles to finish unraveling the plan, and it turns out, the answer is “never”. He never realized that there were some aspects of the treason plot that could only have been carried out by Haut Rian herself.
And she “quotes” him at one point, with one of the greatest lines ever. “Never do for yourself what you can trick an expert into doing for you.”
I’m now through The Borders of Infinity.
The rest of the Galaxy is all just humoring Miles about the dual-identity thing, right? I mean, it’d public knowledge that there’s a prominent Barrayaran noble named Miles whose growth is stunted, and that his mother’s maiden name is Naismith. And here shows up a stunted mercenary leader, who goes by “Miles Naismith”, and named his company after a Barrayaran mountain range. Sure, that trick would probably work the first time, but surely, someone figured it out within, say, a year or so.
I was reading that series, but got distracted and and now re-reading the Earthsea books. Still, i think all of Barrayar is somewhat obscure to the rest of the world.
Barrayar is a galactic backwater, known for being militarists and behind the times. No, no one cares who the aristocrats of the place are though Mile’s father is likely one of the better known. Most of the people Miles encounters early on wouldn’t likely know, and more than the average American (USA) knows about more than 2-3 names of people in Turkey, but now add hundreds more worlds to know about.
There are plenty who are sure that Miles isn’t what he appears to be (early on, he’s winging it and those in the know figure it out), and later circumstances provide a near-perfect double for a time. I suspect that near the end of his direct military career with the other changes in his story, that it was indeed an open secret for those parties with significant intelligence assets, and it would have become an issue.
They actually address that in the next book, Brothers in Arms. I won’t spoil it for you.
That’s why I said “public knowledge”, not “common knowledge”. But the number of people who know about Barrayaran nobility is nonzero, and the number who know of this hotshot new mercenary is also nonzero, and so you’d expect at least some overlap between the two groups. Especially from anyone who gets their butt kicked by the Dendarii Mercenaries: Once you start actively poking around about them, it shouldn’t be too hard to find the connection. Like, it’s not too hard to speculate that they might have some connection with that militaristic planet, and once you start checking that, you’d confirm it with the “Dendarii” name, and so on.
In publication order, it looks like I still have Falling Free and The Mountains of Mourning before that. But I’ll look forward to that.
Falling Free is a prequal - you can read it at any point before Diplomatic Immunity.
As @Alessan and I hinted (trying to avoid major spoilers), it gets addressed at least in part in the near future (chronologically) of the series.
Friends convinced me to read it “internal chronological order, with a few adjustments”, rather than in publication order. That is too say, in the order bujold recommends. (Although i cheated, and picked up gentleman jole and the red queen right after reading the other Cordelia books. I don’t receive this is you’ve never read the books before, but for a reread, it works very well.)
Not only that, but it takes place several hundred years before the time of Miles and Cordelia, so there’s no overlap of any characters.
The timeline of the Vorkosiverse is not given in the stories, but for those interested: Miles’ time is about 1000 years from now; the Time of Isolation lasted some 600 years. The ToI ended about 80 years before he was born.
It’s widely known that the prime minister of Barrayar has a handicapped son, who is being kept out of the limelight. The rumor on Barrayar is that he’s a hideous mutant who the father is ashamed of, but other folks claim he’s just weird-looking. The outsiders who know the most about Barrayar know for certain that anyone who looks like a mutant couldn’t get an important job. Meanwhile, Naismith acts and sounds like a Betan - just about the opposite of a Barrayaran. So he picked a name from Barrayar - he had a Barrayaran bodyguard for a while, and thought the name sounded cool.
No doubt, some folks are pretty sure that he’s one and the same, but they don’t want to do anything based on that information until they’re positive - because anything that looks that hinky might be some sort of trap they don’t want fall for.
Well, not TOO out of the limelight: He was one of the two official diplomatic guests at an important state funeral in Cetaganda, for instance, and the Cetagandans knew specifically that he had fragile bones.
But I’m not prying for spoilers. I’ll see when I get there.
There was an unimportant short story written some time in the previous century, where the central joke concerns the amused contempt with which the advanced-intersteller-civilisation regards our primitive concepts of subatomic “particles”, quarks, leptons etc, which they understand are actually constrained demons.
True - and the villain assumed that Ivan was the smart one, and Miles was just his pawn
As far as Falling Free goes, the only thing that reading it early will do is introduce you to a few characters who are referenced as historical figures in a later novel.
It’s actually confirmed in one of the later books that a certain major power figured it out at some point, although it doesn’t matter by then (probably too vague to be really a spoiler, but spoilered just in case). And Miles himself comments that the cover was getting threadbare by the end.
That was the section I was thinking of. Thank you.