Miles Vorkosigan's Relatives

by James Burbidge

This was originally posted to the lois-bujold mailing list in December 1998.

Miles Vorkosigan comes from a society where (due to its feudal underpinnings) family connnections are important and visible (Miles says of nepotism and the Vor in Komarr, "it's not a vice, it's a lifestyle"). Yet he has remarkably few Barrayaran relatives himself. One would expect, in principle, that Aral's connections would have come crawling out of the woodwork when he became Regent (as if being a Count weren't enough). Yet we see only his immediate ancestors and Ivan Vorpatril (his aunt Alys Vorpatril is a relative by marriage).

So why doesn't Miles have "visible" relatives other than Ivan?

It's fairly easy to work out that he is very unlikely to have any other relatives closer than third cousins on Barrayar, and relatively few of those.

Since his mother isn't from Barrayar, we can lop off half his family tree right there. (We know that Miles has relatives on Beta, but they aren't in question.)

Aral was one of two children; his elder brother died without issue [Barrayar]. Therefore we can rule out any first cousins.

It's a fair assumption that, as Count, if Piotr had had surviving siblings or nephews/nieces we would have heard of them -- they would definitely be cadet members with Piotr and then Aral as the head of the family, and ought to have showed up, at minimum, during the stages of Aral's confirmation as Regent in Barrayar. It's a fair assumption that if Piotr had any relatives via siblings, they were wiped out by the Cetagandans (not, note, Yuri -- they weren't in line for the throne, not being descended from Piotr's wife). Thus Miles almost certainly has no second cousins other than Ivan.

Aral notes in Barrayar, on Padma's death, that the two of them were the last surviving descendants of Prince Xav (the only two to survive Yuri). Therefore Aral's mother (Olivia, according to Lois) had no siblings with surviving issue other than Padma's mother, and we can rule out any second cousins other than Ivan.

For third cousins, there are some possibilities, but not very many. There are four great-grandparent connections to consider:

Xav's parents, the Emperor (Dorca) and Empress of Barrayar at about the time that the Time of Isolation ended. There may be other descendants of this pair around among those with claims to the imperial throne. Gregor is almost certainly not one of them, since the text evidence suggests that if they exist they are collateral to Gregor's line, or Ezar would not have considered Aral's claim to the throne "better than his own". If so, they must be through other siblings of Xav and Yuri, possibly female, of whom we haven't heard. Presumably Yuri would have gone after them, too, which tends to weed them out.
As an aside, this clarifies the most likely nature of Ezar's/Gregor's claim to the throne -- by cadet male descent from Xav's grandparents (or further back), which would make Gregor at best a fourth cousin of Miles via this side. (Lois has now indicated in a post to Baen's Bar that Ezar was a collateral (to Yuri) descendant of an ancestor of Dorca; she added that Ezar he married a sister of Yuri. This makes Gregor a second cousin once removed of Miles through the female line.)
Xav's wife was a Betan. As another off-planet relative, any descendants of her parents will also be off-planet; this branch need not therefore be considered.
One bare possibility is other Vorkosigans who were descended from Piotr's paternal grandparents. There certainly have to be some other Vorkosigans around, or Tien (in Komarr) wouldn't have had to ask about Miles' relationship to Aral. However, cousins of Piotr's are likely to have been subject to Cetagandan reprisals, or to have lived in Vorkosigan Vashnoi, or to have been combatants and then casualties in the Cetagandan occupation.
Descendants of Piotr's maternal grandparents. These may be Vorrutyers, as Miles makes reference in Memory and Komarr to his Vorrutyer ancestors, and this is the earliest place at which they can be plugged in). Admiral Vorrutyer may have been one of these (in which case we know what happened to part of that branch [Shards of Honor]).

Feudal/traditional societies do tend to take more distant degrees of kinship more seriously than we do (marriage in the middle ages was prohibited on the basis of consanguinity to the sixth degree, for example), so Miles probably would think of any third cousins as cousins, but they're not close, and the effect of the weedings caused by Yuri, the Cetagandans (including the likely incineration of many relatives in Vorkosigan Vashnoi) and two off-planet ancestresses means that there aren't likely to be very many, either.

A very rough diagram showing Miles' immediate ascertainable Barrayaran relatives looks like this:

      Dorca
        |
      __|___________________________________
      |           |                         |
     Yuri        Xav--Betan               Daughter--Ezar
     (d.s.p.)       |                              |
            ________|________                      |
            |                |                     |
    Piotr--Olivia          Daughter--X.Vorpatril  Serg--Kareen
         |                         |                  |
_________|__                       |                  |
|           |                      |                  |
Son        Aral--Cordelia         Padma--Alys      Gregor
(d.s.p.)       |                       |
               |                       |
             Miles                   Ivan

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Last updated: November 15th 2002