After 'Shards of Honor', the first book in the 'Vorkosigan Saga', I wondered who it was named for. Before I read any of them, I assumed it was named for Miles Vorkosigan, partly because I'd heard of him before diving into the series and partly because he was the lead in the Hugo-winning 'The Vor Game', which was my introduction to it. However, given that he's only a baby bump late in the book, maybe that series is named for his father, Aral Vorkosigan, a legendary Barrayaran leader. Alternatively, maybe it's named for the family, including Cordelia Vorkosigan née Naismith, who becomes wife to Aral and mother to Miles.

Here, in the third book in the series, it seems like an increasingly unwieldy name because none of the Vorkosigans even show up. Now, it is clearly set in the same universe and Miles is mentioned a few times, not least because the primary supporting character is Elli Quinn (if not quite a leading lady), one of the many background characters in 'The Warriors Apprentice'. She worked for Miles in what became the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet and still does here, though she's doing so at a serious distance. She's undercover on Kline Station, having completed facial reconstruction after being shot in the face in the previous book, and fortuitously, she's the first woman that the actual lead meets when he arrives there.

And here's where this gets particularly interesting, because Ethan Urquhart is about as far away from being a traditional science fiction lead character as it gets. For a start, he's an obstetrician. He's also a religious extremist from what can only be described as a monastery planet. Unlike the religious extremists on our planet, he's gay too, because the population of Athos is restricted to men. It's kind of hard not to be gay when there's only one gender on your planet. And, of course, I can't fail to acknowledge the immediate irony here. His job is to ensure that babies are born safe and healthy but he's never even seen a woman, let alone met one.

The way out of that paradox is to explain that every baby born on Athos are nurtured in a uterine replicator or artificial womb, of the type that played a part in earlier books. They're also sourced from ovarian cultures descending from those brought to Athos by its Founding Fathers centuries earlier. If that sounds rather like a limited supply to be thinned out over generations, then you're absolutely right. They're running out. Brother Haas wants a CJB but will have to settle for a JJY, because the CJB strain has deteriorated to non-viability.

The solution here isn't just an offworld order of new cultures but the source material itself: real ovaries provided by a company on Jackson's Whole. Unfortunately, when they arrive, it's obvious that they belong to cows. Dead cows. There aren't even fifty of them and they're all useless. The Athosians have been ripped off! And so Ethan finds himself volunteered into an offworld mission, to spend a year travelling to Jackson's Whole as a purchasing agent to obtain viable supplies to secure the future of the Athosians. The first stop is Kline Station where everything immediately goes pear-shaped.

For a start, he meets women. Intellectually he thinks of women as "uterine replicators on legs", a fairly accurate but rather limited viewpoint that crumbles in the face of actually meeting some. I should point out that not only are there no women on Athos, you have to reach Clearance Level A to even encounter a picture of one. Dr. Urquhart only gets that far up the chain when he becomes a department head at his reproduction centre, finally becoming qualified to read "totally uncut, uncensored galactic publications" like 'The Betan Journal of Reproductive Medicine'.

He devours one particularly applicable article only to discover it was written by a pair of women. He doesn't even recognise them as such in their photos. They just look wrong for boys or childless men, who on his planet have thus not yet earned the right to grow a beard. The same goes for Elli after he stops her to ask for directions on Kline Station, thinking her to be a "particularly elegant boy". By the time he gets to the transient's area, women are everywhere. One is cradling a baby in her arms and "he stifled a heroic impulse to snatch the child out of danger". It isn't promising.

And then it gets a lot less promising. Quinn saves him from a beating. He escapes her, only to find himself kidnapped and tortured for information. The Cetagandan military is convinced that he's a spy who knows where to find Terrance Cee, even though he hasn't even heard of him. At this point he's only been on Kline Station for a day and he hasn't even eaten yet. Clearly he's never going to make it Jackson's Whole but that's okay, because he's actually stumbled into the real story here on Kline.

And yes, this is a spy story at heart. There's plenty of action but every moment of it is wrapped up in intrigue. There are twists and turns every which way we look and the ovaries that didn't arrive on Athos as ordered become a powerful MacGuffin. What's more, Terrance Cee is a crucial part of that story and he counts as a sort of MacGuffin himself. The only thing more complex than a story built around a MacGuffin is a story built around two and Bujold delivers the goods, with a notably wicked twist to boot that's delivered in utterly delicious fashion using only five off-the-cuff words. That's priceless!

I liked this a lot. Elli is a joyous wildcard here, not always part of the story but there often enough and at all the most crucial moments. She's a relatively traditional character for science fiction, for space opera and for this particular series. She's not the greatest spy ever chronicled but she does well enough to be believable both as a spy and a kick-ass female soldier, even away from her chain of command. Ghem-colonel Luyst Millisor is a relatively one-note villain, easily the weakest of the major characters, but he's suitably callous and without any scruples whatsoever.

The real joy here is Dr. Ethan Urquhart. He's a fish-out-of-water when we meet him and he's still a fish-out-of-water for the vast majority of the novel. It doesn't seem likely that we're going to find ourselves rooting for the misogynistic religious extremist but we do, mostly because he's always a doctor first and foremost. His mindset is laid out clear as day in his responses to Terrance Cee on their first meeting. It's there in his immediate acceptance and it's especially there in how he sees potential applications of telepathy. You can imagine how a spy or a military man would treat that but he's a doctor and he treats it in a completely different way, one that doesn't simply make him sympathetic but something akin to a hero, even if he could never become one in typical fashion.

I also found his planet fascinating. It's not hard to conjure up a planet that's colonised by an order of monks. We can imagine the robes and the rituals. What most of us wouldn't be able to imagine is what a society that didn't contain anything but these monks would look like, especially over the course of centuries. There's no city down the road to provide new recruits. And, if women are seen as demonic corrupting influences, they can't treat the next planet as the next city either. They're on their own and they have to maintain a go-forward society without them and the result is oddly feminist in nature, at least from our perspective, if not from theirs.

It means that people like Ethan have to provide the ability for that culture to procreate through science and a society has to evolve to provide for such children. It means that every job that we'd traditionally see as done by a woman would have to be done instead by a man. With one gender only, there inherently can't be stereotyped gender roles, let alone a battle of the sexes. Either everyone plays an equal part or a new prejudice must be conjured up out of whole cloth. It doesn't mean that every child must be brought up by two parents but, if one is, then both must be men. It doesn't mean that every relationship must be sexual but, if one is, then it has to be homosexual.

Bujold clearly thought deeply about this creation of this culture and the ramifications that spin out from what she conjured up are numerous. I found myself thinking more about that here than in 'The Left Hand of Darkness' or 'The Dispossessed', two science fiction novels specifically about gender. Here, we learn about gender roles in society through the complete removal of them. The result is that every path the Athosians make with one gender is one that we could make with two or another society could make with six. What isn't there in their society, not just gender roles but prejudices about those gender roles, doesn't have to be there in ours.

That's a heck of a lot of depth for a space station spy story. Bujold contines to shine at action and intrigue, even with the cardboard cutout villains she gives us this time out. She keeps this moving at a rate of knots so that we really don't care that we never get to Jackson's Whole, a name that I've wondered about since the first time she mentioned it in whichever book that was. Everything wraps up as it should and she even leaves us with a surprisingly subversive ending. Sure, there are no Vorkosigans in this story, but Dr. Ethan Urquhart is a worthy lead, even if he's probably played his entire part by the time this one wraps, leaving it changed but not to the degree that we might have expected halfway. The 'Vorkosigan Saga' only gets more fascinating. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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