The Flowers of Vashnoi
Categories: [ Books/Barrayar ]
Ekaterin Vorkosigan and Enrique Borgos visit the Vorkosigan Vashnoi area that was left radioactive at the end of the Cetagandan invasion. Enrique has created insects that eat and concentrate the radioactive elements before leaving them in neat dejection piles, in the hope of decontaminating the area. They notice that many of the bugs in the test area have disappeared, and eventually discover that they were picked by a young boy who lives nearby with his adoptive mother, Ma Roga, and two other children. Ma Roga claims she had been living hear ever since Miles' grandfather Count Piotr allowed her to do so instead of executing her with the bandit gang with which she was living thirty years earlier. Since then she has taken care of the unwanted, mutant children who were abandoned in the contaminated zone by their backcountry parents. After a long discussion and a failed attempt by Ma Roga to kill her children and herself rather than having to leave her home, they are all taken to the hospital in Hassadar for treatment. While the children can be integrated in the modern Barrayaran society, Miles and Ekaterin wonder what to do with Ma Roga.