Description:

Attending a diplomatic ceremony on Cetaganda, Miles and Cousin Ivan get into a heap of political trouble when the late empress's lifelong attendant is murdered, and Ivan gets involved with several beautiful and well-connected aliens. ** ### Amazon.com Review Miles is stuck visiting Cetaganda with his doltish cousin Ivan, representing Barrayaran nobility at an Imperial funeral. Miles must have suspected that it wasn't going to be dull after the bogus docking instructions and the odd man who launched himself into their ship and started to pull a weapon on them. Three attacks and a mysterious murder later, Miles is juggling two emperors, two secret services, and a half-dozen traitors--nd that's not even counting the women. ### From Publishers Weekly The power to engineer a civilization's genetic destiny fosters new variations on old struggles for political power in this entertaining space-operatic entry in Bujold's long-running Vorkosigan saga. Miles Vorkosigan, hero of Mirror Dance (winner of the 1995 Hugo Award for Best Novel), is on a diplomatic mission to represent his home planet at the funeral of the dowager empress of the Cetaganda empire when an encounter with an assailant leaves him with a piece of computer software. This proves to be a bogus duplicate of a key to the Cetagandan genome, which each new empress manipulates to produce offspring. With the help of a member of Cetaganda's matriarchal ruling haut, Miles and his cousin Ivan dodge inventive assassination attempts to determine which of the empire's eight governors has tried to pin this "theft" on them in the hope of usurping control of the genome. With her usual skill, Bujold addresses timeless issues of human identity through the personal dramas of her characters, most notably Miles, a deformed mutant whose insecurities afford him insight but sometimes obstruct his investigations. Set in a vividly realized world where Machiavellian intrigues are played out behind a facade of aristocratic discretion, this novel, like its predecessors, blends high adventure with wry commentary on the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between human ideals and political realities. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.