Attempted poisoning of Aral Vorkosigan and his pregnant wife

The attempted poisoning of Aral Vorkosigan and his pregnant wife was a formative attack on the Vorkosigan family, remembered decades later both as a danger to Miles Vorkosigan before his birth and through the objects left behind. Its later recollection connects private family history to the guarded institutional archive where the attempt’s physical remnants were kept.

The Attack and Its Recollection

More than thirty years after the attack, Simon Illyan recalled that Evon Vorhalas had fired a gas grenade through the bedroom window of Aral Vorkosigan and his pregnant wife. Illyan remembered the night, but described the memory as dreamlike; his recollection returned during a conversation with Miles in Illyan’s blank-walled patient room. The event is therefore conveyed not as a newly narrated action scene but as a fragment of the past surfacing in conversation.

Miles connected the attack to a lasting alteration of the family home: all the windows in Vorkosigan House had subsequently been force-screened. His comment makes the domestic consequence concrete. A window, ordinarily an opening toward the outside, had become a known point of vulnerability, and the household’s response was to secure every one.

Surviving Evidence

In a later visit to the ImpSec Evidence Rooms, Miles found the material traces of the poisoning attempt among the objects kept in the weapons room. A corroded metal crossbow and emptied soltoxin gas canisters were among the surviving items associated with it. The passage does not establish that the crossbow was used in the attack; it identifies the crossbow and canisters as the last physical remains of the attempt apart from Miles himself.

The evidence rooms occupied chambers in an old prison block, repurposed to store weapons and other objects gathered during ImpSec investigations. Miles’s choice to revisit the weapons room placed a personal memory inside that institutional collection. The artifacts were not merely an abstract record: they were the remaining material connection to an attack that had preceded his own birth.

Significance

The episode joins two kinds of survival. The force-screened windows record how the family adapted its home after the attack, while the preserved objects record how the state retained evidence of it. Miles stands between those traces as both the child carried by the targeted pregnant woman and the living remainder he later recognizes among the stored artifacts.

In the evidence-room passage, Miles associates the objects with beginnings and endings. That reflection gives the old attempt a place in the book’s larger pattern of recurrence: an early threat to his family returns not as a new danger, but as a physical memory encountered in the present. The attack’s significance lies in that double presence—first as an assault on his parents’ household, and later as a past that remains materially legible to Miles.