Sergeant Bothari

Sergeant Bothari is remembered by Miles Vorkosigan as a consequential early loss: Miles imagines undoing his death, then visits his grave on his thirtieth birthday. Though these passages reveal little about Bothari’s life, they make his death a measure against which Miles weighs later mistakes and give his grave a distinct place in Miles’s movement from mourning toward urgent conversation with the living.

Earlier loss and regret

Reflecting on choices he cannot reverse, Miles says that if he could undo one event, he might return to Sergeant Bothari’s death and change what happened. He does not claim that doing so would have made everything turn out better; he acknowledges that it might not have. Instead, he distinguishes this earlier error as more innocent, though more lethal, from the calculated mistakes he believes he has made since. Bothari’s death thus marks an early point in Miles’s retrospective reckoning, not a loss he can confidently imagine repairing.

The grave at Vorkosigan Surleau

On his thirtieth birthday, Miles leaves the house by a hillside path carrying a roll taken from the kitchen. The garden-and-graveyard had once been the resting place of the barracks guardsmen before the Vorkosigans made it their family plot after the destruction of Vorkosigan Vashnoi. In the morning mist, Miles sits beside Sergeant Bothari’s grave, eats, and watches the sun rise over Vorkosigan Surleau. The scene presents remembrance as quiet company rather than ceremony: Miles lingers beside the grave during a birthday he had hoped to ignore.

A memory set against the living

Afterward, Miles goes to the grave of Piotr Vorkosigan and stares at its silent stone. He recognizes that he and the dead man seem to have nothing more to say to each other, then abruptly decides that he has been addressing the wrong grave. He returns to the house to wake Martin and go somewhere beyond the reach of the comconsole, because he urgently needs to speak with a small lady. The passage does not identify her here, but its turn away from the graves gives Bothari’s memorial scene a clear endpoint: remembrance remains, while Miles’s immediate need draws him back toward the living.