The poisoning attempt on Aral and Cordelia Vorkosigan was an attack on the then-new Imperial Regent and his pregnant wife, carried out when Evon Vorhalas fired a gas grenade through their bedroom window. Recalled more than thirty years later, the incident connects a moment of danger in the Vorkosigan family’s private home to the durable security measures and material traces it left behind.

The Attack and Its Recollection

The attack is not shown as it happens; it enters the narrative through a conversation between Miles Vorkosigan and Simon Illyan in Illyan’s blank-walled patient room. Miles mentions that he had always missed the windows while confined there. Illyan responds by recalling the night a gas grenade came through the bedroom window of Miles’s parents. His memory falters into the sense of a dream, making the event present as both a remembered family crisis and a recollection whose clarity is uncertain.

The House and Its Evidence

The attack had a concrete architectural consequence: afterward, all the windows in Vorkosigan House were fitted with force screens. More than three decades later, Miles points to those protections as assurance that the danger would not recur in the same way. The altered windows make the family home a lasting record of the incident, even as Miles describes it as quiet in the present.

Physical remnants survived separately in the ImpSec Evidence Rooms, housed in the chambers of an old prison block. Among the stored objects were a corroded metal crossbow and emptied soltoxin gas canisters associated with the poisoning attempt. Miles regarded these as the last physical remains of the attack apart from himself. Their preservation among confiscated weapons and other investigative materials turns the evidence room into an institutional counterpart to the force-screened house: one contains the objects, the other bears the security response.

Significance

The attack links private vulnerability to public power: its targets were a family in their bedroom, but Aral’s position as Imperial Regent gave the attempt political as well as personal stakes. Its long afterlife is conveyed through specific survivals rather than a reenactment—the protected windows, the archived objects, and Illyan’s memory of the night. In the later conversation, that memory also exposes the distance between an event’s historical reality and its imperfect persistence in recollection.