Ekaterin Vorsoisson

Ekaterin Vorsoisson is a character in Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction series, the Vorkosigan Saga. Her character is first introduced with the Vorsoisson surname, though it changes to Vorkosigan when she marries Miles.

Ekaterin was born to a comparatively low branch of a Vor family, the Vorvaynes. Her mother was the sister of Dr. Vorthys, who later became an Imperial Auditor, one of eight men holding the extremely prestigious job of being an expert troubleshooter and investigator for the Emperor.

As Dr. Vorthys points out in the novel Komarr, sometimes the low Vor are more passionate about the tradition of Vor than the "High Vor", the true aristocracy. Thus, Ekaterin grew up believing in the need to live up to her word, which left her with few options when her marriage went bad, as she was trapped with no honorable Vor way to escape. She also developed a hard shell around herself, thanks to the torments of her older brothers. The fact that she has three older brothers is itself an artifact of the changes in Barrayaran society, as the newly introduced technology allowing parents to choose the sex of their children collided with the long-standing cultural preference for male children.

Ekaterin's mother died of disease when Ekaterin was a teenager. When her father later desired to remarry, he encouraged an arranged marriage between Ekaterin and Etienne Vorsoisson, in order to tidy up family affairs. Ekaterin, who was 20 at the time, accepted Etienne, who was ten years older, and the couple seemed initially happy. Although she genuinely loved him, she also saw the marriage as her part in the "Vor pageant".

In marrying Etienne Vorsoisson her name changed. Etienne's branch of the Vorsoissons were still low Vor, and thus she did not gain the title Lady. There are Vorsoissons among the high Vor, as related in the novel Mirror Dance. When experiencing marital trouble with her unstable husband, Ekaterin reminds herself of the historical Countess Vorvayne, who followed her treasonous husband into death by starvation, staging a hunger strike alongside him while he was chained up in public to die. Thus she sees it as her duty to stand by her own ignoble husband.

The marriage became troubled, providing a major plot element in the book Komarr. They have a child, Nikolai, who is 9 years old when introduced in the novel Komarr. Unlike most contemporary couples, they (at the insistence of Etienne) gestated Nikolai the natural way, instead of using a "uterine replicator", a piece of galactic technology which had been available for some time. Ekaterin gave into Etienne's pressure based partly on youthful bravado, partly on Vor snobbery, but it has the effect of concealing the fact that Etienne has a genetic disorder. The discovery was only made after Nikolai's birth, when they found evidence of the condition in Etienne's dead brother's papers.

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