The Flowers of Vashnoi

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The lift van banked. Vadim Sammi, the district ranger piloting, pointed through the broad canopy. “The boundary of the Vashnoi exclusion zone is in sight, Lady Vorkosigan. Just… there.”

Ekaterin peered. The cleared fields and scattered farmsteads had petered out a few kilometers back. Below the van stretched a rolling, undifferentiated carpet of mixed native Barrayaran red-brown and invasive Earth-green vegetation, scrub and trees, broken by an occasional glint of stream or patch of meadow or swamp. “How can you tell?”

Her husband Miles, who had been uncharacteristically quiet during the half-hour flight from the district capital of Hassadar, leaned over between the front seats. “There are warning signs posted. On stakes or tacked to the trees every ten meters for the whole two-hundred-kilometer perimeter of the zone. One of the ranger cadre’s jobs is to walk the boundary once a year, record the ambient radiation, and replace any signs that have fallen down with their trees or whatever.”

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