His cousin Ivan Vorpatril, with the help of his friend and ImpSec Captain Duv Galeni (who encountered Miles during the events of Brothers in Arms), manage to get him to break out of his funk.

When Illyan suffers a sudden, crippling mental impairment, Miles attempts to investigate, but receives no cooperation from Lucas Haroche, ImpSec's acting chief, so he asks Gregor to assign him an Imperial Auditor, a troubleshooter answerable only to the Emperor.

Illyan moves into Vorkosigan House to recover, where he receives visits from Lady Alys Vorpatril, Gregor's social secretary, who was also at his bedside during his breakdown.

Miles undergoes surgery to implant a device that can pre-emptively trigger a milder seizure at a time of his choosing as a palliative measure, the underlying condition being incurable.

[1] In the New York Review of Science Fiction (October 1998, number 122), the novel is summarized as follows: In force and intensity as well as this elegiac undertone, Memory is indeed a quantum jump ahead of The Warrior's Apprentice, although in Miles' double trajectory it fills the same position of excursion from "childhood" and foundation of a new personality.

But where Mark subsumes and reconciles himself to his dark internal Others, Miles' integration is achieved by an excision - or, as Bujold put it, a "repossession" ("Letterspace", Letter 8[2] ), with all the word's overtones, theological as well as financial - and a metamorphosis at very high cost.

Reading Memory, I myself felt very much like Wordsworth seems to have when he wrote "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality": what we had here was remarkable, spectacular, far more powerful than Apprentice and its ilk, but it was also darker, less sparkling, without that adolescent, outrageous joie d'esprit.