Falling Free

Artificial gravity — arriving late, and ruining everything.

The quaddies were engineered with four arms and no legs to work in free fall. They are company property, hold assigned trades, are paired by the personnel department, and are genuinely good at the job. Then gravity is solved and a thousand purpose-built people become surplus inventory.

Obsolescence — The work goes, and standing goes with it.

The sharpest obsolescence story in the catalogue, because the workers were manufactured for the work. Bujold refuses the easy version: the quaddies are not mistreated day to day, they are simply written off as an asset class.