"It all goes back... more than six hundred years, if you really want to start at the beginning," he says. "When humanity first discovered they could transit the horrifying void - I love that phrase, by the way - fast enough and far enough to get to other livable planets and back. The definition of 'livable' was pretty broad, as broad as they could make it, because it was hard to find any planets so they had to work with what they could get. That's when humans first came to Barrayar. Fifty thousand of them. And pretty soon after, the wormhole linking Barrayar to the rest of humanity collapsed. A collapsed wormhole isn't like a collapsed tunnel; you can't dig it back out. Gone for good. Rare as hell, but devastating when it's the wrong one. Barrayar lost touch with everyone else, lost hold of technology, government, social structure, everything. The Time of Isolation was hell in a lot of ways. They had to build themselves back up."