Dutiful Passage en route to Venture
Standard Year 1339
In which Er Thom yos’Galan shows his mettle.
Another jump forward of nearly 50 years, and a significant shift in the focus of the series: we are back with Korval, and there, with only occasional diversions, we shall henceforth remain.
So here is a story that shows us Er Thom and Daav as youngsters, part-formed, but already showing familiar traits. It’s also, if memory serves, the only story with an extensive depiction of Er Thom’s mother in her prime.
I’m never quite sure I’ve correctly untangled the interplay about Er Thom’s status in the family. He’s described as his mother’s heir both by his mother herself and by the narrator, and here he is on her ship, learning her trade; the implication is that when he tells the Juntavas boss that he is of no significance because he has a brother who’s the heir, he’s being flexible with the truth. And yet in Local Custom we hear that he does in fact have an elder brother who’s ahead of him in the line of inheritance.
(One could resolve the puzzle, of course, by guessing that after this story was written the authors found it necessary to discover an elder brother to make the plot of Local Custom work; one might even take a confident guess at which part of the plot was otherwise at risk. But one does prefer, where possible, to believe that the Liaden Universe possesses internal consistency.)
If the Master dea’Cort who is Daav’s instructor at the Academy is the same Scout who came to Bell’s aid in “Phoenix”, he must be getting on in years. (Although not, perhaps, as far on as a Terran of the same age; it’s mentioned in “Sweet Waters” that a Liaden in her fifties would be considered to be in her prime, with many productive years ahead of her.)
Your statement: “(One could resolve the puzzle, of course, by guessing that after this story was written the authors found it necessary to discover an elder brother to make the plot of Local Custom work; one might even take a confident guess at which part of the plot was otherwise at risk. But one does prefer, where possible, to believe that the Liaden Universe possesses internal consistency.)”
After having read nearly every novel and short story in this collection, I have almost come to expect some internal inconsistency. Discrepancies across books is almost the norm. The good news is that the discrepancies usually don’t make much difference to the larger plot.
In this, I took them to be talking about the “Dragon’s” heir, I.e. Korval, not Yos’galan, in which case he is the spare for Da’av.
That could be it. The entire conversation is framed in terms of whether yos’Galan (not Korval) will pay to get him back, but that might be because Captain yos’Galan is the ranking person of Korval present on the planet and the person they’d be making the ransom demand to.
Reading about the Juntavas in chronological order adds some depth to enjoyment of “The Beggar King,” but does leave me at a loss to understand the need for Turtles to intervene in Agent of Change, since it ought to be enough for Val Con to declare Miri under his protection, I would have thought.
That would have required Val Con to declare himself a member of clan Korval, which at that point he was still being reluctant to do, both because he wasn’t sure if there was enough of him left to go back home and because he wasn’t sure if it would be a good move to get his family tangled up in his problems. (Later in the book he’s still seriously considering going off on his own and never telling them what happened to him.)
That’s right…thanks for the reminder. I read Agent of Change and its sequence first, so I’ll be a bit fuzzy until I come to then again.
I enjoyed this story again the third time through, but did not feel as though I discovered any new insights to the characters or culture as I have on the re-reread of some of the other books/stories.