The Rifle’s First Wife

In which Diglon Rifle does what he may to help a teammate.

Poker was one of the first new things Diglon was taught after he came under the dragon’s wing, and he showed an immediate aptitude for it, so it’s good to see he’s continuing to develop it. In general, it’s pleasing to see that Diglon is thriving in his new environment – and a bit worrying that Hazenthull apparently isn’t, even now.

I say “even now” because the internal evidence suggests that it’s been over a year since the two of them came to stand with Korval: baby Lizzie, who was not yet born then, has progressed to standing up under her own power.

Lizzie’s development also means that although it’s early spring – “winter having been gone some weeks now” – it’s the spring after the one in which Lizzie was born, and so doesn’t tell us anything useful about that contested spring I’ve been worried about lately.

(It also means that I’ve scheduled this story too early, which is an acknowledged hazard of scheduling a story without reading it first. The actual position would be some time after Dragon Ship – and possibly one or two more novels as well, but since I haven’t read those yet either I’m not going to attempt a definite pronouncement.)

It’s nice that Alara has found a chance to make an alliance with somebody whose company she enjoys and who she has an attraction to, but I do wonder how she’s planning to explain her choice to her delm. It’s all very well saying that Diglon isn’t an Yxtrang any more, but is she going to be able to get away with not mentioning that he was? The delm did specify a “long lineage” as one of the criteria to look for, which means he’s going to want to know about Diglon’s antecedents.

One thing that might help is that, Clan Silari having made the decision to leave Liad, Alara and her clan are themselves, in a sense, no longer what they were either.

Incidentally, I notice that Diam, one of the two people who entertained Diglon on his evening off, is another of those for whom the authors have chosen not to constrain the reader’s imagination by specifying pronouns.


Next: Dragon Ship

12 thoughts on “The Rifle’s First Wife

  1. Paul A. Post author

    The obvious thing to derive from it is that Diglon hasn’t had a wife before.

    The more interesting question is, does it imply that he’s going to have another wife after? That might easily be the case, since limited-duration contract marriage is a thing in this setting, and specifically the thing that Alara and Diglon are proposing – and now I have an amusing mental picture of Diglon becoming an in-demand contract-spouse and having a string of marriages and leaving Yxtrang genes scattered through the gene pool. But it’s not necessarily the case; the first instance of a thing can also be the last instance of a thing. I know a guy who occasionally entertains himself by referring to his “first wife” when speaking to people who don’t yet know him well enough to know that he’s only had one, to whom he’s been happily married for decades and whom he has no intention of trading in.

  2. Linda Shoun

    Almost immediately after posting the comment above, I remembered the contract-marriages. The only rationalization I could come up with for an excuse was that none of the maJor living characters had entered a contract-marriage in “real time”. So I had pushed that to back of mind.

  3. Ed8r

    The title bothered me too. I’ve been working on catching up with all the short stories (how could this one be called a novelette?) and finally got here . . . only to find out that he doesn’t even have a wife at the end of the story! So I am left with the assumption that the authors are being deliberately and intentionally ambiguous with the title.

    Meanwhile, another question: If Silari needs a contract marriage in order to provide an heir, then is Diglon a viable choice? Somehow I had the impression that the Yxtrang were all infertile…or was that just the M series, like Jela?

  4. Skip

    I had wondered about that, too, but somehow they have survived a millennium without their genetic engineers and biogeneticists

  5. Ed8r

    How do we know they were missing genetic engineers and biogeneticists? Or maybe there were some in the troop with just enough training to duplicate past methods? We have memories of the creche, which also harkened back to Jela’s survival.

  6. Othin

    @supposed infertility
    There are several possibilities.
    1. Diligon could have eaten some tree fruit and gotten cured of infertility
    2. He never was infertile – modern Yxtrang (properly only lowly Troop) only use drugs in their food to curb the need for sex – and Diligon had enough time without that drug.
    3. Somewhere – I don’t remember where – there was mention of mix breed children (Yxtrang and others) and their low chance of long term survival
    4. Declining standards of Troop born (as postulated in Gathering Edge by Yxtrang Ambassador) may be due to A. failing genetic material for biogenetics or B. natural birth maybe with K strain mothers.

  7. Skip

    Ed8r, I misspoke. I do not know that the Troop has no geneticists, etc. I only inferred it, because of what Vepal the Yxtrang Ambassador thought, in Gathering Edge. ( see what Othin said below:

    4. Declining standards of Troop born (as postulated in Gathering Edge by Yxtrang Ambassador) may be due to A. failing genetic material for biogenetics or B. natural birth maybe with K stra
    ——

    So, if the genetic material is failing, that seems to imply that the troop has no competent biogenetic engineers and other types of biomed scientists to deal with the problem.

    I think your idea makes sense, Ed8r: “maybe there were some in the troop with just enough training to duplicate past methods?”

  8. Sami Sillanpaa

    I’d say the title is a construct that comes from Liaden culture, where most people probably marry more than once in their lifetime; once to produce an heir for themselves, and probably at least once to provide an heir to the other party in the contract marriage. Therefore, to a Liaden it wouldn’t be strange to label the spouse in someone’s first contract marriage as the first wife, since it’s more likely than not that there will be at least one more.

  9. Othin

    Hello Sami,
    you are properly right. Alara might very well describe herself as Diligon’s first wife in that context. It also makes Diligon appear more Liaden than he is – or it may hint at Diligon role-modelling his relationships from Liaden context – until he develops his own preferences.

    My personal favorite is that while all those thoughts might be true – the authors also included a yoke about marriages like Paul described.

    I’d like to see if serial marriages survive on Surebleak. With all those queandra I’d guess there might be several kinds of marriage contracts from all corners of the universe available and a couple might be free to choose which kind of contract they sign. There might be some 5 or 6 standard contracts from Surebleak, Terran and Liaden history with several specials and variants, including rulings about children.

    We still have to see what Alara’s Delm has to say about that marriage and what Alara and Diligon decide to do at the end of their contract.

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