Crystal Dragon – Chapter 5

Osabei Tower
Landomist

In which Maelyn tay’Nordif is welcomed home, a pleasure that continues to elude Tor An yos’Galan.

Jela’s party succeeds in winning entry to the Tower, with a thesis calculated to draw attention and give Scholar tay’Nordif reason to ask nosey questions about Liad dea’Syl.

It’s interesting, considering what I recall about what happens later, that Scholar tay’Welford is the designated viewpoint for the admission scene. Although that, of course, may simply be because he’s the admissions board’s designated expert in Scholar tay’Nordif’s specialism. (On the gripping hand, that’s not an unrelated coincidence.)

Tor An, meanwhile, is having trouble drawing anybody’s attention to his problem. Apparently people really aren’t all that interested in other star systems going missing. Though if everybody who insists on being interested winds up getting shot, perhaps that’s not as surprising as it first appears.

His polite sarcasm when he’s talking to the X Strain captain reminds me strongly of certain of his descendants.

4 thoughts on “Crystal Dragon – Chapter 5

  1. H in W

    A predatory mess of office politics, where the edges are sharper than usual here in meat space. How can anybody do useful work, or even be sane, in an overtly hostile environment that encompasses all parts of your life?

    Who is controlling the strings of these puppets who keep Liad dea’Syl prisoner and will not permit his student to leave? The Enemy? What do the scholars who enforce these things gain from the enforcement?

  2. Paul A. Post author

    What we have here, I think, is an environment in which doing useful work has ceased to be the point. (“Lot of what you’ll be seeing won’t make sense, and won’t necessarily be keyed to survival. Inside, the important thing is prestige.”)

    I wouldn’t be surprised to find the Enemy involved, but I’m not sure the situation needs the Enemy’s hand. The galactic authorities want to believe that they have the situation under control, and don’t need to do anything that would mean climbing out of the comfortable rut they’re in; they might have swept Liad dea’Syl under the carpet on their own initiative so they don’t have to think about the troubling implications of his work. Which is not a survival trait in the long run, but unfortunately there are people who do think like that. (There’s an example in this chapter of the same thinking on a smaller scale, when tay’Welford notes that the Tower is only a few years away from running into trouble if it doesn’t rethink its policies, but the Governors are in no hurry to do any such thing.)

    The next chapter, which you might have read by the time this comment reaches you, has a conversation which suggests why the scholars have a stake in keeping Liad dea’Syl in the Tower, and his student likewise, even if they don’t know that Liad dea’Syl is a prisoner. (Which would not necessarily be obvious, in a community composed of people who cloistered themselves voluntarily.) Having the great mathematician Liad dea’Syl resident in the Tower increases the prestige of the Tower in general and the scholars who share his specialism in particular; thus, they would be reluctant to have him depart. The deciding point on bringing Scholar tay’Nordif into the fold wasn’t that she was a student of Scholar dea’Syl, but that her work suggests that his work is flawed; imagine the loss of prestige that could result if she were permitted to go and show that work elsewhere!

  3. Jelala Alone

    This struck me as extreme improbability: “Tor An, meanwhile, is having trouble drawing anybody’s attention to his problem. Apparently people really aren’t all that interested in other star systems going missing.”

    Yes, nodding at this: “His polite sarcasm when he’s talking to the X Strain captain reminds me strongly of certain of his descendants.”

  4. Ed8r

    Interesting comment in passing, in the introductory information before we meet the members of the admissions committee: the war which the so-called military did its least to end. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the idiom “to do one’s best” reversed to do the “least,” but it certainly fits what we learn (have learned) about the High Command.

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