Spiral Dance
Ardega
In which the Enemy makes an example.
More about the aelantaza, and about Dulsey’s background, and Cantra’s. That’s an interesting insight about why Cantra’s so cantankerous.
Cantra’s been thinking to herself lately that it’s not safe to find Jela as attractive as she does, and now it appears that Jela has been thinking to himself similar things about Cantra. It’s pretty clear where that’s headed, even if I didn’t already know.
Further info on Spiral Dance — how Garen might have acquired her and how she might be calling to the Enemy. A captain’s challenge giving a chancy prize to win and no way of knowing exactly how chancy (because human tech may not be capable of sensing all the dangers).
If I’m interpreting his comments correctly, Jela thinks “military grade” scans are better than Cantra’s. I wonder, though, what you can get if you’re not too choosy about Dark versus Light?
One of the things I got out of Jela’s comments was that he’s aware military technology ends up on the Dark market sooner or later, and if he thinks his kit is better than Cantra’s it may just be because it’s up-to-date and contains features that maybe haven’t leaked yet.
Of course, the Dark market might also collect leaks from other sources. One might even, if one wasn’t very choosy, be able to find sheriekas technology, which is no doubt excellent — in the abstract — but I don’t think I’d want to trust sheriekas tech to tell me honestly whether my ship was infected with sheriekas tech.
Fun to see the mutual interest grow. Cantra has been alone since Garen for about five years. Now, she must learn to trust someone to watch her back. Nice!
A chapter full of interesting conversations designed to answer various questions. So we know that Cantra had a full sibling, which implies the same two genetic donors or mixes were used to create both Cantra and Timoli, and implying that not to be the case with all the members of her line. And in both Cantra and Jela, we have two genetic lines or series that were or are being phased out due to too much independence. And Cantra’s observations about the Uncle, who has a purpose, (though she doesn’t tell us what it is,) and that he controls all around him in service to that purpose, but does not apply such controls to himself. And a very interesting discourse “trusting” someone that boils down to “you can trust this person to be who they are and to act in accordance with their own personal priorities and needs.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen it put in quite that way before.
Do we have any indication of how long ago they left Taliofi? Is it possible that the elimination of Taliofi might have been an attempt to eliminate Jela (or Cantra, though I think that’s less likely, as yet)?
I see there was no response from anyone. At the moment, I don’t recall whether this is information that it revealed later.