Solcintra
Near Orbit
In which a new venture calls for new names.
The Service Families have declared themselves the new High Houses of Solcintra. That didn’t take long.
Partly in response, Cantra and Tor An decide to strengthen their association, from perhaps-temporary co-pilots to permanent clanmates. (As I recall, Shan’s recounting of the Clan’s history in one of the later novels implies that they didn’t take that step until after landfall, but it does make sense for them to take the step now, for all the reasons Tor An mentions – and it has always been said that the contract was with Clan Korval, so that’s all right. In situations like this, Lois McMaster Bujold is wont to say that “the Management reserves the right to have a better idea later.”)
And on reflection, while it makes first-glance sense for the idea of forming a Clan to have presented itself later, at the point where the voyage was over and Cantra and Tor An needed to decide how they were going to carry on into the future, I’m not sure the Cantra we’ve come to know in this duology would have made this choice then. Forming Clan with her co-pilot means hitching her destiny to someone else’s in a way she’s never done, and I get the feeling that on some level she’s only letting herself do it now because it’s not going to matter if they all die soon anyway. If they’d waited to decide until they knew for sure they had the rest of their lives ahead of them, I don’t know that she might not have got cold feet.
Cantra also sees the strength of a clan in enforcing a contract, particularly with someone who sees them as outsiders (“kenake” pilots).
So Quick Passage is the ship’s name. But Korval is yet to come.
An Insight that did not strike me until this reread —— and perhaps one as blindingly obvious as the cat earlier —— is that each of the four founders of Clan Korval is truly unique in this universe or the new one. Each of them is the sole survivor of their genetic line. We know this for sure for Jela, Cantra, and the Tree. It’s more of an assumption for Tor An. But his planet is gone, and only any wandering off-planet members of his clan might have survived. None of them will have been on Quick Passage, of course. So the new Clan Korval is a four-times-multiplied uniquity.
That’s a very interesting observation.
The odds are in favour of Tor An also being the last of his clan: it’s mentioned back in Chapter One that the destruction of his homeworld occurred at the time of a major family reunion for which even the wandering off-planet members were called home.
Ha! Cantra has given Argast “as much confidence as he liked.” In other words, she was consciously using her aelantaza pheromones again, in contrast to Tor An, who obviously sat the board with the confidence of knowledge and experience of a big ship (or at least, prior training).
Here’s the first identification of the ship as Quick Passage. I can imagine a succession of “_____ Passage” names. But, I want to see more of this ship now that we know it still exists in some form. What more will Val Con do with it . . . anything?