Vandar
Winterfair
In which Val Con speaks to a compatriot and a brother.
Val Con slipping out of his Department conditioning with the l’apeleka he learned from Edger is interesting in several ways.
One way is that it’s an example of things that go around coming around. If Val Con hadn’t been the kind of person who would and could befriend a Turtle, he’d be in serious trouble now (if he wasn’t already dead, back in any of the several incidents where his friendship with Edger has already helped pull him out of the fire).
It’s also a sign of one of the Department’s blind spots. They must have known Val Con had a history with the Clutch — they have access to Val Con’s service history, and even if they didn’t the fact that Edger lent him a ship would have been a big hint — but they don’t seem to have thought much of it. It’s not so much that I expect them to have had a counter for the l’apeleka specifically — I wouldn’t be surprised if Val Con is the only non-Turtle who knows much about it, and certainly even if an agent of the Department tried to get a Turtle to talk about Turtle things he wouldn’t get far — but even if they didn’t know about l’apeleka specifically, they might have considered the possibility that Val Con had learned something unusual from the Clutch, and they didn’t. All the time we’ve seen the Department spend thinking about what lessons they need to learn from Val Con’s past, and his time with the Clutch never comes up. It’s like they take it as read that no non-Liaden culture could produce anything the Department needs to worry about.
Maybe you’re a bit harsh to the department regarding their ignorance of the Clutch. Even Val Con’s family wasn’t entirely convinced that Edger and his family existed until they received his letter, and they are certainly intrested in matters non-Liaden.
“To Cut An Edge” gives the impression that Val Con didn’t know anything about the Clutch when he was dropped on their planet. He doesn’t think for a moment “hey, those guys look a bit like turtles. Wonder if they’re related to those mysterious Clutch my foster mother told me about when I was a child”. Seems he never saw a picture. Yet terrans are not overly surprised when meeting Clutch turtles; they at least seem to know that the species exists. Many of them also seem to know (or at least be able to figure out through research) that it’s important to keep one’s word given to an individual of that species. Liadens, on the other hand, seem to take the turtles more or less for a myth. It does fit to Liaden culture to not to be too curious about other species and not to care about them (which is not valid for members of Clan Korval), and it may even be so that terrans are in general much more careful when dealing with the Clutch as those are big and strong and don’t look like something to be messed with. Yet that does not seem to be enough to explain the discrepancy in knowledge. Exchange of knowledge between diffrent worlds seems to be extremly limited. Makes one wonder how the agents do get along at all.
I think it’s Edger specifically, the individual turtle who became Val Con’s brother, that Val Con’s family took leave to doubt. I know I’d be dubious if my brother came home with tales of having acquired a Turtle as an elder brother even if I knew Turtles to exist.
In “Breath’s Duty”, Daav displays an impressively solid knowledge of Turtle culture, though of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that similar knowledge is available to everyday Liadens, or even to less experienced Scouts than himself. (The Scouts would have to know something about Edger’s planet to have been able to judge its suitability as a test location, but on the other hand being too widely known would itself have been a mark against its suitability.)
Daav has spent quite a lot of time amongst terrans, teaching cultural genetics. He might have learned more about the Clutch from other terrans. I havn’t read Breath’s Duty so I can’t comment more on that part.
Edgars planet might have been the target of previous scout visits. It’s a safe enough world in general (if one doesn’t meet a dragon), and it gives some too ambitious young scouts something to puzzle about.
When Edger is introduced for the first time in Agent of Change, he is described as beeing larger and looking a bit diffrent from Clutch which work as diplomats on human worlds. It’s not clear here if that includes Liaden worlds. There is that planet Volmer which according to Val Con is governed by Liadens, Terrans and Clutch together. And they disguise their vehicle as one operated by the YXtrang ambassador. Imagine an ambassador of that species on Liad… When Edger and Val Con first meet, Edger does speak both Terran and Trade, he does know how his name looks like on a visa, but he doesn’t know much about Liadens. He does admit to have met a few Liadens, though not many. The term “Scout” is not known to him. It seems likely that all those encounters where some form of official meetings of diplomats.
Liadens do not seem to have any form of media besides the Gazette. The scouts are the ones who encounter alien species, and they don’t seem to know much about the Clutch either, though they would have heared about them from the Terrans even before Val Con’s meeting with Edger. First-hand experience would have been rare (Edger had centuries to meet those few Liadens he had encountered) and was not passed on to other members of the Liaden culture.
I have to wonder whether it was the l’apeleka specifically, that enabled him to break their conditioning. By that I mean, does it require l’apeleka or does it only require *something* that the native will can latch on to, to fight the overlaid programming? I suspect it is the latter, especially since we discover in later books that there are other strategies available to those who have the strength of will to endure them. *that* is what Val Con had…the strength of will to use whatever came to hand against his DOI conditioning. For him it was l’apeleka and a term completely off their charts: carpe diem.