Monthly Archives: November 2014

Carpe Diem – Chapter 56

Vandar
Winterfair

In which Sergeant Robertson plans the Snow Wind Trio’s assault on the trio competition.

I’m pretty sure that this is the first published mention in the series of hand-talk. It’s interesting that on this occasion it’s described as “Old Trade” hand-talk, and not a pilot thing. Among other things, it brings to mind the chapter in Crystal Soldier where Cantra exchanged hand-talk with a merchant, and I wondered whether they were using the same kind of hand-talk as pilot hand-talk. Partly because of that, and partly because both “Old” and “Trade” sound more like things Val Con would be taught than Miri, I suspect this is another thing Val Con has been teaching Miri along with the Low Liaden and the bows.

This chapter includes another set of minor characters who get in and out without any gender-specific pronouns: the two children Miri talks to at the brazier.

I wonder how Val Con would have finished the interrupted sentence that began by telling Miri she was wasted as a sergeant.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 55

Vandar
Winterfair

In which there is an opening for a trio.

Speaking of language lessons, Miri’s a lot more fluent in Benish these days too. It’s an interesting detail that she’s started using Benish figures of speech even when she’s talking to herself in Terran.

I don’t know that it tells us anything new, but as a bit of incluing I admire Miri’s statement that once it starts snowing the place will be just like Surebleak except with happy people.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 54

Vandar
Winterfair

In which the first day of Winterfair passes.

Seems Val Con’s taken Miri up on her promise to learn Low Liaden. (And he’s teaching her bows, too; she recognised the bow he gave the king during the medal ceremony.) Well, she did say she has a lot more free time now the king’s men have taken over repair and upkeep of the farm.

And that brings to mind something else I didn’t pick up on in that chapter: the king says something about having arranged for repairs to the farm because of the rebels having done extensive damage, but Miri made it sound like they repaired everything, including the general dilapidation that she and Val Con had been working on. And it doesn’t seem like the rebels would have had time to do a great deal of damage when they were concentrating on dealing with Miri. So was the state of the farm mostly just the state it had already been in before the rebels showed up? And if so, did someone genuinely think the rebels had caused it because they didn’t realise? Or does the king know what the score is, and is using the rebels as an excuse to help out?

Carpe Diem – Chapter 53

Dutiful Passage

In which the captain has a task for the first mate, as one member of Korval to another.

There’s something funny going on with the timing between last chapter and this. Since receiving Nova’s declaration, Dutiful Passage has visited three planets, shedding cargo and crew, a process that must have taken days if not weeks. (From Ardred to Raggtown alone was twenty days in Conflict of Honors, although that was on a trading schedule and they’re presumably travelling more quickly and more directly now.) And so, days or weeks after receiving Nova’s declaration, comes a pinbeam from Anthora, reporting an attack on Trealla Fantrol — which attack took place less than an hour after Nova declared Plan B to be in effect. Pinbeams, we’ve been told, are considerably more expensive than more common methods of long-distance communication, and part of the reason for that is because they don’t take weeks to get to their destination.

On the other hand, the name implies that a pinbeam message is sent directly to its destination, which might mean that it relies on the recipient being in a known location. Perhaps Anthora directed the message to where the Dutiful Passage was scheduled to be, but the Passage wasn’t there because it had already shifted to moving more quickly and more directly, and the message has been playing catch-up since.

Speaking of shedding cargo, there’s an interesting mention of the ship’s very outline having changed, become “lean and sleek”, which suggests that in the normal course of things the ship carries some significant amount of cargo attached to the outside of it instead of carried within internal cargo bays.

What Shan says in this chapter indicates how far off the mark the Department’s view of Korval is. The Department sees that Korval is powerful, and suspects Korval of being a rival for control of Liad’s interests, because that’s what it would be in Korval’s place. But Korval’s interests and priorities are not the same as the Department’s, arising from origins so different that the Department probably wouldn’t be able to understand them even if it was aware of them.

The way Shan tells Priscilla about his decision ties back to the conversation they had earlier about the necessity of seeking for Val Con, in which he said that since they were not yet lifemates Korval’s necessities were not yet hers.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 52

Dutiful Passage

In which the Dutiful Passage is informed that Plan B is in effect.

It’s time for Plan B.

Chapters like this show the value of that thing the authors do where they write a short story about a character or setting to get a feel for it before its first appearance in a novel. There’s a lot of detail and texture in this chapter that probably wouldn’t have been there if the authors hadn’t written Conflict of Honors first. (As I understand it, Conflict of Honors started out being one of those short stories I just mentioned, but turned out to be longer than the authors had initially anticipated.)

Carpe Diem – Chapter 51

Vandar
Winterfair

In which Cory and Meri and Hakan are Heroes of the Realm.

I wonder if the king’s doing Zhena Trelu as much of a favour as he’s presumably trying for; she mentioned a while back that she was thinking of selling the farm and moving into town once it had been fixed up enough to be marketable, and now she’s pretty much stuck with it. With free upkeep and a guaranteed income, admittedly, which makes it less of a burden, and maybe a few months with Val Con and Miri around have added enough good new memories to the place that she’d have reconsidered anyway. Whatever she might think of the arrangement, she clearly knows that there’s no point arguing about it once it’s been publicly announced.

And then Val Con gives the king the bow between equals, which is interesting. Presumably the Benish don’t know precisely what it signifies, but from the zhena’s reaction it still reads to them as being not as respectful as they’d expect. Or is the zhena’s reaction because Miri, following Val Con’s lead, bows instead of curtseying?

I like the bit about the quarterweight of hontoles; it gives the investiture of the Heroes of the Realm a feeling of being a tradition that’s been around for a while. I wonder if a quarterweight of hontoles is worth more these days, or less, than when the first Hero of the Realm was invested.

The king is another of this series’ minor characters who makes a brief but impressively deep impression. I always feel like there’s more going on with him than we ever get to see.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 50

Liad
Trealla Fantrol

In which Rel Vad Yoltak encounters abnormal conditions.

Despite Nova’s worry, Anthora and Jeeves seem to be doing all right for themselves, and justifying the decision to leave someone to hold off invaders. Without active resistance, I wouldn’t put it past the Department to just break in and ransack the place.

Anthora’s polite semi-apology for giving advice to a member of another Clan has undercurrents; as social errors involving members of other Clans go, giving one advice is surely less serious than fronting up to one’s home and ordering one about. It is thus a bad sign, though by this point not a terribly surprising one, that Agent Yoltak fails to take the hint.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 49

Liad
Trealla Fantrol

In which the First Speaker of Korval departs Liad in a hurry.

This is a new wrinkle in Nova’s talent: before, when a Memory came upon her, she was stuck in a fixed re-enactment of a past event, but this Memory is aware of and responsive to the circumstances in which it is being Remembered. That makes sense, though, since this is a circumstance in which a fixed re-enactment wouldn’t be very helpful.

The phrase “the children would be off-planet already” is a useful one. Not only does it save the authors the time and space necessary to list the children individually, it leaves them room to later remember an extra child or two whom they might not have thought to mention (such as, for instance, Pat Rin’s heir, who presumably exists but has not yet been introduced).

Carpe Diem – Chapter 48

Nev’lorn Headquarters

In which Shadia is all joy to see Clonak.

I’ve been puzzling over the sequence of events leading up to this, because the main thing I remembered about Nev’lorn from earlier readings of this chapter was the Department trying to get hold of Shadia, which had left me with the impression that the Department had somehow decided to siphon her off to Nev’lorn and recruit her even before she crossed Val Con’s trail. I think I’ve got it straight now, though: Her transfer to Nev’lorn was authentic Scout business, possibly due to Clonak wanting to keep her away from the Department or perhaps to recruit her in the Scouts’ resistance against it, and it was only after she filed her report from Vandar that the Department decided to take an interest in her.

(Another trick my memory played on me was that I remembered Shadia’s reunion with Clonak playing out in a corridor. I suppose I must have been confusing it with Val Con’s account of how the Department got hold of him.)

According to a series of blog posts Sharon Lee did back in 2009 about the authors’ collaboration process, the closest they ever got to a major deadlock was on the question of whether Shadia and Clonak survived the end of this chapter. (Neither of them actually wanted Shadia and Clonak to die, but one of them was convinced it was the inevitable consequence of events up to this point.) The blog posts, which all make fascinating reading, are here: Part 0, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The story about this chapter is in the last part (but do be aware, if you’re in a position where it matters, that it does give away what decision they eventually reached).

Carpe Diem – Chapter 47

Liad
Trealla Fantrol

In which Nova visits Access Grid 703.

I’m not sure how much good it did to tell Nova not to talk to the Department of the Interior and encourage her to use Val Con’s credentials to log into the Department’s system. If the point of the former was to avoid attracting the Department’s attention, what did Val Con expect the latter to do? Did he think the Department wouldn’t be watching for his login? I suppose it might make sense that he assumed they’d think it was him, and wasn’t expecting that they’d be able to determine where the login was actually coming from.

I don’t buy all that stuff in the Objectives and Guidance about forswearing allegiance to self-serving Clans and allying oneself to the Department which serves the interests of Liad as a whole. I think that’s guff for the punters, and the Department is really acting for its own individual interests just as much as any Clan is.

I also find myself wondering about the stuff about the threat posed by Terra. It’s obviously not true that every Liaden-Terran partnership is a Terran conspiracy, but is that just a bunch of conspirators seeing conspiracy everywhere, or is the Department deliberately and knowingly exaggerating the threat of Terra so that it’s got something to claim to be defending Liad against? The same question, in a way, applies to the Terrans who really do threaten Liadens; the Terran Party is a plausible menace now, but I recall that in Val Con’s father’s time they were considered a bunch of wingnuts who couldn’t connive their way out of a wet paper bag. How much of their increased effectiveness is due, directly or indirectly, to the Department?