Standard Year 1393
Vandar Orbit and Jump
In which Miri is not keen on sleep-learning.
The timing gets tricky again here: Val Con says that he and Miri have been together on Vandar for eight months, but there’s a solid date near the beginning of Carpe Diem and there’s a solid date near the beginning of I Dare and the gap between them is closer to four months.
Four Standard months, that is: Val Con doesn’t say what kind of months he’s thinking of, and since they’ve only just left Vandar, maybe he’s thinking of Vandar’s months — and if that’s so, and a Vandar month is about half the length of a Standard month, it all fits together.
If this is the case, it would also neatly solve the puzzle in Carpe Diem where Val Con said it had been slightly over a month since they left Lufkit and Miri said it was less than a month and the best estimate I could come up with said it was about 20 days. If Val Con was already thinking in local months (which would make sense for a Scout who’s trained to pick up local customs) and Miri was thinking in Standard months (which would make sense for an untrained person who was struggling to pick up the local language), that fits together too.
It’s a good thing I enjoy figuring out how much smarter than me the authors are, considering how often it happens.
Something else I’ve been wrong about, that I need to make a note of because it’s come up in the comments before: I’d always thought before this re-read that autodocs and sleep-learning units were the same thing, but every time I re-read a bit that I thought supported that impression I turn out to have misunderstood it. This chapter is where the confusion started for me; it’s the first time in publication order we see someone go into a sleep-learning machine, and I thought it was the same device as the autodoc Miri was in a few chapters ago, partly because Miri lies down in both and partly because Val Con gets her tested by the autodoc to see if she’s ready to try sleep-learning. On this re-read, I’m picking up the differences, like the autodoc having an entrance hatch on the side that cycles open and closed and the sleep-learner having a lid on the top that raises and lowers.
I thought it was the same device as the autodoc Miri was in a few chapters ago, […] partly because Val Con gets her tested by the autodoc to see if she’s ready to try sleep-learning.
I think I may have nailed down the specific point where the misapprehension settled in: after Miri is tested by the autodoc, and while Val Con is still interacting with the autodoc, he makes a remark about “this module”, meaning the sleep-learning module. Re-reading it now, knowing that they’re two different devices standing near each other in the same room, I can see that in the text, but the first time I read it I understood him to be speaking of the device he was interacting with, the autodoc, and thus took the implication that the sleep-learning module was part of the autodoc.
Satisfying to get the cause of that misunderstanding nailed, isn’t it!