Monthly Archives: January 2015

I Dare – Chapter 10

Day 286
Standard Year 1392

Teriste MidPort
Panake House, Field of Fire, Speculator’s Trust

In which Pat Rin meets she who is called, among other things, Natesa the Assassin.

We’ve heard the name of Natesa the Assassin quite recently: she was mentioned in “Quiet Knives” as one of the Juntavas judges who had made herself scarce to avoid the disfavor of the late Chairman Krogar. And there was another Natesa way back in “Veil of the Dancer”, which may be part of the reason why I often have trouble remembering which of those two stories is which.

LaDemeter is another name we’ve encountered before: the handgun Theo won by right of conquest shortly before being thrown off Eylot was also a LaDemeter design. To some readers, the name also rings a different bell: it’s a shout-out to the classic Lensmen space opera series, in which the hero’s ray gun of choice was the DeLameter. (It is thus an amusing twist that Cheever’s LaDemeters, rather than being futuristic ray guns, are powered by the classic process of combustible powder.)

I Dare – Chapter 9

Day 50
Standard Year 1393

Lytaxin
Erob’s Medical Centre
Catastrophe Unit

In which healing goes forth.

Erob’s medical technicians think a lot of themselves, don’t they? To be fair, I suppose they have a right to, most of the time; it’s just that this situation is unlike anything they’ve been trained for.

A couple of unexplained visions occur. Shan gets a vision of Moonhawk to match his vision of Lute last week (I really hope those get elaborated on some day), and Miri gets a vision of Val Con in Jelaza Kazone’s garden. Val Con’s easy enough to explain, given the lifemate link, but it seems unlikely, even given the givens, that he and she have literally travelled all the way back to Liad; perhaps it’s Val Con’s metaphor for some safe space within himself that he retreated to for protection from the damage that was unwittingly being done him. It might not be an inappropriate metaphor, at that; the way the Tree meddles with its mobile branches, it might be personally responsible for Val Con’s survival even if it’s not directly present.

I like the moment where Shan thinks of the room he’s in as the “room of catastrophes”, leaving it open whether it’s a room in which catastrophes are dealt with, per the official designation, or a room in which catastrophes are created.

I Dare – Chapter 8

Day 50
Standard Year 1393

Liad
Department of Interior Command Headquarters

In which Commander of Agents moves forward on two fronts.

One of Commander of Agents’ characteristic attributes is the way he’ll casually sweep past concepts with really troubling implications. This is at least the second time his plans for Korval have taken advantage of knowledge gained from confidential medical reports. He has no apparent problem with “retraining” Val Con to betray his own family. And then there’s the box that produces “interesting reactions” in a dramliza confined inside, currently undergoing “testing”; that pretty much has to mean live test subjects, and given the Department’s track record I wouldn’t want to bet on them being informed volunteers.

It’s not quite true that Anthora’s powers have no known limits; there’s at least one known to her kin, which was hinted at in Plan B and will be explicated later in this novel. Her family seem to have kept that one to themselves, which is just as well; the Department has had the opportunity to do a horrifying amount of damage if they’d known about it.

I Dare – Chapter 7

Day 50
Standard Year 1393

Lytaxin
Erob’s House

In which Edger gives a demo.

A nice concise summary from Shan of what a Healer is, and isn’t.

An interesting touch in the med tech’s rant, the complaint that Edger and Sheather are “not of Erob’s house medical staff”. Separately, it’s reasonable to be concerned that they are not certified medical staff, and understandable to be concerned that they are not of Erob’s staff (and therefore are unknowns). But with that wording it isn’t just the sum of those two concerns, but has the flavour of an ingroup-outgroup bias (“Erob’s house medical staff are the best; I am of Erob’s house medical staff and these persons are not; I am obviously right and they are obviously wrong”).

The similarity Shan sees between the Turtles and the Tree is intriguing. It doesn’t mean they’re related, particularly since the similarity seems to be one of kind rather than detail, but more like another facet of their other commonalities, being very old and having more to them than meets the eye.

I Dare – Chapter 6

Day 50
Standard Year 1393

Lytaxin
Erob’s Grounds

In which collecting Yxtrang may be a genetic trait.

Because the sentry’s challenge is followed immediately by Diglon Rifle breaking cover, I thought at first that the sentry had spotted him, but if he and his seniors were keeping so quiet even Nelirikk didn’t notice them that seems unlikely. On further consideration, I think the sentry was challenging Nelirikk and the scouts, approaching openly on the path, but Diglon Rifle thought he’d been spotted and panicked. (I notice that Hazenthull Explorer did a much better job of keeping her head and keeping hidden, as is perhaps to be expected.)

It’s good to know that Explorers still exist. I remember Nelirikk worrying about that in the previous book, since it had been so long since he’d had word of their activities. (He doesn’t seem to give it particular note at the moment, probably because there are more immediate issues to attend to. Possibly also because the issue is not quite so personally important now; back then, the loss of the Explorers would have meant the loss of all he had in the way of comrades and family, which is no longer the case.)

I Dare – Chapter 5

Day 50
Standard Year 1393

Lytaxin
Erob’s Medical Center

In which Miri has visitors.

Forward again now to the day Plan B ended on, for which we now have a specific date.

It is beginning to become apparent that one of the disadvantages of possessing a mystical bond so rare it’s frequently considered mythical is that it might complicate one’s medical situation in ways your average medicial technician is probably not trained to recognise, let alone deal with.

Although, that said, part of the entertainment of this chapter is that in some ways hospitals haven’t changed at all in however many centuries it’s been.

I Dare – Chapter 4

Day 284
Standard Year 1392

Departing McGee

In which Cheever offers a lesson in piloting.

Cheever is clearly of a mind to keep poking at the boundaries of Pat Rin’s Not-A-Pilot-ness. Pat Rin doesn’t expect anything to come of it, since the best pilots in Korval (which are among the best pilots anywhere) haven’t been able to make anything of him, but it seems to me that Cheever might have a chance precisely because he’s not of Korval, and therefore not family, and their interactions are not weighed down by shared history: different approach, maybe leading to different results.

(Pat Rin is in his early forties now, which means he’s had a lot of time to get used to being Not A Pilot. Indeed, it means he’s been Not A Pilot for more than half his life.)

I Dare – Chapter 3

Day 283
Standard Year 1392

Liad
Department of Interior Command Headquarters

In which the economy demands a Korval.

Re-reading in order, we’ve already had the truth behind Pat Rin being “dismissed to a wastrel life of spoiled self-indulgence”. Even without that context, though, I’m pretty sure I could already tell the first time I read this that spoiled and self-indulgent wasn’t really what Pat Rin was like, and that he was unlikely to be as receptive to the Department’s intention as they might have hoped.

I Dare – Chapter 2

Day 283
Standard Year 1392

McGee Spaceport
Fortune’s Reward

In which Cheever has a few words on the importance of backup.

It’s not long after we last saw Pat Rin and Cheever, back near the end of Carpe Diem — they’re still on the same planet they were just arriving at then — but a bit of time has passed, enough for Cheever to go on leave and come off, and for Pat Rin to make several unsuccessful attempts to cut him loose.

It occurs to me to wonder where Pat Rin was planning to go to ground if he had succeeded in cutting Cheever loose. Since, as we are reminded, he is not a qualified pilot himself, that would have dramatically limited his options.

I Dare – Chapter 1

Day 276
Standard Year 1392

Master Jenn’s Workshop
Neglit

In which Master Jen gets what’s coming to him.

This chapter takes us back nearly five months, all the way through Plan B and some distance into Carpe Diem. The dates in Carpe Diem can be vague, but this is almost certainly before Nova declared Plan B to be in force, and although it’s probably after Nova started poking around in the Department’s business, the collection of the ring is only the end of a sequence of events that must have begun well before. The Department plans ahead.

It’s not explicitly stated that the agents murdered the boy as they did the boy’s grandfather, but I think it likely; they would not want to risk him telling anything he might happen to remember. (And past experience of fictional villainy teaches me that the kind of people who promise payment in full and mean “we’re going to kill you” are often also the kind of people who say “we didn’t wake him” and mean “we killed him in his sleep”.) Certainly, since their next action is to destroy the evidence by burning the building to the ground, one hopes they didn’t leave anybody alive inside.