Neogenesis – Chapter 13 part II

In which Tolly offers Hazenthull a game of cards.

Looking back over my past posts, I apparently never got around to remarking on the fact that Nostrilia has almost the same name as Cordwainer Smith’s most famous planet in the universe (as seen in the novel Norstrilia, the short story “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons”, and others). I’ve been waiting nearly two years for the story to reach Nostrilia so I can see if the two planets have anything in common beyond their names.

And it appears I’m going to be disappointed, because Tolly and his team have made their escape from Nostrilia space without getting anywhere near the planet, and unless they’re really unlucky I don’t suppose they’ll ever be going back.

But I think I may have my answer anyway, from the one part of Nostrilia we have seen: the elaborate and famously impenetrable defense network surrounding it. Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia has one of those too; “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” is all about someone trying to penetrate it. (He fails, because he’s the villain of the piece.)

Although, at that, Tolly and his team haven’t exactly penetrated the defense net, so much as bounced off it without taking damage. Yet. There’s still the bomb drone to deal with (and the situation different enough from the bomb situation in I Dare that the solution is going to have to be too). And then if they survive this Jump, if I’m correctly interpreting Tolly’s earlier remarks about Admiral Bunter’s plan, they don’t actually know where they’re going to come out at the end of it…

Incidentally, I’m intrigued by the broadcast Admiral Bunter makes in his own name in the midst of all the fake messages he pumps out to confuse the airwaves, because it’s got bits of truth in it. He really is just here to pick up Tarigan, and the other voices really aren’t real. Which makes me wonder about him describing them as “emanations of prior existences”; one way that could be true too is if the ships he’s faking up are the ships of the little armada he ran on back at Jemiatha station, perhaps using details about them he picked up from their comps while their comps were what he was running on.

2 thoughts on “Neogenesis – Chapter 13 part II

  1. James Lynn

    I think that Tolly and the Admiral were assuming that Inkirani had kept Nostrilia informed as to her actions, to a greater extent than was revealed by the pinbeam log that they found, and so the Nostrilian local defense forces would be likely to be tricked into the belief that the Admiral was mentally disintegrating, if those were messages from the ships into which he had been downloaded. Not knowing how much detail Nostrilia had, they would have stuck to the actual ships.

  2. Ed8r

    PA: if the ships he’s faking up are the ships of the little armada he ran on back at Jemiatha station, perhaps using details about them he picked up from their comps.

    Good thinking! That had not occurred to me, but it is certainly a logical deduction from elements of the story.

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