Surebleak Port
Portmaster’s Office
In which the Portmaster has people looking over her shoulder.
Oh, yeah. And the survey team. I’d forgotten about them, what with so much else going on.
It’s an interesting worldbuilding detail that the formal term for Theo’s citation isn’t in Latin, as legal terms usually are in our times, but in what Google tells me is Esperanto.
Portmaster Liu reads Theo’s attitude as indicating anger, but I’m not sure that’s correct. Theo has a long history of appearing angrier than she actually is, and her conversation with Bechimo just beforehand suggests to me that what she actually is mostly is worried.
I wonder if the mention of Liu having had a bad previous experience as a test case is related to the as-yet-untold story of how she ended up on Surebleak.
PA: Theo has a long history of appearing angrier than she actually is.
Huh . . . thanks for mentioning that. I did not recall.
PA: I wonder if the mention of Liu having had a bad previous experience as a test case is related to the as-yet-untold story of how she ended up on Surebleak.
As do I. It sounds like a perfect background for a Liaden short story. I wonder if there’s one planned?
Esperanto. In a different reality, it could have become the universal human language.
Yes, curiosity kicks in: Liu having had a bad previous experience as a test case is related to the as-yet-untold story of how she ended up on Surebleak.
Meanwhile, I forgot I was going to comment here about how much I liked the imagery of Pat Rin’s annoyance expressed through a “toxic increase in irony levels.”
When Theo says that she is a citizen of Delgardo, the Portmaster is unsurprised: merely noting that it doesn’t stop people thinking of her as related to Korval. But although she (I think the Portmaster is female) apparently knew that Theo was a citizen of a Terran planet, she has still been thinking of her as Liaden. She is surprised that Theo shows her emotions on her face, and responds to her direct approach by noting that Theo, together with some of the younger clan members, had ‘taken up the Terran mode.’
But being a citizen is not equivalent to being part of a certain culture group.
Apparently Theo picked up enough of the Clan face from her father, as well as having the Liaden body form, that some Terrans perceive her as Liaden, especially those that know of her kinship with Korval.
@Theo has a long history of appearing angrier than she actually is.
Yes and this is very easy. In this I speak of personal experience. In a situation were I was very afraid, up to the point of not being able to speak, a lot of people told me later, that they believed me to be extremely mad about something – so that they kept avoiding me, which only made me more afraid.
Also to me Theo appeared to be worried and maybe a bit confused, and it made me stop short / hesitate when port master Liu took Theo to be angry. I finally took it as an example of cultural differences between Surebleak and Delgado. On Delgado a frowning person will likely be thinking hard about solving a problem, on Surebleak a frowning person might frown upon someone else’s behavior. At least that is my take on this. Any other opinions?
The way it’s described in Saltation always makes me think that at least part of it is that she spent a formative moment of her life in the pilot school on Melchiza, where everyone is taught to be aggressive and self-assertive, and absorbed the body language without being entirely aware of doing it.
When she lived on Delgardo, where noone assumed that she was Liaden, she was thought of as dangerously clumsy, but not aggressive. We don’t see much of her on Delgardo after she returns from Melchiza, but that doesn’t seem to have changed. Certainly, when people immediately start reading her as aggressive at Anglingdin, it comes as a surprise to her.
I think that on first impression people (who are familiar with Liadens) assume that she is Liaden, and then when she behaves like a Terran, they interpret that as a an annoyed / aggressive Liaden, rather than revising their first impression, and concluding that she’s actually a normally-behaving Terran.
This is probably not just because of her appearance, but also because she has picked up enough Liaden mannerisms from Daav to support the initial impression.
Thanks James, I couldn’t have said it any better. But now that Paul pointed it out, I believe that his impression of having picked up some of the aggressive and self-assertive body language at Melchiza is also true.
Ever since her performance with her dance-teacher on Delgado (whether dance is math or conversation) she might have found a new level of reacting to the body-language around her, especially towards those who seemed to be conversant in that same “language”. And on the ship as well as on Melchizia she started to classify those to who’s body language she reacted especially strong as pilots. So there might be part of her gift also involved, at least on an unconscious level.