In which Geral Jethri believes in the Envidaria.
If someone had asked me what I expected future Liaden Universe stories to be about, I don’t think I’d have picked “what Jethri’s descendants are doing in the present day” as a possibility, but now that it’s happened it seems like an obvious question to explore.
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Hoselteen
In which Kamele receives news of her daughter.
I like that the news of Theo’s activities comes from news sources that show a range of degrees of reliability and accuracy, where a writer less committed to worldbuilding might have just had one. (I particularly appreciate the detail of the biased summary on the Eylot situation saying “Eylot threatened with interdiction; vessel destroyed”, which makes it sound like somebody threatened Eylot for no reason and then destroyed a ship, instead of Eylot destroying a ship and being threatened with consequences.)
Joyita has acquired a fourth ring since last time they were mentioned, which was at Velaskiz Rotundo, just before Kara signed on as crew – and putting that way makes me wonder if that’s the key. Perhaps the fourth ring represents Kara, and the original two represent Theo and Clarence… or Theo and Win Ton, the holders of the first two ship keys, and the third was added at the point when Bechimo accepted Clarence as a crew member and not just a temporary nuisance. (It appears, I think, at about the same point that Bechimo stops objecting to being addressed as “Chimmy”.)
Bechimo
In which Bechimo‘s crew assess the damage.
It occurs to me to wonder just what it means for a pocket of space to be empty. Most of space, by definition, consists of emptiness; what is it about this particular spot that makes it emptier than any other?
I’m also curious about the image Hevelin shows Win Ton of Theo dancing. That seems more like one of Win Ton’s memories than Hevelin’s; Theo wasn’t in the mood for joyous dancing the first time she met Hevelin, nor during the run to Codrescu and Velaskiz Rotundo that ended with Hevelin coming aboard. Although I suppose there’s still the trip from Velaskiz to Ynsolt’i, after Kara joined the crew; Theo might well have been in the mood to dance then.
I had been noticing that there have been more explicit mentions of the ship’s gravity in this book than is usual for the series. I suspect now it may have been leading up to this introduction of the Struven Unit which provides the ship’s gravity and is also connected somehow to the ship’s Jump ability. (I also suspect now that there’s some connection between the malfunctioning Struven Unit and the unusual behaviour of the flotsam.)
Ynsolt’i Approach
In which Ynsolt’i is back off the agenda.
My response to the Department’s claim of being “proper representatives of Liad” is a rude noise, but I wonder how much the Ynsolt’i authorities believe it.
The pilot from Metrose is another addition to the gallery of one-off characters who make an impression in a single brief appearance, the more impressively for appearing only as a voice. (That sentence was slightly trickier to put together than I expected when I began it, because I realised partway through that the pilot also belongs to the set of characters whom the authors have not burdened with gendered pronouns.)
Bechimo
In which Theo introduces Kara to her ship and crew.
I’ve been passing up several opportunities to comment on earlier, more subtle hints, but it’s pretty obvious now that there’s something going on between Theo and Kara. Good for them, though it’s not entirely consistent with the way their friendship was depicted in Saltation.
Perfection, the ship Asu is serving on, is now revealed to have the full name Asu Perfection. Or is “revealed” the wrong word? The obvious assumption is that its crew habitually shorten the name, in the manner of Shan and the crew of the Passage, but another possibility is that the ship was actually renamed to recognise a member of the Diamon family taking charge.