“Eleutherios” is, without hesitation, one of my favourite short stories in the Liaden Universe. (It occurs to me that several of my favourites are stories that stand alone, without direct ties to the characters and events of the novels; the extra work called for to establish the setting and characters pays off, I guess.)

The title is from the Greek, and means “liberation”.

One of the things I like about it is that it’s a happy ending all around (except, I suppose, for the police, but somehow I don’t find it in me to feel sorry for them, much). Niku is liberated from captivity, and Friar Julian and his church are liberated from their encroaching poverty.

I always find myself wondering how much of a hand Friar Julian’s gods had in that, because one of the other striking things about this story is that nothing Friar Julian believes about his gods is shown to be wrong. Niku may be chuckling to himself about being able to use Friar Julian’s faith to achieve his goals, but I wonder if somewhere there’s a god chuckling to himself about being able to use Niku’s unbelief in a similar manner.

During this re-read, I found myself wondering if the gods and their consorts might be, as it were, people we know; specifically, with certain details from the duology fresh in mind, it occurred to me that “a god and his consort” might be somebody’s understanding of a dramliza – and that the gods and their consorts might even be, perhaps, the same Names revered on Sintia, seen from a different angle. I am, however, less confident of this idea now than I was about halfway through; by the end of the story, there had been enough mentions of men in Friar Julian’s religion pledging to each other as life partners that I don’t even feel confident assuming that the gods’ consorts are female.

“Eleutherios” is the first story in the re-read that doesn’t have any straightforward indications of when it’s set, so perhaps I ought to say a few words about why I placed it here. The answer, in a few words, is “gut feeling”. It seems, to me, like it’s set early in the Liaden Universe, but there aren’t any details I can point to that firmly settle it, and some of the bits that feel to me like they support my theory could probably be seen to support a different theory if you happened to have one. The aspect I think I can explain most clearly is that there are parts of the culture that remind me of the culture in the Crystal duology, which suggests to me that that wasn’t so long ago; in particular, the police and their restraining chip remind me more than anything else of the bond-threads used to control runaways in the old world.

(There is a thing that needs to be said, sooner or later, about Niku’s kin, but that’s not so much relevant to this appearance as it is to their next, so I think I’ll save it until then. I may, at that time, give it a post of its own.)