Tag Archives: First Pair

Ghost Ship – Chapter 30

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Boss Vine’s Turf
Surebleak

In which Theo is offered a trade route and a seed pod.

One advantage of re-reading is that when you know where the story’s going, it can be easier to make out what the foreshadowing is trying to tell you. For instance: Here is Clarence, who’s made himself unpopular enough that somebody came to shoot at him, and probably hasn’t helped his case much by being so unobliging as to shoot the person who came to shoot him. Might be he’ll soon be in a situation where a job that takes him offworld for a longish while will be just the thing he needs.

And Clarence’s visitor is interesting: Seems to have known him from when he was working on Liad, and got on the wrong side of him then. An independent operator, not a fellow Juntava, is my impression. It’s not just Korval’s friends who are making the trip to try their luck in the new land of opportunity.

Ghost Ship – Chapter 23

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Bechimo

In which Theo and Bechimo come to an agreement.

It’s a good thing for Theo (and, as she reminds us, Win Ton) that Bechimo agreed with her reasons for venturing out into the dangerous universe again. There doesn’t seem like there’s much she could have done if he hadn’t.

One hundred twenty-six years is a long time to be waiting in an empty patch of space with nobody to keep one company. Though perhaps, when it comes down to it, not that much worse than the other three hundred plus years spent waiting in more occupied patches of space with nobody to keep one company. When we get reminded how long Bechimo‘s been waiting for Captain and crew, the wonder is maybe that he’s not even less well-adjusted than he is. It’s probably a testament to how much care the Builders put into adjusting him in the first place.

Tomorrow: “Hidden Resources”, then “Kin Ties”, “Code of Honor”, then back to chapter 24.

Saltation – Chapter 32

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Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Theo’s parents receive her news.

There’s some looking-back going on in this chapter; not just to Theo’s recent activities, but further back to the events of Fledgling with the news that Kamele’s friend Ella has become the Chair of EdHist and is well advanced in repairing the damage there. (Ella professed to believe, back in Fledgling, that Kamele would be the next Chair, but I think this outcome was more likely and is more useful to all concerned, given their respective attitudes to office politics.)

And then, even further back, to Staederport, which we learned in Mouse and Dragon was where Aelliana first met Jen Sar Kiladi, coincidentally on the same day that she and her co-pilot introduced Hevelin the norbear to Bruce Peltzer of the Pilots Guild.

Like Mouse and Dragon, Saltation has a lapse of some years between chapters (specifically, this chapter and the next). And, as with Mouse and Dragon, I will be putting Saltation on hold while I read the stories set in the gap — beginning, tomorrow, with a return to Eylot for “Landed Alien”. After that, it’s back to see how Clan Korval (remember Clan Korval?) is getting on.

Saltation – Chapter 5

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Combined Math Lab
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which Theo goes over her math drill and her memories.

It turns out the Chelly wasn’t just worried about Theo: he knew the pilot who Theo watched being shot down.

The fleeing pilot was named Hap Harney, a former student of the Academy, and the pursuers were officials of some stripe. And Theo might have been suspected of being an accomplice to his flight if her instructor hadn’t had the foresight to have her not only get out of the air but power down and get out of the glider. (Well, she’s suspected anyway, because this seems like one of those everyone-is-a-suspect situations, but she’d have found the suspicion harder to shake.)

We still don’t know what Pilot Harney was up to that got him shot down and shot up by four pursuing jet fighters, except that it apparently had something to do with Politics.

I don’t have an opinion yet about whether the behavior of Asu’s Checksec was deliberate or just thoughtlessness. I’m inclined to believe thoughtlessness on Asu’s part, but we don’t know what priorities the Diamon security head who gave it to her might have had.

It’s not much of a surprise to learn about Theo’s relationship with Bek, considering the direction their interactions were headed the last time we saw them together. The only other person we saw her interacting with in Fledgling that might have been a likely candidate for First Pair was Kartor, and although he seemed to attach some particular value to her, judging by his tendency to leap to her defence, she didn’t appear to think of him that way (nor to be particularly impressed by having her defence leapt to). In any case, he might well have got his job on the Station and moved (as it were) out of Theo’s orbit by the time she got back from Melchiza.

Fledgling – Chapter 42

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Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Theo turns fifteen.

This is one of those cases where I don’t feel inspired to talk about any of the things I might have talked about if I were reading the novel for the first time, and there weren’t many new things I noticed. Although I did notice this time Jen Sar’s fishing trip in the mountains, which I suspect was at least partly intended to lay a foundation for a tale to tell anyone who asks where the idea of the old-style Gigneri came from.

I will note that this is another novel I like more after this re-read than I thought I did after I read it the first time.

It’s not easy to establish precisely when Fledgling takes place, due to a lack of outside referents. From Theo’s age we know that it’s more than fifteen years since Jen Sar came to Delgado at the end of Mouse and Dragon — but, as Theo points out in this chapter, that’s Delgadan years, and we have no indication of whether those are longer or shorter than Standard Years, let alone by how much. All we can say with confidence is that it’s after Jen Sar’s last scene in Mouse and Dragon and before his first appearance in Plan B. (The suggested reading order by internal chronology on the authors’ web site places Fledgling after Plan B, but that’s a clear case of bending chronology for the good of the story flow and reading experience, making it in effect an entire novel-length flashback; there is no possible way Jen Sar’s scenes in Plan B happen before Fledgling.) The positions I’ve given Fledgling and Saltation in this re-read are approximations achieved by starting at the end of Saltation and counting backwards based on my memory of what occurs in them; I’m taking notes as I re-read and hopefully I’ll end up with a less approximate idea of how much time they cover. (But when I publish my own suggested reading order by internal chronology at the end of the re-read, it’s likely I’ll be adopting the strategy of bending chronology for the good of the story flow and reading experience, the good sense of which becomes more apparent to me the further the re-read progresses.)

Tomorrow: Saltation

Fledgling – Chapter 29

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Vashtara
Atrium Lounge

In which Jen Sar makes a contact.

Lystra Mason doesn’t have much of a future in surreptition: when she attempts to pretend that she doesn’t know what Jen Sar is talking about, she denies a specific accusation that he hasn’t explicitly made yet. It’s true that he hints at it, to show he knows what she’s up to, but if she really had no idea what he was talking about the clue would have gone straight past her. (It went straight past me, and I did know what he was talking about; I had to go back and re-read what he said before I could see what prompted her denial.)

It has occurred to me to wonder whether the people behind this plan on Delgado are the same people behind what happened to Aelliana in Mouse and Dragon. The possibility has surely occurred to Aelliana and Jen Sar as well, which perhaps explains the degree of Aelliana’s interest here.

Fledgling – Chapter 28

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Vashtara
Dining Hall Lobby

In which offers are made at mealtimes.

I’m amused by Jen Sar’s private observations of the care Roni has taken with her appearance. But I wonder about his discourse on the subject of the first-pair: it doesn’t seem in character for him, but on the other hand it doesn’t seem in character that he would simply be saying whatever he thinks Lystra wants to hear; like many Liadens, he’s disinclined to use an outright lie when a misleadingly-stated truth will serve. (As witness his statement about Lystra standing guardian over that which interests him nearly.) One aspect that comes to mind is that, while he says that he believes in the advantages of a first-pair partner being superior in age and experience, he doesn’t say how much, and leaves Roni’s mother to assume that he considers the gap between Roni and himself appropriate, where perhaps his true belief is only that things are likely to go smoother with a partner who’s a little bit older and not a complete novice.

Aelliana’s assertion that she knew no questionable people before she met him is… maybe true, from a certain point of view; it depends on what questions one is inclined to ask. She certainly had friends among the scouts, who many cultured Liadens including members of her own family would be inclined to consider questionable people. And, for that matter, there were members of her own family who were somewhat questionable themselves, though she might not have thought to say so before she met him.

There are several observations a person might make about the conversation with Hafley and her onagrata, but I’ll content myself with noting that the mention of Clyburn’s pull with Administration provides an additional suggestion, if one were needed, that Hafley’s advice to Kamele about cultivating a young man for the benefit of one’s career was drawn from personal experience.

Fledgling – Chapter 16

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Retrospection on an Introduction
Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Kamele and Jen Sar took a step forward in their relationship.

The second of the full-chapter flashbacks, and it perhaps says something that I let the first one go by without remarking on how it fits into the idea of re-reading the series in chronological order. Which is, clearly, that a flashback chapter belongs where it’s been put by the author, because even if it’s describing chronologically-distant events, the remembering of those events is happening at this point in the story, and it matters to this story that it’s happening here. To have moved these chapters to before the beginning of the novel because that’s when the events-being-remembered happened would have been to do an injury to the story.

(If you were around for the planning stages of this re-read, you may recall that I lost sight of that at one point, when I was deep in the analytical “timeline-all-the-things” headspace that made a full-series chronological re-read possible. I want to take this opportunity to apologise for the mess that conversation was, and to express my gratitude for being talked down from doing anything then that I would have regretted when I found my way back to that other, wiser headspace which knows why a full-series re-read is worth doing.)

About Tra’sia, cha’leken!, the “expression of joy” that Jen Sar declined to translate: We have seen “tra’sia” before only as part of the phrase “tra’sia volecta”, a Liaden greeting for which we have not, to my recollection, ever been given a word-for-word translation. What we do know is that it’s Low Liaden, used for family and close friends; in High Liaden, one might instead say “Entranzia volecta”. We have not seen “cha’leken” before at all, though we have seen “cha’leket”, which is used to refer to a person for whom one feels a sibling’s affection; it might mean a person for whom one feels affection equally strong but of a different nature.

So, the full phrase might perhaps mean something approximately like, “Greetings, beloved!”, or perhaps, “This is a good thing, beloved” (if “tra’sia volecta” is something like “good morning” and “tra’sia” is more like “good” than “morning”). Another possibility is that it’s the Liaden equivalent of the “I see you, sister” that Priscilla gives Lina in Conflict of Honors.

And whatever it means, I have a strong suspicion that the reason Jen Sar was chagrined about it is that it was Aelliana who said it and not him.

Fledgling – Chapter 15

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University of Delgado
Faculty Residence Wall
Quadrant Eight, Building Two

In which Kamele and Jen Sar make plans for the future.

If Theo was unhappy about moving from the suburb to the Wall, how much less is she going to like leaving the planet entirely? Even if it does solve a lot of problems.

I don’t think Jen Sar is unhappy with the idea of looking after Theo, as far as his own preferences go. But there is also to be considered how it would look to outsiders, if Kamele left her daughter in the care of a man — and not only a man she doesn’t have an ongoing relationship with, as far as the world knows, but a man with whom she recently broke off a relationship — rather than, say, her close friend Ella. And particularly at this point in time, when she’s moving in deep political waters and any deviation from customary behaviour may become a weapon against her. And Kamele knows all this as well as he does, which is why, I think, he’s surprised at her even making the suggestion.