Bechimo
Crew Lockers
In which news is received of absent friends.
There I go again: the question I asked last entry is immediately answered, and not in the way I expected.
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The Gathering Edge – Chapter 26
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Tag Archives: Jermone Joyita
The Gathering Edge – Chapter 24
Bechimo
Minot Station
In which Win Ton considers the future.
I wonder at the passing mention of “a local intrigue having to do with a weather prediction”. Again, it might be just a detail thrown in to add richness to the scene, but I find that I wouldn’t mind learning what that was about.
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The Gathering Edge – Chapter 23
Bechimo
Aubernet System
In which Bechimo arrives in a new place.
Lots of technical details in this chapter, which is impresive but not the kind of thing I personally find most entertaining to read or talk about.
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The Gathering Edge – Chapter 6
Repair Bug
In which the Pathfinders offer assistance.
…or the other thing could happen, which is that they think Theo is a pirate. Which I can see how that might seem like a reasonable consideration, from their point of view.
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Dragon Ship – Chapter 39
Jemiatha’s Jumble Stop
In which Bechimo and his Captain rescue their crew.
Bechimo‘s reserve personalities were mentioned back in Ghost Ship, shortly after Theo first came aboard; Bechimo had just started really wondering if Theo was the right captain, and worried for a while that accepting her and Win Ton might be not only a bad judgement call but the first sign of a mental instability that would end with him being deactivated and replaced by one of the reserves. So there’s a kind of Balance to them being mentioned again now, when he’s come to the conclusion that it was the right call after all.
I am kind of wondering, however, what kind of situations the Builders were expecting Bechimo to get into, that they gave the ship the kind of abilities it demonstrates in this chapter.
Dragon Ship – Chapter 33
Bechimo
In which Bechimo is concerned for the safety of his crew.
We lead off immediately with the important news: despite Bechimo’s concerns about the Remastering Unit being affected by the Department’s attack, Win Ton is all right.
Well, okay, the important news is that Bechimo is still in one piece, but that’s pretty much implicit in the news about Win Ton, right?
(As the chapter progresses, though, there are hints that maybe Win Ton’s recovery wasn’t entirely unaffected.)
I’d like to know a bit more about how Bechimo “extrapolated this location”. It makes sense that a place like this wouldn’t be somewhere you’d be able to learn the co-ordinates of from piloting records – for that matter, if the main appeal of it is that nobody else can find it, being able to find the co-ordinates in piloting records would be a disqualification – but extrapolated from what? while seeking the answer to what question?
Dragon Ship – Chapter 31
Ynsolt’i Incoming
In which Bechimo finishes with its detour and arrives at Ynsolt’i.
And the narrative jumps forward, so we get no more information directly about what the norbears have to say or ask about Joyita. Whatever it is, it seems like it’s not a mark against Theo or Bechimo, seeing as they’ve been selected to host the Embassy Mobile to Norbears.
I wonder how much actuality there is behind the Embassy Mobile. It seems clear from the way Master Peltzer talks that it was genuinely Hevelin’s own idea to go travelling with Bechimo, but is the Embassy itself just a legal fiction to keep him out of trouble in systems that don’t like norbears, or are there actual formal diplomatic relations between norbears and the Clans of Men? Was the point of meeting Sinaya that the business required the approval of a higher-ranking norbear? It seems kind of unlikely – not, I should say, because I’m in any way doubting the intelligence of norbears, just that they don’t seem temperamentally inclined toward formal structures and hierarchies – but stranger things have happened.
Dragon Ship – Chapter 28
Bechimo
In which Bechimo leaves Codrescu.
There are some intriguing hints in Bechimo’s flashback. Joyita being removed from the project early. The Uncle seeing things differently from the Builders (and perhaps an implication that he too has been removed from the project?). Another mention of that subetheric communication method. And, more prosaically, the origin of Bechimo’s habit of referring to “mere ships”.
This is not an occasion for petty point-scoring, so if anybody noticed it’s wise of them not to say so, but it amuses me that Eylot Control call Theo “First Class Pilot Theo Waitley”, when in less fraught circumstances they would likely have said that they don’t recognise Theo’s qualification.
Dragon Ship – Chapter 19
Tradedesk
In which there are many meetings.
…well, that seems a pretty clear statement that Bechimo was built in or shortly after Jethri’s time, with Arin’s ideas as guidance. There have been other people named Arin (there’s one in Crystal Dragon), and there might even have been another who was a noted thinker on subjects of interest to traders, but it’s not likely there was another who was all that and had a son who took a different path.
But we’re still stuck with the fact that the beginning of Ghost Ship states straight up that Bechimo has been awaiting a captain for over five hundred years – which is to say, since two hundred years before Jethri was born.
(On another, less contradictory, note, we have another hint to go with the one from “Intelligent Design” of a technological underpinning for psychic abilities in the Liaden Universe.)