Dutiful Passage
In which Padi makes connections and Shan receives news from home.
The looper families Shan mentions are among those who have appeared or been mentioned in the Jethri-era stories: the Smiths were the first family to have norbears travelling with them, the Tragers were friendly with Jethri’s family, and the Wildes did that ill-fated bit of experimenting with Old Tech.
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In which yo’Lanna achieves a crush and Surebleak achieves a coup.
After Val Con commenting at the first inspection that the decor in the entrance hall was unsubtle but mendable, I was looking forward to seeing what had been done with it, but the narration skips past it and straight to the ballroom. Then again, perhaps Lady yo’Lanna hasn’t had time to do anything interesting with it yet.
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In which Syl Vor goes to school.
Personally, I always thought Syl Vor’s objection to the bracelet was worthy of consideration, and his question about whether the other students would be wearing similar was on point, though not perhaps in the way he meant it. He’s already going to stand out from the rest of the group as it is, just by who he is, without making things more difficult by adding another obvious point of difference.
And isn’t it interesting that when trouble does happen, it comes from amiable Pete, and not – say – the more overtly antagonistic Rudy? (Rudy, incidentally, does come from one of the turfs that initially resisted the opening of the Road, though it’s suggested in I Dare that the people there came around once they understood what they stood to gain.)
I don’t remember if the novel goes into this later, but Pete’s reading trouble is a well-recognised dyslexic symptom, and there are some fairly straightforward things that can be done to mitigate it that would be within the reach even of someone living on Surebleak – the trick, of course, being finding someone on Surebleak who might recognise the symptoms and know about the remedies.
Dutiful Passage
In Jump
In which the Passage is welcomed to Lytaxin.
Another chapter where much happens, but all I can find to talk about is minor details like this:
The message signed by Grandmother Cantra establishes that Plan B is very old. It’s even older than the Council of Clans, which wasn’t chartered until the sixth year after Planetfall.
Dutiful Passage
Jump
In which the crew of the Passage investigate the capabilities of the new weapon pods.
Okay, that settles it: the Passage has been in orbit around Krisko all this time.
There are several possibilities for the author of the message with the chess-based code, but I lean toward the Krisko Portmaster, whom the authors made a point of describing near the beginning of the chapter as an old chess partner of Shan’s.
Dutiful Passage
In Orbit
In which Priscilla learns some history.
The dateline doesn’t say what Dutiful Passage is in orbit around. It might be Krisko, since that’s what they were in orbit around the last time their location was mentioned, and they were loading extra weapons then and they’re loading extra weapons now. There’s been the dramatic business with Shan going to speak to Val Con in between, but there’s no reason that couldn’t have happened in orbit around Krisko too; all things considered, it didn’t actually take very long.
If Shan was seventeen when he recruited Seth, then Seth has been with the ship around twenty years. The story of that recruitment has echoes of Shan’s rescue of Ren Zel dea’Judan (“That’s my man, sir”), and for that matter of his hiring of Priscilla (“Always need a good pilot”, even if there’s no vacancies).
I was going to say that I was surprised Shan didn’t pass his discovery on to Nova and save her some trouble, but then I remembered that Plan B is effect and he doesn’t know where Nova is now.
We don’t, I think, know any of the people involved in the last contract between Korval and Erob, when the child came to yos’Galan. The only yos’Galan child of that generation we know of is Petrella, Shan’s grandmother, but we know both her parents and neither was of Erob, so there must have been another yos’Galan who died untimely.
All this talk about the close ties between Korval and Erob has brought on the realisation that they have similar designs for their clan badges: each has a dangerous winged creature flying over something tall and enduring. I wonder if the founders of Erob did that deliberately.
Dutiful Passage
In which the captain has a task for the first mate, as one member of Korval to another.
There’s something funny going on with the timing between last chapter and this. Since receiving Nova’s declaration, Dutiful Passage has visited three planets, shedding cargo and crew, a process that must have taken days if not weeks. (From Ardred to Raggtown alone was twenty days in Conflict of Honors, although that was on a trading schedule and they’re presumably travelling more quickly and more directly now.) And so, days or weeks after receiving Nova’s declaration, comes a pinbeam from Anthora, reporting an attack on Trealla Fantrol — which attack took place less than an hour after Nova declared Plan B to be in effect. Pinbeams, we’ve been told, are considerably more expensive than more common methods of long-distance communication, and part of the reason for that is because they don’t take weeks to get to their destination.
On the other hand, the name implies that a pinbeam message is sent directly to its destination, which might mean that it relies on the recipient being in a known location. Perhaps Anthora directed the message to where the Dutiful Passage was scheduled to be, but the Passage wasn’t there because it had already shifted to moving more quickly and more directly, and the message has been playing catch-up since.
Speaking of shedding cargo, there’s an interesting mention of the ship’s very outline having changed, become “lean and sleek”, which suggests that in the normal course of things the ship carries some significant amount of cargo attached to the outside of it instead of carried within internal cargo bays.
What Shan says in this chapter indicates how far off the mark the Department’s view of Korval is. The Department sees that Korval is powerful, and suspects Korval of being a rival for control of Liad’s interests, because that’s what it would be in Korval’s place. But Korval’s interests and priorities are not the same as the Department’s, arising from origins so different that the Department probably wouldn’t be able to understand them even if it was aware of them.
The way Shan tells Priscilla about his decision ties back to the conversation they had earlier about the necessity of seeking for Val Con, in which he said that since they were not yet lifemates Korval’s necessities were not yet hers.
Dutiful Passage
Liad Orbit
In which Priscilla seeks that which is lost.
The obvious implication of having this chapter here is that it happens not long after Miri and Val Con go to sleep, but I’m not sure I believe that. Priscilla reports that Val Con is “protected within deep meditation”, when we’ve just finished hearing that Val Con no longer believes himself to have access to the protection offered by the deepest level of the Rainbow, and that he is perhaps engrossed in playing music, which he hasn’t been doing any of lately either. So I think perhaps this scene takes place somewhat in advance of the main plot strand, and foreshadows an event we’ve yet to see from Val Con’s side.
Liad
Trealla Fantrol
In which Pat Rin acquires a new pilot.
Speaking of first mentions, I seem to have missed noting the point at which Val Con was revealed to be the next Delm Korval, and not merely a young man whose sister made him Second Speaker in order that she might have an excuse to complain that he was never home.
Korval obviously doesn’t intend to just send Cheever McFarland away now that he’s made his delivery, but it’s not clear yet whether they’re simply thanking him for his service by ensuring him a steady employment until his ship’s renovations are complete, or keeping him under Korval’s wing in case there are any unfortunate consequences to him as a result of becoming involved in Val Con’s recent adventures. The fact that he’s being entrusted to the member of the Clan whom we know from the prequels to be particularly skilled with firearms is certainly suggestive. On the other hand, maybe they’re just hoping Cheever will be an improving influence.
Liad
Trealla Fantrol
In which Val Con’s siblings receive news of his doings.
The mention of “children, cats, and dogs” as potential hazards to navigation is, I think, the first mention of there being dogs in Korval’s Valley, or indeed on Liad. In fact, I’m not sure it isn’t the only mention of dogs at all in the series (outside of Necessity’s Child, which has a major character with a dog). Characters in the Liaden Universe are much more likely to be cat people, like their creators.
Speaking of children, we get a run-down of the youngest generation of yos’Galans: Shan’s daughter Padi has been mentioned before, as has his foster-son Gordy (who would be about 18 Standards old now), but this is the first mention of Nova’s son Syl Vor and of Anthora’s twins, Shindi and Mik. Unsurprisingly, in the latter case, since they’re “brand new” — which is a reminder that just as Val Con’s relatives are unaware of what he’s been up to lately, so is he unaware of their latest news.