Tag Archives: Liaden timekeeping

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 29

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 155
Third Shift
12.30 hours

In which there are consequences of the encounter at the jump point.

When Kayzin Ne’Zame suggests to Shan that Priscilla should be promoted to second mate, I suspect that’s Shan being a trader and allowing himself to be reluctantly persuaded into the course of action he already wanted to take.

This chapter contains a hint that there’s an actual practical reason for Shan to carry that glass of wine with him everywhere. As he told Priscilla, he does drink from it sometimes. The rest of the time is perhaps so that the times when he needs it don’t stand out, to give away something that might produce a disadvantage.

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 28

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 155
Third Shift
12.00 hours

In which Gordy becomes a tree.

A little domestic interlude before the crew meeting, which is no doubt going to have Consequences.

I like the part where Lina is watching Priscilla at work. It adds to the ongoing thing of Priscilla’s friends learning about her, and it’s also a nice example of the technique of having a character compare an unfamiliar thing with a thing that’s familiar to the character but not so much to the reader, and thereby show the reader more about both things.

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 27

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 155
Second Shift
6.00 hours

In which Sav Rid Olanek makes a countermove.

Just one of those details one notices: Near the beginning of the chapter, Priscilla wishes she might be told that she’d done something well, rather than the second mate’s understated “okay”. By the end of her chapter, she’s got her wish, although (as is so often the case with wishes) in circumstances that she might happily have foregone if given the choice.

One wonders precisely what instructions the mercenaries were given that their captain summarized as “he wanted you out of the race real bad”. I’d be inclined to assume that meant shoot-to-kill, but we were told earlier that death is not usually considered an appropriate way to achieve Balance, and I don’t think Sav Rid’s that far gone yet. Is he?

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 26

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 155
First Shift
4.00 hours

In which preparations are made for departing Arsdred.

Shan apparently has an alarm clock set so that hitting the snooze button makes it try even harder to wake him. There are days when I could do with one of those.

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 25

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 148
Fourth Shift
20.00 hours

In which even a Mendoza of Sintia must deal with graceless people at parties.

Though Priscilla welcomes the intercession of Mr dea’Gauss and Judge Zahre as divine intervention, she might reasonably be inclined to doubt that that was what it was after it results in Ambassador Grittle’s outburst. And yet, I wonder; we know from the Moonhawk stories that the Goddess is not averse to steering her children through uncomfortable moments on the path to good outcomes, so it’s possible that there was a divine intervention and that the outburst was as much an intended part of it as the intercession. (Indeed, there are times when I suspect that the entire course of Priscilla’s life from that day in Diablo’s has been part of divine plan that we have yet to see the end of. It’s a hard road she’s been walking, but certain people seem to have spent the last few centuries building roadblocks over all the easy ones.)

Speaking of roadblocks, I take it that Shan’s shadowed expression in the last scene of the chapter is due to the reminder that, for all that they’re able to be comfortable and joke together, Priscilla still thinks of him first of all as Captain yos’Galan, with all the limits that implies on how they might interact. If she’d understood that she had the option of replying to her friend Shan instead of to her captain, and if she’d chosen to exercise that option, the conversation might have proceeded very differently.

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 24

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 148
Fourth Shift
17.00 hours

In which Priscilla’s sister offers her a gift.

This chapter heading offers a couple of puzzles.

In the first place, it’s now the following day and yet also still the day of the ambassadorial reception — but I think I have that figured out: though the previous chapter begins on Tripday 147, it’s not unlikely that Mr dea’Gauss found enough work to keep him busy through several shifts, so that the final scene of the chapter (“much later, after the inspectors had left for the night”) is actually early on Tripday 148. And it’s in the final scene that Shan says that the reception will be later the same day.

The other puzzle, which I have no such satisfying solution for, is that it says both “Fourth Shift” and “17.00 hours”, which doesn’t work in either my favourite or my less-favoured models of the Passage‘s shift system. In fact, I believe there is no way of dividing the day into four equal shifts that would place 17.00 hours in the fourth shift.

Unless.

Unless, for some reason, the shift times are offset so that the change from one day to the next occurs not at shift change but during a shift. A 24-hour day divided into 6-hour shifts fits the available data — if the first shift begins with the last hour of the previous day. Second shift from 5.00 to 11.00, third shift from 11.00 to 17.00, fourth shift from 17.00 to 23.00, first shift from 23.00 to 5.00. It even accommodates chapther 10 without any need of fudging.

(But at this point I won’t be surprised if another chapter later on fails to fit this model, too.)

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 23

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 147
Third Shift
15.00 hours

In which Mr dea’Gauss gets to work.

So, about three days to get from Liad to Arsdred in a hurry. (Dutiful Passage, I think someone said in a recent chapter, has taken about four months to get to Arsdred, but it was going the scenic route and stopping places for days or weeks along the way.)

The exchange rate for Terran bits to cantra is still (or again?) 35,000 to 1, as it was in Balance of Trade.

There are a remarkable number of ambassadors on board the Passage at present. Apparently, they’re here for an ambassadorial reception, but it says something about the ship’s melant’i, that it’s able to hold ambassadorial receptions — and more, that so many are in attendance when the ship is still in lockdown, with nobody allowed on board without specific authorization. (I get the impression from the ambassadors who have had speaking parts that some of them have come specifically because of the ship’s present situation, to show solidarity.)

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 21

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 144
First Shift
1.30 hours

In which the long arm of the law reaches toward Dutiful Passage.

The nature of the accusations against Shan’s ship offer food for speculation. The one about “illicit pharmaceuticals” might be a sign that Sav Rid Olanek has somehow got wind of Lina and Rusty’s thwarted venture with that remarkable perfume, or it may just be the old trick of accusing one’s adversary of one’s own sins. We don’t get any elaboration on the “proscribed animals”, but I’m inclined to look toward the norbears in the pet library; we know from Mouse and Dragon that they are proscribed on some worlds, though presumably Lina or somebody would have checked what the rule is for Arsdred and filed whatever paperwork was necessary to let them sit in orbit for the duration of the Passage‘s visit.

Trellen’s World has previously been mentioned, during Er Thom’s visit to the Passage in Local Custom, in a context that links it with Arsdred but doesn’t shed any light on why Budoc finds the thought of it so impressive here.

It would appear from Shan’s complaints of him that Val Con has inherited his father’s reluctance to settle for a temporary marriage to secure an heir. (Or perhaps he’s just too busy not-being the Delm-in-waiting.) Shan, on the other hand, apparently has no such troubles; this chapter also contains the series’ first mention of his daughter Padi.

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 20

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 143
Fourth Shift
18.00 hours

In which Lina consults with a colleague.

A lot happens in a very little space in this chapter, but I don’t have much to say about it. Some of it is like Lina’s attempt to explain melant’i and her more successful word-picture of Lady Kareen, which I think are each respectively the first such published in the series, but both of which have in this chronological re-read been well and truly pre-empted by the prequels. Some of it is like Lina and Shan’s discussion of where he stands with regard to Priscilla, which falls into the area of things I’m just not good at talking about generally.

I do like the warmth and attention to detail in the depictions of Lina’s conversations with each of her friends in this chapter.

The mention of Lina’s interactions with Shan when his mother died and again when his father died suggest to me that he was on the Passage both times. Not that I believe he would shun her company when they were home on Liad, in the normal course of events, but a death in the family is not in the normal course of events, and the ones we’ve seen have generally been accompanied by withdrawing from social contact for the period of mourning.

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 19

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Shipyear 65
Tripday 143
Third Shift
16.00 hours

In which Shan has some explanations.

This is a significant turning point for Shan and Priscilla, with Shan finally explaining what’s going on and the two of them agreeing on a future course of action.

We get another mention of that elusive person, Anne’s brother Richard, and perhaps the most extensive account of him, in Shan’s description of his conflation of Liadens with elves. Shan doesn’t say why Richard picked on Val Con for the role of “king of Elfland”, but presumably it’s because he had heard some account of the Contract which once prompted Anne to accuse Val Con’s father of being King of Liad. In which case, I’m pretty sure this is the first intimation, in published order, of the existence of the Contract.