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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Surebleak
In which Korval is keeping its head down.
Oh, yeah. And the survey team. I’d forgotten about them, what with so much else going on.
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Vivulonj Prosperu
In which the Uncle learns the outcome of his project.
He chose to be amused. The better reaction for everybody, I expect.
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Surebleak
In which it’s a new day.
It looks like we’re done with dramatic confrontations for now, and are into the part of the book where things are wound down and tied off. There were a couple more dramatic confrontations I was expecting, but maybe they’re being saved for next time.
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Tinsori Light
In which there is a universe.
I wonder if shutting down life support on the docking area is going to be a problem later. It might make things difficult if they have to evacuate in a hurry — or if more help arrives.
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Tinsori Light
In which Tocohl makes a status report.
I found the jump from where Tolly and Haz were at the end of the previous chapter to where they are when they show up in this one so jarring that I actually flicked back a few pages to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped a chapter. Maybe it would have been a short chapter, and amounted to “Everything went according to plan for once”, but it still feels to me like its absence leaves a perceptible gap. Even a sentence or two from Tolly or Haz about what they’d been doing since the end of last chapter would have helped. (Maybe we’ll still get that in an upcoming section, and I just haven’t got to it yet because I stopped to write this entry.)
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In which matters proceed with unexpected swiftness.
We were discussing pacing in the comments a few posts ago, and I said that I have trouble judging it because I only read one chapter a day. This isn’t entirely true; although I usually do read one chapter and write one blog post a day, I sometimes get ahead of the schedule if the story is exciting enough to pull me forward. (The record is the end of Scout’s Progress and beginning of Mouse and Dragon, where I burned through at least a dozen chapters as quickly as I could write the blog posts between.) The reason I mention this is that there have been a couple of places in Neogenesis, including this chapter, where I’ve started to feel that pull forward, only for it to be cut off as the story switches to a different set of characters. Switching to a new storyline every time the current one gets exciting is a way to keep suspense, but it also means that each storyline has trouble building momentum.
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In which the light keeper shares the gift of his knowledge.
Last time, I mentioned two things an experienced Liaden Universe reader might know about the light keepers that someone coming to this novel cold wouldn’t, and already both have been brought out in the open. Which is fair enough, because they’re both important things to know.
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Ahab-Esais
In which Tocohl and Inki meet the light keepers.
They’re not dead yet. That’s a good start.
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In which Jen Sin yos’Phelium leaves his ring at Tinsori Light.
This is one of my favourite of the Liaden short stories, but I’m having the problem again of not knowing what to say about it, and not feeling moved to talk about things I might have made more of if it were my first reading.
The story does not give a specific date, though we know it’s before Scout’s Progress and on the other hand the presence of an autodoc on Jen Sin’s ship argues for it being later than Balance of Trade. I stuck it here because there was a gap, and I thought it fitted thematically with the stories we’ve been reading lately, with the concern about Old Technology.
The Old Tech autodoc that repairs Jen Sin is clearly related to the one Cantra had in her ship, complete with the “you’re now in perfect health, but you could be better than perfect” spiel.
The thing I’m wondering is: how did that set of coords find its way into Korval’s set of emergency destinations in the first place? Someone connected with Jela might have known about the Tinsori waystation, but that was in the old universe, and as Lorith points out the Light’s location and coords changed in the transition to the new. The optimistic option is that somebody marked the space down as a quiet, out-of-the way place to hide out for a bit (like Bechimo‘s favourite hiding place in Dragon Ship) without noticing or being noticed by the Light. A less reassuring possibility is that there was someone else in the past, less suspicious than Jen Sin, who had their ship repaired by the Light and then took it back into the wide universe.