Tag Archives: Nalli Olanek

Crystal Dragon – Chapters 36 & 37

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Quick Passage

In which we enter the Liaden Universe.

The tale of Moreta‘s Flight has gotta be a shout-out to Anne McCaffrey.

After being in transition for twenty-eight days, Quick Passage arrives at its destination – alone. It’s not clear here, and I remember being confused by it the first time I read the duology, but the authors have said in interviews that all the other refugees from the sheriekas made it to the new universe (by some mechanism I’m still not entirely clear on, but which undoubtedly had the fingerprints of the dramliz all over it) sooner or later.

And when I say “sooner or later”, some of them arrived later than Quick Passage – and some arrived sooner. There are places in the modern Liaden universe, about five hundred years on from here, that have histories stretching back considerably more than five hundred years. (Not to mention that if the modern era is Standard Year 1393, it’s counting from something that happened centuries before the Solcintrans arrived on Liad. Calendars don’t prove anything; Anno Domini wasn’t invented until AD 525. And even if the Standard calendar is a Liaden invention, it may be counting from something that happened back on old Solcintra.)

I wonder if Cantra bothered to ask any of the passengers before naming their planet for them.

Not that it’s an unreasonable choice. (I just suspect they’d rather have called it New Solcintra, or something.) If anything, naming one planet after Liad dea’Syl is a bit small. It’s not just solipsism: this really is the Liaden Universe.

Crystal Dragon – Chapter 31

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Quick Passage

In which Clan Korval exists.

I had always assumed, before I read the duology, that the Tree-and-Dragon emblem of Korval was a combination of the emblems of the two founding lines, and that since the Tree was obviously yos’Phelium’s contribution, the Dragon must have been yos’Galan’s. This turns out to be true in a sense, since Clan Alkia’s emblem is a dragon (which is not just the mascot of Light Wing after all), but it seems kind of unbalanced when yos’Phelium has dragons of its own.

Though perhaps the way to look at it is that both lines are represented by the Tree and the Dragon. yos’Phelium is the tree (for the obvious reason) and also the dragon (because of the branches-with-wings); yos’Galan is the dragon (for the obvious reason) and also the tree (perhaps representing, for Tor An, the piata tree that grew by his family home, and by inference the home itself and all that went with it).

The Clan investiture (which reads very much like a wedding ceremony, which I suppose is not inappropriate) also gives us our first mention of melant’i.

It occurs to me that one of the side-effects of reading on a fixed schedule of one chapter per day is that it messes with the pacing. An author who wishes to give the impression that events are picking up speed might go for lots of short chapters, but at one chapter per day shorter chapters mean that events proceed slower (and the long, slow chapters zip by in comparison).

I had completely forgotten the wrinkle involving Mr dea’Gauss’s family. I look forward with interest to seeing what Cantra intends to do about it.

Crystal Dragon – Chapter 30

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Solcintra
Near Orbit

In which a new venture calls for new names.

The Service Families have declared themselves the new High Houses of Solcintra. That didn’t take long.

Partly in response, Cantra and Tor An decide to strengthen their association, from perhaps-temporary co-pilots to permanent clanmates. (As I recall, Shan’s recounting of the Clan’s history in one of the later novels implies that they didn’t take that step until after landfall, but it does make sense for them to take the step now, for all the reasons Tor An mentions – and it has always been said that the contract was with Clan Korval, so that’s all right. In situations like this, Lois McMaster Bujold is wont to say that “the Management reserves the right to have a better idea later.”)

And on reflection, while it makes first-glance sense for the idea of forming a Clan to have presented itself later, at the point where the voyage was over and Cantra and Tor An needed to decide how they were going to carry on into the future, I’m not sure the Cantra we’ve come to know in this duology would have made this choice then. Forming Clan with her co-pilot means hitching her destiny to someone else’s in a way she’s never done, and I get the feeling that on some level she’s only letting herself do it now because it’s not going to matter if they all die soon anyway. If they’d waited to decide until they knew for sure they had the rest of their lives ahead of them, I don’t know that she might not have got cold feet.

Crystal Dragon – Chapter 29

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Solcintra

In which some details are hammered out.

Of all the familiar names that unexpectedly turn up in the duology, dea’Gauss is probably my sentimental favourite. (Although I feel moved to note that he’s not as accomplished a contract-wrangler as his descendant, if that’s not too obvious a thing to be worth saying; I can’t imagine the modern Mr dea’Gauss letting a clause get past him that was so ambiguous as to support several centuries of dispute about its interpretation.)

Another amusing thing in this chapter is the list of things the Solcintrans avoid using: genetic engineering, AI, mobile phones — in short, all the technologies whose absence might have caused a reader in 2006 to regard the twenty-year-old future established in Agent of Change as a bit dated.

(That said, it makes sense for a culture who use body language so heavily as the Liadens do to not make much use of mobile phones. You can’t bow properly over a mobile phone.)

Crystal Dragon – Chapter 28

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Solcintra

In which certain negotiations take place.

The two Solcintran negotiators both have names that recur in the Liaden Universe – which is perhaps only to be expected. Some of Nalli Olanek’s descendants will find themselves in dispute with some of Tor An’s descendants in Conflict of Honors, and Clan Hedrede is mentioned a couple of times in Scout’s Progress and Mouse and Dragon, with a Dath jo’Bern of that clan being an incidental character in the latter. (With thanks to the Liaden Wiki – my memory for obscure details is not that good.)

The Enemy have taken out High Command in its withdrawn and reinforced position, without having to pass through any of the intervening space, which just shows how much good that did.

We see the origin of Cantra’s logbook, which will become a tradition upheld by her successors; that answers something I’d been wondering aloud a while back.

Another thing I’d been wondering, though it never quite got to aloud, was about Moonhawk and Lute’s colleagues in the Great Weaving. It’s pretty obvious that Moonhawk is the same Moonhawk who is Priscilla’s guiding spirit when she’s a priestess of the Goddess, and seems clear therefore that the other guiding spirits from Priscilla’s religion are this Moonhawk’s sisters in the Great Weaving (I don’t recall that any of their names are ever given, in either context). What I’d been wondering was whether, since they’re presumably all a dramliza pairing like Moonhawk and Lute, all the guiding spirits have masculine sidekicks like Lute and it was just that somehow we’d never heard about them. The scene in this chapter where Lute learns that Moonhawk has made an independent space for him in the Weaving suggests that no, it’s just Lute.

(I think where I went wrong was at “dramliza pairing like Moonhawk and Lute”; there’s probably no other dramliza pairing that’s quite like Moonhawk and Lute. One of the other things I’ve been realising on this re-read is that my understanding of the dramliz from the first time through had been weighted too much toward taking Rool Tiazan and Lute as typical of their station, when as two of the few – or even, for all it’s said, the only two – free zaliata to have accepted the yoke, they’re each blazingly unique.)