Tag Archives: Pilot in Command time

Saltation – Chapter 29

Anlingdin Piloting Academy
Eylot

In which Theo goes for a walk.

It’s approaching the long break, and the prospect of working at Hugglelans again, so it’s a whole year since chapter 20. A school year, that is, which is not a great deal of help for fixing the timeline without an idea of how the Anlingdin year lines up to the Standard Year.

I’m not convinced Theo’s solution to the problem of next year would have answered the case: moving out of the main quad into the DCCT dorm would have removed her from the immediate vicinity of the parochial and suspicious, but it would have only made things worse in the long run by making her seem to align herself with Them against Us. I suppose, had things been otherwise, it might have served to delay matters enough for her to finish her schooling. Might have. And the attack on DCCT makes it pretty clear that things are not that kind of otherwise.

Healer el’Kemin’s little exposition on the uses of vya expands our knowledge of it somewhat. We had known that it was used to stimulate passion, but previously we had only seen it used to stimulate passions of one particular kind. (And, come to think of it, the information that it has more varied applications offers a new angle on Aito-who-always-wears-too-much-vya.)

Saltation – Chapter 15

Administrative Hearing Room Three
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which certain facts are found.

Theo’s inner calm — as she says, the calm a pilot needs to act not only quickly but well — is, I think, at least partly thanks to the ministrations of the Healer. Wilsmyth does not seem to have attained a similar degree of calm, so apparently he either wasn’t offered the same service or didn’t take to it.

The amount of interplay going on at his table during the hearing suggests to me that he’s inclined to push for more and his advisors are inclined to believe that doing so would not be in his best interests. I note particularly the urgent whispering when the question of victimhood is raised; I can well believe that someone with Wilsmyth’s attitude would consider himself the injured party, but his advisors must be aware that if he tries to push that interpretation of events it’s likely to go against him.

(I’m reminded of something that occurs in passing in Scout’s Progress: a dispute between two Liaden clans which might have been settled in arbitration if one of the disputants had not, as the character describing it says, “taken up the melant’i of victim” and insisted on a formal hearing. Which proceeded to decide resoundingly against the self-assigned victim. But I digress.)

Theo completely fails to take the hint about wanting to speak outside the range of official ears, and has to have it spelled out, but she is young and relatively guileless, and particularly she was raised in a world where “outside the range of official ears” was not a concept to be considered, let alone a situation to be sought out.

Part of her advisors’ plan for balancing Wilsmyth’s attack on her flight time involves her getting to fly a Star King Mark VI, which has the effect of making Wilsmyth seem even pettier in retrospect. Even had Theo been the type to be tempted by the prospect of being upgraded to a newer and shinier aircraft, an upgrade from a Mark II to almost-a-Mark-III doesn’t seem like a bribe worth very much.

Theo being set straight by Instructor yos’Senchul reminds me of an incident when I was about her age and one of my teachers had to set me straight in similarly uncompromising fashion after I did something thoughtless. I don’t want to dwell on what it was I did, which was so spectacularly ill-considered that the me of today can’t imagine doing it, but it seems appropriate to acknowledge that moments like these, uncomfortable as they can be at the time, are important: I’m the person I am today, who would never do something like that, at least in part because of having that experience when I was the person I was then. And if we’re lucky, we get that kind of thoughtlessness out of the way in a relatively safe place where a vehement set-down from a teacher is the worst that results and we can take the lesson without coming to any lasting harm.

Saltation – Chapter 13

Ozar Rokan Memorial Flight Center
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which Theo loses her temper.

The thing that strikes me about this conversation on Wilsmyth’s side is that he clearly hasn’t bothered to learn much about Theo before trying to reel her in. I suspect he has some kind of mental picture of What Junior Students Are Like and has planned his strategy based on how his hypothetical Junior Student would react, instead of taking the time to work out how this particular junior student interacts with the world — with unfortunate results when it turns out that Theo differs from his ideal student in… pretty much every significant respect.

It doesn’t entirely surprise me, since he’s basically trying to pick up Theo as a tool to his own advancement, that he’s not thinking of her as a person with her own viewpoint, but it does kind of surprise me that he doesn’t at least realise what’s likely to happen when he threatens her: he was right there when her reputation for reacting aggressively started. (On the other hand, he was right there and didn’t back down until somebody else pointed out the danger he might be in, so maybe he’s just not very good at spotting what’s going on outside his own head.)

The thing that strikes me about this conversation on Theo’s side is that the subtext of the conversation goes straight over her head without her even feeling a breeze. You can tell she hasn’t been raised Liaden: I don’t know if a Liaden her age would have been able to negotiate a graceful exit from the conversation with Wilsmyth so determined to get what he wants, but she would at least have noticed that he was trying politics on her.