Tag Archives: rebirthing units

Accepting the Lance – Chapter 10

Surebleak Port
Scout Headquarters

In which Clonak ter’Meulen sees a ghost.

Looks like the separately-published Neogenesis outtake describing part of Daav and Aelliana’s visit with Kamele remains in continuity; it fits neatly into the space left between their last scene in Neogenesis and their first scene here.
Continue reading

Alliance of Equals – Chapter 15

Tarigan
Jemiatha’s Jumble Stop
Berth 12

In which an alliance of equals begins its work.

Tolly’s got a job on his hands, here. It will be easier to set Admiral Bunter straight once he’s in a proper installation where he can think properly and has more room for new ideas, but I suspect Tolly’s going to have to manage some straightening out before he can even get the Admiral to agree to the move. If I were the Admiral, I’d be suspicious about being moved into a new body, and worried about what might happen while I was in the middle of moving and not able to concentrate. Not to mention that what ships Inkirani might find to move him into presumably aren’t armed, or Bechimo would have stuck the Admiral into one of them in the first place, and the Admiral might object to being put in a body that makes it harder for him to carry out what he knows to be his job.

I wonder if it would be possible to do a partial move to begin with — say, perhaps just the bits that are crammed into extra and unsuitable computers like the commissary computer someone mentioned, so that he went from being split between thirteen comps on seven ships to being in eight comps on eight ships. That way he’d still have access to all the capabilities of his existing ships, but be less fractured, and have room to think in the new ship, so he could properly consider what he wanted to do next.

It strikes me that there’s a commonality of theme across the two halves of this chapter, speaking of being suspicious about being moved into a new body. Daav has been moved into a new body without being consulted first, and he’s suspicious of what might have been lost — or added — in the process.

(I keep thinking of the pilot who visited Tinsori Light, and who destroyed his ship and himself with it because he couldn’t trust either not to have had any nasty surprises installed in them, and hoping Daav’s situation is not going to come to a similar end.)

Alliance of Equals – Chapter 9

Vivulonj Prosperu

In which patience is a virtue.

Interesting. The scene with Daav is Interlude 9 from Dragon in Exile, only from Daav’s point of view instead of the Uncle’s. Which means this present is after Dragon in Exile‘s main plot line (i.e. the part that had Tolly and Haz in) but contemporaneous with the interlude/subplot. Well, it’s not as if it would be the first Liaden book where the various plot lines travelled at different speeds. The other interesting thing about it is that the empty chamber Daav finds himself in, and gets up to explore, is not real — or, let us say, no more real than the plain he recalls having been on earlier. In the Uncle’s viewpoint, he’s lying in the rebirthing unit the whole time with his eyes closed.

I’m getting really worried about Padi now. If she’d gone ahead with the plan to attack the guard she’d have been in a whole heap more trouble without having achieved any benefit — had she even got as far as thinking about what she planned to do after she’d killed him? (Failure to consider longer-term consequences seems to be a thing with her when she’s upset. Probably an effect of what she did to lock her fears away: if you don’t consider the consequences you don’t need to be frightened of what they might be. But you might also easily do something that solves an immediate problem by causing much worse problems later.)

Dragon in Exile – Interlude 11

Vivulonj Prosperu
In Transit

In which Daav resumes his chair.

Continuing to associate wildly on the name of the Uncle’s ship, the second half is also reminiscent of the name of Prospero, the wizard in The Tempest. I’ll have to think on that some more before I make any decisions about what that might say about the Uncle.

This is the final Interlude of the book, so the next time we see Daav and Aelliana will presumably be when they arrive home on Surebleak, to find a large crowd of people waiting for explanations. Daav will perhaps not be entirely surprised to find Kamele among them; I think he might be more surprised to find that she actually likes Kareen, which is a trick he and most of his friends never quite managed.

Speaking of people arriving home on Surebleak, and of people likely to be wanting explanations, Theo is probably due back soon. Perhaps she’ll arrive at the same time, just to increase the confusion.

Dragon in Exile – Interlude 10

Vivulonj Prosperu
In Transit

In which Aelliana eats a sandwich.

Mint has been established as the characteristic scent/flavour of the Tree’s seed pods, so Aelliana waking up with it on her tongue suggests that the Uncle was able to get her to accept hers.

That’s an intriguing hint about Arin having taken his own path. Does that mean he’s still out there somewhere, following his own path? Or did his own path take him somewhere that meant he could no longer share the Uncle’s kind of immortality? (And why is it his name that occurs to Aelliana?)

Also intriguing is the Uncle’s choice of meal to offer as her first in this new existence: tea and shaped sandwiches is the first meal she had as she began her new life with Daav. It might just be a coincidence, or shaped sandwiches might be a common enough thing on Liad (or perhaps specifically in Healer’s Halls) that he thought would be soothingly familiar, but there’s also that slight chance that it’s a sign he knows details of her life he probably shouldn’t have had access to.

It occurred to me, reading this chapter, to ask: Are Daav and Aelliana still lifemates? In the general sense, obviously, yes, but what about the spooky inside-each-other’s-heads sense? Daav’s inability to sense her presence, and hers now to sense his, might just have been because each was woken while the other was in a coma, but it may be that the bond has been broken because Aelliana is in a fresh new body, and will have to be rebuilt. Under other circumstances there might be a question of whether it can be rebuilt, with Aelliana in a new body that might not have whatever predisposition her original one possessed, but I expect that’s one of the things the seed pods are for.

Dragon in Exile – Interlude 9

Vivulonj Prosperu
In Transit

In which Daav is not yet ripe.

The thing the Uncle didn’t take into account in his plan to wake Daav up first and bring him up to speed while they were waiting for Aelliana to join them is that Aelliana’s presence has been a mainstay of Daav’s existence for decades. There’s a hint of the trouble in the Uncle’s reflection, just before his error makes itself known, that Daav will be inventorying himself and checking his memories: for Daav, that process would automatically include checking to make sure Aelliana is still there, and now she isn’t.

Daav’s first question is always going to be “Where’s Aelliana?”, and the Uncle’s not going to be able to wake him safely without having a satisfactory answer ready – with any answer other than “Right here” likely to prove unsatisfactory. He might, in the end, have to reverse his plan and leave Daav asleep until Aelliana’s conscious and up to speed.

Dragon in Exile – Interlude 3

Vivulonj Prosperu
In Transit

In which the Uncle is informed of Daav and Aelliana’s decision.

In light of the earlier interlude, I don’t think the Uncle’s attribution of the decision to Daav is quite accurate, though it makes sense that he would think of Daav as the primary decision-maker when Daav is the most visible half of the partnership. It’s more a case of Aelliana, once again, acting to protect the vulnerable and preserve the clan’s resources.

More re-establishing of the situation from previous novels, with a nice seasoning of new details. We’re getting answers here to questions about the Uncle that have been lurking in the background of the series for a long time.

The reference to the Uncle having “guided captured intelligences, long accustomed to the bodiless state, into warm and waiting flesh” is intriguing. We haven’t seen anybody do that since the Enemy’s pet dramliz, way back in Crystal Dragon. (And then, it was generally bad news for the intelligence in question.) It raises so many questions: When did the Uncle do this? With which intelligences? With what aim in mind? (And is the mention of it now just adding richness to the backstory, or is it setting up a future plot development?)

Vivulonj Prosperu is presumably the name of the Uncle’s ship, which hasn’t been named up to now. It looks like it might be derived by some indirect method from the phrase “live long and prosper”, which is entirely appropriate, since that’s pretty much the Uncle’s goal.

Dragon Ship – Chapter 19

Tradedesk

In which there are many meetings.

…well, that seems a pretty clear statement that Bechimo was built in or shortly after Jethri’s time, with Arin’s ideas as guidance. There have been other people named Arin (there’s one in Crystal Dragon), and there might even have been another who was a noted thinker on subjects of interest to traders, but it’s not likely there was another who was all that and had a son who took a different path.

But we’re still stuck with the fact that the beginning of Ghost Ship states straight up that Bechimo has been awaiting a captain for over five hundred years – which is to say, since two hundred years before Jethri was born.

(On another, less contradictory, note, we have another hint to go with the one from “Intelligent Design” of a technological underpinning for psychic abilities in the Liaden Universe.)