Tag Archives: Sheather

I Dare – Chapter 55

Solcintra
Liad

In which the Captain acts for the safety of the passengers.

The mode of Ultimate Authority, which is referred to twice in this chapter, has, perhaps unsurprisingly, not come up much before: three times in the series up to this point. Priscilla adopts it briefly when putting Sav Rid Olanek in his place at the end of Conflict of Honors; Commander of Agents is said in Carpe Diem to use it when dealing with his underlings; and Val Con, greeting the Tree in Plan B, places the Tree in the position of ultimate authority.

The fact that it’s used twice in this chapter, and by whom, is the central conflict in a nutshell: the first is Commander of Agents again, and the second is Miri when she takes on the melant’i of Liad’s Captain. And I think it says something that, whereas Miri adopts the mode temporarily and in a situation where she is in fact the duly-appointed ultimate authority until the emergency is resolved, the Commander is not only self-appointed but apparently expects to be regarded as the ultimate authority all the time.

There’s a leap near the end of the chapter that I’ve never been able to follow. After the doomsday weapons are activated, ter’Fendil says he can deactivate them if Val Con gives him the control device, and Val Con does. Then it cuts to another scene, and when it cuts back everybody’s running for their lives and talking about the urgent need to do something before the weapons break out and start killing everybody. Is there something missing, or is it just me missing something?

I Dare – Chapter 51

Day 54
Standard Year 1393

Dutiful Passage
Jump

In which various people spend time in transit.

I haven’t been noting it every time a relevant detail has come up, but I think by now we have to acknowledge that in the Liaden universe cats are sapient and capable of dramliz-type abilities. Some cats, anyway. Merlin, at least. (Come to that, I wonder if Val Con knew how appropriate the name was when he chose it…)

I feel like I should say something about the scene with Hazenthull and Nelirikk, but nothing particular is coming to me.

It’s good to see Trilla again.

I Dare – Chapter 38

Lytaxin
Erob’s House

In which Delm Korval hears for the first time of Sector Judge Natesa.

I notice the interweaving of the chapters is set up so that we’re in some suspense about Pat Rin and Natesa, too. We know more about what they’ve been doing than Val Con and Miri, and more recently, but the most recent we know of them is still two months ago, which is plenty of time for something to have happened to them.

I Dare – Chapter 34

Lytaxin
Erob’s Clanhouse

In which the woes of Yxtrang have nothing to do with those who serve as soldiers in Jela’s line.

I like that Diglon Rifle does the best at poker, on a table that includes two Explorers and a Scout: it’s a reminder that just because he’s used to doing what he’s told doesn’t mean he can’t think for himself.

There’s a nice point of view play in this scene: we get a Nelirikk’s-eye view of the terrifying Clutch Turtle, and only later is it mentioned that it’s Sheather, whom Val Con so recently described with some accuracy as “one step from timid”. (Mind you, even though it is timid Sheather, I fully believe that in a situation where his friends were actually threatened by Yxtrang he’d be capable of everything Nelirikk fears of him.)

And now Nelirikk and the new recruits are going to be, I expect, the first Yxtrang ever to set foot on Liad – except of course that the whole point of this chapter is that they’re not Yxtrang.

I Dare – Chapter 32

Dutiful Passage
Lytaxin Orbit

In which Korval begins to gather allies.

Shan mentions again the bond between himself and Priscilla, which he knows to be special but the precise nature of which he is not sure of. I have to wonder how much Priscilla now knows or suspects on that score; the revelation of Lute’s involvement, if she wasn’t already aware of it, must be a pretty significant clue, although not an easy one to interpret.

I Dare – Chapter 31

Day 51
Standard Year 1393

Lytaxin
Erob’s Clanhouse

In which the Ring passes.

That makes two people in a short space of time who have spoken to Val Con of Korval’s responsibilities under the Contract, which is a subject that doesn’t often come up in conversation outside of Korval. It might be that, as close allies, they know something most don’t, but I think it’s less that the Contract is some kind of secret as that most people who don’t know Korval well don’t take the idea seriously. (And at that, I’m not entirely sure Emrith Tiazan wasn’t being sarcastic. We might infer that she believes in Korval’s belief in the Contract but doesn’t entirely believe in the Contract herself.)

The exchange when Korval-pernard’i removes the ring from her finger and Delm Korval places the ring on his own finger reminds me of something that I didn’t remark on when it happened: Pat Rin put the false ring the Department gave him on the second finger of his left hand, Korval-in-Trust’s finger, not the third finger, the delm’s finger. The Department was expecting that Pat Rin would happily be delm if there were nobody left to tell him he couldn’t, but what they weren’t considering is that as long as Pat Rin lives, there will always be one person of Korval judging his suitability: Pat Rin himself. Even in the eventuality that he must take up the delm’s ring because there is nobody else left, Pat Rin doesn’t count himself worthy to take up the delm’s melant’i with it, only to hold the ring in trust until Korval is able to produce someone qualified to be delm.

We also get, speaking of that incident, a detailed description of the true ring and thus the signs by which Pat Rin knew the false ring to be false. I wonder what it says about the Department that they didn’t know about the signs of wear. It might just be that they couldn’t find any way of examining the ring closely without arousing suspicion. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if it never even occurred to them to look; they might have assumed that a wealthy Liaden family would always get any damage quickly repaired.

I Dare – Chapter 24

Day 50
Standard Year 1393

Lytaxin
Erob’s Clanhouse and Garden

In which kin share news of kin.

The bit about Shan and Nova having different preferred languages for casual speech is a nice reflection of the fact their lives have taken different paths despite them being siblings. Shan was raised as a Terran among Terrans for the first few years of his life, and although he’s embraced his Liaden heritage, he spends much of his time as a Trader out in the wide universe and often surrounded by Terrans again. Nova was born and raised on Liad, and her line of work keeps her there for the most part; she must have left the planet a few times, if only to earn her pilot’s licence, but this here may well be the furthest she’s ever been from home.

I’m not sure I understand how Val Con knew about his mother, but I don’t feel too bad about that because it sounds like Val Con isn’t too sure himself.

I Dare – Chapter 19

Day 50
Standard Year 1393

Lytaxin
Erob’s House

In which Erob’s house has many visitors.

This is one of those chapters where there’s potentially a lot to talk about, but I’ve read it so often nothing really stands out to me.

Well, there is one thing: I don’t know if it’s me being really unobservant or just having a bad memory, but I don’t remember having understood before that Hazenthull Explorer might have only been intending to stick around long enough to get her senior patched up. (I notice, by the way, that her senior finally gets a name in this chapter.) How she planned to get around having sworn an oath of loyalty to get that far, I don’t see; perhaps, as Daav says, she hadn’t planned that far ahead.

Another point of connection between the two separate plot strands of the novel is that they’re now both concerned with issues of appropriate behaviour between oath-holder and oath-sworn.

I Dare – Chapter 10

Day 286
Standard Year 1392

Teriste MidPort
Panake House, Field of Fire, Speculator’s Trust

In which Pat Rin meets she who is called, among other things, Natesa the Assassin.

We’ve heard the name of Natesa the Assassin quite recently: she was mentioned in “Quiet Knives” as one of the Juntavas judges who had made herself scarce to avoid the disfavor of the late Chairman Krogar. And there was another Natesa way back in “Veil of the Dancer”, which may be part of the reason why I often have trouble remembering which of those two stories is which.

LaDemeter is another name we’ve encountered before: the handgun Theo won by right of conquest shortly before being thrown off Eylot was also a LaDemeter design. To some readers, the name also rings a different bell: it’s a shout-out to the classic Lensmen space opera series, in which the hero’s ray gun of choice was the DeLameter. (It is thus an amusing twist that Cheever’s LaDemeters, rather than being futuristic ray guns, are powered by the classic process of combustible powder.)

I Dare – Chapter 9

Day 50
Standard Year 1393

Lytaxin
Erob’s Medical Centre
Catastrophe Unit

In which healing goes forth.

Erob’s medical technicians think a lot of themselves, don’t they? To be fair, I suppose they have a right to, most of the time; it’s just that this situation is unlike anything they’ve been trained for.

A couple of unexplained visions occur. Shan gets a vision of Moonhawk to match his vision of Lute last week (I really hope those get elaborated on some day), and Miri gets a vision of Val Con in Jelaza Kazone’s garden. Val Con’s easy enough to explain, given the lifemate link, but it seems unlikely, even given the givens, that he and she have literally travelled all the way back to Liad; perhaps it’s Val Con’s metaphor for some safe space within himself that he retreated to for protection from the damage that was unwittingly being done him. It might not be an inappropriate metaphor, at that; the way the Tree meddles with its mobile branches, it might be personally responsible for Val Con’s survival even if it’s not directly present.

I like the moment where Shan thinks of the room he’s in as the “room of catastrophes”, leaving it open whether it’s a room in which catastrophes are dealt with, per the official designation, or a room in which catastrophes are created.