Solcintra

In which Cantra takes Tor An on an excursion, Rool Tiazan takes Liad dea’Syl on an excursion, and Arin takes himself on an excursion.

Two things in this chapter caused me to look up from the book and say “Oh!” in that tone of great enlightenment that means my backbrain has just done something clever, like figure out whodunnit before the detective. Neither of them are super-important; I think they struck me because I didn’t notice either of them the first time around (or if I did then, unlike most of the other revelations in this chapter, they didn’t stay with me).

Thing 1: During Master dea’Syl’s conversation with Rool Tiazan, he says the math predicts or prescribes that the new universe they’re planning to escape to will be constantly expanding – unlike the steady state of the universe they’re in now. This is, of course, one of the hints that this duology is not set in our universe, but the thing I realised this time is that it’s also the base explanation for the differences between how interstellar travel works in the duology compared to later. Long-distance navigation through space is bound to be different when space itself behaves differently.

Thing 2: According to the timing mentioned when Cantra is inspecting Salkithin, the ship she inherited from Jela, Salkithin is none other than the ship Commander Ro Gayda mentioned when she recruited Jela way back near the start of Crystal Soldier, the one he was to be made Captain of for its voyage to a then-unnamed place of storage, as the excuse for being detached and placed under Ro Gayda’s command.

And the maintenance crew of Salkithin, getting back to things I did notice the first time around, are – apart from being the crew that Jela commanded on that voyage – the founders of Jela’s Own Troop, of whom we will be hearing more much later. (And they’re not just X Strain; there’s a couple of Ms, a Y, and “Ilneri, who was, as far as Cantra could make it, a natural human”. I don’t know how much that’s going to affect the bodies of Jela’s Own Troop – as I’ve had occasion to comment before, we’ve never been told anything about how the Yxtrang go about making little Yxtrang – but it certainly explains a deal about the shape of the Troop’s minds.)

To finish the chapter off, the event we’ve been waiting for all this time heaves into view on the horizon, as what passes for the leadership of Solcintra at the moment turns to Wellik after their actual leaders do a runner. (It’s possibly my favourite of the Solcintra-as-it-really-was details that, for all the status jockeying and High House politics the Liadens get up to, there’s not a single Clan on Liad that was High House before the Great Migration, because the High Houses all had the resources and the lack of scruple to take off on their own.)

(I wonder what happened to them all.)

(Maybe they got eaten by a giant mutant star goat.)