Tag Archives: the Trio

Breath’s Duty

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Delgado
Leafydale Place
Standard Year 1393

In which Scout Reserve Captain Daav yos’Phelium returns a favour.

Speaking of first published appearances, this is Kamele’s, brief as it is, and it gave me entirely the wrong impression of her until Fledgling came out. I blame the translators’ decision to use “mistress” as a substitute for whatever word they use on Delgado, because while it has the advantage of bypassing a lengthy explanation it fails to capture the actual spirit of Kamele’s relationship with Jen Sar. On the other hand, I admit there were also some failings of comprehension on my part, regarding (a) the actual likelihood of Daav getting in the kind of relationship that “mistress” implies, and (b) the fact, which is mentioned right there in the story, that they’ve been together long enough for her daughter to be grown up.

This may also be, even more briefly, the first published mention of timonioum.

One of the purposes of this re-read was to see what new associations would come out of the stories by reading them in a different configuration: what would come out of a story by reading it near another story I maybe hadn’t read it near before? In this case, a new thing that struck me was the first dissonant detail: after a couple of pages of Jen Sar Kiladi getting ready for a fishing trip, just as he always does, he pauses to run through the Rainbow pattern. Reading the story so soon after Carpe Diem, with everything it has to say about the Rainbow and about the Rainbow being a Scout thing, that really jumped out at me as a sign that Professor Kiladi isn’t the groundhugging academic he appears. It says, if one didn’t already know, a great deal about his background in a very few words.

Another association that I don’t think I picked up before this re-read is that Acting Scout Commander sig’Radia has the same surname as Senior Scout Cho sig’Radia, the friend and mentor of Daav’s daughter. Probably a relative, not the same person; “Phoenix” has established that sig’Radia has a history of producing Scouts, and this story says straight up that Daav doesn’t know her. (I wonder, though: I don’t think Kiladi ever actually met Cho sig’Radia other than through written correspondence, and if he did notice the connection Daav wouldn’t make anything of it while he’s keeping the Kiladi connection quiet; conversely, of course, Cho sig’Radia knows Theo’s father only as Kiladi and has no reason to suspect he’s Daav. And one who was a Senior Scout a few years ago might have progressed far enough to become Acting Scout Commander now — especially since the “Acting” suggests that the Department’s recent actions have resulted in some rapid movement in the line of succession.)

I’m pretty sure I got the significance of the Richard A. Davis Portmaster Aid Foundation first time, though.

I seem to recall there being something I wanted to say about the bit where L’il Orbit casts shade on Kiladi’s piloting skills, but the only thing that’s coming to mind now is that it was never Kiladi, in the old days, who was called “schoolteacher”. And that there’s a bit of an irony in Daav yos’Phelium being named as a reliable pilot considering what happened the last time he was seen piloting a spaceship.

Veil of the Dancer

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In which a scholar’s daughter learns much about the power of knowledge.

The telling of this story is interestingly done: it starts out like a fairy tale, but gradually shifts until the final scene is pretty much in the series’ usual mode. And there’s a related shift in the narrative voice’s selection of details: the story is set in a modern world, with computers and a thriving spaceport, but those details don’t really start getting mentioned until the latter part of the story, when the fairy tale gloss has already begun to slip away.

Much as I like this story, I’m uncomfortable about the way the authors have given Skardu’s fictional oppressive religion recognisable elements of the real religion of Islam. I suspect it’s at least partly done as part of the fairy-tale atmosphere, to add a bit of Arabian Nights flavour, but that doesn’t actually help; it makes it seem like the authors are saying that, because these cultural details have appeared in fairy stories, they’ve become a kind of exotic story spice that can be mixed into a new story without thinking about the real cultures and real people they came from. (This is not, regrettably, the only story in the Liaden series with this problem.)

On this re-read, I find myself comparing this story to Tamora Pierce’s story “Elder Brother”, which I read last year. It’s also set in an imagined culture with a religion that oppresses women (with, again, elements resembling elements of Islam), and the main female character’s arc is in many ways like Inas Bhar’s. One thing I get out of the comparison is that it highlights how much this is an outsider’s viewpoint of Skardu; the fairy-tale overlay makes it a story about somewhere far, far away, where people are strange and different, and although our protagonist was born there, she never really belongs. Skardu exists mainly as a place for the protagonist to leave. Pierce’s protagonist is also an outsider in her own culture (like Inas, she had one parent from somewhere with less restrictive ideas) who ends up leaving, but the depiction of her homeland is less distanced — and what really helps is that Pierce didn’t leave it at that; she returned to the setting later to explore the stories of the women inside the culture, who never had the chance to leave or who saw something in it worth staying for. Seeing Skardu fleshed out like that would make me feel better about this story; there’s a glimpse of what it might be like in Inas’s conversations with her sisters on the night of Humaria’s betrothal, but it’s not much set against the rest of the story, and more wouldn’t hurt.

Tomorrow: “Heirloom”