In which Jen Sin yos’Phelium leaves his ring at Tinsori Light.

This is one of my favourite of the Liaden short stories, but I’m having the problem again of not knowing what to say about it, and not feeling moved to talk about things I might have made more of if it were my first reading.

The story does not give a specific date, though we know it’s before Scout’s Progress and on the other hand the presence of an autodoc on Jen Sin’s ship argues for it being later than Balance of Trade. I stuck it here because there was a gap, and I thought it fitted thematically with the stories we’ve been reading lately, with the concern about Old Technology.

The Old Tech autodoc that repairs Jen Sin is clearly related to the one Cantra had in her ship, complete with the “you’re now in perfect health, but you could be better than perfect” spiel.

The thing I’m wondering is: how did that set of coords find its way into Korval’s set of emergency destinations in the first place? Someone connected with Jela might have known about the Tinsori waystation, but that was in the old universe, and as Lorith points out the Light’s location and coords changed in the transition to the new. The optimistic option is that somebody marked the space down as a quiet, out-of-the way place to hide out for a bit (like Bechimo‘s favourite hiding place in Dragon Ship) without noticing or being noticed by the Light. A less reassuring possibility is that there was someone else in the past, less suspicious than Jen Sin, who had their ship repaired by the Light and then took it back into the wide universe.