This week, the Dendarii have a staff meeting. I don’t think I would enjoy participating in the Dendarii staff meeting, which has to deal with a particularly dire topic. However, I admire the efficiency with which Elena Bothari-Jesek approaches the agenda.
This reread has an index, which you can consult if you feel like exploring previous books and chapters. Spoilers are welcome in the comments if they are relevant to the discussion at hand. Comments that question the value and dignity of individuals, or that deny anyone’s right to exist, are emphatically NOT welcome. Please take note.
The main business of this meeting is to go through all the combat helmet data recorders to see where Norwood might have left the cryo-chamber containing Miles. This business is complicated by Norwood having been killed in action and his helmet destroyed. Framingham has survived, and reports that Norwood ran down a hall with the cryo-chamber and came back without it, proclaiming that the Admiral would get out of here even if the rest of them didn’t. Please recall that “here” was a secured Bharaputran medical complex. This account is corroborated by the available helmet data.
I read space opera, cozy mysteries, and books where people with psychic animal companions have ill-advised romantic relationships. And I have read Mirror Dance before. It’s obvious to ME that Norwood has popped Miles’s cryo-chamber in the mail. AND LET’S TAKE A MINUTE TO CONSIDER THAT. In the bowels of their secured medical complex, Bharaputra has a mail drop, AND in the aftermath of a firefight in that complex, an experienced Dendarii trooper is confident that the mail service will continue uninterrupted. On a planet noted for its flagrant libertarianism, in the middle of a situation in which a large chunk of the building has been destroyed by fire. NEITHER SNOW NOR BOTCHED DENDARII RESCUE MISSION NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS. The mail carrier is going to wade through the charred rubble and unlock the absolutely enormous drop box, and then just tote Miles’s cryo-chamber—which took Norwood less than six minutes to package, so I think he probably just smacked an address label on it—off to the processing center. Without comment. The same way they handle all the other occupied cryo-chambers that people stick in the mail. What does shipping cost for a package the combined weight of Miles and a cryo-chamber? Who paid for it? How? Do the Dendarii routinely carry credit cards in combat? It doesn’t matter—House Bharaputra’s internal security is going to look the other way BECAUSE OF THE SACRED PRIVACY OF POSTAL MAIL.
WELL THANK GOODNESS, BECAUSE I WAS WORRIED THAT THE CITIZENS OF JACKSON’S WHOLE MIGHT ENCOUNTER EXCESSIVE SCRUTINY FROM THE LAWLESS CORPORATE HOUSES THAT DOMINATE THEIR PLANETARY ECONOMY AND APPARENTLY GOVERNMENT, AND THAT IT MIGHT CAUSE THEM DIFFICULTY IN SENDING PRIVATE CORPSICLES AND OTHER CORRESPONDENCE THROUGH THE MAIL. If the Dendarii employed Miss Marple, she would simply call the post office and ask them if they had any record of the package she had sent yesterday, because of her concern that she might have accidentally addressed it to the wrong cryo-revival facility, because you know how scatterbrained older ladies can be. And they would cough up the address without a moment’s hesitation, because who doesn’t trust a dotty old lady? Elli and Elena don’t appear to have read that story. I haven’t yet re-read the part of the story where the Dendarii figure out what Norwood did, so I cannot, at this moment, evaluate what Bujold did to make mailing a cryo-unit sound plausible. I’m looking forward to rediscovering it.
Other business this week: Quinn relieves Bel of command. Bel is under house arrest, remanded to their own custody. I’m surprised that more of Quinn’s rage doesn’t rub off on Bel—she’s so angry at Mark that at one point she refuses to look at him. I agree that Mark did a lot of things that contributed to Miles’s death; None of those things would have been possible if Bel had answered the comm or admitted that they knew that Mark wasn’t Miles.
Elena is not a sworn Armsman—she can’t be. But in some ways she is still her father’s daughter, and her attitude towards Mark is a reminder of this. She tells Mark that one day Cordelia will ask what Elena did for her son. And then she tells Mark that Cordelia will be talking about him. I love Cordelia so much. It makes my heart ache that she’s not here. I don’t think there’s any way she possibly could be; Cordelia ordered the intelligence report on Mark’s life, but she doesn’t know where he is, or where Miles is. She’s not tracking their every move. Obviously, it would be a very different book if she were here. Cordelia made the decision not to attempt cryo-revival when Aral died. Given her description of those circumstances, it’s unlikely to have worked, but she was the only person who had the authority to say so. Cordelia might have been able to call off efforts to rescue Miles and the cryo-unit when Elli and Elena could not. And she might have.
In a Barrayaran mirror dance, partners mirror each other’s movement, and either can lead. I love a metaphor, so I’m looking for the moves. Mark and Miles both went to Jackson’s Whole. Now Miles is frozen and on a journey through uncertain dangers. He’s made the leading move here; Mark is in a sort of stasis, waiting to find out what the women he sees as Miles’s harem will do to him. Oh look, everyone is frozen.
Tune in next week, when I think something probably has to thaw!
Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.
If I remember correctly, it’s not a mere mail drop, it’s a fully automated packing-and-shipping facility that Bharaputra uses to send large packages to their clients on a regular basis, and the planetary shipping network that it ties into is also at least partially automated. This doesn’t explain the lack of records but it may at least account for nobody having objected to the package leaving the building.
I think the mail is heavily automated. Though you’re right about the data trail.
ETA: Ninja’d! The Duronas would clean up the records at some point but you’d think Bharaputra would have gotten to the data first.
I’m amused you’re using the wrong pronouns for Bel. Herm pronouns are one of the more annoying quirks of Betan culture.
As I recall the first order of business at the debriefing was to pass around a bottle of painkillers, a touch I found hilarious.
It’s not surprising that Jackson’s Whole has a good mail service, or that very important secured medical facilities owned by Great Houses have access to it. This isn’t the USPS or Royal Mail or whatever, it’s those helicopters that fly your kidney to the other hospital, plus a bike messenger service.
If some grubber off the street got mail service this good, I’d be REAL surprised.
I think what’s going in here is not so much that there’s no surveillance, as that the Duronas are cheating it. It’s clear that Lily has been making plans, and presumably mapping the extent of Fell’s surveillance is an important part of that. As escape to or connivance with another Great House is a very likely option, she’s got to have some kind if weather eye on the other security arms too.
Meanwhile, Bharaputra doesn’t know the cryochamber has been shipped. That has to rise fairly quickly through their list of possibilities as the facility search comes up empty, but they probably waste at least several hours checking all the closets, etc. During those hours, Lily Durona is laying a false trail, fabricating evidence that the package which arrived at the Durona Group was something other than Miles’s cryochamber.
Meanwhile, if I ran a high-security automated mail service between Great Houses, I’d keep a real close lid on my security. I wouldn’t release whatever scans I’d done to any of my clients, because one major purpose of those scans is to keep Ryoval from mailing a bomb to Fell, so if I let Fell see my scans there’s a chance he can figure out what my scanners can and can’t see and work out how to cheat them. I’d only release fully-digested data, like “it was a cryochamber, serial number whatever, with a body in it. Total weight XXX,” and remember that weight is going to suggest an even smaller occupant than Miles, because the chamber’s prep kit is also 100% dry, and it appears to contain enough fluid to prep 1.75 Ivans or so, under combat conditions.
If Lily’s smart (and, uh, I think we know that about her), what she’ll do is suggest a problem in shipping FIRST. That gets her access to at least a first-cut on what the shipper will tell a client about this package, so she can shape her lies. Then she has some underling get REAL MAD at some poor Bharaputra minion: “the fuck did you send us? We ordered a training capsule, you sent us a used model with dog guts still inside! I work for HOUSE FELL, if I want a blown-up dog I can just have them blow one up for us! What do you mean you can’t find the order in your records? I’m looking at the damn package, so somebody over there got the order. They just thought they’d cheat us and now you want to play like it never happened, is that the game?”
@2: Ellen has addressed why she calls Bel as “they” rather in “it” in several of the last posts. Since Bel is a fictional character, and Ellen has had very negative experiences with people calling others “it”, Ellen choses to not use “it.”
@1: Not only fully automated, but he also stayed there long enough to wipe the transaction from the computer – according to Mark’s speculation later on.
But this does bring up the whole cost thing. Or is the Bharaputra house mail department defaulted to charge the house for a shipment? That seems odd, considering the problems Miles has later with the call network.
It’s a really impressive system to operate during the middle of battle conditions. No one thought to put a “hold all shipments” order in place? Especially once they started looking for a large box near the shipping department?
Guess this is one time Bujold used handwave logic. But it was a good use of it. I never thought how odd it was until just now.
And Elena’s response of “She’ll mean you Mark.” gets me every time.
I wonder what House or Houses control protected mail and messenger services on the Whole? I betcha it’s pretty profitable and probably quite powerful in a subtle way.
@6 – I wonder about the planetary services Houses too. Overnight delivery! Air traffic control! Sanitation! Phenomenal cosmic power to the sanitation workers!
The FedEx drop box that gets Miles out of the facility is an oddity.
Think about the kind of influence having the monopoly on sanitation services would give you!
Hmmmm. Who handles linen services for the Duronas? Does Lotus have that as well-sewn up as we surmise she has package delivery? Or might a janitorial employee hand a gene sample from Miles Vorkosigan over to someone on a set of dirty sheets?
The Duronas almost certainly incinerate medical waste which could well include dirty sheets (especially if they don’t want an outside source checking). Note that their research for House Fell is such that routinely destroying more things than is usual for a medical facility might well be standard.
IIRC the facility automatically boxes items as well as conveying them elsewhere as the start of shipping.
I don’t agree that is is that hand wavery. i presume the facility is very highly automated, presumably not just at the sender end but also all along the line and at the receiving end until delivered to the addressee. So if the computer records are tampered with, there would be no one to notice and nothing to track. In a very busy in house facility, I don’t expect they are paying per package, but rather for a general subscription for on planet stuff within certain size and weight parameters. And I have to say that I don’t see why whoever is in charge of security should take time when under attack by armed mercenaries to wonder if maybe they wanted to send a package (as opposed to kidnapping clones say) and close down the mail room. It does make you wonder if the whole rescue op could not have been done rather more quietly: a small covert team breaks in, drugs clones, boxes them up and sends them by mail to a secure location. Perhaps Miles would have thought of that?
on the question why Quinn seems so mad at Mark, not Bel: she is after all in an intense romantic and sexual relationship with a man who is dead and vanished, and Mark looks just like him, but is not him. I can understand why she won’t look at him, and note Mark’s POV perception that it is mainly because of anger may be off
My expectation on the shipping – it’s a time limited medical package directed to a medical facility. That means it’ll have priority stickers all over it, and as far as Bharaputra is concerned, all the raiders have left bar a few bodies. First priority for the shipping department would be to make sure all priority traffic is gone asap, lest it spoil in transit and SOMEONE is held responsible.
I always think of the service as being a high end automated courier service rather than traditional postage – because all the great Houses have a vested interest in there being a completely anonymous mail service – knowing who sent what to who is extremely valuable metadata.
I wonder if the mail service is controlled by a minor House, with its neutrality very carefully maintained by all majors lest one get an advantage. Nobody messes with the mail, or you get to decide whether to be blown up by Fell or terminally experimented on by Ryoval.
I work for HOUSE FELL, if I want a blown-up dog I can just have them blow one up for us!
This raised a smile.
And, yes, as many people have pointed out, a Jacksonian Great House, especially one specialising in weird biologicals, is going to value prompt, reliable and confidential shipping extremely highly. So I don’t believe that Jackson’s Whole has a House Postman, far less a House Sanitation; those are vital functions and the Great Houses will want to keep them in-house rather than leave themselves vulnerable to an outsider.
I am just touched that Norwood, in the middle of a firefight, thought of his old college chum Lilly Durona, who he hasn’t spoken to in years, as the ideal recipient for an unsolicited short frozen dead person. There’s an old joke about how the difference between a friend and an real friend is that a friend will help you move, and a real friend will help you move a body. Lilly falls into category 2.
I expect that part of the Dendarii attack including jamming communications, so that other parts of the Bharaputra organization could not find out what was going on. So a lot of departments were continuing business as usual, unaware of the attack in progress. And shipping, unlike security, would not be a high-priority for dealing with the attack.
In re: the general “it wouldn’t be a priority to stop shipping” response – If so, these people have craptastic emergency response.
In the event that an unauthorized force takes over a building for any length of time in the modern world, police and investigative forces do not assume that everything in the FedEx drop box in the basement is okay to go. So you maybe you lose some biological samples in the time it takes to check things over. Lab work can be replicated, but if someone opens a mail bomb on the other end, you can’t take that back.
@5; no matter that ellen explained her use of ” they” for Bel. It irritates me all the same as well as @1. If not “it” I would prefer Bel or s/he or … whatever. ” They” is just wrong for a single person.
Re shipping: imo the automated station us plausible. Especially because Mooreood taperef eith the computrr data after the fact.
@16 I’m not irritated by “they.” In fact, I prefer it to “it.” I was amused because using the Betan “it” makes me twitchy. I’m no longer amused as our host is not avoiding it out of mere twitchiness.
@16 “They” has been used as a singular pronoun for centuries. Prescriptivists have not managed to win this particular battle and should probably concede defeat.
@@@@@ 15 – While there is a certain amount of connection between the areas, I’m thinking that the area being raided to rescue the clones was just one part of a much larger facility – something equivalent to a small dorm on a very large university campus.
If there is a problem in one building on a large campus, you don’t shut down the whole thing, and you keep most people doing what they were doing, with perhaps an instruction not to go outdoors, etc. So if there was an incident in a chemistry lab, students might continue classes in the law school building, even going from class to class, but not be allowed to leave that building, or to enter an area around the affected building.
In this case, Bharaputra believed the problem was contained in the clones’ dorm, and the rest of their vast operations were secure. One trooper, with one container, slipped through to the shipping facility.
In addition, assuming the Dendarii could interfere with communications, other parts of the facility might not have been aware of what was happening. Again, using a university campus as an example, there are times when there has been a fire drill and evacuation of one building, and I’ve simply gone one building over to officially “evacuate” without having to actually go outside – and one building beyond that, no one was aware that a drill was even happening.
This is a working facility, not a military base. The vast majority of people working there have nothing to do with security. And the Jacksonian system does not encourage loyalty, or anyone sticking their neck out for someone else- ordinary workers for the Bharaputra facility would look the other way if they saw something odd, not risk drawing negative attention to themselves if they noticed something they shouldn’t have. As we learn later, through Tej, people on Jackson’s Whole believe they have to genetically and psychologically manipulate people from birth to be a “Jeeves” to get loyalty, which is not reciprocated, they aren’t looking for ordinary employees to care about the welfare of the larger organization, beyond what it gives them.
So an armed person, with a large package, might well pass un-commented-on, as employees looked the other way, neither knowing or caring if this was some strange project or something wrong, but knowing that interfering in something that isn’t your business could get you in trouble.
The small on-site security force that would be the initial response would need to contain the attack, and limit the size of the area they’re trying to control to what they can realistically control. Other Bharaputra forces, from space facilities or other parts of the planet, would arrive more slowly, and reinforcements.
Frankly I find both ‘they’ and ‘it’ problematic. We need new words – at least I think so.
@20 New pronouns would definitely be easier than using ‘it.’ I don’t find ‘they’ to be as difficult but it can be unclear if the person’s gender is unknown rather than actually indicating a gender status.
And in SFF, ‘they’ might very well refer to a plural entity in a single body.
I suspect that “it” was chosen, both from a Doyalist and Watsonian perspective, specifically because it does make people uncomfortable to call people “it.” Using “they” which can be third-person singular neutral, is carrying on a linguistic tradition for when gender is ambiguous. But a herm’s gender is not ambiguous, it is specifically herm.
The utopian experimenters who were the parents of the first herms would have wanted to emphasize the specific gender of their children – not male, not female, not ambiguous or unknown, but herm.
And I suspect a similar writerly motive of wanting to keep people aware that Bel is herm, not a person of unknown/ambiguous gender.
@21, Noblehunter: I personally find having to remind myself constantly that this ‘they’ is singular more than a little distracting.
Wasn’t a singular “they” just accepted by one of the major style manuals or newspapers in cases where a particular gender was unsuitable? I thought I saw some news on that recently.
@24 – It was the AP. Other style guides may also have made the change, but the AP’s is the one I happened to hear of. I believe my use of they for Bel predates the change in the AP’s guidance, but I’m not tracking their announcements super-closely. And in any case, neither the AP nor I are being at all innovative with this usage. I try to avoid using pronouns for Bel at all because I know the singular plural is distracting for readers who don’t use it in their own lives. Pronoun avoidance can be distracting and unnatural too.
@22 That makes sense. Bel would certainly enjoy making people twitchy or uncomfortable over gender. I could see Betans using the pronoun to show off how tolerant they are.
Also, any gender-neutral pronouns already in use would still mostly refer to genders other than herm.
@13:
On the other hand she had been a Jacksonian medic, who had been at the same cryo-medicine training as him, so the context helps. And we do not know for sure that they had not been in contact later.
@26 – To be clear, I don’t think that Bel chose the pronoun “it” for itself.
Bel is very much cis-herm, in a society structured around three genders rather than two. It uses the pronouns it grew up with, and gender as assigned at birth. Bel doesn’t seem like the introspective sort, to think about what pronouns it prefers and the effects on others. Bel left its home planet to be a mercenary soldier – this is the choice of an adrenaline junkie, not of someone deeply introspective.
It was Bel’s non-herm ancestors who chose the pronoun “it” to use when they chose to have the first generation of herm children, and create a herm community.
Bel does, however, have fun with the discomfort of non-Betans such as Miles. It’s amused by the reactions non-Betans have to calling people “it”, etc. Just as Ethan wound up in an unexpected bar fight from misinterpreting the nature of macho-male subculture, I suspect Bel wound up in a few bar fights as well, only more deliberately, and with results that it controlled.
About Betan hermaphrodites using “it” for themselves. My personal idea is that Beta is full of very “politically correct” people, all of whom use correct pronouns for everyone.
The hermaphrodite designers were the worst of these. The kids probably grew up with “xir” and all the rest of the gender neutral pronouns.
And then in a fit of teenage rebellion, they revolted against their creators! Being that there isn’t that much to revolt against on Beta, they decided to horrify their parents by using “it”. And since properly PC people MUST use someone’s chosen pronoun that was it.
@29 – I see using people’s preferred pronouns as similar to using their name. Pronouns are a way of identifying a person, and it feels weird to be misidentified. It’s nice when we can spare everyone tha awkwardness. Why would willingness to use a non-traditional pronoun make someone “the worst” of a group of people who try not to misidentify others?
@27 Spiggana – It would been have odd if Norwood had not been thinking about his college friend from Jackson’s Whole on the way to the planet.
@30 EllenMCM – Accepted PC practice is to use the name, or pronoun, the person you speak with, or about, wants you to use, within reason (I draw the line at three syllables). And it’s pretty clear Bel wants you to use “it”.
I think it could get annoying the way grammar Nazis can be annoying.
@31 – Bel hasn’t visited 21st century Earth to see thesights and have a chat, so I don’t think it’s at all clear what Bel would choose to be called in this context. If you want to be in charge of the pronouns in the reread blog, you’re going to have to write your own.
I think what you’re actually trying to do is suggest that my question to Zan reveals an inconsistency in my reasoning in re my choice of pronouns for Bel. I’m inquiring about Zan’s characterization of PC as bad, not about why certain Betans use certain words.
If I may say so politely, the conversation about pronouns has gotten to look more than a little unkind. We don’t have data for why Bel uses it, we do have data for why the reread blogger uses they, we could choose to move on without taking potshots at political correctness (which seems to me to be the thoughtful practice of not being a jerk, so shots at it bother me rather a lot), or alternative pronouns and the people who use them. If really costs me nothing to say or type zie or xher or whatever my friends and associates choose, and apologizing for getting pronouns wrong is no more trouble than apologizing for forgetting people’s names, which I already do all the time.
@28 I meant the Herms chose it to make people uncomfortable. Freaking the mundanes seems to be a common Betan pastime. So it makes sense the Herms would do it, too. Though Zan’s idea of teenage rebellion is a good possibility.
Now I want a story about that first generation. Betan Herms might be stodgy and comfortable but they started out as a radical attempt to change humanity.
@33 Time Travel AU: Bel, Cordelia, and Lady Alys end up on 21st Century Earth. Hilarity ensues.
Echoing the comments @34, it does seem that this discussion is starting get bogged down a bit; it might be time to move on to more constructive comments or different areas of discussion, at this point.
About the shipping issue, later in the book Rowan tells Miles he arriv d by common carrier with no return address so it seems there is a House Post Office.