Diana does not wind up having sex with Kukulkan Zachary but might have done. Axor, a Wodenite, and Dragoika, a Tigery, express different attitudes.
Axor:
"'...I have begun to fear for that maiden's virtue.'"
-CHAPTER NINETEEN, p. 404.
"'Oh, dear. And she so young, innocent, helpless.'
"Axor crossed himself."
-ibid.
Axor does not know Diana.
Dragoika:
"'Give yourself to the wind, but first be sure 'tis the wind of your wish.'"
-CHAPTER TWENTY, p. 418.
Diana lives by Dragoika's precept.
Ironically, when she has learned that Kukulkan and his fellow Zacharians are conspiring with the Merseians against the Empire:
"'Goodby,' she said to the alien." (p. 424)
- "the alien" now being Kukulkan. Diana is closer to well-meaning Axor and to shrewd Dragoika than to the Zacharians who have put themselves outside the human race.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Ah, I remember that bit about Diana saying goodbye to the "alien"! A small, subtle, understated but real point Anderson was making. Yes, she was closer, in different ways to Targovi and Fr. Axor, rather than to the "human" Kukulkan Zachary.
Ad astra! Sean
The Zachary clan are examples of the perils of excessive self-esteem... 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
To say nothing of the similarly grandiose self esteem of the Merseians, thinking themselves the natural and rightful lords of the galaxy!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: The Merseians have more to back it up. Mind you, times change.
In the book I'm working on now, Luz reflects on the self-image of great powers and history, and her 1922, in which Japan and Germany and the US/British Oceanian Alliance dominate the world:
"When they [the Japanese] aren't going on about the Land of the Gods and how the divine blood of Amaterasu-ōmikami is destined to rule the world, which the people the Taguchi family so wisely left back in the Old Country do a lot these days.
Mind you, there’s a good deal of that going on around the whole wide globe in this Year of Grace 1922.
Her lips quirked slightly. This wasn’t the only year of the world you could say that in, by any manner of means.
The actors change, but the play goes on, Luz thought.
In 1531, the year the first of her mother’s Aróstegui ancestors moved from Santander to Santiago de Cuba, Spaniards had thought they were destined to rule the world for the glory of Holy Mother Church, the power of the king in Madrid, and the profit of the conquistadores, and they’d had a fair bit of evidence for the belief at the time.
When she was a little girl in the dying years of the last century her father had gone with the Rough Riders to show the Spanish that nowadays they couldn’t even rule Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Back in the fifteen-hundreds the Chinese had been convinced they already did rule the world, or all of it except a few inconsequential islands far away inhabited by ignorant, smelly, hairy savages with poor personal hygiene and disgusting eating habits.
The Japanese had been in the middle of two centuries of bloody civil war to settle who was going to be Shōgun -- Barbarian-Subduing Generalissimo – and in exquisitely polite terms tell the Emperor and everyone else what to do. And the United States wasn’t even a gleam in an English imperialist’s eye, with Henry VIII battering away at the Scots and Irish and trying to find a princess he didn’t want to decapitate as soon as he’d married and bedded her".
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
In other words, the more things change, the more they DON'T change? I can see that!
I will be reading your third and fourth BLACK CHAMBER books with great interest!
Ad astra! Sean
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