At critical moments, Lochlanna aristocrats do not get tense but loosen up and seem to become very calculating:
"Tolteca sometimes thought that that alone made them so alien that the Namerican Revolution had always been inevitable." (I, p. 547)
Of course an irritating mannerism would not in itself be sufficient to cause a revolution but this is a good example of the simplistic explanations that people do think of. At the end of the Great British Miners' Strike, 1984-1985, a miner got to a microphone at a public event and started drunkenly thanking all the local supporters of the strike. Some of those supporters were saying, "Get him away from that mike!" A man sitting beside me said, "This is stupid! This is why the miners lost!" I tried to explain that there were much deeper reasons for the outcome of the strike but, of course, we need to speak to someone who is willing to listen.
An orbit is any path through space, not just round a planet or other body. At the beginning of this chapter, the Quetzal leaves the orbit that it had been in and swings down toward the planet Gwydion which is still a small blue disc. A "boat" had gone ahead to make arrangements. The Quetzal might have been in orbit around Gwydion's sun or might still have been on whatever orbit had brought it to this planetary system.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Even more simply Lochlanna aristocrats might been trained on how to discipline and set aside emotions, to enable them to examine problems calmly and objectively. And that would be useful for officers and soldiers.
Ad astra! Sean
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