Clients visit Serendipity, Inc. under assumed names. Thea Beldaniel, a Serendipity partner, says that they are bound to recognize individuals who are "'Prominent in this galactic neighborhood...'" (II, p. 340) but that no living brain can recognize all important beings in a civilization that extends across scores of light years. Someone famous on Earth can become unfamous again simply by traveling to another part of Technic civilization. See here.
Thea has met van Rijn but is not yet familiar with Falkayn. On meeting the latter, she deduces:
he is obviously a colonial;
his bearing suggests nobility;
the Solar Commonwealth does not have such hereditary distinctions;
therefore, his home planet is autonomous.
I thought that, unlike its successor state, the Terran Empire, the Commonwealth as a political unit covered only the spatial volume of the Solar System and therefore that any extra-solar colony had to be autonomous.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Most likely Thea Beldaniel was putting a somewhat heavy emphasis on the fact that humanly colonized worlds were independent of the Solar Commonwealth. A human who had grown up on a human world would have simply taken that datum for granted.
Sean
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