Ivar Frederiksen is responsible for the deaths of Imperial personnel and must not be allowed to remain free but how should he be pursued and arrested? How should he be tried and what penalty should be imposed? How should the affair be publicized?
Desai can refer the matter to Llynathawr or Terra but what do they know? The next courier boat will take a fortnight to reach Sol where his petition would be have to be processed, discussed, annotated and supplemented, would pass between committees and would then be:
"...referred through layers of executive officialdom for decision; and the return message would take its own days to arrive, and probably need to be disputed on many points when it did -..." (p. 99)
Desai realizes that he is alone.
"'I don't know what to do,' Desai nearly groaned." (p. 98)
Desai is a far better man, and better for Aeneas, than other possible High Commissioners who would think only of finding and killing Ivar Frederiksen.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree Commissioner Desai was an extremely able, imaginative, and decent man. But weren't you being just a tad too hard on many of his fellow commissioners? I thought of this bit from the beginning of Chapter 3 of THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN: "Chunderban Desai's previous assignment had been to the delegation which negotiated an end of the Jihannath crisis. That wasn't the change of pace in his career which it seemed. His Majesty's administrators must forever be dickering, compromising, feeling their way, balancing conflicts of individuals, organizations, societies, races, sentient species. The need for skill--quickly to grasp facts, comprehend a situation, brazen out a bluff when in spite of everything the unknown erupted into one's calculations--was greatest at the intermediate level of bureaucracy which he had reached. A resident might deal with a single culture, and have no more to do than keep an eye on affairs. A sector governor oversaw such vastness that to him it became a set of abstractions. But the various ranks of commissioner were expected to handle personally large and difficult territories."
So, granting Desai being unusually imaginative, many other commissioners were just as able as he was and would probably be just as competent. But the peculiar situation seen on Aeneas, with many people there flirting with a millennialism manipulated by Aycharaych, might have defeated many of Desai's fellow commissioners.
Ad astra! Sean
Far-flung administrators are often in that position. French officials in the "Sudan" (what's now West Africa) in the 19th century were notorious for ignoring orders from Paris, usually by simply doing what they wanted and presenting their nominal superiors with a fait accompli, often deliberately getting out of contact with the telegraph first.
British governors in India were even more prone to it, given that for a long time correspondence could take six months or more -- the annals of the East India Company and then the ministry that succeeded it are rife with messages from proconsuls blithely telling their masters in London that they've done something they were forbidden to do but it's too late to undo it now.
Sir Charles Napier, forbidden to meddle in the then-independent chiefdoms of Sind, annexed the place, and was rumored to have sent a one-word message back to England -- Peccavi, Latin for "I have sinned" (ie, "I have Sind").
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And it seems that the Empire, unlike the British and French, tried to allow for its middle ranking commissioners to have the space needed for them to do what needed to be done. After all, if they succeeded that would be good for both them and the Empire. Success would vindicate them and win forgiveness for ignoring or breaking orders!
I have heard of Sir Charles Napier and his famous one word Latin message (with its double meaning) to London.
Ad astra! Sean
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