Murdoch sees Trevelyan entering his private suite at:
"...the discreet and expensive Altair House." (p. 95)
- and exclaims:
"'...Sunglaze! You again!'" (ibid.)
This is a standard fictional hero-confronts-villain routine: Trevelyan hero; Murdoch villain. The former has thwarted the latter before. Imagine that this story is an installment of a series in which these two men have clashed at least once before. It is not. "The Pirate" is written as a prequel to The Peregrine but not as a sequel to any earlier Trevelyan Micah installments. There were none. However, Poul Anderson easily persuades us to accept that Trevelyan has had a long and distinguished career in the Stellar Union Coordination Service and that, in this role, he got the better of Captain Murdoch Juan on a previous occasion.
Heroes confront villains all the time and it has to seem fresh every time. Written by Alan Moore, the Batman intones, "So, Red Hood, we meet again!" (Standard stuff.) But the dupe inside the hood thinks, "What is happening? Is that a demon?" (Very unstandard, Alan Moore stuff.)
"You again!" can mean something completely different. When Robert Heinlein's Dan Davis approaches the scientist who has discovered "temporal displacement" but has been pressurized to suppress it, the latter says:
6 comments:
If he thought he could get away with it, he'd laugh in the police officer's face. And a.generation or two afterwards, he'd be able to.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: That "discrete" and "Sunglaze" didn't look right to me, so I looked up the same texts of "The Pirate" in my copy of HOMEWARD AND BEYOND. This is what I saw on page 79: "discreet" and "Sunblaze." The text you used was defective, but even typos sometimes have to be quoted.
Mr. Stirling: I agree, if Murdoch Juan could have got away with what he planned, he would have mocked Trevelyan. Maybe not even a generation later, if Trevelyan had not succeeded in following Murdoch.
I can see there being good arguments for the State making some effort at policing a frontier, to prevent some of the all too likely grosser abuses. But I don't believe all such attempts will succeed or even should succeed. I also believe it will be futile to tightly police a vigorously expanding frontier. Better for the Cordies to focus on real abuses.
As far as the planet Good Luck is concerned my sympathies are more with Murdoch. Since the original inhabitants were wiped out by the nearby supernova, why shouldn't he have the patent or charter for colonizing Good Luck? At most such a document could have included sections requiring Murdoch agreeing to archeologists and xenologists studying the remains of the extinct natives. Large parts of Good Luck should still have been available for colonization by Murdoch. I think Trevelyan Micah went too far.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
My copy indeed has "Sunglaze" but it also has "discreet." I had unconsciously substituted the British English spelling of the latter and will now correct it.
Paul.
I have now looked further and found that "discrete" and "discreet" have different meanings but I am used to using "discrete" in either sense!
Kaor, Paul!
I had not known that some people in the UK thought "discrete" had the same meaning as "discreet." I recalled Churchill's droll comment about the UK/US being "separated" by the same language.
Ad astra! Sean
I never noticed the difference before.
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