Status Updates From Ice Crown

Well, an open ending and denouement. But shall we trust what Imfry will do with his admission and now duty? Is this a happy ending, or suggestive of something else going on? With this ending, it actually makes the book/story seem like just another chronicle of planets as studied by The Service, that could go on.

More interesting description of the installation's influence, just in a changed way now. I like these passages set in caves and secret tunnels; reminds me of Earthsea's second volume in Tombs of Atuan, very atmospheric with an intense sense of place. Some classic fantasy tropes evident here.

Interesting that the installation affects memory and a sense of orienting awareness, too. Are Imfry and the princess suffering similar or different effects? Questions still to be answered and discovered by Roane.

Imfry and Roane trade life stories or contexts. We learn that on the Planet Clio with royal and titled families the youngest inherits to give expected needed provision for life rather than the eldest, expected to have succeeded in their own way. The Service should have its anthropologists study and take interest in that instead. We learn Conditioning can make blind but not affect touch if so guided.

Ah, convergences. She speaks of her off-planet Service's non-interference interloping research. I'm sure this is a plot convenience, but the way it's done or spoken about is near. Interesting that I'm reading this concept of non- interference search for old planet-controlling tech when I'm reading Star Trek and a discussion about the Confederation's Prime Directive for starship captains to comply to in missions.

"People did have odd tastes, as who should know better than she, who had been exposed to a variety of worlds and customs---but to find a man dealt unreservedly with direhounds!
...
'Ill luck can come from too early thanksgiving.' She had never been superstitious before, but now, as uneasy as she was inwardly, she could understand primitive natives who feared to invoke wrong powers, tempt retaliation from ill luck."

Ok interesting world-building developments with Roane's vision-dream and further ponderings of the Psychocrat installation they found regarding it's use and effect on worlds and cultures. We finally are getting to learn more about the workings of the context for their party's search and mission in this technology.

Hmm, influence being had and held by 3 sources, consecutively: Reddick's Mind-globe, the Ice Crown, and the machines experimenting on Clio and keeping them primitive. Quotes to come.

"'I assure you...what has passed since then is born of the Crown alone.To rule and to reign is very different from living as an heiress to such glories. I think we shall find the Princess is no longer as you have always known her.'

Roane comparing her adventures on the planet with the princess to the dream-like state drugs give to experience alternate lives, as if virtual reality. Lord Imbert's hesitations and restrictions and news of the King for protection seem sketchy and ill-influenced. Her mental comparison of the training's info of Revenue to the princess's more detailed + superior.

'Ill luck is to real a thing to most kings and lords.'

More references which remind me of Aragorn, son of Arathorn, and his tributes to Gondor ancestors; and the customs and favors along the stops of the journey for the Hobbits and Fellowship. I like these literary elements included.

" 'I see this is a vow bridge...We travel with clean hands and no malice at heart....But it is a good omen that we ride by one Niklas' favor!'

Customs.

"'Of what use is any ruler to her people unless she understands their ways? Oh, I know that there is in some countries the odd belief that there is no common meeting point between king and subject. But that is not so with my House and never has been.'

'For the good of him who built the way, for the good of those who walk the way, for the good of the journey, and the good, surely, of its final ending.'"

Ah, the quaint old language of the Princess calling her kidnapping, rescue, trapping in the cave, provisioned back to the Guardian's camp as 'adventure.' This also does kind of cause to think back vaguely to Lord of the Rings. Roane noting Reveny faces to remember later.

" 'Does anyone forget those who serve them faithfully? It is not strange to do so. Rather it would be unfitting and strange if one did not.' "

"The crown will know...; it has many strange powers. All the crowns do. They are the hearts of the countries possessing them and their lives are those of the nations...Why is it with you...that men and women dress alike? Even our peasant girls delight in their bright skirts and would your wear very ugly and drab...I do not understand you. Yet you will let them take you---you sit here and *wait* for them to take you!"

"That restless desire for freedom which had been born at Cram-brief was coming to a flowering here on Clio...Not that all this flowed coherently thru her mind now...His callous solution...had acted on Roane like the cut of a whip---not to lash her into a slave line, but rather to awaken her resistance...[they] had had wrapped her in a cocoon of acceptance. But larvae develop in cocoons, in time they break free."

This section of two chapters of deciding against the rules to remain unnoticed and uninvolved with planet natives, to help the Princess escape, and their further explorations, remind me here of the atmospheric, magical and dark setting of Le Guin's Tombs of Atuan. Nicely told context & history, though the princess has rather stilted speech and reactions.

"A land w/o a crown is a land w/o a name or being, so decreed"

Fantastic, atmospheric description of this abandoned and decrepit exposed tower.

This description definitely makes me think of the asteroid station (Ceres?) in The Expanse series:

"While it was impossible to get lost, Roane found that venturing alone into the wilderness made her slightly uneasy. She had never been completely alone before. On board ship there was the cramped feeling, even in a private cabin, of other lives close by, just as the lifeless air one breathed had (recycled)"

"Once more she wondered what it would be like to have a real, set-on-a-planet, immovable home where one dared accumulate things one fancied and enjoyed to look upon just because they were beautiful, or reminded one of some happy time, or were fun to own."

! I hope this isn't what we have to look forward to in the future!---no luxury or leisure for personal belongings or memorial pieces. Sadness, as with The Expanse