TFT snippet #3

Dilandu wrote:
Exactly. What use would have Eastshare for future Safehold, say, 100+ years after Reveal? Historical oddity, at best. Not even a valuable "witness of the past", because Owl's SNARC's made a much better chronology of Safehold.

Frankly, it would be much more humane just not wake him up at all.

I dunno. I vaguely recall that one Starfire novel where an admiral from the past was woken up because of the latest war crisis going on. The old (rejuvenated) admiral proved to be useful.

I can imagine something like that happening on Safehold. Some future crisis crops up, Charis or even the planet itself finds itself suddenly short on competent military leadership for some reason. Enter Eastshare after a suitable period of brushing up on all the latest updates to warfare.

Hey, Eastshare has already lived and fought through one major shift in how wars are fought and adapted superbly. What's another one to a guy like him?

Considering the considerable effort put in to enable Eastshare to be an effective general despite not being a member of the inner circle, I'm absolutely SHOCKED that Cayleb and Sharley tried to make him an inner circle member after the war. Why waste all the effort Merlin went to advising Eastshare in various personas during the war? If they thought that Eastshare's ironclad belief in the CoGA was unshakeable and a huge part of who he was, why risk losing him for the convenience of having him him available for instant conversations and so he could join in the planning for the Big Reveal and general skullduggery?

I never expected them to try to bring him into the inner circle, and I was shocked that they were even discussing it. Their "unbroken" string of success went to their heads I suppose. (Although Sandaria's "conversion" is still iffy in my opinion.)

RFC uses this debacle to show us the unbreakable grip that the CoGA has on a HUGE percentage of Safehold's population. Eastshare wouldn't even LOOK at TF tech or read any of the vast library of information that was made available to him because he knew down to his bones that all of it was the work of Shan-Wei, and that the "demon" Merlin was tempting him with it. (Can you say "Cognitive dissonance?)

How is the Big Reveal supposed to sway the minds of people who refuse to open their eyes to the Truth when it's shown to them clearly and in a manner they can understand? When they believe their very souls would be in jeopardy if they so much as look? When they consider everyone who accepts the Big Reveal as heretics and blasphemers worthy of the Punishment of Schueler?

The Jihad will be nothing compared the the Holy War(s) caused by the Big Reveal. RFC has mentioned this several times - that the wars resulting from the inevitable schisms that split from the CoGA would be vastly worse than the war for the survival of Charis and its allies.

A bunch of us predicted that the WORST outcome of the war from Merlin's point of view would be Duchairn gaining control of the CoGA and reforming it to what almost everyone on Safehold believes it should have been all along. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. How does one fight against a religion that you ostensibly agree with once again?

Yes, the Church of Charis (and presumably the Church of Siddarmark) will exist, mostly because of the bitterness the survivors feel due to millions being slaughtered by the troops of Mother Church and the Inquisition, or who died fleeing the war or starved or froze to death due to the privations it caused. The fury they feel towards Mother Church will make it impossible for them to ever reconcile with the CoGA that did that to them and their families, and by extension their entire country. (Siddarmark and every member of the Empire of Charis.)

Toss in North Harchong, (I haven't read ahead of this snippet so this is all conjecture) whose church hierarchy were happy with the former CoGA and all the lovely graft it allowed them to skim from the system, and you have the setting for a massive slave revolt, even before the news that the slaves of the Mighty Host are never coming home because they're too dangerous to the status quo. That's going to tick off EVERY family member and extended relative whose father/son/brother/cousin/etc. went off to war, and for all their loved ones know, are still hale and hearty and just as dedicated to Mother Church as the day they left, yet the CoGA won't allow them to return to their loved ones. This is going to get UGLY!

It will REALLY get ugly if a sizeable number of the Mighty Host manage to return to North Harchong, especially if they bring their weapons with them. The slaves have been kept in check so far because they only have slings while the police force has guns and cavalry with bows. (I'd guess they carry pistols by now.) Imagine those enforcers charging their horses into a line of ex-Mighty Host soldiers armed with the latest CoGA rifles. (There's a lovely scene from the invasion of Corisande that shows in lurid detail what happens when cavalry charge a line of riflemen!)

The plantation owners are DEAD if the army/police and their overseers can't protect them from the slaves they've abused for their entire lifetimes, so all of North Harchong is a potential bloodbath that has nothing to do with the CoGA. Once the overlords are slaughtered, how do former slaves govern themselves? How do hundreds of millions of people keep from starving to death when the social structure has been destroyed and there are likely to be millions of refugees scattered to the winds, looking for their next meal? What begins as a slave uprising could devolve into complete chaos and warlordism.

Fortunately the teachings of the CoGA might have a wee problem surviving a result like THAT - given a few generations. (Refer to the Pirates of Trellheim as an example - based on their behavior and the fact that they likely have little or no oversight from the CoGA, they may be as close to agnostics or atheists as can exist on Safehold.)

No, the Big Reveal won't do the citizens of Safehold a lot of favors for a few generations, and it won't until the true believers either die out, are purged, or become willing to accept the truth or at the very least agree to live and let live. Meanwhile, a whole lotta people are gonna die.

McGuiness wrote:Considering the considerable effort put in to enable Eastshare to be an effective general despite not being a member of the inner circle, I'm absolutely SHOCKED that Cayleb and Sharley tried to make him an inner circle member after the war. Why waste all the effort Merlin went to advising Eastshare in various personas during the war? If they thought that Eastshare's ironclad belief in the CoGA was unshakeable and a huge part of who he was, why risk losing him for the convenience of having him him available for instant conversations and so he could join in the planning for the Big Reveal and general skullduggery?

I never expected them to try to bring him into the inner circle, and I was shocked that they were even discussing it. Their "unbroken" string of success went to their heads I suppose. (Although Sandaria's "conversion" is still iffy in my opinion.)

RFC uses this debacle to show us the unbreakable grip that the CoGA has on a HUGE percentage of Safehold's population. Eastshare wouldn't even LOOK at TF tech or read any of the vast library of information that was made available to him because he knew down to his bones that all of it was the work of Shan-Wei, and that the "demon" Merlin was tempting him with it. (Can you say "Cognitive dissonance?)

How is the Big Reveal supposed to sway the minds of people who refuse to open their eyes to the Truth when it's shown to them clearly and in a manner they can understand? When they believe their very souls would be in jeopardy if they so much as look? When they consider everyone who accepts the Big Reveal as heretics and blasphemers worthy of the Punishment of Schueler?

The Jihad will be nothing compared the the Holy War(s) caused by the Big Reveal. RFC has mentioned this several times - that the wars resulting from the inevitable schisms that split from the CoGA would be vastly worse than the war for the survival of Charis and its allies.

Snip

While I agree that RFC used Eastshare's reaction as a demonstration of how deeply ingrained faith is on Safehold and what is likely to happen in many cases, they preferred trying to reveal it to him rather than risking his developing any sort of suspicions on his own. Also, having him advised by a "Seijin" every time has its limitations, especially in war. It was high risk and high reward and now that the Jihad ended, they could reduce some of the risks (like losing their best field commander in the middle of a war or challenging his loyalty and having him denounce them to the Group of Four) by telling him them. I would also guess that the Inner Circle has expanded significantly in the post-Jihad era, as they are no longer fighting for their survival.

Referring to the OBS and the likelihood it has of firing at Federation Tech, I'll toss in my two cents. Keep in mind that the OBS was built while the Hamilcar was still in orbit, so there were a LOT of spacecraft/robots flying around building (and rebuilding) the OBS, both the "quick and dirty" version used on Alexandria, and the much more robust version that currently exists.

Since as Merlin once noted, it would be quite inconvenient if the Rakurai fired on the archangels as they flew about the planet, and the fact that it's never fired on the recon skimmer or the lorry, it's very likely that the OBS is programmed to ignore TF aircraft and probably spacecraft as well. That being the case, I'd bet that it likely won't fire on any TF craft that leaves orbit - after all, where was the Hamilcar getting the raw materials to build the Temple and the OBS? Somewhere else in the Safehold system, most likely an asteroid belt. If RFC were being sneaky about it and wanted to eliminate a parade of ore cars from an asteroid belt to the terraforming fleet, I'll concede that grabbing an asteroid that was large enough and towing it into close Safehold orbit would provide all the raw materials for everything the Hamilcar and its fellow construction ships ever built. It would also have been visible with the naked eye from the surface, and Commander Pei didn't see it and the Testimonies of the Adams and Eves would have mentioned it, even if it had been towed into place decades later. So I don't think RFC can sneak that in at this point - which means that I'm probably wrong!

Obviously the construction work to build the current OBS took place before/during/and possibly after the War with the Fallen. By the time the war was over and construction of the OBS was complete, the Hamilcar was most likely STILL in orbit, and the archangels flew to and from it regularly. With all that coming and going, it seems unlikely that the OBS was programmed to fire at spacecraft flying to and from Safehold orbit. By the time the Temple was built and whatever control hardware and software was built into it to manage the OBS, (IF the OBS is controlled from the Temple, let's not underestimate the sneakiness of RFC!) there likely hadn't been any sightings of survivors of the Fallen, let alone any of their aircraft in decades. With no apparent threat from the Fallen (which turned out to be valid for centuries) there was no reason to run the risk of having the OBS fire at aircraft or spacecraft.

Perhaps the last surviving archangels felt that there wasn't any remaining threat from the Fallen, so they left the default state of the OBS to NOT fire at any TF craft - unless they violate some predetermined rules, in which case the OBS would check with the Temple for guidance as to what (if anything) it should do to a craft that's leaving orbit, for example. Of course we don't know if it has the offensive weapons to shoot down a TF craft that's leaving Safehold, or approaching Safehold if the 1000 year return includes the return of the Hamilcar.

All we know right now is that the OBS won't fire at a recon skimmer flying at mach # in near orbit. If if the plan to destroy the OBS is to attack it from outside Safehold orbit, then the good guys need to try an experiment where a TF craft tries to leave Safehold on a vector where it clearly isn't threatening the OBS in any way. If it's allowed to leave, a whole bunch of possibilities open up.

The problem is that doing so might wake up whatever is under the Temple...

thanatos wrote:While I agree that RFC used Eastshare's reaction as a demonstration of how deeply ingrained faith is on Safehold and what is likely to happen in many cases, they preferred trying to reveal it to him rather than risking his developing any sort of suspicions on his own. Also, having him advised by a "Seijin" every time has its limitations, especially in war. It was high risk and high reward and now that the Jihad ended, they could reduce some of the risks (like losing their best field commander in the middle of a war or challenging his loyalty and having him denounce them to the Group of Four) by telling him them. I would also guess that the Inner Circle has expanded significantly in the post-Jihad era, as they are no longer fighting for their survival.

I agree with every point you make - the war is over, he's their best commander by far, and he'd be WAAAAY more effective as a member of the inner circle.

However, they kept him outside of the inner circle and went to the considerable effort of having a series of seijins guide him throughout the war because they KNEW that his rock solid belief in the CoGA was so central to his personality that they couldn't take that faith away without destroying him. Wasting all that effort now, even though they aren't at war so if the worst does happen and he rejects the truth they'll have to put him on ice, their reasons for running that risk seem a bit thin. Obviously they agonized about it for years, but if I as a reader could predict that it would result in disaster, Cayleb and Sharley should have been able to as well - and they know him way better than I do!

RFC lectured us once on the fact that we know more than the characters at any given point in a novel, since we're shown scenes and the thoughts of other characters that the heroes simply don't know anything about. Perhaps the explanations RFC gave throughout the series of just how pious and devout Eastshare was gave us an unfair advantage. Plus we're sort of playing "Monday morning quarterback" on their decision to tell him, and I'll admit that his refusal to listen or even look at the evidence right in front of him in Nimue's Cave surprised me. That man was devout to his core and in fear for his soul if he so much as glanced at the fountain of knowledge they offered him. He was both defiant and terrified that he'd already sold his soul by working with Shan-Wei worshipers.

On the other hand it would be awfully hard to deny the truth as you're lying in a cryo crate and Merlin is slipping the needles into your arm to put you on ice for however long they think it will take for Safehold to change enough for you to accept the truth. (Or cynically, for as long as they need to keep you out of the way.)

Sigh... Eastshare was one of my favorite characters. A brilliant general, and a nobleman who dealt with commoners like real people as long as they wore a military uniform, and who realized that there are commoners and there are seijins, and some commoners are just a wee bit more important than others. That was so endearing! And now he's gone.

This will certainly slow the expansion of the inner circle, and I suspect that introductions to the truth will no longer take place in the palace after dinner. It wouldn't do for the phrase "Being invited to dinner with the Emperor and/or Empress" to become a code for "You're going to have a heart attack!" Expect introductions in out of the way warehouses and such, handled by Merlin, Staynair, and anyone else close to the invitee who might be helpful. (Why didn't they have Staynair there? He might have made a difference!)

None are so blind as those who will not see, and Eastshare gives us an example of just how hard it's going to be to convince a large percentage of the population of Safehold to even look! Barring some major catastrophe, like a second Pearl Harbor... (Look it up if you'd like to go down the rabbit hole to some serious real life conspiracy theories!)

And if this failure doesn't cause them to pause and consider the faithfulness of everyone who's already part of the inner circle, something BAD is going to happen! Hint: Put a SNARC on Sandaria at ALL times and review its data every day - at least! Perhaps its time for Nynian to send her off to supervise Seijin Khody's shrine for the rest of her life...

I keep thinking about this snippet and I wonder ...

what if it's the other way around -- not the Inner Circle having decided he should be told, but Eastshare having gone over the war afterwards and not being able to add up everything to his satisfaction ... we know he's a smart man, and it could be that he's decided something is not right about what happened with the information flows, or the extremely timely seijin's visits ... and the Inner Circle has *no choice* but to either tell him or (literally) freeze him out from asking questions in puiblic ?