Bluesqueak wrote:A Beautiful Friendship implies Sphinx is just out of the plague. Marjorie has to restart a lot of projects because her predecessor died. Stephanie says people are ‘crazy busy’ restarting. Scott MacDallan arrived twelve years ago and was treating plague victims on Sphinx.
Got it, thanks. But that doesn't imply anything nefarious. The plague was the reason why Manticore was bringing in new immigrants in the first place.
Re: yeoman versus nobility: From What Price Dreams: “she [Stephanie] seems to’ve spent a great deal of effort avoiding publicity.” And later: “several accounts insist she was offered a peerage…”
At which point we’re moving from ‘could only afford yeoman status’ to ‘actively avoiding a hereditary role in parliament.’ Again, an Alpha line with an entirely legitimate title of nobility would be very useful to the Alignment. Add this to the avoiding publicity and the impression is that the Harringtons are a Lost Alpha line working hard to stay lost.
Hardly. A noble in Manticore at the time had little to no particular use for the MAlign: Manticore was in the middle of nowhere, literally. The League was 6 months away travelling in hyperspace and the next island of civilisation was Haven, another 3 or so months further out. It's unknown when the MAlign started turning their eyes towards Haven for their part to bring the League down and create chaos, but this would be too early. We know that in a couple of decades from ABF's time that the only other entity to have any battleships at all was the Andermani Empire, which implies that Haven didn't have the military prowess it would have needed to attract the MAlign's attention. Maybe the Andermani did and The Plan was later changed to Haven when infiltration of the emperor's court proved infeasible and Haven's economy grew.
Either way, a noble in Manticore is not of more use than a noble in the Free Duchy of Barca or a wealthy industrialist in Casca. It's not like the Harringtons would suddenly become the Royal Family; being just one more family of Earls and Countesses, or Barons and Baronesses among the hundred-or-so peerages of the time isn't going to give them more attention than otherwise.
As for avoiding the peerage and attention, there
is a covert reason: the treecats themselves. We know they did start a centuries-long conspiracy to keep the treecats' true level of intelligence unknown. To assume the Harringtons had a second, covert reason is stretching it. Not impossible... just stretching it. Besides, I don't think the peerage would get them
more attention than they were already getting from having discovered the twelfth sentient alien race. The MAlign would be far more attracted by the treecats -- and we know they did attempt to acquire treecats -- than by the Harringtons.
What could be a part of it is lying low to avoid being leveraged by the MAlign into helping them obtain treecats. But what could the MAlign use to blackmail the Harringtons?
Yes, the book could have a new conspiracy for its plot, but the Star Kingdom series has been very careful to plant the notion that Mesa will find the treecats fascinating and might pay highly for information. Chekhov’s gun - if you mention Mesa in the early books, they should show up in the later ones. (Just as Stan Chang’s drug use became a later plot point and Trudy’s early desire for pet animals matured into voluntary work.)
While Chekhov's Gun is true, that doesn't mean Mesa has to be the big baddies out there. They had already been established as prominent geneticists, like Beowulf, so it's only natural that they would have interest. It had also been established that Manpower had attempted to acquire them, even getting involved in Crown Princess Adrienne's attempted assassination (which spectacularly backfired!). So they had to be mentioned.
And the early books make it sound like Stephanie had no idea her family was going to emigrate. She’s been ‘brought’, she’s been ‘dumped on Sphinx’, she’d ’deeply resented’ leaving Meyerdahl. It’s also an exciting ‘rescue mission’ … Stephanie seems to have no memory of her parents ever mentioning emigrating until they’d booked the starship tickets. Add this to the other Chekhov’s gun from the main series - the Harringtons are a Lost Alpha line.
I mean, you could have them just deciding to emigrate and not having a clue about the Alignment, but that’s not really an exciting plot.
I will grant you this is a good possibility. We know the MAlign is out there and that Manpower has their spies trying to obtain treecat samples. If we also know that the Harringtons are a lost Alpha line -- whether they know it or not -- it stands to reason that a MAlign agent might try to coerce them into getting involved. But back to my question: how? Being a "lost line" implies they'd already lost interest in the Alignment's goals, so asking for their commitment to "the cause" is not going to be of use.
On the other hand, I don't think we'll get to that deep. For one thing, the Star Kingdom series has mostly stood alone from the rest. You don't need to read the rest of the series and sub-series in order to understand it. It's targeted at young adults and so far all the books have been detective problem-solving, not military sci-fi. So I don't think David and Jane are going to pivot the series completely to the point previous readers would be unable to follow and would become disinterested.
Bringing in Manpower agents, yes. That can also start the rehabilitation of Terrence Bolgeo, which we know from
Toll of Honor did happen.
