1991 SF, first of a trilogy. Saint Butterflies-are-free Peace Sincere
was happy as a smuggler pilot, but she had to go and save an
inexperienced mercenary from the local lowlife, and then things just
got complicated.
"I understand you are a pilot-of-starships?"
We established that I was a pilot-of-starships, that I owned and
could fly a ground-to-ground-rated freighter-licensed ship, and that
my tickets were in order-Directorate clearances, Outfar clearances,
inspection certs, et cetera, and tedious so forth. Forged, of
course, but the information was correct-I'd have to be a fool to
claim to be able to pilot something I couldn't.
We also established that Gibberfur here was the Chief Dispatcher for
the Outlands Freight Company, a reputable and highly-respected
organization that chose to do its business in sleazy arcades. I
ordered another round of tea and waited.
All right, part of the complication is that she has some dodgy tech
hidden on board, Paladin, or Library Main Bank Seven of the Federation
University Library at Sikander Prime. There hasn't been a Federation,
for thousands of years, and the Libraries may be part of the reason
why, though nobody really knows; by now, any sort of artificial
intelligence is vanishingly rare and utterly illegal.
And of course it has its own agenda.
I quickly abandoned the question of relative value when Butterfly
introduced the concept of "fun" into the discussion.
I have learned that "fun" means exposing yourself to extreme risk
without compensation, so I attempted to explain to Butterfly that if
she were dead she would not know how much "fun" she was having.
This did not work.
Multiple plots from multiple players mesh by accident, sometimes
reinforcing each other, sometimes interfering. Even when Butterfly is
coerced into doing something, it's not at all clear whether the person
coercing her really wants it done, or just wants her to be in a
particular place and act the way she normally does, or indeed wants
her to fail spectacularly. Nobody's going to look out for this
spiky found-family except itself, and not even that sometimes.
The book is written in Butterfly's heavy dialect much of the time, and
sometimes contextual clues are thin, but I didn't find it hard going;
in fact I very much enjoyed it. The book does end quite suddenly, and
I'm glad I have the sequel available.
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