[Dragaera] Paarfi's Whitewash of Adron

[Philip Hart]

On Sat, 6 Aug 2011, Jerry Friedman wrote:

> turned yet.  In the timeline, Alexx, you wrote, "Tazendra (and Adron's) 
> understanding of what is going on is almost certainly mistaken.  The 
> Cycle has not actually turned, so Adron is not truly Emperor."  But I 
> don't think this follows--Adron could have briefly been the Emperor, 
> enough to cause the paradox, even though events two hundred years later 
> proved the Cycle hadn't turned.

It seems to me simpler to think that the Orb believes Adron is emperor, 
but he's not.  In my take Zerika hasn't programmed in the case where the 
death of the emperor doesn't indicate the next house gets the orb, because 
she wasn't thinking about great cycles, say.  She increments a pointer to 
the next house when the emperor dies, or abdicates, or acknowledges losing 
to a rebellion; or she just assumes the pointer to the next emperor has 
been updated in a call-back from the Cycle and uses some unitialized 
memory. I would think that the unit testing of the orb was not extensive.

(For that matter I can imagine that there was _no_ Cycle-emperor during 
the interregnum - that seems cleanest.  That would surely not be a 
handled case unless the programmer was extraordinarily careful.)

This avoids paradox, I think, and at least accords with my programming 
experience of having different modules believe they own a piece of 
information resulting in bad behavior and then a crash.

Paarfi might not want to discuss bugs in the orb if the Paarfiad is, as 
I've speculated, written as a Dragaeran Aeneid, a work of propaganda or 
anyway state-building.