[Dragaera] Paarfi's Whitewash of Adron

[Jerry Friedman]

> From: Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu>

> 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.

It's simpler in one way, but it requires the additional assumptions that there's a distinction between the Orb's belief and the fact of who is Emperor, and that Adron's spell depends crucially on its belief, and that he doesn't realize this (or, for unreliable-narrator fans, that Paarfi doesn't).

> 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.

It does seem strange that Paarfi says the Orb "searched, in its own way, for the next Emperor".  Of all the things the Orb knows, I'd have thought one of the most basic is who will be Emperor if the present one dies, and where that person is.  I can see why it has to "interrogate the Cycle"--if the Cycle has changed, the Emperor is from the next house, whereas if it hasn't, there might be a choice--but that's not much of a search.

By the way, I've long wondered whether the Cycle was originally in the Orb.  Steven confirmed the suggestion (sorry, but I can't remember who figured this out) that the order of the Houses is determined by historical forces.  After the muddling through of the Tsalmoth, the Empire wants the Vallista to build a stable and well-arranged society, but the prosperity and the laws create a good environment for the Jhereg, and then people turn to the Iorich to clean things up, or something like that.  So maybe the first succession of Houses happened the way it did by historical necessity, and then the pattern recurred, and the Cycle formed out of nothing.  This would mean that, assuming the Orb does interrogate the Cycle as Paarfi says, it started doing that on its own or by someone's "revision of the code" rather than being made to do that by Zerika.

Otherwise I don't know of any textev either way, except that Vlad mentions "the forces of history, tradition, and will that keep the cycle turning as it does."  If Zerika and maybe Sethra and the gods had simply created the Cycle at the start of the Empire, history and especially tradition might not be involved.

> 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.)

I don't see much doubt that you're right.

> 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.

I can see why you've speculated that, though there's a fine line between a work of state-building and one that panders to patriotism.

But everybody now knows there's a bug in the system.  I'm not sure it matters much whether the bug is in the Orb, in some sense.

Jerry Friedman