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Allegiance
Nov. 2nd, 2016 07:35 amDreamed I quietly uncovered a plot in the Fae courts
and the Fae queen was just as quietly happy with me
but then I had to answer to the actual Queen of England because someone said this was a sign my loyalties weren't where they should be.
I was something like one eighth Fae and had precisely one trick left of the magic
but it was a very good trick
tuning attention.
So I could be a walking Somebody Else's Problem field, or walk in All Eyes On Us.
Which is super extra sneaky, because how would anyone suspect someone that obvious could be that inconspicuous?
So I had sneakily learnt what the signal would be for 'everyone run' for the conspirators, and then made sure everyone noticed it when I made it in the middle of a banquet.
The Queen could just arrest everyone when they got out into the halls.
The prince trying to usurp her throne had his fangs quite thoroughly pulled.
But it was suggested to the Queen of England that this maybe might be a bit partisan for an Ambassador, who after all would have to deal with any regime going.
And humans can have allegiance problems when going among Fae, who have so many powers of glamour and beguilement.
So I was asked point blank where my loyalties lay, and had to think about my answer.
This did not go over well with the security people.
But it was because my answer was more about philosophy and alignment than politics.
Humans live in a set of overlapping and complexly interlocking systems, the wreckage of any one of which can skew all the rest. And the way we deal with that of late is to have nation states each arguing their corner, instructed by complex arguments in parliaments within those states, and so on and so forth down the scales to individual choice. But a truly global view of how those systems work makes it ever more urgent they keep working, since any one loop 'winning' would go the worse for it not very far down the line. And that much is obvious even when it's just humans.
The Fae courts have been trying to play a symphony of complexly interlocked non human sentience, and they've been doing it as individual players for as much as a millennium. As a whole system they've been going at least as long as human civilisation, and quite possibly longer than humans as a whole. The argument about whether they arose from us or we from them is misguided when you consider some of them appear to be sentient lava or thinking air. And the most impressive part is how lava and air and plant and meat based forms have been, with significant exceptions, basically getting along, at least well enough the planet is still standing. And they've done it without causing mass extinctions, even when we started to.
Once these things are known, the question of loyalty is a bit of a stumper, since it boggles the mind to just... choose one part, and hope the rest just get on with it.
So I woke up trying to explain that to a court uninterested in most of the necessary referents.
I wanted to ask them how they could find so many forms of sentient life and still have loyalty to any concept smaller than Starfleet and Federation, but for assorted reasons that was unlikely to translate.
Still, that's the basic problem that interests me about all these setups. When you meet other sapients who think different than you but just as well, when they have diverse and even clashing needs, what do you do?
As a disabled queer woman this is not an academic exercise and I'm quite interested in the responses to the defamiliarised versions.
and the Fae queen was just as quietly happy with me
but then I had to answer to the actual Queen of England because someone said this was a sign my loyalties weren't where they should be.
I was something like one eighth Fae and had precisely one trick left of the magic
but it was a very good trick
tuning attention.
So I could be a walking Somebody Else's Problem field, or walk in All Eyes On Us.
Which is super extra sneaky, because how would anyone suspect someone that obvious could be that inconspicuous?
So I had sneakily learnt what the signal would be for 'everyone run' for the conspirators, and then made sure everyone noticed it when I made it in the middle of a banquet.
The Queen could just arrest everyone when they got out into the halls.
The prince trying to usurp her throne had his fangs quite thoroughly pulled.
But it was suggested to the Queen of England that this maybe might be a bit partisan for an Ambassador, who after all would have to deal with any regime going.
And humans can have allegiance problems when going among Fae, who have so many powers of glamour and beguilement.
So I was asked point blank where my loyalties lay, and had to think about my answer.
This did not go over well with the security people.
But it was because my answer was more about philosophy and alignment than politics.
Humans live in a set of overlapping and complexly interlocking systems, the wreckage of any one of which can skew all the rest. And the way we deal with that of late is to have nation states each arguing their corner, instructed by complex arguments in parliaments within those states, and so on and so forth down the scales to individual choice. But a truly global view of how those systems work makes it ever more urgent they keep working, since any one loop 'winning' would go the worse for it not very far down the line. And that much is obvious even when it's just humans.
The Fae courts have been trying to play a symphony of complexly interlocked non human sentience, and they've been doing it as individual players for as much as a millennium. As a whole system they've been going at least as long as human civilisation, and quite possibly longer than humans as a whole. The argument about whether they arose from us or we from them is misguided when you consider some of them appear to be sentient lava or thinking air. And the most impressive part is how lava and air and plant and meat based forms have been, with significant exceptions, basically getting along, at least well enough the planet is still standing. And they've done it without causing mass extinctions, even when we started to.
Once these things are known, the question of loyalty is a bit of a stumper, since it boggles the mind to just... choose one part, and hope the rest just get on with it.
So I woke up trying to explain that to a court uninterested in most of the necessary referents.
I wanted to ask them how they could find so many forms of sentient life and still have loyalty to any concept smaller than Starfleet and Federation, but for assorted reasons that was unlikely to translate.
Still, that's the basic problem that interests me about all these setups. When you meet other sapients who think different than you but just as well, when they have diverse and even clashing needs, what do you do?
As a disabled queer woman this is not an academic exercise and I'm quite interested in the responses to the defamiliarised versions.