Mark A Mandel wrote: > # [[ An aside: I've made the claim that the increased sorcerous powers > # post-Interregnum are not due to skills honed during the low-power > # Interregnum days; that's just plain silly. If it were true, folks > # born after the Interregnum (like Vlad) wouldn't be able to teleport > # because they didn't get those centuries of skill honing. > > ISTR that it wasn't attributed to honing of individual skills, but to > advancement of the state of the art. And those developments would have > been passed on to anyone learning sorcery. > Possibly screwball musing follows: First, the Jenoine can use amorphia directly, correct? The Orb, OTOH, only allows access to the first sea of chaos, not the second. And the gods try to keep the Jenoine from showing up on Dragaera. So... What if something like hacking an alien higher-tech ship with a Macintosh is really rather unlikely, and in most cases the alien should have no problem at all subverting a lower-tech computer base, and leaving the programmers scratching their heads wondering what the hell is happening? Maybe the reason for Dragaera's rather slow tech progress is the gods deliberately keeping Dragaeran 'technology' extremely secure from hacking by the Jenoine, even though it results in rather stunted progress in the state of the art, because the more options you give a sorceror, the more options you also give a Jenoine if he gets access? Perhaps also why pre-Empire sorcery is discouraged, since it lacks the protections on the Orb to avoid virus-equivalents? Now, if the Orb was reprogrammed after the Interregnum to make teleporting easier, perhaps that was because the gods thought they had enough safeguards that the Jenoine couldn't hack the Great Sea or Orb v.2, and so made it easier to teleport using the Orb - but they miscalculated because they were so focused on protecting the Great Sea that they forgot about the lesser one. Make sense, or totally off the wall?