On Thu, 4 Sep 2003 rone at ennui.org wrote: > [SPOILERS?] > > > David Silberstein writes: > /Taltos/, chapter 14, pg 144 in th Ace PB: > "I'm your cousin. My name is Morrolan e'Drien. I am the eldest son > of your father's youngest sister." > I have speculated elsewhere about whether Dragon lineage follows the > father always, or can perhaps sometimes follow the mother. But I am > nearly certain that Rollandar's wife, Adron's sister, was an e'Kieron. > > "And yet," observed Kéurana, "he has not the bloodlines to use > such powers fully." [LoCB, p. 391] > > I am confuséd. > > Note that "eldest" would appear to be wrong, although it occurs to me > as I type this that Morrolan might not have known of his brother > Molric when he said that. Or Vlad or Steve just got it wrong. > > Hmm. FHYA, page 141: "To-day my cousin is Warlord, and his younger > son is my chainman, [...]" Note 'younger'. I think I've argued here before that Dragaeran might well have a system for describing relationships like the Romans used and various other cultures use, with a host of precise terms for degrees of separation - and that the poor translator is faced with difficulties keeping them straight (it's a masculine genitive of the foo declension, and the referent is dead, so...) This word is likely to be unique in the corpus of Dragaeran texts, adding to the difficulty. Also I would like to ask what it could possibly mean to have the e'Kieron genes. Does one lose the right to claim that lineage if one doesn't have two copies of gene K? Can one have gene K but not be an e'Kieron? I can well imagine that Adron's sister might be his half-sister, further complicating matters, and Molric might be Morrolan's half-brother (maybe Rollondar had two different e'K wives...) And how can having genes K0, K1, ... possibly affect one's interactions with the amorphia? This protein is ok, says the big blob of chaos, but add an extra carbon on the wiggly part and I'll have to eat you.