A Dark and Hungry God Arises 20 - Min [1]
Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 4:34 am
This is the first point-of-view chapter in the Gap books told from the perspective of Min Donner, Enforcement Director of the UMCP. Still, she is not entirely new to us; we met her before in first two Warden chapters of this book. From these two chapters, we get glimpses of Min as a highly disciplined, principled and loyal. She doesn't necessarily agree with everything she has to accept, but she trusts and admires Warden and is dedicated to her work in UMCP.
Morn (both as a child of two UMCP officers and as herself a trained UMCP cadet) starts out with values much like Min's, but her time on Bright Beauty and Captain's Fancy have compromised her UMCP rectitude with so many ethically-murky choices. Morn still appears to be our protagonist, but she has her ambiguities...as we would expect from an SRD leading character.
Angus and Nick clearly are not cut from the same cloth as Min or Morn. They mirror one another; one starts frankly detestable, but we are learning more. The other starts white knight, but clearly isn't.
Those three characters were the only perspectives we saw in the first two books. In ADAHGA, we've started to see through the eyes of additional characters. Holt and Warden certainly fall in the ethically ambiguous camp so far. Milos doesn't seem ambiguous; indeed he is such a rotter that it is darkly ironic that he holds so much power over Angus. Davies as a character is pretty much Morn-in-a-different-body at this point.
So, now Min steps into the POV spotlight_
This clear-cut portrait is a bit of a contrast to the other POV characters we've seen in two-plus volumes of the Gap.No matter how profoundly she'd been shaken by Warden Dios' recent revelations, she was loyal to him. The same dedication which kept ED almost fanatically clean, free of the taints and ambiguities which clung to Data Acquisition like a miasma, also ensure that she would carry out her Director's personal instructions as purely as she could. The old commandment which had once guided the police in human society -- "to serve and protect" -- wasn't written anywhere in her certificates of commission. It didn't need to be: it was written in her blood.
She wasn't impervious to doubt, not by any means -- especially not now, when the very nature of the organization to which she committed herself was being called into question. But she understood with the clarity of pure conviction that doubt and action were fundamentally irrelevant to each other.
She wasn't responsible for Dios' integrity, or for the UMCP's. she was responsible for ED's and her own. And that was a function of action: she had integrity to the extent that she gave herself wholly and simply to the goals and duties of her position. Doubt was something she set aside in the name of her service toward Warden Dios, to Enforcement Division, to the United Mining Companies Police, and to humankind.
This was essential to her. Without it she would have been paralyzed. Doubt by its very nature was omnivorous: it consumed everything. Recent events provided a good example. In his conference with the GCES, Warden Dios had given her reason to doubt his honesty. But other things he said and did -- for example, the instructions which brought her to Earth now -- cast doubts on the image of himself he presented to the Council. Whom should she believe, the private man who had sent her here, or the public figure who had effectively accused himself of selling human beings for tactical gain; of selling Morn Hyland, who's plight made Min Donner's loyal and uncompromising heart ache like a personal wound?
If she let doubt choose her actions for her, she would be useless. She needed another standard by which to make decisions.
For her that standard was service.
Morn (both as a child of two UMCP officers and as herself a trained UMCP cadet) starts out with values much like Min's, but her time on Bright Beauty and Captain's Fancy have compromised her UMCP rectitude with so many ethically-murky choices. Morn still appears to be our protagonist, but she has her ambiguities...as we would expect from an SRD leading character.
Angus and Nick clearly are not cut from the same cloth as Min or Morn. They mirror one another; one starts frankly detestable, but we are learning more. The other starts white knight, but clearly isn't.
Those three characters were the only perspectives we saw in the first two books. In ADAHGA, we've started to see through the eyes of additional characters. Holt and Warden certainly fall in the ethically ambiguous camp so far. Milos doesn't seem ambiguous; indeed he is such a rotter that it is darkly ironic that he holds so much power over Angus. Davies as a character is pretty much Morn-in-a-different-body at this point.
So, now Min steps into the POV spotlight_