"Goodbye Old Buddy" -- Pirate Freedom murder mystery, take two

Dave Tallman · 04 Dec 2008, 16:18 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

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From: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 09:18:19 -0700
Subject: (urth) "Goodbye Old Buddy" -- Pirate Freedom murder mystery,
	take two
Message-ID: <1bf4dd40812040818s573f5f06je48b3ccc34d11a10 at mail.gmail.com>

Now that we have cleared Chris of the murder of Valentin and the other
time-crimes of Burt and Lesage, it's time to re-evaluate his morality. Wolfe
invites us to do this: "I am not like that -- either I have never lost Him
or I have never sought him. When you read this you can say which" (p. 17).

Chris started out with plenty of original sin; he had wise-guy in his genes.
His father sent him to the monastery school in hopes that he would stay out
of the gangster life (p. 58), but Chris chose to leave and lied to the abbot
that he would return (p. 21). He was drifting toward a life of crime, though
he didn't know it yet.

The trip to the past gave him a brutal taste of that life. Like the
characters in "Free Live Free," he got a chance to live his dreams so that
he could have better ones. When he got back to the present he had a chance
to start over, and he chose the ministry.

For some reviewers like thalassocrat on the Urth
list<http://lists.urth.net/htdig.cgi/urth-urth.net/2007-December/008386.html>,
his years of living amends as a priest are not enough. They want him to
commit temporal suicide -- to prevent young Chris from going back to be a
pirate. This would wipe out the everything, good and bad. Slaves would not
be freed. Novia would come to a bad end as a battered wife or a run-away
adulteress. Chris' son would never be conceived. Young Chris would drift
into the life of a wise-guy, carrying out in modern dress the same sort of
crimes that he did in the past. This would have been throwing the miracle
back in God's face.

When Chris returned as Ignacio, he was prepared to be a good husband and
father. He chose not to leave his wife and child abandoned in the past. This
is to his credit, whether or not it's a sin against his vows. My verdict is
that Chris started out bad but ended up redeemed and reformed. Yes, he
rationalized some of the evil deeds he did as a pirate. By gangster logic he
had to kill Michet to maintain respect. But he did change his ways, which is
what real repentance is all about.
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