“All earthly creatures shared a common scent, the tellurian signature. But (to Demane’s nose) a rare few smelled also of the stars, as if some subset of their ancestors sprang from other dust than this. There were mortal men and women in the captain’s lines of descent, yes, but the gods abounded too. That voice of his, for one; and who but a cousin descended from the Towers could manage such fast footwork?”
This passage refers to Captain Isa who will prove to be just as significant a character in the narrative as Demane. The narrator is penetrating into the thoughts of Demane in this scene and the quote becomes foreshadowing. The important information being foreshadowed has to do with “that voice” of the captain. Captain Isa has to work very hard to hide some important secrets from almost everybody else. This can be very difficult when one has to deal with an obsessive-compulsive tic requiring constant checking of a headscarf and even more unnatural speech affliction requiring one to sing words rather than simply speak them. The passage is also significant because it foreshadows Demane’s rather unnaturally elevated sense of smell.
“Exigencies of FTL. Superluminal travel is noncorporeal: a body must become light. The Gods could only carry away Homo celestialis with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most sapiens—even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica—haven’t yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism.”
It is clear from this quote that Demane has an elevated intellect and style of speech. Much of his dialogue, in fact, engage the vernacular of a much lower stylistic formality. This is to say, he speaks the slang of the street shared amongst the more traditional soldiers within the mercenary platoon. This duality is not merely the result of Demane being a more highly educated individual who is attracted by the low life. Demane is a demi-god and the duality of his language is intended to be a manifestation of his half-god/half-human status.
“Captain fell asleep. Cumalo glanced over. He signed with a hand as folk did back home in the green hills, when the hunt was successful, or some athlete won in the games, or sweethearts were finally wed. Victory, blessings, congratulations!
Cumalo thankfully did not whoop out the ululating cry as well.”
The other big secret that the captain must work hard to keep is his homosexual relationship with Demane. The two are operating within a group of men from a culture foreign to their own which views crying as a sign of a lack of proper masculinity, so one can well imagine the view taken toward homosexuality. Cumalo is also a stranger to this cultural repression and reveals himself here as having absolutely no personal prejudice toward the situation at all. The referential imagery to a gesture signifying a successful hunt, sports victory, or pre-honeymoon ritual all speak to a dominant patriarchal milieu linking males.
