Osabei Tower
Landomist
In which we’re all mad, here.
Well, what do you know. Score one for the reasonable motivation.
Speaking of reasonable and unreasonable motivations, we were having a discussion in one of the comment threads about High Command’s decision to draw back to the Inner Worlds, and whether it made any sense. Given Jela’s explanation to Tor An in this chapter, I’d call it… well, not reasonable, but maybe “comprehensible”?
(What it still isn’t, of course, is the least bit honorable or admirable.)
Cantra is starting to leak through now, to the confusion and distress of the Scholar as she prepares to draw fire and give Jela and Master Liad an opportunity to slip away unnoticed.
(And as someone who’s read this book before, I note that the memory of Garen’s death is, apart from being the kind of powerful memory one might expect to slip through, an instance of the authors sneakily refreshing the reader’s memory about something that’s going to become relevant again shortly.)
It occurs to me that what she’s doing now is the same thing, on a different plane, that Rool Tiazan and his lady were doing last chapter (which might, for all the indications we got, be simultaneous with this one): playing the target to keep the enemy occupied. I don’t know if that means that the sheriekas do have an interest in what’s happening at the Tower, or just that the dramliza wanted to make sure that now of all times wasn’t the moment they started.
The inner worlds bought the high command, so the military is pulling out of the Rim Worlds to go protect the inner worlds.
Good catch. First time this dishonorable motivation has been made explicit. At least, I do not recall reading it before.
The next sentence: “The more space the enemy crystallizes, the more they can decrystalize.”
Is Jela the only one who knows this? Or, to tweak Tor An’s query: “Are THEY all mad?”
Barry McGuire comes to mind: “Ah, you don’t believe, we’re on the eve of destruction…”
Whether pulling back to the Inner Worlds is honourable (or not), it is not effective. The military cannot stop the decrystallization, and at least some of them know it. I think anybody can reason that the military cannot stop it, since the military is retreating before it and the decrystallization is accelerating (perhaps not everybody knows that last point yet, but suppressing all knowledge of it is getting harder and harder).
Are these memories not only “Cantra”s but even those of the being she was before she constructed the Rimmer-pilot named Cantra?
To answer myself: It seems as if she is leaking more than “Cantra, the Rimmer Pilot” if she is suddenly remembering the port police calling her to identify her mother’s remains. Or was that call what left Garen on her own and vulnerable to Veralt?
No, I finally realized that the “mother” was in fact Garen. Garen thought of Cantra as her daughter and Cantra went along with it, being called to identify Garen’s body after some ploy had gone bad.