Day 32
Standard Year 1118
Gobelyn’s Market
Jethri’s Quarters
In which Jethri gets the bad news.
The downside of this being a re-read is that I’m mostly inspired to talk about the things that strike me new or different, so I don’t really have anything to say about the conversation between Jethri and his uncle, which hasn’t changed notably since last time I read it.
The sequence of Jethri and the calendar is a nice bit of characterization, both of Jethri the teenaged boy and Jethri the spacer who’s spent most of his life in a tin can and feels uncomfortable without a ceiling close over his head.
The calendar also offers a worldbuilding hook in itself, or perhaps I should say a worldbuilding bridge; the reader who is familiar with 21st-century Terran garage calendars will find things to recognise in certain aspects of it.
Speaking of which: The Gobelyn family are Terrans, a word which appears here for the first time this re-read.
The Captain is heavy-handed when it comes to dealing with Jethri. Why could she not have consulted Jethri or looked a little further before “disposing” of him to a very limited (in many ways) and long run? I see that the she is disposing him to is kin. But that ship is also full and not a good learning experience for a young person who is more studious than the others.
I suspect that it’s less a matter of them being his kin than that they’re hers, and therefore predisposed to do her a favour and save her having to look further afield for a placement. She doesn’t seem to have much if any sense of investment in Jethri, nor inclination to exert herself much to consider or act on questions of what she can do for him.
I can kind of see why she might not feel invested in Jethri, if it’s true she never wanted nor traded for him. But it does make things rough for him. And if after seventeen years she still doesn’t see him as anything except a nuisance to be disposed of as effortlessly as possible, she must have been making a considerable effort not to get invested.
She also doesn’t seem inclined to consider what, now that she’s got him, he can do for her. To the point that I think, quite apart from the issue of how good a mother she is, it’s not doing her good in her melant’i as captain either. Jethri is shaping up to be an asset to the ship and the family, and if she’s casting him off just because she personally dislikes him, she’s not doing right by them. (A point that I suspect Paitor has been trying to suggest to her, without success.)
The calendar was fun. My first time through, I totally missed the significance of the bit about “close up on the people and the sand, blocking out the long unsettling sweep of sky.” “Unsettling sky”? Why would the sky be unsettling? Now I know.
I still find myself very uncomfortable with Iza, but also a bit more understanding of her predicament. In fact, with some perspective and from my own experience, I can identify Paul’s comment above—“she’s casting him off just because she personally dislikes him”—as inaccurate.
I didn’t lose a husband, but I did lose a beloved son 7 years ago. I never expected to remain so easily ambushed by grief, unable to participate in activities that might specifically remind me of him. But we can’t just chose to “move on.” I can’t imagine having to be daily reminded of someone so nearly, and yet have the person not be him. And since Jethri is not actually her son (as we find out later) she does not and cannot feel that bond of kinship with him.
Oops…meant to comment too on the color of the fractins design on the bathing suits. The blue with yellow lettering seems to be unremarkable, but the white ones, with lettering in black, he think s are like no fractin he’d ever seen. I can’t think of anywhere this information becomes significant, but I thought I’d mention it nevertheless.
I can’t imagine having to be daily reminded of someone so nearly, and yet have the person not be him.
That’s a good point. And given what will become a recurring thread about just how similar he is to Arin, it’s probably getting worse the closer he gets to the age Arin was when Iza knew him. So that might be another reason why she’s so urgent for him to be somewhere else.
Thank you for sharing your experience.