Day 189
Standard Year 1118
Irikwae
In which Junior Trader Jethri Gobelyn looks to the future.
I’m still not sure about the wisdom of choosing Master ven’Deelin as the evaluating master. She does have a point, but then this isn’t just about avoiding partiality, it’s also about being seen to avoid partiality: letting her evaluate her own apprentice gives anyone who doesn’t want to accept Jethri an opening to suggest that she let him off easy.
Although, it just now occurs to me, to do so would be inevitably to cast aspersions on the melant’i of a widely-known and well-respected Master Trader, which they might well be forced to conclude was a course of action whose consequences they couldn’t sustain. So perhaps it’s not so unwise as I thought.
Tomorrow, “Out of True”, which is still up on the Baen front page. Then, on to the sequel.
This chapter came as a total shock to me, even the second time around. It’s just such an abrupt ending, without any real threads tied up. If I hadn’t been reading all these books years behind everyone else, I would have been more than a little annoyed. But as it was, I was able to jump right in to the next one, where there were still no loose ends tied up!
At least this time through I was not caught unawares. These two together form one long novel, with at least a *bit* of closure at the end!
And here Master ven’Deelin appears ahead of schedule – more than 1 ½ relumma early. And Jethri gets evaluated after 21 days – instead of a relumma.
All through this book, ever since Master ven’Deelin took an interest in Jethri, he had to accommodate to increasingly tight schedules with increasing courses of study and shortening learning curves, every time exceeding first expectations. Similar to Clan Korval Clan Ixin – or as Master ven’Deelin says in chapter 7 “the ship accepts only excellence”.
The letter Jethri got in chapter 34 said he would be evaluated after a half-relumma – but that’s 48 days, so the evaluation is still significantly ahead of schedule.
(One might almost be tempted to suspect that the authors had thought a relumma was shorter when they wrote this book, except that it’s one of the books that explicitly defines the length of a relumma in the glossary at the front.)