Clan Ixin’s Tradeship Elthoria, in Jump
In which Jethri reads his mail.
Maybe I just have a suspicious mind, but I do wonder if there was more than just unlucky timing to Dyk’s interruption of Jethri’s getting-to-know-you session, either on Dyk’s own part or on the part of the Captain.
I’d been meaning to keep an eye out for the first honest-to-goodness, undeniable cultural reference that shows that Terrans are from our planet Earth, but I may have let it slip by me. “Balrog” is surely one of those, anyway, even if it’s not the first.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Jethri as a possibility, but it seems plausible to me that the Scout’s desire to speak with Jethri Gobelyn rather than Jethri ven’Deelin means he’s made some discovery touching on Arin’s kin. If so, that could be good news or bad, and no way to tell until the Scout has had his say, and possibly not even then.
The Scout has a fine sense of melant’i and is trying to clarify whose melant’i is affected by what he must tell Jethri.
I found this comment to be extremely tantalizing: It was clear he’d missed some kind of training his father was to give, and he wondered if the book held keys to more of that birthright that [sic] he’d considered before. But then there is really no further development of this idea—at least in terms of Jethri decoding the book.