Trade Secret – Chapter 9

Flight Deck, Gobelyn’s Market, Raising Serconia Three

In which the First Mate and the Senior Trader talk about the future and the past.

So Iza’s always known Jethri wasn’t hers – Arin showed up with the infant Jethri one day, at the end of a long trip away, and talked Iza into accepting him as a Gobelyn. (That’s a clarification I’m right glad to have, considering where my train of thought was ending up on the back of the information we’d previously had.) So then she had to work with the apparent implication of Arin acquiring a son somewhere without her involvement, and then the less apparent but more unsettling creeping realisation that Jethri was all Arin’s, all the more unsettling set aside the growing realisation that she knew much less about Arin than she’d thought she did.

Paitor mentions that they found out Arin had had other children before he met Iza. I wonder if we’re going to meet any of them this trip – and I wonder if any of them have the same “family resemblance” as Jethri.

Speaking of family resemblances, Paitor says that there was a family resemblance between Arin and the Uncle, though he stops short of “twin”, which is what he says about Arin and Jethri, so I don’t know if he’s implying that he thinks that the Uncle is to Arin what Arin is to Jethri.

(I’ve actually been thinking that might be the case myself for a few weeks now, since the “Arin’s youngest brother” chapter of Balance of Trade, because it reminded me of the scene in Crystal Dragon where Cantra earns a sharp look from the Uncle by suggesting that Arin looks enough like him to be his brother. And it’s prompted me to finally get around to comparing the physical descriptions of Arin and his Uncle, which I hadn’t done before because they’re in separate books of the duology; I suspect now that that was deliberate, to avoid making it too obvious that Arin and his Uncle are both tall, lean, dark-haired and grey-eyed.)

(But here’s an odd thing: Grig’s Uncle Yuri is tall and lean, but contrariwise is grey-haired and dark-eyed.)

(And while we’re at it: Jethri’s father Arin, in the photocube from Balance of Trade, has hair described similarly to the earlier Arin’s but his eyes, like Jethri’s, are brown.)

In Paitor’s stories about the doing of the Tomas family, I see the seeds of several things that crop up in the novels featuring Theo. (And given the bit about the Uncle’s secret shipyard, I’m wondering if Bechimo is one of them.)

3 thoughts on “Trade Secret – Chapter 9

  1. Ed8r

    Maybe the physical descriptions do not exactly match because the DNA has been slightly tweaked for different iterations. We know that was done for Jethri. Also, we don’t know whether Arin’s other sons are his biological sons or just earlier “twins.” What was it Grig said about breeding during the previous book? Oh, no, it was Raisy: “We breed like Grig here gone and done, the very next generation goes back to default.”

    I’m not sure I understand, what does it mean to “go back to default”? Just that, for example, Grig and Seeli’s son will just contribute normal DNA in his sperm?

  2. Ed8r

    Ah . . . I see no one responded to this question when I posted it in 2018. I’d be interested in input from others who think things through more nimbly than I! 😉

  3. Othin

    “going back to default” I took to mean that the special talents that pure stock may have are either not dominat – so that they won’t bred true or they are traits that hinder survivalbility – meaning that the process of breeding also plays a role in providing those conditions that allow a fetus with trades of pure stock to survive until birth – and those conditions are not present in a women’s womb. Those conditions may be met in an artificial womb.

    But this is just my guess. I could be wrong.

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