Shipyear 65
Tripday 171
Third Shift
14.00 hours
In which Shan receives news of a friend’s death.
I like the little details that enrich this chapter: Ken Rik is in a bad mood. BillyJo thinks Shan isn’t eating enough. The description of what else was in Shan’s mail before he hit the pinbeam from Sintia, because even though the other message isn’t significant to the plot, it is significant to Shan.
I have read the various parts of Priscilla’s story so many times by now that I don’t recall what I thought the first time I read the pinbeam from Sintia. I am pretty sure, though, that I could have been added to Shan’s litany of people who wouldn’t believe it meant Priscilla was a desperate criminal.
Yup. I could be added to the litany as well.
So, unless I misunderstood the sequence of events, what a Liaden calls a “strafle melon” is just what a Terran calls an “apple”?
Certainly, it appears that what BillyJo refers to as an apple is the same piece of fruit that the narrator called a strafle melon when Shan picked it up. That could be a gap in BillyJo’s botanical knowledge, though.
Since the text mentions BillyJo greeting him from the door of the galley, it was my impression that BillyJo would be one of the cooks on the ship…who would be likely to know what to call the different fruits being offered to the crew, don’t you think?
Yes, BillyJo is confirmed in a different chapter to be one of the cooks, so she probably does know what the fruit is. She might not think it’s necessary to be precise in casual conversation, and perhaps “you can’t live till luncheon on an apple” is something a parent used to say to her that she’s quoting verbatim.
I’m being stubborn about this, I realise; the thing is that I fundamentally do not believe that a strafle melon is literally just an apple. Words mean things, and an apple is not a melon. (Unless people in Shan’s time have gone back to the old meaning of the word “apple”, in which it was a general term for any kind of fruit, which is why so many fruits in mythology are called apples.)
(What I actually think probably happened is that the authors lost track of what fruit they’d given Shan between one page and the next, but trying to find an in-universe explanation is more satisfying.)
Ha-ha! Okay, I yield!
Yes, we really don’t know exactly what fruit was supposed to be on the Tree of Knowledge. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad description of Jelaza Kazone.