Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado
In which Theo’s parents find out what she’s been up to.
Cho sig’Radia’s cover letter doesn’t give any warning about what happened on Theo’s famous flight. The pilot who raised Theo might perhaps be trusted to realise that a flight which has drawn special attention and been deemed a valuable teaching aid probably involves a more-than-usual amount of adversity, but Kamele, who was raised on a Safe World and has little experience of pilots, could have used a warning.
Speaking of the pilot who raised Theo, I notice the narrator is again doing that thing of not referring to him by any particular name.
The pilot who raised Theo is not named by the narrator, but his identity is no mystery. In the opening sentence, Aelliana praises the bluebells — she who can only be heard by the pilot. A moment later, Kamele enters the garden and calls out the pilot’s name.
I may have failed to make myself clear.
Obviously, it’s the man who Kamele knows as Jen Sar – but he has not been Jen Sar all his life; sometimes he has been someone else instead. And who is he being at the moment, alone in the garden with nobody’s expectations to conform to except Aelliana, who would know him whoever he was?
If he was simply being Jen Sar, the narrator would presumably have said so. Instead, the narrator doesn’t commit to a name until the very end of the scene, which feels to me like he’d put Jen Sar aside for a time and is now putting him back on in order to get on with Jen Sar’s day.