Tarigan
Jemiatha’s Jumble Stop
Berth 12

In which the road to occupying a new body is not without bumps.

And now I’m wondering how much of this foreboding I’d be having if I hadn’t read “Wise Child” first, because there’s quite a bit there about Tolly’s background that hasn’t explicitly come up in this novel yet. I’m pretty sure I’d have made the connection between Inki’s powers of persuasion and her background with the Lyre Institute being similar to the aelantaza and the Tanjalyre Institute, but I’m not sure I’d have spotted that Tolly’s also a graduate, even with all the hints that the novel’s been dropping about how he’s designed to inspire trust and make friends easily. And if I hadn’t realised that Inki and Tolly share a background, I wouldn’t now be worried about Inki stabbing everyone in the back and dragging him back “home”.

(Though I would probably still be worried about her stabbing everyone in the back and abducting the Admiral as soon as he’s stable enough to move.)

Come to think of it, something similar happened with Dragon in Exile, where I was waiting all through the novel for something because it had been mentioned in the short story that was written later but published first. I didn’t with Trade Secret, but I did end up thinking the short story would have made more sense if I’d read it after the novel. So maybe I should make a rule about not reading the new short stories before the new novels? But the short story comes out a whole month before the novel, and it’s difficult to just leaving lying there, and you figure they wouldn’t let the short story be published first if reading it first was wrong…