Trader’s Leap – Chapter 8

Off-Grid

In which the counselors of the Haosa discuss visitors past and future.

I didn’t notice in the last Off-Grid chapter, until Skip pointed it out in the comments, that the narrative didn’t specify Tekelia’s gender. In this chapter, all the other Haosa are accompanied by masculine or feminine pronouns, but Tekelia remains undefined.

Emit’s description of how the Reavers died seems to me to settle the case that they’re members of Tarona Rusk’s network who didn’t survive Shan’s intervention. If I’m right about Shan being one of the Great Ones who is to come, he’ll be in a position to answer a lot of the questions the Haosa have… although it remains to be seen whether they’ll think to ask him, or trust him to give honest answers.

I’m not sure I’d be particularly unsettled by a Seer who could “judge the most likely future by weighing the lines of probability”. In some ways, that strikes me as less unsettling than a Seer who sees definitely the one future that will actually happen, which seems to be the most common alternative. (At the risk of getting off the subject, there’s an interesting variation in Jo Walton’s Tir Tanagiri novels: the seers there can see every possible future except the one that will actually come to pass.)

Another thought that occurred to me since the last Off-Grid chapter: would Korval’s notorious former delm Theonna yos’Phelium, if she had ever visited wherever-this-is, have fit the criteria to be recognised as an Oracle?

1 thought on “Trader’s Leap – Chapter 8

  1. Ed8r

    Interesting questions that occurred to you Paul. This year I had not done a reread of any previous books before I started the eARC, and I found that though it held my interest, I had very few moments in which I–accurately–connected any of the previous pieces. When I finished, I had to go to the spoiler discussion set up on korval.com in order to read others’ impressions and ask LOTS of questions!

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