Osabei Tower
Landomist

In which you may call a scholar anything you like so long as you don’t call her late for dinner.

There’s a lot going on in this chapter.

We’re reminded a couple of times in this chapter that Scholar tay’Nordif, unlike Cantra, lacks a dancer’s or a pilot’s grace. There’s her wobble when she’s turning on her heel to look at the entrance hall — by the way, I would not handle ascending a stairway like that with anything approaching calm — and there’s the bit where she fumbles her data-case.

The scene where she accidentally assembles a jamming device and, in general, the whole business of her unconsciously acting in Cantra’s interests for reasons which she insists make perfect sense to herself, is one of the things that really stuck with me from the first time I read this.

(I was reminded, the first time I read it, of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, in which being possessed by a disembodied spirit is similar: one finds oneself doing unexpected things, and unconsciously inventing explanations for why one did them. There’s also something similar in A Fire Upon the Deep, though I don’t remember whether I’d read that yet. And there are also cases in real life, although not — as far as we know — with another consciousness directing them: some psychologists reckon that our motivations are, to a greater or lesser extent, a story we tell ourselves after doing what our instincts and unconscious urges prompt us to do.)

(Superficial aside: Scholar tay’Nordif talking about her patron from the house of the horticulturists reminds me of Mr Collins talking about Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Carnivorous Rosings?)

Meanwhile, it begins to become really apparent that in the Tower the cut-and-thrust of academic debate is taken rather more literally than we’re used to. And I’ve got to say that I’m detecting an undercurrent to Scholar tay’Welford’s expressions of concern about his boss’s health.

Speaking of health, the news that Liad dea’Syl’s students have been dying untimely is unreassuring (although not, by this point, very surprising). I wonder if that includes Jela’s instructors?