Tag Archives: Serconia

Trade Secret – Chapter 24

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Gobelyn’s Market

In which the Gobelyns keep an eye out for trouble.

One of the commenters remarked, back when we were reading Balance of Trade, that she wondered how Iza had continued to be captain. I was inclined at the time to give Iza the benefit of the doubt, since we hadn’t seen much of her and that not at her best, but the more we see of her the less room for doubt there’s getting to be. This chapter, one of the crew goes so far as to express (out loud, though not in Iza’s hearing) a hope that Iza will think to step down, but it seems they don’t think the case is bad enough to ask her outright.

Yet.

In other news, the stuff about the difficulties of navigation in a four-star system is interesting, for those who are interested in that kind of thing, and may be a warm-up for a discussion of the difficulties of navigating the Seventeen Worlds later.

I don’t like the way the Liadens are paying attention to them, and I don’t like the way the chapter ends with “and then the door opened”. That could lead to “so they stopped talking and went in”, but it could just as easily lead on to “revealing, to their shocked gaze, …” (So far, though, I am being good and not going straight on to the next chapter.)

Trade Secret – Chapter 9

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Flight Deck, Gobelyn’s Market, Raising Serconia Three

In which the First Mate and the Senior Trader talk about the future and the past.

So Iza’s always known Jethri wasn’t hers – Arin showed up with the infant Jethri one day, at the end of a long trip away, and talked Iza into accepting him as a Gobelyn. (That’s a clarification I’m right glad to have, considering where my train of thought was ending up on the back of the information we’d previously had.) So then she had to work with the apparent implication of Arin acquiring a son somewhere without her involvement, and then the less apparent but more unsettling creeping realisation that Jethri was all Arin’s, all the more unsettling set aside the growing realisation that she knew much less about Arin than she’d thought she did.

Paitor mentions that they found out Arin had had other children before he met Iza. I wonder if we’re going to meet any of them this trip – and I wonder if any of them have the same “family resemblance” as Jethri.

Speaking of family resemblances, Paitor says that there was a family resemblance between Arin and the Uncle, though he stops short of “twin”, which is what he says about Arin and Jethri, so I don’t know if he’s implying that he thinks that the Uncle is to Arin what Arin is to Jethri.

(I’ve actually been thinking that might be the case myself for a few weeks now, since the “Arin’s youngest brother” chapter of Balance of Trade, because it reminded me of the scene in Crystal Dragon where Cantra earns a sharp look from the Uncle by suggesting that Arin looks enough like him to be his brother. And it’s prompted me to finally get around to comparing the physical descriptions of Arin and his Uncle, which I hadn’t done before because they’re in separate books of the duology; I suspect now that that was deliberate, to avoid making it too obvious that Arin and his Uncle are both tall, lean, dark-haired and grey-eyed.)

(But here’s an odd thing: Grig’s Uncle Yuri is tall and lean, but contrariwise is grey-haired and dark-eyed.)

(And while we’re at it: Jethri’s father Arin, in the photocube from Balance of Trade, has hair described similarly to the earlier Arin’s but his eyes, like Jethri’s, are brown.)

In Paitor’s stories about the doing of the Tomas family, I see the seeds of several things that crop up in the novels featuring Theo. (And given the bit about the Uncle’s secret shipyard, I’m wondering if Bechimo is one of them.)

Trade Secret – Chapter 8

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Flight Deck, Gobelyn’s Market, Local Day Graceful 23 on Kinaveral

In which the Gobelyns shake the dust of Kinaveral from their feet.

And we leave Jethri for now, to go and see how the rest of the Gobelyns are doing.

Jethri’s name still comes up a few times. Partly it’s that getting the ship flying again means people are returning to old routines, and noticing the spaces that Jethri used to fill; partly it’s other things. Apparently the two trades that earned Jethri his ten-year key were interesting enough that people are seeking the Market out in hopes of doing business with him. That can’t be doing Iza’s temper much good.

Speaking of Jethri, we also find out that back in the day Arin got the ship to actually run some of Jethri’s make-believe trade routes. We don’t find out yet what resulted, but I have a feeling that’s coming.

The refit has, after all, taken long enough that Grig and Seeli’s son has been born on the ground instead of in space. The bit about Grig and Seeli not being decided about which surname, and which set of associated connotations, to give him is interesting. So is the bit where Captain Iza decides for them: she’s not accepting any relative of Arin’s and Grig’s as a Gobelyn, no matter who his mother is.

By the end of the chapter, Khat has been made first mate, on the recommendation of Cris, who was first mate before the refit; the work Cris was doing while he waited out the refit has left him rusty on skills a first mate needs, while the work Khat was doing sharpened her up some, and anyhow Cris’s other skills are going to be needed for the various issues associated with the shakedown cruise.

(I kind of wonder if she’s going to go further by the time this book’s over; there are hints that some of the crew are beginning to doubt whether having Iza as captain serves the ship as well as once it did.)

The conversation about safe-runs is, in a way, a reply to the conversation last chapter about memorizing the coords of one’s homeworld. It appears that even spacers whose birth home is a ship, now and always, have an equivalent – another thing nobody bothered to teach Jethri.