Blair Road
Boss Conrad’s House
In which Mrs kaz’Ineo has an idea.
The mention of the Gilmour Agency’s human resources manual as a recent acquisition places this chapter not long after the opening scene of “Block Party”, in which Luzeal had just made the discovery, although perhaps not after the entire story, which covers a period of several weeks.
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Blair Road
Boss Conrad’s House
In which Boss Conrad receives a letter.
The cinnamon toast is a small detail that shows how things have improved since Boss Conrad got the Council of Bosses set up. I’d bet cinnamon was hard to come by in the old days.
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Boss Conrad’s House
Blair Road
In which Penn Kalhoon has something to say.
I was wrong about the meeting Pat Rin sent Quin to, which I might have known if I’d thought; on further consideration, if it had been something other than an ordinary sort of meeting Pat Rin would have said so. This is not the first time I’ve been wrong in this novel about an upcoming meeting going to be the occasion for excitement; my persistent mistake has been to misunderstand what kind of story this is. I kept assuming that if a meeting got mentioned it was probably going to be important to the plot, and that if trouble was brewing it would come to a head quickly, but this is a more slow-burn story than that, and meetings of the Council of Bosses are important to the plot even if nothing dramatic happens at them simply because it matters to the characters that there is a Council of Bosses and that it’s holding regular meetings.
And that brings us around to what Pat Rin tells Penn, which is another thread of the ongoing thing about how the new ways are going to survive: if Pat Rin and Val Con and Miri get killed, that isn’t the end of the new Surebleak. Korval might have shown the way, but they couldn’t have made it happen without Surebleakeans, and now the way has been shown the Surebleakeans can make it happen without Korval if they have to.
I suspect it speaks to how much Surebleak has improved already that Pat Rin is able to compare its port to Solcintra’s Mid Port instead of its Low Port. For that matter, the state Surebleak Port was in when Pat Rin arrived was so run-down and uninhabited it might not even have stood a comparison to the Low Port, which whatever it may not be at least has an active population.
It hadn’t occurred to me how useful a scholar of the history of education might be in a city trying to develop a proper education system. I wonder how long the authors have been planning that one.
Office of the Road Boss
Surebleak Port
In which it’s time to be gone.
I expect we’ll get Tolly’s story in a chapter or two, but what’s the fun of reading a book for the first time if one can’t speculate? I had wondered, when it was established that Tolly’s former employer was a Liaden, if this was another aspect of the Department of the Interior, and the mental-control business with the whistles also points in that direction. (If so, I notice that Liaden servants of the Department get names, but Terrans, even if they’re valuable specialists, are tools with serial numbers.) On the other hand, indications so far have been that the Department doesn’t think enough of Terrans to use them even as anonymous tools. Maybe this is some kind of splinter operation; maybe it’s a completely unrelated bunch of unscrupulous Liadens. It might not even be a Liaden group entirely; the woman with the other whistle isn’t said to be Liaden, and although she is said to be small in stature, it’s Hazenthull’s viewpoint saying so, and there are maybe three people on Surebleak who don’t look small to Hazenthull.
I was worried that, with Hazenthull having to take off with Tolly, there’d be nobody left to explain matters to Commander Liz, but Tocohl will be in contact with the port tower during lift, and maybe she’ll get a chance to pass a message then. Or she probably has some way of communicating directly with Jeeves, and can dump the whole thing in his metaphorical lap. (There’s another thing to look forward to: Hazenthull’s reaction to Tocohl.)
Boss Conrad’s House
Blair Road
In which the Road Boss makes plans for the day.
Miri’s bruised cheek is one of those things that have extra resonance from details mentioned in other stories. Pat Rin is especially upset about it because the culture of Liad puts a big value on presenting a clean and unblemished face to the world: no dirt, no smudges, no injuries. (No concealing make-up, either.) That’s also part of why everyone made such a fuss about Val Con’s scar in Plan B, beyond its inherent unpleasantness. Val Con is less concerned about it, partly (as with his scar) because of his Scout training, and partly because, as he reminds Pat Rin, this is not Liad.
Val Con and Miri do a neat job of diverting Nelirikk’s disapproval.
I somehow suspect there’s something to the fact that Tocohl’s proportions are described entirely in terms of being similar to Theo’s. Her voice isn’t Theo’s though, if Val Con recognises it but Miri doesn’t. (I wonder if it’s modelled on Aelliana…) Perhaps Jeeves decided that if Tocohl was to be a child of Korval, she ought to bear some resemblance to her sisters and her cousins and her aunts.
Tocohl takes after her father in choosing a name from fiction that suits her intended role: Susumo Tocohl is the protagonist of Janet Kagan’s novel Hellspark; she’s a linguist, a dab hand at smoothing over the problems caused by clashing cultural assumptions, and her universe’s leading authority on the process of teaching an AI how to be a person.
(Hellspark is a long-standing favourite comfort-read of mine, and I would perhaps be more excited about this development except that the surprise was spoiled for me long ago by an acquaintance who, in addition to our shared loved of the works of Lee & Miller and of Kagan, has a taste I don’t share for reading Advance Reader Copies.)
We still haven’t been given the name of the specialist Jeeves proposes as Tocohl’s colleague, which suggests that the authors consider it something worth building up to. My only guess at this point is that it’s Tolly, if only because he’s been established as a specialist earlier in the novel. And, come to think of it, if he’s still being looked for by someone he doesn’t want to be found by, he might welcome a trip away. (…and if he’s a specialist in AI, what does that say about the person who’s looking for him?)
Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak
In which Rys offers his brother a gift.
The bit about the dreams of the Bedel is an answer to a question I never thought to ask, and it almost makes me want to immediately re-read Necessity’s Child just to look again with fresh eyes at all the times the luthia speaks of dreaming on a subject or Rys’s brothers dream on the design of his leg brace. (“Eleutherios”, too.) I have no doubt that when I do, I will find that they are all consistent with this newly-revealed information; I have a feeling the authors have known this about the Bedel all along, and chose not to mention it in Necessity’s Child to achieve a particular effect. Well played, authors.
(There’s also a suggestion that when he says he prayed with his brothers, that has a particular meaning to the Bedel. That one, I think we had a hint of in Necessity’s Child, the first time Rys himself heard one of the kompani use the word in context.)
I’m seeing an interesting bit of melant’i going on in the exchange between Pat Rin and Mr pel’Tolian. They’ve been together something like twenty years at this point, and Mr pel’Tolian chose to follow Pat Rin to Surebleak, so I think it’s safe to say they’ve got some degree of personal regard alongside the lord and manservant relationship; but it’s all being expressed through the forms appropriate to the lord and manservant relationship because to be otherwise would be, well, inappropriate.
Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak
In which situations develop.
I am impressed and horrified by Agent bar’Abit’s plan and by the circumstances that led to her attempting it. I’ve said before that the Department does not treat its people well; I’m increasingly feeling the depth by which that’s an understatement.
I’m on Val Con and Miri’s side about not wanting to give up on the prisoners, but at the same time I’m aware that that’s very easy for me to say when it’s just a hypothetical situation for me.
I don’t think I believe in the existence of the man who supposedly asked Mr Kipler to play a joke on Hazenthull; the explanation doesn’t fit the things he actually said. I particularly keep coming back to the bit where he went off on a tangent about the Road Boss, which doesn’t fit his narrative. (It also makes me wonder about whether he’s telling the truth about having nothing to do with Liadens; would someone who didn’t care about Liadens care about Korval attacking Solcintra?)
Boss Conrad’s plan for dealing with Baker Quill’s problem seems straightforward and well thought out, but the fact that the novel’s cover depicts a shoot-out near a bakery inclines me to suspect it won’t go off entirely without a hitch.
Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak
In which there are conversations on the way to dinner.
Luken’s reassurance to Theo – “You are among kin, now, and the House will be vigilant for you” – has, I think a double meaning. On one level, it’s the same thing people have been saying ever since she was invited to guest, that the house has good security and she’ll be protected from physical danger; on another level, I think it’s a reminder that as her kin it’s within their melant’i to protect her from the less obvious dangers attendant on making a social error.
It belatedly occurs to me that Jeeves has lately been referred to only as the head of house security, and not as a butler; of course this makes sense, since Trealla Fantrol no longer has need of a butler and at Jelaza Kazone the job is already ably filled by Mr pel’Kana.
It’s said of Luken that he is “grandfather to no one in this room”, which is less definite than I thought I remembered, leaving open the possibility that he has grandchildren elsewhere. One thing we can say about them, if they exist, is that they’re not counted as children of Korval, or they’d have appeared on a roster by now or been mentioned somewhere in all the arrangements resulting from the declaration of Plan B; perhaps their parent, Luken’s child, married out of the clan.
The scene with Pat Rin and Penn at the end seems like a bit of abrupt shift after the rest of the chapter, but I notice a thing which ties the scenes together (apart from them presumably happening on the same evening): the one scene has Theo remembering to be polite among Liadens by not shaking hands, and the other scene has Pat Rin remembering to be polite among Terrans by shaking hands.
Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak
In which Clan Korval looks to the future.
Jelaza Kazone is currently housing all the members of the Clan, excepting the children and the two adults who are with them, and they are ten in number. That would be Daav, Val Con, Miri, Pat Rin, Natesa, Shan, Priscilla, Nova, Anthora, and Ren Zel: ten. Doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already, but does confirm that there aren’t any extra members of the Clan everybody’s forgotten to mention.
And just when they’re beginning to feel they’ve got their feet under them, in walks Clarence O’Berin, whose presence surely portends something, though whether good or bad remains to be seen.
Surebleak
In which Korval acquires a new neighbour.
It’s an evocative name, “World’s End”. There’s the obvious sense in which the place is named, referring to a physical boundary, a place where the world comes to an end, but there are other things it could mean, such as a temporal boundary, a time when a world comes to an end. Sometimes a person’s world can come to an end even though the planet continues untouched. Yulie’s world might have ended when he lost the last of his kin. It might have ended today, if Boss Conrad had been someone other than the person he is.
(And isn’t it interesting how, when he’s talking to Yulie, he’s mostly Pat Rin but sometimes he’s Boss Conrad for a moment or two?)
It’s also interesting to speculate how things might have gone differently if Yulie’s brother hadn’t got himself killed before Boss Conrad showed up, and had been the one handling the negotiation for road access.