#the locked tomb liverread

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 8

We get our first interior description of Canaan house, and it’s a house house; decorations, (in particular occluded paintings!) and other creature comforts long since fallen to ruin.  Space opera and gothic horror rolled up in one. I’m now very very sure of my kneejerk reaction that First and Ninth houses are being positioned as foils; both houses depopulated, kept isolated from outside intervention by fiat. The Ninth drilling into a massive pit, the First ascending in a big fuck-off tower to the heavens. The main difference being that the Ninth are zealous to the point of collapse, which you could frame as a sort of death of personality, but Gideon frames the religious zealotry of the First House priests as placid, robotic, almost indistinguishable from the servitors in their demeanor, and revulsion of all things Ninth aside, she seems to subtly view this as worse. Only Teacher looks alive; for better or worse, that absolutely isn’t an error you could make about the still-living population of Ninth House. 

During the prayer sequence, Ianthe and the Seventh Cav (whose name my computer keeps trying to autocorrect to Petroleum) are notably called out as not reciting the prayer. This is a point in Ianthe’s favor for me. Petroleum, though, is in a different boat; this chapter keeps calling attention to the fact that he does nothing unprompted; not sitting, not slapping Dulcinea’s back, not praying. I’m beginning to think that he’s some kind of necromantic construct, or else has been significantly augmented. I’m also starting to suspect that Dulcinea’s big entrance may have been staged, because he did move to attack Gideon unprompted before Dulcinea “stopped” him.

“I pray the rock is never rolled away.” Parallels to the resurrection of that one guy that one time. The one the Italians nailed up, you know, him. They’ve got an antijesus in that tomb, I reckon.

Interesting that in the ring distribution scene, they skip from the second and third houses all the way up to the seventh, and then the narration jumps the eighth right to Gideon; this is either Gideon's narration, focusing on who Gideon finds interesting (Second House has the cohorts!) or else the narrator giving me a little hint about who's gonna survive the obvious incipient cast herd thinning. Given the Ortus thing, I'm betting on the former; someone Gideon didn't care enough about to mention in the first wave of name drops is going to become extremely important later, to the extent that anyone in a group of seventeen can’t be important.

SO the wording of Teacher’s spiel is interesting because it’s the first indication we get of what The Emperor is like as a guy. (And he IS Just Some Guy; I know that much, that’s what drew me to the books, the hilarity of God being Just Some Guy.) The other Lyctors are the ones who want new Lyctors, if we're to believe Teacher; the current proceedings are the result of them finally getting through to him after a very long time.  I've picked up enough about the Emperor from tumblr that this could either be a true reflection of his petty grief impeding things, or a cover story to make him look sympathetic; but either way, Teacher is telling everyone in the room that The Emperor fucked up. He isn’t using those words, but that’s the shape of the facts as described. The wording leans heavily on God As Kind Of Like Us to make the error sympathetic; but my first reaction is, Christ, You mean your God is mopey to the point of impediment?!

Okay, so this is a boarding school plot. I stand by my earlier assessment that the basic shape of this narrative is violently, virulently transmissible in all directions, to any kind of AU you want. Dollars to donuts there will be a prom later.

So Lyctorhood is a trial-and-error sort of thing. Teacher is such a funny little guy. He’s interesting to me because he’s clearly leaning on the Wonka/Yoda/trickster-mentor archetype, but he’s doing so from an obvious position of massive institutional power (one shaped like the Catholic Chuch, no less!) Wonka can get away his bit because despite running the factory he’s convincingly painted by the narrative as a misunderstood maverick holding the line against the real institutional forces, and even then he’s often dragged as being a capitalist serial killer. Yoda can get away with it because Yoda is at rock-bottom, is kind of a dick, and already demonstrated enough of a fall from institutional power that you get the sense he’s mixing it up a bit, trying something new to see if that works better. But this guy is literally just a catholic priest! He can’t convincingly do this bit when we already have such a mass of knowledge about what the system that he’s mouth piecing for is like!

I'm getting extremely dehumanizing vibes from the "Bed-at-the-foot-of-the-bed" bit in the Ninth’s Quarters. Gideon is framed like a dog, or beast of burden. As is Protesilaus. "I know what befalls cavaliers," indeed.

And in the final scene of the chapter, Gideon overhears the skeletons pushing all the dropships off the landing platforms, and then she goes to sleep. Is this protocol that she was briefed on? Is this something more sinister? That seems like a deliberately overdramatic way of slamming the door shut behind everyone. What do shuttles cost?

Last note- I really, really like the description of drinking hot tea. That is in fact how it feels. Cauterized taste buds indeed. Lotsa verisimilitude on this one.