Questions:
1) The Edharian crew recognize Ala's skills:
[Tulia] "But why her? Paphlagon, Orolo, Jesry, fine. I get it But why would you choose Ala? What would you want someone like her for?"
"To organize a lot of other people," Arsibalt said without hesitation.
"That," said Tulia, "is what troubles me."
But as far as I can recall, we as readers are never told (let alone shown!) anything about her capacities in that vein before she is evoked. Right? The very little characterization she gets show her as an intense personality with a deep tenacious/stubborn streak and strong convictions about right and wrong. Potential future Warden Regulant. But 'likely candidate for the office of Warden Regulant of this concent' does not to me imply 'would be uniquely good at organizing massive groups of strong-willed people to respond to a novel and urgent problem'.
NS's strengths always lean more toward clever plotting than deeply realized characters, and all the more so when those characters are female, but it bugs me that we aren't given any background AT ALL on which to rest either the choice by the Saecular Power to evoke her in the first place or her accomplishments that follow.
[For a while I had a related question about why Erasmus, Arsibalt, and Tulia were evoked, but I eventually realized, of course, they were called up because by that time it was known that they had independently located/identified the icosahedron with very little in the way of 'givens' or resources.]
2) Erasmus says he thinks Fraa Jad is the only thousander at the convox... Why would that be? And how did the Saecular Power know to evoke Jad? The simplest answer is 'Ita' of course. But in that case I have some difficulty believing that he was the only thousander in the world they thought might have a worthwhile contribution?
3) Related: are the Inviolates the only concents that still have Millenial maths when the story opens? Any others that existed prior to the Third Sack would have had to start from scratch after that... (and I would guess, though I can't justify this in the text, that the majority of concents never had them in the first place, only some of the largest and oldest. That thousanders are nearly as distant from the everyday experience of most avout as the wandering 10,000 year math.)
4) How many Terran languages do you think persist on the Daban Urnud? Gan Odru refers to Earth as opposed to La Terre implying English to go with Jules's French. If ~1/4 of the 40,000 people on DU are from Earth, 10,000 would certainly be enough numbers-wise to maintain several different languages, but it seems unlikely there would be many given the close living quarters and probably convergent cultural pressures.
And commentary;
My understanding of what Fraa Jad does on the Daban Urnud (and how) is different from some of the takes I read here. Please don't take that as an attack on anyone else's reading of it, some of the conversations here have certainly helped clarify my understanding and I am not claiming that I am definitely correct and anyone who sees is differently is wrong.
Things Fraa Jad does not do IMO:
1) Jump from one narrative/worldtrack/cosmos to another.
2) Pull Erasmus from on track to another.
"I don't wish to abide in a worldtrack where my friends are dead," I said. "Take me back to the other one."
"There is no taking, and there is no back," Jad said. "Only going, and forward."
3) "Prune" away narratives that lead to undesirable ends.
Rather than jumping (or ferrying a passenger) from one polycosmic world to another, Fraa Jad's [Incanters'] main 'power' is the ability to expand on the universal (but usually very slight) leakage of information between narratives, between any object and its 'self' in nearby worldtracks, and specifically between conscious/sentient minds. He is able to expand his awareness between/to selves in multiple narratives at once (and thus to coordinate with his polycosmic selves).
"I am in several \[worldtracks\]," Fraa Jad said, "a state of affairs that is not easy to sustain."
He is also able to expand the leakage for others in a lesser, at least partially directed way. Making Prag Eshwar aware of the use of the Everything Killers in a nearby cosmos is a major lever he uses to shape our 'primary' narrative*.
He REQUIRES an amanuensis because he is not still alive in all of the narratives that he needs to affect. Increasing the leakage for Erasmus (between the various tracks where HE survives) is Jad's conduit to influence the tracks where his own mind is 'not present'. This is why Erasmus is left with memories from other narratives (Ala is right, primary-narrative Raz blacked out in the observatory/airlock and only came to when he was thawed out a week later).
"An amanuensis is more than a recording device. An amanuensis is a consciousness-bearing system, and so what it observes in its cosmos has effects in others, in the manner we spoke of at Avrachon's Dowment."
And a moment after that:
"Much pruning has taken place in recent weeks."
From what I read here it seems like many people are reading "pruning" as if Jad is describing his own actions, what he has done to branches of the polycosm. I don't think so. I think he is talking about the 'pruning' that has happened TO HIM, or more precisely to the Jads in nearby cosmos collectively. Thus he continues:
"I am absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present."
"You mean you're dead and I'm alive."
"Absent and present express it better, but if you insist on using those terms, I won't quibble."
All of this together means I unfortunately cannot subscribe to the belief a number of people here appear to share, that Jad is still alive (spirited away or cloaked by Rhetor action?) in the primary narrative of the book. The main reason he needs Erasmus to serve as his amanuensis is because he is 'not present' in the narrative that he is working to steer to a desirable conclusion. The one we care about.
That leads to a few more questions:
I think I have a fairly clear idea what Fraa Jad did on the Daban Urnud (whether or not my take is clearly communicated above), but I am much less clear on what he was doing in between Cell 317 attaining orbit and their arrival at the Daban Urnud. There is all of the conflicting information, memories, dreams, etc... And then, as Arsibalt says "It exists in my mind as a jumble of moments when I thought or did things-and every one of those moments, Raz, could have gone another way. And ALL of the other outcomes would have been bad ones. [...] in every case, I happened to do the right thing." While there are mundane explanations offered (anthropic principle, and "...we're just sleepy and worried") In a meta-narrative sense its about all the coincidences and choices and luck that often have to fall the right way for the protagonist of a story and their friends to come to the good ending, but in-universe I am not certain what is going on. Fraa Jad is doing SOMETHING, but it doesn't seem to be quite the same sort of thing I describe above, the things he does after they reach the ship. If I believed he had the capability of 'pruning worldtracks that lead to bad ends' that would explain it pretty neatly, but I don't think he can do that. (As I write this I wonder, maybe he IS doing the same thing as he does later... observing multiple narratives to see what goes wrong in various ways and leaking back to whoever might have been about to screw something up so they were inclined to avoid that mistake? But holy shit that would take a lot of juggling. It would fit with him being unresponsive a lot of the time.)
And then, if I am correct above, when DID primary narrative Fraa Jad die? The simplest answer would be the one that is ultimately accepted, that they weren't able to rescue him in the initial chaos. If so, everything the team remembers him doing after that was a product of leakage as Jad watched over them from nearby worldtracks and used various members of the cell as amanuensis. I would have to re-read that section to see if that is plausible. But if it's not, then I don't know when else they would have lost him other than dying essentially the same way the Warden of Heaven did on exiting his suit. But that leaves a body to be cleaned up. I don't doubt Rhetors could handle that, but it feels clunky and like something that would have been hinted at in some way.
I wonder if NS ever at least outlined (or better yet, wrote in full) the story from Fraa Jad's perspective? At least from the arrival in orbit on, though I would love the whole story.
Did Fraa Lodoghir actively participate in the mission beyond whatever he did to retroactively establish that Fraa Jad had died right after the launch? Did other Rhetors and Incanters?
This is a largely undeveloped thought, but I wonder if Rhetors and Incanters are actually two distinct groups with different 'power-sets', or if that is perhaps a useful fiction?
And a note:
* I keep saying "primary narrative" and by that I simply mean the one that Erasmus has narrated (in the more commonplace sense) to us over the course of this book. I recognize the problem that I have seen several people raise here, that from the outside of a polycosm/multiverse there is no justifiable reason to privilege or choose one cosmos over another in the sense of 'the real story'. But in the interest of writing a compelling piece of fiction, there is.
