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The Locked Tomb Read: Nona the Ninth, Day 4 [1]
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Date: 2023-05-22
It’s Day 4, 48 hours until the Tomb opens.
There’s a long history in Classical literature, beginning, as far as we know, with Greek tragedy, of giving away the end before the play starts. This is the nature of tragedy: relieving the audience of suspense: if you know in advance that Oedipus is going to end up ruined or Antigone is going to die, you can sit back and appreciate, not what happens, but how and why it happens. You don’t have to root for the character, or hope that this time it’ll be different — this time, our hero is going to defy the odds and win. Therefore, you experience what Aristotle called catharsis, that is, feeling all the pity and the terror of the hero’s circumstances, in all its fullness, and thereby be cleansed of it, your understanding of suffering deepened.
Throughout the history of theatre up to and including the Renaissance, this general axiom of tragedy held. Shakespeare gives it a nod, as in Romeo and Juliet, when in the Prologue, the Chorus tells the audience that the death of the two lovers will end a feud. There is no hope that Romeo will arrive late at the tomb and find Juliet awake — instead we watch and weep.
It’s not melodrama — it’s exactly the opposite. In melodrama you focus less on the how and why and more on the what; you get emotionally wrapped up in the will they? or won’t they? instead of looking past the events to their causes and the forces that drive the action.
This is the tradition that Muir draws on. We know the Tomb is going to open. Now we watch the how and why; we consider the motivations that drive all the characters to act as they act. For instance, how involved is Blood of Eden in opening the Tomb? Why would anyone want it open? (That’s easy: everyone knows that the Death of God is in there.) Who wants to keep it closed? (That too is easy: John has gone to great lengths to keep the Tomb impregnable but, for all his efforts, the Tomb is going to open). What is to be gained or lost, and all those other big questions that we have pending — that’s what we focus on.
Day 4 is heavy on action. We’ve spent a lot of time on the build-up, so for this day we’ll have fewer pins and less explanation. You don’t need it. Without further ado:
Chapter 17 Header: a green shoot
Nona wakes and, for the first time, Camilla isn’t there to record her dream. Throughout this section, Camilla is preoccupied about Pyrrha’s disappearance; her inattentiveness leads to some dire consequences. First up, Nona remembers how she wanted to tell Palamedes that she had gone to the broadcast, but Palamedes is so focused on Pyrrha that he doesn’t give her an opening. When she wakes she tries to record her dream but mixes up the buttons and listens in on a conversation between Cam and Pal about Blood of Eden’s objectives and their longing for each other, before the tape gives way to one of Nona’s early dreams. She’s struggling to communicate, but clearly the dream is still the dream of the pool.
At breakfast, Camilla tells Nona that Pyrrha had to have made an on-the-spot decision about where she was going, because she left her guns behind. They’re going to the spaceport, but first Camilla agrees to go to school so that Nona can say goodbye. As they leave the building, it’s obvious that everyone else in the complex is also getting ready to leave, and the streets are under military guard.
The kids, but for Born in the Morning, have gathered at school — the only stable place they know — and Angel arrives. Camilla thanks her for looking after Nona, and the Angel tells her to come upstairs and they’ll talk. She starts to advise the kids about surviving in the coming days, and how to make rational decisions about survival. She gives them a map to show them what places to avoid and where to be safer, and she talks about what they can expect from the Houses. Born in the Morning shows up and all the kids swear their loyalty to each other.
It’s a longer-than-usual chapter and there’s some stuff here that isn’t self-evident, so here goes:
Pyrrha took off at least an hour before the broadcast was announced, so that wasn’t what motivated her (p. 228). Nona reminds Palamedes about the shuttle, and it clicks for him — she took off because of the shuttle.
The recording: Blood of Eden wants Nona to be Harrowhark, but neither Camilla nor Palamedes know why. Palamedes thought they kept Judith alive to make a Lyctor of her, but “I’m not so sure. I think I buy Corona’s story that she’s the getaway vehicle” (p. 230). They need her to operate the stele. “But it’s Harrowhark they want — or at least, it’s Harrow that We Suffer wants . . . Everything comes back to the Tomb” (p. 230). There are two operational plans (that we know about): use of the stolen ship with a stele to attack somewhere in the Houses, and the chance to turn Harrow into a weapon against John.
Camilla and Palamedes argue about their relationship: P: “Here I am, installed in your body, mere minutes from chewing up your soul … Camilla, I can’t bear this. I’m eating your life” . . . C: “I’ve carried you, Warden. And I’ve carried your memory … I’d rather carry you . . .Love and freedom don’t coexist, Warden” . . . P: “This is all there is to love? Simply by being in your life, I have added indelibly to its weight?” . . . C: “Yes” (p. 230). Notice that Camilla always calls Palamedes by his title, Warden? She might call him Palamedes to a third party, but never to his face. Just notice the pattern. When he says, “I adore you, Scholar,” she answers, “Indubitably, Warden” (p. 230). Which is one of the first things we hear Camilla say in Gideon, p. 131.
They wonder whether “Nona’s actually — a completed merger? One we will never actually be able to unpick, a successful soul gestalt?” (p. 231). They are thinking of trying what John said couldn’t be done, but something they know (from Pyrrha’s example) is possible: separating the souls of necromancer and cavalier. Then there is something else that’s possible: a true merger of two souls that can’t be undone.
Camilla tells her that, after today, she probably won’t see her friends again. “She was glum, but she had been expecting it” (p. 234). I’ve mentioned before that Nona is changing, but those changes are starting to accelerate. We also have to wonder what else Nona hasn’t been telling herself.
She heard Varun make “a low, voiceless moan — a wanting sound — but quiet, on the edge of hearing” and she asks for help, then adds “Don’t do anything weird, okay? I’m having enough trouble right now” (p. 234).
Everyone is preparing to run. “There was something electric in the air, as though the city were tensed and waiting for a loud noise” (p. 234). Militia is on patrol and tempers are high. We learn later in this section that the Building is a Blood of Eden safe house, so the residents know what to expect if they stay — interrogation, torture, and execution.
Nona feels “fragile” and is on the edge of a tantrum, but pulls herself back (p. 237). This becomes important later — she’s on a short fuse.
When Beautiful Ruby disrespects her mother for saying she’ll accept House rule again, Hot Sauce calls her mother “weak,” but the Angel explains to them that individual situations and loyalties are complicated because people have to care for others and make compromises to keep their loved ones safe: “Don’t care about what people say … care about what people do” (p. 239). She warns them against doctrinal thinking: “If you think in black and white your brain can’t be agile” (p. 240)
They talk about Lemuria, where the Angel was born and was part of the third society to be settled on the thanergy planet. The Angel was a zoo director when the mutation tipping point came: “The Houses pulled support, said they’d prep us for an early move, but they left minimal forces in the barracks. We dug up old caches of materiel and used them. On the mutants from the sea, on the animals as they changed, on one another, on the Houses when they saw what we’d got our hands on and came back to take control. Blood of Eden was there too, you know. And in the end the Houses won and most of us surrendered and we were moved” (p. 240). This is pretty much exactly what’s happening on New Rho, with the addition of a Resurrection Beast. “There’s still a facility on Lemuria . . . for geopolymer refining . . . Microsilicates, zeolites. Industrial sands” (p. 240).
When the Angel asks why Southgate would be a good refuge, and Nona gives a strategically sophisticated answer (p. 242). This is one of the things that Nona knows but doesn’t admit.
The Angel advocates for a “middle ground” because there are too many unknowns. They don’t think necromancers will land because of Varun, and “they may simply shell the place if things get too bad . . . Lots of people are about to start streaming out, and it’s in the Houses’ best interest that the population stays in one place, and stays put” (p. 244). This is a strategic intel mindset, and tells us a lot about the Angel’s perspective.
They start to close up the school. Aim tells Nona “I have a lot of bosses . . . Millions” (p. 246).
She sees the drawing that Nona made and stops dead. “She said, ‘Sure,’ as though everything were normal and she hadn’t acted like she had been knifed” (p. 246).
Hot Sauce: “Edenites go through people like water” (p. 248). Hot Sauce and the others in the gang are more radical than Blood of Eden.
Chapter 18 Header: Eighth House skull.
While they’re clearing up the classroom, “Camilla” trips and touches Aim. Aim asks Nona how she knew to draw a “cradle creature.” Aim explains that she’s only ever seen a picture in a politically active archaeological group. “Camilla” asks if she had ever been treated by necromancers and Aim almost panics. Noodle does. Aim puts Noodle in the kitchen and all but begs Nona to go with him, but Nona remains. Aim accuses Palamedes of being a Lyctor, and he swears on Camilla’s life that he is not. Hot Sauce enters the room just as Nona is shot.
She regains consciousness to hear Pash trying to cancel an order to Merv Wing. Pash and the Angel argue over her extraction. They decide to fight, but first Pash wants to make sure Nona and Camilla are dead. Nona sits up and Pash shoots her again. Camilla comes around. Aim tries to call Merv Wing off and warns them if they come upstair they’ll be killed. Camilla prepares to help them defend themselves, and Aim admits she called for them to killed. Nona goes to the generator room to make sure Hot Sauce is safe. Hot Sauce is panicked and asks if she “made it up” and Nona plays along. The Angel retrieves them and they return to the classroom, where Hot Sauce realizes that Nona was indeed shot in the head. She pulls her gun and shoots her again.
Some on the internet theorize that the cradle creature is an elephant, but no one knows. Palamedes has heard the term “cradle creature” before (p. 251).
Palamedes asks if Aim has gotten an implant from a House necromancer (p. 252). It sounds like something he’s familiar with. Aim’s reaction startles Nona: “She suddenly seemed older and more shrunken — rather than tiny and buoyant, tiny and withered” (p. 252). Each knows the other now — the game is up (whatever that game is). Noodle recognizes it, too. She returns from the kitchen “still looking grey and haggard but more resolute and settled” (p. 252). This is because she’s given the extermination order.
“Nona sat herself down in one of the big puddles of blue light, enjoying the sensation of it and absolutely nothing else that was going on” (p. 253).
Aim tells Pash they’ll take Hot Sauce and get out of the building before Merv Wing comes in because she’ll be killed (p. 256). Aim didn’t know that Camilla and Nona were part of Troia Cell. She didn’t know that Nona lived in the safe house. Pash didn’t realize that Nona was in school, either.
“Aunty always told me it was ninety percent superstition and ten percent for the fun of it” (p. 258) with respect to shooting people.
“’Pash shot us!’ she wailed. ‘And my teacher! Palamedes was talking to the Angel and someone shot us through the window and now the carpet’s gross! This is the worst day of school ever!” (p. 259). Even with everything falling apart, there is no way this will ever not be funny.
“We’ve got my dog in here! No, we will not put on a gas mask, this is a coup — Fine. If you come up those stairs the lifeguard will shoot you” (p. 260). Noodle is more important than we suspect, I think. Merv Wing is going to try to capture Aim. Merv Wing would have murdered Hot Sauce to avoid leaving witnesses.
“She and Hot Sauce held hands all the way down the corridor. She thought Hot Sauce looked at her a little strangely” (p. 266). She knows. The question is, how much of a child soldier is she? Answer: in the short run, she’s enough of a child soldier to shoot someone she loves as a sister in the head, close up and personal.
John 5: 1
In this dreamtime, everything John wants is at hand, so when he wants a can of gas to torch a car with, he can put his hands on one. Earlier in the dream sequences, she would have to prompt him with questions to get him to talk; now, however, he’s on a roll and, in fact, “he wasn’t really talking to her. He was talking at her” (p. 27).
At this point, his grievances are piling up and the group tries to figure out how to make the world pay attention when other people are invested in discrediting them. They enter into an agreement to have John remotely puppet a dead world leader and take payment in several billion dollars and a suitcase nuke.
John is still determined to save the planet, not abandon it, which is what the trillionaires want to do.
P— (Pyrrha) advises they get something they can use as leverage: “If they want to make you into a bad wizard, be a bad wizard. We can write the history books to say you were a good wizard . . . They’re not going to listen because we talk nicely, they’re going to listen because we scare the shit out of them” (p. 271). NCEA Level 2 is Catholic School accreditation and the equivalent of a high school diploma.
The “big black car with a bunch of suits in it” (p. 271) is an organization willing to pay enormous bucks for John to puppet their leader. They decided to consider the money their funding to start up their cryo project again. When they realize it’s the head of a major country, despite the risks, they go ahead with the puppet plan (p. 273). The country is one that has nuclear weapons, which narrows the field considerably.
Meanwhile, they discover that the FTL project has been internationally green-lighted, which just infuriates John. “Everyone showed us what looked like evidence to them, and when we argued back they reminded us that cows had best friends and complex social relationships” (p. 273). John’s anger and outrage, his grievance and resentment, are starting to pile up. On top of it, he takes bad press and shitposting personally. Muir doesn’t come out and say it, but it’s clear from John’s actions and words that he’s thin-skinned.
Chapter 19 Header: the Tomb with chains broken
Nona wakes up shackled and restrained, and has a tantrum. She tears her body apart breaking the bonds and breaking out of the room. BoE soldiers shoot her and she she just gets madder. Someone drops a hood over her head and swaddles her. She hears herself say, “Fool. You’re killing her” (p. 278).
Nona’s tantrums are really something.
“Her sight and her sound and her smell came back all at once, but her memories stayed weirdly distant, like they were shuffling their feet behind a doorway, waiting to announce a surprise party” (p. 275). At least part of Nona is still anticipating her birthday.
She doesn’t remember her first tantrum, but it frightened Pyrrha, who “had been laughing with her mouth, but not with her eyes: her eyes had been very brown and distant and uneasy, as though this tantrum had reminded Pyrrha of something her brain didn’t want to bring back” (p. 275). Remember that the Lyctors prevailed on John to put Alecto down because of her anger and her inability to act human.
“The ocean made her stop being angry, and had a prolonged effect” (p. 276). Salt water. Nona is a “green thing” and a “salt water creature.” Salt water has a sacramental quality.
Her anger is a super power: she screams “until her throat broke and healed and broke again and she was screaming blood as well as sound. This was her warning to everyone else” (p. 276). The scream is a warning that it’s about to get worse.
“Nona’s anger gave her the power to not listen” to pain or to any restraint. She tears her body apart to get free. Make a note of that. When she breaks the door, they shoot her and all the manage to do is make her madder. One fool shoots her again and she screams at them, making them drop their gun and cover their ears, “and she opened her mouth to remember her teeth” (p. 277). So . . . did she rip his face off? Maybe?
“When it all went dark, her body seemed to remember that she had used something up inside her, something enormous, and she started to tremble . . . she heard her mouth say, savage and distinct and cool despite the trembles: ‘Fool. You’re killing her.’ But she was only talking to herself, after all” (p. 278). Who is talking, and to whom? Many readers think this is Alecto talking to the part of herself that is Nona.
John 3:20
John continues down his path of trying to change to public’s mind and failing in the face of his adversaries’ lies, threats, and disinformation. John realizes that the trillionaires are deceiving the public, holding out the promise of survival but with no intention of fulfilling it — they aren’t building a fleet of ships, just enough to save themselves and abandon everyone else. He drops the scientific persona and announces that he’s a necromancer.
She isn’t used to having a body, and “quite often forgot how to breathe, or swallow, and she would choke on her own saliva until the fright passed and the body remembered for her” (p. 279).
The group considers the nuke to be leverage, never to be used in reality.
C— (Cassiopeia) asks, “Are we more invested in proving this new plan is bullshit, or in saving you? I was like, It’s both. C— was like, It can’t be both. Pick one and stick to it. Decide what you give a fuck about. He said, I found that the problem with being the death man is you stop giving much of a fuck” (p. 279). More evidence that John has lost the thread. It doesn’t help that he’s right — the trillionaires are preparing to abandon the earth and the population, and they plan to leave, saying they want to have the “second wave [of departures] ready before our next round of climate starvation” (p. 280). He realizes there won’t be a second wave, because there won’t be any ships: “I was good at long distance by then, I’d had to practise. I got eyes and ears on the plant that was meant to be the main building site and I immediately saw that it wasn’t to spec” (p. 281). What’s it going to be: is he going to save the earth or punish the trillionaires?
“I’d tried to make out like everything I was doing had principles I was probably going to write papers on later. I dropped all that, because turns out nobody wants papers, nobody wants principles. They want the magic bullet. They just want to be saved” (p. 282). John had pretended to have principles and planned to write papers on his theories. Then he gives up on pretense and announces his power and authority. This proves that John is as much a poseur as the trillionaires he despises.
We’ve reached the end of the fourth day. Slowly Nona has been changing from the six month old we met four days ago. Someone else is emerging.
Day five is unbelievably long and significant. I’m about as up to writing it all in one week as you are up to reading it in one sitting. So let’s break it up. Next week we’ll cover Chapters 20-25, and that will be plenty.
[END]
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