As before this blog is designed to be read in conjunction with the accompanying chapter, now published on the site. To access the chapter, click on the dropdown menu Read Book One, and scroll down…
The title of chapter thirteen is yet another of my pop culture references, and the chapter itself is broken into three parts, each one a two-hander… The first of these features Marta and Priya, out on Mission together, and focusses on their developing friendship (with its ups and downs), a crucial driver of the action later on…
The second half of the chapter has two shorter scenes; the one between Marta and Jorge, that follows her return, comments on what has taken place earlier and develops into a philosophical debate on the true nature of Alpha 5. The coda takes the form of a short exchange between Marta and Rai which drives the plot forward…
The chapter closes with the enormity of what they are doing finally dawning on our heroine, who grows up a little more as a consequence…
During Another Girl, Another Planet, the girls make an incidental discovery about the crusties (they venerate their dead), but their main investigation yields nothing as the pseudo-crustacean ‘Harvey’, the main subject of their experiment steadfastly refuses to engage with the machine they send to interact with it, as Marta had predicted… The girls have also come to understand that the main thrust of Mission exobiological enquiry has shifted, to the pods and their theorised collective intelligence, and their work has been sidelined as a result…
Ever the arch-rationalist, Marta is sceptical about the notion of ‘pod’ intelligence, partly because she is miffed that her insights are being ignored, but mainly because she is instinctively suspicious of anything that smacks of spirituality…
There’s some action in this chapter (it’s still an adventure story, after all!); Marta nearly dies (again), but this time as the result ‘of a stupid accident!’ Priya saves her (as she saved Sal), which strengthens the bond between them; a bond that cannot be threatened by the scientific spat that follows. Although this disagreement will prove to be the harbinger of things to come…
Prior to the accident, Priya had been urging her friend to talk to Han who has data that would support her theories about ‘crusty’ development. Marta is reluctant, and is forced to confess to her rather hamfisted and utterly futile attempt to get the boy to take an interest in her when they were out on Mission in Carl Sagan minor, the year before…