{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1090",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1090,
    "subject": "Digest urth.v018.n014",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-09-04T09:49:39+00:00",
    "last": "1998-09-04T09:49:39+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0018-0104@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Jon Camfield",
        "address": "griffjon at mail.utexas.edu"
      },
      "date": "1998-09-04T09:49:39+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Re: Digest urth.v018.n014",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Tony Ellis wrote:\nThe relevant quote is in the final chapter of Urth (Chapter LI), where\nSeverian is chatting with his priest. He remembers the young officer\nreporting that Hierodules had landed a man and woman on the grounds of\nthe House Absolute: \"Remembering that, it was simple enough to guess who\nmy priest's forbears had been - the sailors routed by my memories had\npaid for their defeat with their pasts, just as I would have lost the\nfuture of my descendants had my own past been defeated.\"\n\n\"my descendants\" seems pretty unequivocal here."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I had always taken this to show Sev believed that the sailors (Gunnie, etc.)\nwere the Adams and Eves of Ushas, though looking again, hm.\n\nAnother one of Wolfe's highly compacted sentences--\nThe part of the sentence up to the dash lead the reader to expect the next\npart to reveal the ID of the Adam and Eve pair.\n\nBut the second half.... It seems to be a statement of his memory, which does\nnot ID the pair.  Continuing unpacking, the sailors section is about the\npast 'as it happened', in other words, the sailors lost their chance.  The\ndescendants section, however, is prefaced by a 'would'.  We can interpret\nthis as \"could have, but did not, in fact, the opposite happened\".  This\nleads to Tony Ellis' view.\nHowever, Sev never mentioned having any children, By Valeria or otherwise,\nand as Apheta wasn't human I doubt that that would be the source (though\nperhaps their union provides a Jahi figure?).  Maybe Gunnie (the only sailor\nwho protected him) had a child by Sev...  Or perhaps Sev had children with\nValeria and just didn't remember(jk) to tell us about them....  The idea I'm\npursuing here is that 'descendants' doesn't have to be literal, or (if\nliteral) to mean descendants engendered on the Yesod trip.\n\nPerhaps the Hieros only acted as an Ark for survivors in other parts of Urth\n(did Apu ever have children??)\n\nI remain unconvinced of either argument, that it is the sailors or that it\nis Sev's children...\n------------------------------------------------------------------\nJon Camfield      \"GriffJon\"  |Webmaster, Plan II Honors Program:\ngriffjon at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu   | www.dla.utexas.edu/~plan2\nGriffJon at mail.utexas.edu      |Webmaster, Broccoli Project:\n                              | www.utexas.edu/students/brocproj\nHomepage, Gallery, Resume:    |Channel Manager, Undernet #Poetry\n ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~griffjon | www.tripod.com/~ircpoetry\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n\"The most incomprehensible fact about nature is that it is comprehensible\"\n-- Albert Einstein"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}