Subject: (urth) Easter stuff

From: Tony Ellis <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 12:22:36 +0000

Lots of interesting posts while I was away from my pc for Easter. A few
thoughts:

Allan Lloyd wrote (of Kevin Malone)

> This story is to me one of Gene’s more obvious Christian parables. The
> clues in the text
> are almost too many to mention...
>
Welcome, Allan. I suppose it's too much to hope that your e-mail was a
victim of international datelines, and that the actual date it was sent
was a day earlier than the date shown? Only Fooling. Sorry.

Roy wrote:

> 3) Who was the beautiful, weeping woman Sev saw in the loggia of the
> Secret House, being led away by six Praetorians? Ch. XLI, _Urth_ This was
> right after resurrecting the dead assassin and right before emerging behind
> the throne. He can't recall who she is.
>
She's the Contessa in Dr Talos's play, who relates seeing a mysterious
figure as she was led away by guards. (I must admit, I thought this was
what you had in mind when you suggested that the play was changing the
future rather than reporting it.)

Mitchell A. Bailey wrote: (Of the Nature of the Aborigines of St. Anne)

> The strangest inhabitant of a certain green world was one which I,
> taking a cue from Mr. Borski, will call the pleiomorph...
>
As you say, the various explanations for what has happened on St Anne
are so finely balanced it may be that we are supposed to choose our own.
Here's why I haven't chosen yours:

> It may well have come not to possess what we would call a natural form
> of its own, so completely did it live in disguise. The Shadow
> Children remember them as wormlike creatures which lived in holes
> beneath the roots of trees.
>
What the Old Wise One actually says is "'We had no names before men came
out of the sky... We were mostly long, and lived in holes between the
roots of trees.'" My point being, the Shadow Children remember
-themselves- as being this indigenous, primitive lifeform.

The Old Wise One is, of course, an unreliable narrator. Earlier he
speaks of the Shadow Children as the space travellers, and Sandwalker's
people as the indigenous shape-changers, which ties into your
"Atlantean" interpretation. -But-, he later takes this back. The Wise
Old One is a telepathic construct, and he is influenced by the minds
that make him. When he is being generated only by the last Shadow Child
and by Sandwalker, he says "Now I am half a man, and know that we were
always here..."

It depends on how much credence you want to give to that remark, but for
a long, long time now it's been my theory that the Shadow Children were
on St Anne first. They may have been indigenous or, as the Wise Old One
also says "it may be that all are one stock" and that they are the
remnant of a truly unimaginably ancient human migration. Either way,
they were telepathic, and had a very tenuous sense of self. When the
"Atlanteans" arrived from Earth, they so impressed these creatures that
they began to emulate them, to the extent that eventually they came to
think they -were- the humans. At the same time, the real "Atlantean"
colonists became so seduced by the dreaming life of St Anne that they
lost first their technology and then even the ability to use tools. They
became Sandwalker's people.

> Quite probably no Terran of the latter wave of colonization, French or
> English-speaking, ever encountered or spoke to a Shadow Child personally
> after that first landing
>
No? What about "animals shaped like people" Mary Blount remembers
playing with as a little girl? "...the children, the little ones, you
know." What about Robert Culot's grandfather, who knew that there were
"many races" of Annese, and saw something "sometimes like a man,
sometimes like old wood."?

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Mitchell A. Bailey <mab at lindau.net>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 14:41:09 +0000

Tony Ellis wrote:
> > The Shadow
> What the Old Wise One actually says is "'We had no names before men me
> It depends on how much credence you want to give to that remark...

The explaination I would offer is basec on the fact that, as you say,
the Old Wise One at the time this remark was made was being generated by
one lone Shadow Child, Sandwalker, and a tenuous contribution from every
other Shadow Child band on St. Anne. Sandwalker's alien contribution in
particular probably confused the Old Wise One. Contrast this with the
Old Wise One's manner when the Shadow Child band was intact earlier, at
which time he was more knowledgable and confident of his viewpoint and
beliefs.

I myself when I first read 5HC pondered the possibility that the Shadow
Children were the evolved offspring of pleiomorphs and the abos were
descendants of human colonists. I belive that the evidence, apart from
what the Shadow Children say about themselves, more convincingly
suggests the converse. Consider:

The Shadow Children are portrayed as stunted and rather weak and
unhealthy scavengers with a poor grasp of reality. They are clearly
nocturnal and very shy. I cannot find anything in the text to suggest
that they were shape-changers to even a minimal extent, or even thought
to be, though they allegedly had other odd telepathic and psychokinetic
powers. This seems to me more consistent with degenerated, drugged
humans.

The abos of Sandwalker's kind, including the Free People of the
mountains, the marshmen, and their alleged descendants the Trenchards,
are diurnal, strong, healthy, and possess a talent for chameleon-like
self-camouflage or alteration of appearance. In my view that makes them
much better candidates for descendants of the native Annese
shape-changers, who took on the human form for so long and so thoroughly
that their pleiomorphism degenerated to a vestige which (per Dollo's
Law) they can never reverse.

> sometimes like old wood."?

My impression of the contact accounts Dr. Marsch recorded in his journal
in "V.R.T." were more likely with pleio-abos than Shadow Children. It is
strongly implied they only occured in daylight, and the last one
remembered by Culot's grandfather in particular was alone and
camouflaging itself. Mary Blount's "children" could conceivably have
been SCs, but I don't think little Mary would have allowed out in the
late evening (if the SCs didn't eat her, there was always the
ghoul-bear!), or that true SCs would have come out during daylight. 

BTW I notice that Shadow Children are mentioned as such only by Victor,
either as recorded by the real Dr. Marsch, or in the accounts, including
"A Story", written by Victor impersonating Marsch. Note that
first-person references to hanging up food for "those who hunger" occur
only after the transition in the journal marking Marsch's demise. John
Marsch evidently was unfamiliar with the idea of Shadow Children,
thinking that Victor referred to a constellation. Although Dr. Marsch's
sources, such as Culot's grandfather and even Dr. Hagsmith, recognized
that there were several distinct "ethnic" groups of Annese, it was
probably only Victor and his parents who knew much of the 'genuine' abo
lore concerning the SC.

---

From: Mitchell A. Bailey <mab at lindau.net>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 20:06:47 +0000

Mitchell A. Bailey wrote:
... What the Old Wise One actually says is "'We had no names before men
me
> > "Atlantean" interpretation. -But-, he later takes this back. ...
> ...

Guess I better own up to a goof: when the OWO makes that statement there
are still three Shadow Children of that band remaining with Sandwalker.

I don't think that cripples my point, tho. 

Let me hasten to point out that the band had suffered defeat and
capture, probably pretty traumatic considering their inflated and
fragile egos. Then by this point, it had just lost two of its number to
violence, this violence and this loss being felt all the more acutely
because every Shadow Child was part of a telepathic mental continuum and
probably the pain of one was shared by all. 

And Sandwalker still made up 1/4 of that telepathic community
(neglecting the attenuated contact with other Shadow Children bands). 

So I still think the OWO was in a somewhat stressed and disoriented
state compared with the earlier scene where Sandwalker was initiated a
Shadowfriend.