Spectacled Bear wrote
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Compare M. Million's lesson in which he asks No. 5 and David about the supposed abo artifacts. David argues that the artifacts were not important in the lives of the abos compared to their religion and culture, and appears to make up some examples - but those examples agree in every detail with the descriptions in "A Story"! The trees are there, and the flails made of sea-shells, and everything. This is astonishing whether "A Story" is true or not - if not, how did Marsch pick up those ex tempore bits of colour from David's lesson, and if so, how could David possibly have known them?
This has to do, I think, with the weird chthonic/cryptic linkage between the narrator of "V.R.T." and Number 5, the narrator of "The Fifth Head of Cerberus." Both heads seem to share that information: which means it is "true" (and many others know it as true) or there is a private bond between those two heads. This link might be only my imagination (as usual!), but I used it to trace the details you have mentioned, and I think that the strongest textual evidence for a private psychic link is the fact that in story #1, Number 5 sees robots gone berserk, killing prisoners in the third year of his sentence at the frontier prison (70); in story #3, the narrator VRT/JVM has a dream of robots going berserk and killing him (210), yet there are no robots in evidence at the urban prison where he is located.
These two guys have only met a few times, and yet they have the same sort of eerie twin telepathy on display in story #2. (And they are both young men guilty of murdering older men, etc.)
In addition to all the other loops, I think that the internal order of the stories is reversed: #3 (all or at least most) was written by its author first, then #2, and after he was released from prison, Number 5 wrote #1. So reading them through in order presented amounts to moving backward in time.
As we read it the first time, we take story #2 to be an anthropological reconstruction/daydream, that is, we understand it to be a fiction written by an Earthman Ph.D. Revelations in story #3 change this impression.
=mantis=