# 5HC: VRT/Number 5 link *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 13 Nov 2000* > 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. --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *13 Nov 2000, 07:54* Spectacled Bear wrote > 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= ---