Subject: (urth) 5HC recent bits

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at sirius.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 20:12:04 +0000

Talarican's burst of 5HC questions.

>I was wondering if the selection of a 402 day year, pink sun, and so forth
>had some significance, and perchance if even their astrometric unlikelihood
>was intentional and in itself had some significance. (of course, I
>originally embarked on this research intending to shed light on the question
>of the planets' orbital periods and length of day and so forth)

Right.  Issues of error all put to one side: In a nutshell, I think 402
days means that the twin planets are at the outer edge of the ecosphere of
their rather Sol-like star.

>If lonely little Shadowchild Wolf terminated the Song of Bending Sky-Paths
>that None May Come, why does the sun still look pink afterwards?

This suggests (to me, at least) that pinkness has nothing to do with the
disguise itself (although the fact that we cannot see a pink star within 20
light years might be taken as a clue that the cloaking is going on).  The
image-changing field (rather like a shape-changer, come to think of it)
must begin a few AU out, making the star look like a dim M type of star.

Re: Many Butterflies vs. Mary Butterflies.  Since I originally knew only
the Ace version, I thought it was/accepted "Many" and didn't think much
about "Mary" at all, since the name isn't applied to any character.  And
the "Mary" thing is a puzzler: does this mean that Cedar Branches Waving
and Seven Girls Waiting are really "Mary C.B.W." and "Mary S.G.W."?  (Note
those initials: my main reason for posting at all right now.)

The brothers are both named "John," yet "John" doesn't really show up after
their births--they are mainly known by their other name(s).  These women,
though, they have three names; and the names have strange parallels to each
other (similar sounds, similar stress patterns).  Then there's the
grandmother's hidden name, which Sandwalker asks of his mother CBW, but she
weeps and won't answer.

(The "Mary/John" business when first presented seems to be the aboriginal
response to Christianity brought by the Frenchmen.  But "A Story" is set in
the pre-contact time and has at least Johns [if not also a Mary, but
certainly not Many Maries <g>], which either points to its "fictitious"
nature as an anthropological romance, or to weird deeper truths.  In any
event, the notion that "Mary/John" comes with/after French contact is
thrown into question (where there was never any question before).

Sandwalker is on his vision quest, which will mark his transition from boy
to man.  His seemingly tangential dalliance with SGW is actually no tangent
at all: she is proven to be fertile, she is in need of a hunter's bounty
(weak boys die of hunger, hunters provide), he gives her honey (rather like
manna in that desert environment), and then they make whoopie.  So when he
meets the Shadow Children he can boldly claim to be a man since he has had
visions =and= he has been with a woman.

But still, there's that weirdness of the girlfriend's name being like his
mother's name (and different from, say, "Sweetmouth" or "Three Faces").
And how the girlfriend is a mother, father unknown.  And they all are
thrown into the pit.

What makes me wonder about this bundle is the fact that in his
"autobiographical" mode, VRT has this weird "mother caught me with the
prostitute" thing, which might be either the root "reality" of which "A
Story" is built to disquise (Freudian), or the opposite--it might be the
"civilized gloss" to disguise the "A Story" reality (dissembler).  Or
something else again.

That is: "mother caught me" might be real, "SGW" fantasy; "SGW" real,
"mother caught me" fantasy (based upon these intersections of names, states
of motherhood, being thrown together into the pit, etc.); or a blend.

=mantis=

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

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 08:52:23 +0000

> must begin a few AU out, making the star look like a dim M type of star.

Reading "A Story," I got the impression that the field was hiding St. Anne
from an already-settled-by-humans St. Croix, not shielding the whole
system from Earth.  In the story, the humans show up almost instantly
after Shadowchild terminates the song (which seems odd, even if they were
just on the sister planet), and I also thought it odd that no one on
St. Croix mentions St. Anne suddenly appearing out of nowhere - if that
had happened, you'd expect it to be known as "the planet that suddenly
appeared out of nowhere."  On the other hand, I guess the astronomers
might have thought they simply hadn't noticed it until then.

Am I misinterpreting all this?

-Rostrum