I (half in levity, I admit) yesterday said something about sending horn a year into the past into Silk's body to finish up the healing, possibly leaving his home on Blue and Silk's home at the same time. This gave me such a headache that I got sick thinking about it: if Horn is transplanted into Babbie, then Horn can possibly be helping himself on the boat in Babbie, and he can see his own intelligence in the eyes of the beast. The headache was only beginning. Could Horn/Silk be writing about the things that happened to Horn as they happened, or even slightly before? ARGH. That damn two year comment destroyed my life - and I've wondered about it before. On the con side of this (meaning it MIGHT just be a typo) is the following from In Green's Jungles: "'How long has your father been gone?' About three ... Did you hear that, sir?'" (pg 407 SFBC BOTSS, toward the end of Chapter 19 IGJ) How long does it take Silk to get from that point to Horn's home at last? A long time? What could Hide be saying besides three years? Why did he get cut short? Is it an important ommision? Three months? Three half years? Three and many moons ago? Could it really be a typo about the two year business? The idea that Horn is in two places at once at least reconciles one argument against him being in Babbie: that he was already riding a beast with three horns when he died (or was injured mortally) on Green. (incidentally, a literal beast we never see at all - he is on a lander). But it makes me sick to think about that.
That makes the book much too vertiginous for me. It really puts a new relationship between the random stuff Silk/Horn writes down and his confused and jumbled attempt at explaining a quest that may be contiguous with the time of composition. It might be better just to ignore this clue in order to sleep OK at night. This almost achieves the same disorientation for me as 7 american nights or the end of A Story in the Fifth Head of Cerberus. Marc Aramini