Subject: (urth) Silk-23 skidooby

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 19:26:04 +0000

Rostrum quoted me and wrote:
>> Anyway.  My position has been that Silk-43 brain-data was erased from the
>> 43-year-old Silk body; Horn brain-data was downloaded via the Neighbors
>> (by-passing the whole monitor mechanism); later on, Silk-23 brain-data was
>> transferred from Pig to Horn-in-Silk via the eye and the monitor.
>
>Interesting theory - and kind of sinister - instead of Silk conquering Pas
>in Mainframe, Pas is secretly still around pulling all the strings.
>
>But the Narrator can't be a complete reboot back to the Silk-23 back-up
>data, because he still knows and is trying to avoid facing the fact that
>Hyacinth is dead.
>
>"I could not look upon Hyacinth, dead." - isn't that a line from a famous
>poem (with someone else's name in for Hyacinth)?

Well, since in this reading I take it as Horn alone who sees Hyacinth dead
(Silk-43 being completely gone), it is Horn who sees her.  Silk-23 comes
later, via the eye transfer; and Silk-23 would be even more shocked and
distraught over the memory (I'm assuming that Horn and Silk-23 can access
the memories of Horn) than Horn, who was the actual witness.

Adding to the confusion is the question of who the Narrator is when he is
actually writing the words of a given book.  (Percentage-wise, for example.)

But back to the idea of erasing the 20 years of failure. FWIW, it is a
messier "nuts & bolts" version of (a reading of) Severian's "I am not the
first Severian" deal, where Severian is clearly the optimized product and
we don't see the un-edited Severian.  It is also similar, in the literary
world, to that Borges story where young Borges goes into the hotel where
old Borges is committing suicide.  In the comic world, it has some
similarity to how in the "Adam Warlock" series, the depressed Adam Warlock
of the future (all friends died; betrayal and ruin) commits suicide by
folding himself back into his younger self in an attempt to avert that fork
in the life-path that led to such a dead end.

=mantis=

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 15:47:29 +0000

> the memories of Horn) than Horn, who was the actual witness.

I don't think this works.  For one thing, the only way I can swallow Horn
steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the obvious during his return to the
Whorl (that he is a spirit posessing Silk's body - an almost commonplace
idea given Horn's experiences) is that Silk himself is preventing it in
order to avoid facing up to Hyacinth's death.

For another, it only works if Pas and the Neighbors are in league
together, because by your "sinister" reading, the Neighbors wipe Silk-43
and then later Pas completes the plan by engineering the reboot with
Silk-23.

Another:  This contradicts your "Silkhorn gets some Silk from Pig after
restoring his sight" theory.  Because Pig was posessed fairly recently,
and not by pure Silk, but Passilk-42, or maybe Passilk-43 minus a few
months (weeks?).  The only source of pure, unadulterated Silk-23 would be
from the tape backups on mainframe.

Another:  It really undermines the whole healing of Silk theme.  Silk-23
coming to terms with the fact that he's suddenly older and a widower seems
much less interesting than Silk-43 overcoming his grief.  

Another:  Silk-23, recorded when Silk was on the airship, feeling
depressed, suddenly finding himself older and Hyacinth dead -- we ought to
see a major shift in Silk's personality between when he says goodbye to
Pig and when at the end when he gets on Hari Mau's lander.  (Maybe the
kids didn't understand what had happened and didn't know to depict it?)

-Rostrum

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From: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 16:35:45 +0000

dying, not that it was dead. I've assumed Silk-43 continued on, but rather 
dormant and wounded, while Horn ran the body. A new infusion via Pig would 
most likely be Passilk-42, as you noted, and if Wolfe is playing with this, 
it might factor in to the greater political wisdom Silkhorn shows after his 
return to Blue. Silk-43 had not been a successful leader on the Whorl. 
Silkhorn on Blue is quite successful, perhaps as a result of combining 
wisdom both from his failures as Ur-Silk and what he had experienced as 
part of Good-Pas. Something to consider.

Nutria

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