Time must have a stop

--- Don Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net> wrote: [snip]

Because the Outsider wanted it to. Since I don't have the text here, I'll accept for the sake of argument your claims that time stopped rather than something else happening and this is separate from Silk's enlightenment. Your contention is that this happened because of some action of the Whorl's space drive, maybe coming out of FTL (I don't quite remember what you wrote), and the Outsider miraculously exempted Silk from this stoppage. Right? I would assume--but correct me if I'm wrong--that the Outsider's choosing this moment wasn't a coincidence. For some reason the stoppage of time was a favorable circumstance for his enlightenment of Silk. Do I have that right? But if stopping time was favorable for enlightenment, than the Outsider (who is omnipotent) could have stopped time on his own. And would have--why not? So we're choosing between the Outsider's taking advantage of an event in the Whorl's trip to work a miracle, or the Outsider's working one miracle to create the right set-up for another. If we had some independent evidence that the Whorl did have FTL, and (better) that Wolfe's imagined FTL involved time stopping at some point, then your suggestion would tempt me. But as it is, the possibility that the Outsider is directly responsible for everything Silk experiences seems much easier to believe.

Thanks Jerry, this is, essentially, not far from what I proposed in my post as a reasonable alternate explanation, and which Don didn't address in his reply. Basically, the Outsider is directly responsible, possibly by means of Silk having an embolism. The embolism is much easier to believe than the FTL explanation, if we're looking only for the most believable/possible answer. I am not a crusader against the Blushas theory, though I do not believe it. I just think there are more fertile grounds to pursue the question than this particular line. In the absolute best case, if one proves beyond reasonable doubt that FTL did occur, one merely proves that the Blushas theory is not impossible - it does nothing to establish its truth. And there are much easier ways to show that Blushas is not impossible, without resorting to FTL. You could say that the ship went in a circle, or it might never have even left the solar system in the first place. There are arguments against both of these, too, I grant, but they both require less justification. Chris

Fair enough. The thing I think that keeps me drawn to my theory is the fact that Marble's internal clock is off by three thousand years (well 2,700) soon after Silk's enlightenment. I know that's circumstantial evidence and everything is breaking on the Whorl, but it seems compelling to me. Don