# Beans and other pollutants *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 10 Feb 1998* > 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. --- ### Charles Dye *10 Feb 1998, 09:11* CRCulver at aol.com writes: > In _Shadow_, chapter XXXV, there is the tale of the woman who brings black > beans from the stars. This woman threatens to cast them into the sea unless > she were obeyed. The lords of the time "a hundred times more complete in > their dominion than [the] Autarch...had her seized and torn to bits." > This story seems, in my opinion, to show the planting of the black hole in > the Old Sun. I think that the sea mentioned is not Ocean but rather > Oroborus(sp?), which is outer space. The lords, I think, are the monarchs, > because they were more powerful and had a larger empire than those of the > autarchy. Thus, the black hole was put into the sun because of the tyranny of > the monarchs. I had interpreted this as the arrival of Abaia, Erebus, Arioch, and company. (Like Baldanders, we're told, they grow ....) Still, perhaps the one is symbolic of the other? > There is an alternative interpretation of this story. Jonas mentions that > this happens before the city was called Nessus, because "the river" was not > yet poisoned. Perhaps the black beans that the woman brought from the stars > were simply a device used to poison Gyoll. > I would like to know the etymology of 'Nessus' and what relation it has to > poison. Nessus, if I recall aright, was a centaur murdered by way of a poisoned cloak. (Larry Niven's "Ringworld" includes puppeteers named Nessus and Chiron.) As for the poisoning of the river, I don't see anything terribly mysterious there. Gyoll is both the sewer and the drinking- water source for a very large city. The city climbs the river as the lower reaches become too polluted to sustain even the most desperately poor. raster at highfiber.com ---