Perhaps those who see more clearly can help me with a little detail that I have worried loose and wish to see where it leads, if anywhere?
In Return to the Whorl Silk seems to have a song on his mind a lot it goes in part (like this):
These young girls live to deceive you,
Sad experience teaches me.
I wish I knew what the tune was like so that I could try filking this song. I bet that Gene Wolfe had a tune in mind.
Mostly, however, I wonder what deception the girl in the song was practicing. Could it be that the girl was really a boy dressing up and deceiving the singer? It's a strange gender reversal in any case. Normally in folk songs it is the man who is the deceiver of the young girls as in:
Oh don't deceive me, Oh never leave me,
How can you use a poor maid so?
So could this then be loosely related to the theme of Hyacinth as being a "deceiver", if you please?
My mind takes a leap like a dolphin, and more than likely, lands with a big splash. Could the deception Silk is musing over be the deception of the inhumi, particularly his daughter? Wasn't that character so sweet and tragic? And deceptive? The timing doesn't exactly fit, though.
Please, if not a gender deception, what then is the deception that young girls practice on their wandering seducers and peeping toms?
Che
Ché Franz Joseph Monro -- http://www.chemonro.com
che at chemonro.com -- flirt at technologist.com