Subject: (urth) Mamelta

From: Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:10:46 +0000

>
> Here, Silk resolves not to sleep until his mommy comes
> (here, it is Mama). Well, who does he meet in the next
> chapter? Mamelta! And later, what do we get in
> Epiphany of the Long Sun (Calde,actually) on page 220:
> "The Outsider was the dancing man on a toy, and the
> water the polished toy-top on which he danced with
> Kypris, who was Hyacinth and Mother, too."
>
> Kypris is Mother!? and she is probably Mamelta, too.
> Now I understand why the Mamelta scene is so familiar
> - it is like the Dorcas scene in Shadow of the
> Torturer - except instead of Grandma, we get Silk's
> mom! In the scene where he leaves his body, I am
> certain that the tall man with blue eyes is Pas, and
> the mother (not the one who raised him) was Mamelta.

I agree that Mamelta is quite likely to be Silk's mother. This is
partly because of the mother references in the passage where he meets
her, and partly because in the scene where he meets his parents on the
Aureate Path, one of his fathers says 'We are your fathers and your
mothers', and he turns to the second womn and says 'You were my
mother. I understand.' This strikes me as a weird thing to say - just
repeating what he's been told -  unless it's someone he has already
met, and he's saying '_You_ were my mother'.

I'm not at all sure, though, that Mamelta is Kypris. As Gerry says,
her description of her life at home doesn't seem to fit the monarch's
mistress, and she appears to be on the Whorl as a technician. Besides
that, why would Kypris be on the Whorl?  Pas has taken a scanned
version of her to accompany his scanned self, and if he is sending
clones - which I'm not sure of - I can imagine him sending a cloned
embryo of her to accompany his cloned self. But the physical Typhon
isn't leaving Urth, so why would he pack his mistress off? (Kypris is
afraid that he may have killed her - presumably in the sense that
Typhon, on Urth, may have killed her original - so she seems to think
she was left behind.)

I'm not sure that Silk's father is Typhon - would the Outsider choose
Typhon as a person to deliver his message? - but if he is, his mother
still doesn't have to be Typhon's lover, if the embryos were produced
in vitro.

As for the identifications of Kypris with various characters, I take
them to be largely symbolic; Kypris is a love-goddess (and not a
purely sexual one, even if that was her original function) so in
Silk's imagination she becomes linked with people he loves. (I take it
the mother in the 'dancing man' passage is his birth-mother, who is
hard to link with Kypris in any literal way.)