Subject: (urth) Short Sun Notes: Mucor

From: Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 23:17:30 +0000

A happy Feast of Saint Katharine to you all.

I recently finished reading _Short Sun_, and as I went along I found
myself encountering a lot of puzzles, and also possibly seeing some
solutions to existing puzzles, so I thought it would be useful to post
some comments here. I plan to do so intermittently in coming weeks. As
is my wont, I think that quite a lot is reasonably clear, and it’s
possible to grasp the broad outline of the story without solving all
the mysteries, but an amazing amount is not clear — about Neighbours,
about inhumi, about gods, about trees, about the Rajan’s identity
(it’s obvious who two of him are, but, given what he says about the
pen-case, who is the third?) and so on.

I think I _may_ have spotted Silk’s father. (Not Typhon. And I don’t
just mean Tussah.)

Anyhow: a while ago we were discussing the Mucor/Pike/Oreb scene in
_Long Sun_, and I raised the question whether Mucor may have the power
to summon ghosts (as Silk later suggests) and whether she may be able
to communicate to others her power of out-of-body travel.

As to the first: I think she has. In RTTW, at Blood’s mansion, Pig
meets Mucor, but then enters Hyacinth’s suite and apparently meets
Hyacinth — he smells her perfume and she kisses him. It seems quite
likely that the beautiful woman whom Pig met earlier when exploring
the mansion was also Hyacinth; the Rajan doesn’t realise this at the
time, because he only knows the story of the mansion being haunted by
an ugly woman, i.e. Mucor; but Pig insists the woman was beautiful,
and it’s not clear why he would think of Mucor as such. So I think
it’s likely Mucor has summoned the ghost of Hyacinth, as she earlier
did the ghost of Pike.

As to the second; this is less clear. One possible indication is that
it’s said Remora sent the “crazy” woman away because she was driving
other people crazy. But the main evidence has to do with Mora and Fava
and their power of possession. It seems quite likely that Mucor is
the source of this. It’s the same kind of possession she does, and not
at all like the standard inhumi form of astral travel. When the Rajan
meets them possessing Vadsig, he initially thinks that the possessor
is Mucor, but when he says it can’t be, because “Mucor would be alone,
I think”, Vadsig giggles — suggesting that Mucor is around somewhere
and the possessors do know her. Earlier, Hide has a dream involving
two little girls (Mora and Fava) and a wooden doll (which, on the
basis of something the Rajan works out later, would seem to be Mucor).
Finally on reaching Mucor’s island, the Rajan says to his companions
“you’re wrong when you say that Mucor does not know you. She knows all
of you almost as well as she knows me”, which suggests she has been,
in some form, with the party on their travels. (Though how Mucor
contacted Mora in the first place remains a mystery.)

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From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:58:34 +0000

Also, in regards to the below, one of the girls is equated with hyacinth in the dream.  Together they certainly reach back to talk to hy, with much the same mechanism that inhuma and our narrator dream travel.  The question is, ghost of hy or hy temporarily pulled forward from a point when she was alive? 

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 25, 2012, at 4:17 PM, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com> wrote:

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From: António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:48:05 +0000

Andrew Mason wrote (25-11-2012 23:17):
> I think I_may_  have spotted Silk’s father. (Not Typhon. And I don’t
> just mean Tussah.)

C'mon, ya can't say that and then leave us hangin, dyin to tear yer 
hypothessus to bits.

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From: Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 23:05:24 +0000

Marc Aramini wrote:
>
> Also, in regards to the below, one of the girls is equated with hyacinth in the dream.

Very true. That's in a later dream of the Rajan's, I think, but the
two are clearly connected. I find it hard to see how Mora can _be_
Hyacinth - when she turns into Hyacinth, Fava turns into a doll with
Chenilles' knife through her, i.e., I take it, Mucor (who was
possessing Orpine when Chenille stabbed her) - and in both cases it
doesn't seem to make sense to see them as the same person.  But the
people who appear in this dream - Mora, Fava, Scylla and (implicitly)
Mucor - are the same people who appear in Hide's dream, and are
genuinely present with the travellers; so that does seem to be
evidence that Hyacinth is there as well - perhaps Mucor is still
drawing her spirit.

>Together they certainly reach back to talk to hy, with much the same mechanism that inhuma and our narrator dream travel.  The question is, ghost of hy or hy temporarily pulled forward from a point when she was alive?

Any special reason to think it's the latter? I think ghosts can
certainly exist in this world - that would seem to follow from the
combination of out-of-body travel, such as Mucor does, and a genuine
afterlife, as revealed by Silk's vision on the Aureate Path. But if
Mucor is indeed reaching back in time to a point when Hyacinth was
alive, then she might have done the same with Pike.