Subject: (urth) Short Sn notes: Inhumi and their sources

From: Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 20:28:24 +0000

Marc Aramini wrote:

>
> The scene on dorp when Jahlee is mistaken for Chenille also has two other
> weird things - the presence of auks ghost and it is where Oreb brings a
> ring that changes to look like Horn's ring.

Oreb brought the ring a lot earlier, before they arrived in Dorp. Auk's
presence is certainly a puzzle, but it has to be a supernatural presence
.of some kind, so I don't see how it can  be evidence of his actually
having travelled there in a lander. Either he's an actual ghost, possibly
enabled to reveal himself by Mucor, who does seem to have the power to draw
ghosts - but in that case he must be dead - or he's astrally travelling -
but it's not clear who, apart from the Rajan, could enable that.

>  Silk is also very concerned about the woman Jahlee just fed on, asking if
> she was dead, a big woman.

Well, he is concerned because he wants to get Jahlee out of the bad habit
of killing people. The woman's being big is relevant because it means that
Jahlee could get quite a lot of blood out of her without killing her - or
so, at least, she hopes. .

> Jahlee acts drink because she just fed on someone who turned to drugs in
> her sorrow.  The ring, auk's ghost, and suddenly being mistaken for
> chenille and feeding on a big woman, as well as a lander for silk to leave
> in at the end, tell me auk fixed the lander and chenille wound up bled in
> an alley by Jahlee in dorp.

They do say (well, Seawrack does) they are going to Pajarocu to get a
lander at the end.

 Time paradoxes are irrelevant.  Astral travel is time travel.  Silk could
> have not have freed them in his time line yet.
>

I'm not sure what time paradox would arise in any case. The scene where the
Rajan meets Chenille on Green is quite a bit earlier than this. But
actually, I think there may, if I'm following this correctly, be _more_ of
a problem if you do bring in time travel. The scene in Sinew's village on
Green is, I think, the strongest piece of evidence for time travel, because
of the ages of Sinew's children - two and three - which makes it seem that
more time has passed than we can account for. The Rajan even draws
attention to the problem by asking if they are twins. But that would imply
that, on this occasion at least, they are travelling into the _future_, and
these events would then be happening after the end of the main storyline,
when the Rajan and party have left Blue - in which case Chenille can't have
come to Blue before that.

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From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 22:37:21 +0000

A ring that remains textually unidentifiable unless it is somehow the original ring that should have been on Green is the main reason I have always felt that Auk must have repaired the lander off screen.  If not in Dorp, it shows up near it on Blue. Indeterminacy is the theme of short sun from our narrator on down - is this urth? Is this Silk?  Is this the same ring?  Can we identify the ring?  Not if it isn't horns.  Did Auk die? If he didn't, then the fate of her children would still be enough to drive Chenille back to drugs and drinking.  Just a coincidence it was a big woman in the alley and all of a sudden after that victim Jahlee is recognizable as Chenille? 

Short Sun is one of those books where it is impossible to prove anything definitively, but knowing Chenille's fate, what happened to the ring, and that Silk would free Auk to fix the lander closes more holes than it creates, in my opinion. 

Jahlee has fed on a big drunk woman, the dominant description of Chenille. I don't see Auk's ghost and a woman matching chenille's description as just meaningless coincidence.