{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/713",
    "note": "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.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 713,
    "subject": "Liev's Postpostulate; A Story; Human-Annese interbreeding",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-06-02T10:15:25+00:00",
    "last": "1998-06-02T10:15:25+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0012-0053@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Tony Ellis",
        "address": "tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk"
      },
      "date": "1998-06-02T10:15:25+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) re: Liev's Postpostulate; A Story; Human-Annese interbreeding",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Adam Louis Stephanides wrote:\n...There are several possibilities:\n\n1) Annese can change their DNA along with their shapes.\n\n2) All Annese, not just the Shadow children, were descendants of an\nearlier wave of human colonization.\n\n3) Either of the alternatives I presented for \"Liev's Postpostulate\" (the\nAnnese are French settlers gone native, or projections of the settler's\nthoughts).\n\n4) R.T. is not V.R.T.'s genetic father.\n\nAny opinions?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I say you're closest with theory 2. The Annese _are_ the descendants of\nan earlier wave of human colonization, but the Shadow Children are not.\n(Although they may yet be of human stock.)\n\nThe idea that the abos descend from \"some earlier wave of human\nexpansion\" from Gondwanaland is first raised way back in The Fifth Head\nof Cerberus by the narrator. It seems pretty damn unlikely at the time,\nbut lo and behold it gets confirmed in \"A Story\". Originally the Old\nWise One remembers wrongly, imagining that the Shadow Children landed on\nthe planet, to find an indigenous humanoid race of mimics:\n\n\"You come of a race of shape-changers - like those we called werewolves\nin our old home. When we came some of you looked like every kind of\nbeast... we walked amongst you in power and majesty and might, hissing\nlike a thousand serpents as we splashed down in your sea, stepping like\nconquerors when we strode ashore with burning lights in our fists, and\nflame.\"\n\nBut Shadow Children have a very confused sense of identity (numerous\nexamples), and a few pages later, the Old Wise One remembers more\nclearly:\n\n\"Since first _they_ came here,\" the Old Wise One corrected him gently.\n\"Now I am half a man, and know that we were always here listening to\nthought that did not come; listening without thought of our own to be\nmen.\" (He adds \"Or it may be that all are one stock, half-remembering\".)\n\nThis means that for a lot of what the Old Wise One has said earlier, you\nhave to replace \"You\" with \"We\" and vice versa. Humanity arrived on St\nAnne in prehistoric times and became the Annese. The indigenous,\nshape-shifting race are the Shadow Children, or what they grew out of.\n\nThis explains why abos and humans, such as VRT's mother and RT, can\ninterbreed. It also gives us Liev's Postpostulate: it's not that the\nFree People are colonists gone native, but that they interbred with (or\npossibly replaced) the original French settlers. Hence \"I have read the\ninterview with Mrs. Blount -- a hundred times while I was in the hills\n-- and I know who I believe the Free People to be\". What Mrs Blount says\nis: \n\n\"those little French girls... weren't they the cutest things? ..one of\nthose Frenchies would come in, just in rags you know, but with a ribbon\nand a flower in her hair, and every boy's head would turn.\"\n\nNow doesn't that sound like the famed Annese ability for mimicry?\n\nI am Liev and I have left."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}