# sybil as inhumus

*The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 28 Jun 1998*

<https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/868>

> 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.

---

### Alice Turner
*28 Jun 1998, 11:52*

Oh ye of little faith, observe. These are citations from the text, Claw,
Timescape edition.

284: "...and as I studied her face I had come to doubt that she was an old
woman at all, and to recall only too clearly the hideous faces of the
cacogens who had removed their masks when Baldanders had rushed among them."

286: [says Hildegrin of Jolenta] "'And a bat bite did it? They've grown
uncommon strong lately then. I've been bit a couple of times myself.'"

291: "As I suspected, the Cumaean was not a woman at all; yet neither was
she one of the horrors I had beheld in the gardens of the House Absolute.
Something sleekly reptilian coiled about the glowing rod. I looked for the
head but found none, though each of the patternings on the reptile's back
was a face, and the eyes of each face seemed lost in rapture."

Remark, please, the difference between entirely plausible suspicion (even if
slightly jocular) and fan fiction. If you can figure it out.

-alga-

---

### Peter Westlake
*06 Jul 1998, 10:06 · follows Alice Turner*

> At 11:52 1998-06-28 -0400, alga wrote:
> Oh ye of little faith, observe. These are citations from the text, Claw,
> Timescape edition.
> 
> 284: "...and as I studied her face I had come to doubt that she was an old
> woman at all, and to recall only too clearly the hideous faces of the
> cacogens who had removed their masks when Baldanders had rushed among them."
> 
> 286: [says Hildegrin of Jolenta] "'And a bat bite did it? They've grown
> uncommon strong lately then. I've been bit a couple of times myself.'"
> 
> 291: "As I suspected, the Cumaean was not a woman at all; yet neither was
> she one of the horrors I had beheld in the gardens of the House Absolute.
> Something sleekly reptilian coiled about the glowing rod. I looked for the
> head but found none, though each of the patternings on the reptile's back
> was a face, and the eyes of each face seemed lost in rapture."

The Cumaean is certainly extraterrestrial (it says so in one of the
afterwords) and the reptile/inhumu link has been mentioned before;
but tying in the bat bite is very ingenious! I would really like to
believe that this is a deliberate link, but there are difficulties.
I discount that this happens some distance from where they meet
the Cumaean. Severian doesn't see any wings, but that's not an
insuperable objection. What makes me think it was a real vampire
bat is that the blood would not clot. That's true of vampire bats,
but I don't recall it being mentioned for inhumu.

> Remark, please, the difference between entirely plausible suspicion (even if
> slightly jocular) and fan fiction. If you can figure it out.

We need a new term for "things that might have happened because the
story doesn't say they didn't". "Reichenbach" is too long and too
hard to spell; how about "gap fiction"?

SBear.

---