Subject: (whorl) Passilk

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 15:04:27 +0000

Is there more than one Silk-god in Mainframe?  Is there a Silk-alone god
(Silver/Silent Silk) as well as a Pas+Silk god?  I find that hard to
accept, since we don't know of any other instance of multiple versions of
the same god in Mainframe.  That would seem like Silk has been uploaded
twice - once to merge with Pas and again to be just himself.  Maybe once
uploaded, a copy of Silk "got away" and runs about Mainframe on his own
while the other copy became Passilk, but that seems pretty speculative
(and if Passilk is in charge, who is Silent Silk running from?), so for
the moment lets assume there's only one Silk-god.

But if the Silk-god in Pig is Passilk, do we see any hints of Pas/Typhon
there?  We don't have much to go on, but in all the scenes where Silk
talks instead of Pig, he seems like plain old Silk to me.

So what about Pas?  I've speculated before that the reason Silk was
uploaded was to that there weren't enough fragments for Pas to be put back
together on his own.  To use Kypris's metaphor, Pas needed another head to
be complete.  And I submit that Silk is the 'Typhon' head - the one in
charge, while the shards of Pas are the 'Piaton' head, that is, the bits
of code that run things, the code that makes Pas ruler of Mainframe.

To put it another way, Silk is now Autarch of the Whorl because he has
consumed Typhon and knows all the passwords.

-Rostrum

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.com