Subject: (whorl) Pike at Sea

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 1997 21:56:00 +0000

[Posted from WHORL, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

Reply:  Item #0023002 from WHORL at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET03#

vizcacha,

Another hint re: Blood's father is when Marble/Rose is talking to
Silk about Mint: "Mint . . . was so shy that she ran from you . . .
Maybe she guessed what happened to me long ago.  I've sometimes
thought that, and you were young and good-looking, as you still are"
(III, chap. 10, around same area of your quote).  This deftly
explains Rose's crazy paranoia regarding Silk and . . . Marble?  (I
was going to write "Mint," but Mint never was alone with Silk, and
Rose's paranoia was "crazy" because she seemed to fear carnal
relations between bio and chem.)

However, this adds more bewilderment . . . how could Pike =not= have
known?  He =must= have known that he had experienced carnal relations
with a woman, unless we imagine inhumi succubi/incubi acting as
pollinators--and this succubus/incubus notion is shot down by the
fact that Rose =knows= who the father is (unless we go further and
allow the s/i to physically mimic their victim's love-object).

All of which gets very tricky.  But it removes the initial duplicity
from Rose (later duplicity being the hiding of the pregnancy).

(Note the paradox: Pike's naughty nookie, while creating manteion's
nemesis Blood, may have also flipped the orgone switch that allowed
Kypris to contact Pike and promise Silk, the manteion's savoir and
Pike's "spiritual son."  We are repeatedly told that Pike was
sacrificing a rabbit, critter of comely Kypris, when he got the buzz
about Silk.)

If we allow more mendacity for the maytera, then we can imagine her
disguising herself, so that while Pike knows he has been with a
woman, he thinks her to be something other than a sibyl (a
prostitute, for example--recall Orchid's casual attitude toward
Silk's libido, and guards catching Silk in Hyacinth's room before
that), and certainly not a sibyl from his own manteion.  Thus she
knows and he doesn't.  "Pasiphae in the wooden cow (resulting in
Minotaur)," as it were.

Or, to turn the tables a bit, make Pike the temporary predator and
Rose the victim who then covers up the moral lapse of a night or
maybe several by hiding the consequences from Pike while still
living in such close proximity.  In this case, Pike knows that he
was with Rose, the only thing he doesn't know is that she gave birth
as a result.

To aid the miraculous birth in any event: the gender segregated
living quarters.  Silk had never even seen the inside of the cenoby,
the sibyl house.  The sibyls always made such a big deal about going
into the manse, the patera house (but notice how often they =did=
<g>).

=mantis=