# more MANSEED spoilers *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 07 Sep 1999* > 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. --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *07 Sep 1999, 07:42* SPOILERS! > (The Defenders have genitals which serve them as pleasure organs, but not > as organs of elimination, nor procreation. Which is kinda sorta weird, to > give your robots. And another problem: the whole idea of the clones) Thus the text breaks off in mid-thought. Here's the rest: The whole idea of the clones is based upon the seed analogy: that genetic material can be activated and grown (in this case into adulthood in 30 days). Thus the ship carries a gallon of this and a gallon of that and grows the comparitively very bulky 40 colonists at the site. Ah, but robots are not grown from seeds (then again, there was that children's fantasy, was it Narnia or Oz, where the boy planted a bolt in the Otherwhere and the next time he came to that spot, a lamp post had grown). This aspect is covered in the text: there is only enough material for three defenders to be created by the ship. But still, those parts are going to weigh something . . . then again, the defenders seem to be "grown" more than simply "assembled"; furthermore, the same womb that grows the defenders also grows the first colonists . . . it is murky as to how this might work; within the story it is simply given. =mantis= *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. ---