{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/716",
    "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": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 716,
    "subject": "Tricky, tricky, tricky!",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-11-09T00:30:24+00:00",
    "last": "1999-11-09T00:30:24+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0010-0158@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "William H. Ansley",
        "address": "wansley at warwick.net"
      },
      "date": "1999-11-09T00:30:24+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Tricky, tricky, tricky!",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Gene Wolfe just loves being tricky. I noticed an example in OBW as I was\nlooking for something else. Horn is describing Seawrack's jewelry to\nBabbie, wondering whether she was real:\n\n-------------------\n    \"Red earrings, too,\" I told him. \"Or pink. I caught a glimpse of those\nthrough her hair. They may have been coral.\"\n     His look said very plainly, Well, _I_ saw no such thing.\n-------------------\n\nThe first time I read this I thought it was just an amusing touch, but on\ncoming back to this passage I realize that, of course, Babbie is right.\nSeawrack had no such earrings. What Horn saw were her gill slits.\n\nThere is a mystery here, as well, or part of one. When Seawrack vanishes\nfrom Horn's boat, he begins to doubt that she was ever really there. To\ndetermine if she was real, he turns to Babbie. \"I questioned him then, and\nfrom his answers knew that the young woman I had seen had been real.\" The\nmystery is, just how intelligent does Horn think Babbie is? He often talks\nabout him as if he were an animal, albeit highly intelligent, but here Horn\nseems to regard Babbie as having an almost human ability to communicate\n(unless this \"conversation\" was actually a hallucination).\n\nPerhaps an even more important question is: How intelligent is Babbie,\nreally? If such a question can be said to have any meaning.\n\nWilliam Ansley\n\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}