Subject: (whorl) Typhon's Home: Pas as Neighbor

From: Robert Borski <rborski at charter.net>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 21:08:53 +0000

I've always wondered why Typhon targeted the Blue-Green system as the
Whorl's ultimate destination. (This assumes the ship did not end up there by
accident or miscalculation.)

Speculation: could this be because he himself actually hails from
Blue-Green? "Typhon," after all, is a mythic name, and according to Wolfe's
nomenclatural stratagem, this should make him an alien--so perhaps his
launching of the Whorl has merely been his way of returning home--one
grandiose beyond all believing, and not simply as some expatriate, or even a
legendary conqueror of various galactic realms, but as a god. Typhon has
also previously told Severian that "I was not born as I am, or born at all,
as you meant it," which to me implies a possible exogenetic origin; and both
Typhon and the Neighbors bear doubled body parts (heads vs. limbs), so
there's a relational twinship between the two. And what better army to
finally eradicate the dreaded inhumi than one consisting of chems and
taluses?

This might also explain the alliance between the Neighbors and the Mother
(since it appears to be the former that supplies the magic ring Seawrack
gives Horn). If she's truly Scylla, as I've proposed, they're not so much
aiding and abetting an alien intruder (I refuse to call her a wetback), but
one of their own native kin (if perhaps deracinated; there's evidence she's
resumed her old sea monster form if we're to believe Seawrack's "She's
another shape, very big" and "She doesn't look like a woman unless she makes
part of herself a woman." OBW, 244).

Possibly, if we could just make out a Neighbor's facial features, this might
provide a clue? (Or do the VP look like Horn?)

Robert Borski

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