{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/952",
    "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": 952,
    "subject": "Brother and Sister",
    "messages": 2,
    "voices": 2,
    "first": "2000-08-18T23:08:51+00:00",
    "last": "2000-08-24T11:03:00+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0011-0127@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Robert Borski",
        "address": "rborski at charter.net"
      },
      "date": "2000-08-18T23:08:51+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Brother and Sister",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Fernando Gouvea having previously written:\n\n<Clearly the events at the very end of OBW are very important. Who are the\nBrother and Sister?>\n\nAs I briefly mentioned in a previous post I'd like to suggest that Brother\nmay be the lost child Bricco from Fava's first story. Given how Wolfe has\npreviously analogized real world events in his little embedded tales I don't\nthink this is unreasonable.\n\nHere are the correspondences:\n\n1) Brother does not know his real name. (\"Two children are living alone\nthere: they call each other Brother and Sister, and if they have ever had\nother names they do not know them.\")\n\nIn Fava's tale, \"[The boy] didn't know his name or if he did he wouldn't\ntell it.\"\n\nNotice also how both Brother and Bricco begin with B-R.\n\n2) Fava in her tale passes through \"a perfectly lovely forest\" the morning\nbefore she later happens upon Bricco and his mother further up in her jaunt.\n\nHorn discovers Brother and Sister in \"a hovel in a forest.\"\n\n3) It is hard to tell the ages of Brother and Sister, but from Fava's tale,\nwhere Bricco appears to be about three years old, Brother could now easily\nbe five. (The tale takes place two years earlier.)\n\n4] Bricco, allegedly, has been kidnapped by the Vanished People. (\"They\nsaid...That a highborn woman of the Vanished People had taken a fancy to him\nand stolen him away.\")\n\nBrother and Sister \"see the Vanished People sometimes...Sometimes the\nVanished People even help them.\"\n\nIn addition, we have the following admission from Fava in regards to\nmaintaining her youthful composure: \"It's been so hard staying young for you\nwhile I dined with your grandmother. I kept having to stop on the way to\nDuko Rigoglio's palace, or on the way back, to find another child.\"\nCertainly, Hansel and Gretel--er, Brother and Sister--would be appropriately\nsnackable, especially as the inhumi tend to return to previous sites to\nfeed, frequently victimizing the poor because they live in dilapidated\nhousing. From what Incanto later tells Mora, it appears that he believes\nthat Fava has probably killed Bricco.\n\nAs for Sister, perhaps she's even the original human Bean, whose essence\nprovides vampiric Fava with her identity; according to Inclito \"[Fava's]\nfather is away,\" implying maybe that her mother is dead, as indeed are\nBrother's and Sisters; this or Sister's indigent mother passed away, and\nFava chanced upon the orphaned child in the wilderness and decided to take\nadvantage of the situation, bringing Brother/Bricco to her for company.\n\nThen again maybe none of the above is valid since as Fava tells us, \"All\nstories are false, and none are falser than those that are supposed to be\ntrue.\"\n\nRobert Borski\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0011-0167@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Peter Westlake",
        "address": "peter at harlequin.co.uk"
      },
      "date": "2000-08-24T11:03:00+00:00",
      "subject": "Re: (whorl) Brother and Sister",
      "in_reply_to": "<whorl-v0011-0127@digest.urth.net>",
      "reply_link": "subject",
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "At 23:08 2000-08-18 -0500, Robert Borski wrote:\n..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "In addition, we have the following admission from Fava in regards to\nmaintaining her youthful composure: \"It's been so hard staying young for you\nwhile I dined with your grandmother. I kept having to stop on the way to\nDuko Rigoglio's palace, or on the way back, to find another child.\"\nCertainly, Hansel and Gretel--er, Brother and Sister--would be appropriately\nsnackable, especially as the inhumi tend to return to previous sites to\nfeed, frequently victimizing the poor because they live in dilapidated\nhousing."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I see what you mean about Bricco, but Brother and Sister live on\nan entirely different continent to Fava. She is finding children\n(different ones each time, by the sound of it) between Incanto's\nfarm and Soldo.\n\nSBear (which almost sounds Italian, doesn't it? I hope it isn't rude ...)\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}