Who's in Oreb

Roy C. Lackey · 25 Jun 2005, 21:05 · from 2005-June.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sat Jun 25 21:05:18 2005
Subject: (urth) Who's in Oreb
Message-ID: <001201c57a04$209942a0$893ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

>Crush said:
>>>[Incidentally, it is at the location I cited that the Rajan denies Pas
>>>intended to rule Blue in person.]
>
>Roy answered:
>>I'm not sure what the point of that last statement was, but that's not
quite
>>what is said. I'm not going to quote it all; readers can read it for
>>themselves, pages 361-362. In short, Scylla is reported by Silkhorn to
have
>>believed that "Pas would not have peopled Blue unless he had some way to
go
>>there himself to rule them." Silkhorn thought she was wrong.
>
>You are wrong; self-evidently so. That is exactly what the text said.

Hardly. Silkhorn did not deny that "Pas intended to rule Blue in person", as
you claimed.

>Why are you quibbling about it? The point of that statement was that the
Rajan,
>who arguably knows as much or more about Pas than anyone, flatly
>denies that Pas felt it personally necessary or desirable to rule the
colonies
>in person.

That statement says no such thing, exactly or otherwise. The statement
purports to express a conditional belief of Scylla's. It says nothing about
what Silkhorn may have thought about Pas' intentions, one way or another, to
rule Blue. What Silkhorn disagreed with, it seems to me, is the condition
Scylla believed would have kept Blue (and Green) from being colonized at
all. That condition was that Pas had to be there, somehow. Silkhorn knew,
for a fact, that both Blue and Green _had_ been colonized. He also had no
reason (and therefor neither do we readers) to believe that Pas was present
on either planet, in any form. Thus Scylla was wrong, in his opinion.

>He implies that he has special insight into this matter that he
>could have made available to Scylla if she had asked.
>Thus the idea that Pas would not want clones or other hyped-up
>embryos ruling in his stead is not true.

There you show where your bias lies. You _want_ your theories to be true.
Silkhorn's disagreement with Scylla's assessment says nothing about Pas'
proclivities for ruling the colonies via clones or bodies grown from
enhanced embryos. Implications are one thing, but they have to take a back
seat to what was actually written.

I didn't call you a liar. All I said was "that's not quite what is said". I
stand by that.

-Roy

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