Shaving Clones

James Wynn · 27 Jun 2005, 16:11 · from 2005-June.txt.gz

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From: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Mon Jun 27 16:11:10 2005
Subject: (urth) Shaving Clones
Message-ID: <33061531.1119913868099.JavaMail.root at wamui-little.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Mark Millman said:
>In the earlier of your two (so far) messages today,
>you refer twice to "the Mainframe", presumably mean-
>ing the computer construct on the Whorl that takes
>the place of Heaven.  Silk's seeing two sets of par-
>ents there is important to your theory of cloning
>and ancestry.

>It seems to me, however, that the "Mainframe" in
>which he sees his two sets of parents is not the
>computer construct--it's the real Heaven of the Out-
>sider.
>[...]
>You may decide that this doesn't affect your theory;
>I confess that I've lost track of the details and
>so can't judge the likelihood of this for myself.
>To me, it makes explicit some of the unexpressed as-
>sumptions in this conversation, and helps resolve
>some of the contradictions that seem to have led to
>the current form of your hypothesis.

Well, having Silk's reunion with his parents NOT occur in the Mainframe would
certainly eliminate the question of how his second set got there, you've
definitely got your finger on a major issue in this case. Here's my problem
with that:

1) We have another instance of people meeting dead parents -- it occurs
at the end of the story when everyone sails to the beginning of the Sun
and it undeniably occurs in the Mainframe. 

2) The 2nd set of parents in the Mainframe (or Heaven) is a big one to me
but it is not the only one. I think I laid out my questions to the best of my
ability here:
http://listserver.dreamhost.com/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2005-June/001214.html

Here, at last, the joke about Occam's Razor and infinite clones simplifying
matters for once works in my favor. Most readers have presumed
that  Tussah was speaking figuratively when he called Silk "the son not of my 
body" since "what other explanation was there?". Chris has proposed a vast
array of psychoanalysis on Tussah to explain his need for an embryo to
succeed him. And now you have offered an alternate understanding of the
Mainframe...supposing that that the place where Silk met his parents the
first time is different from the place where he and Remora and Hyancinth
and everyone else met their parents at the *end* of the story.

At this point, by comparison, Tussah as a clone of Typhon is demonstrably
not awkward at all:

Tussah was a clone of Typhon. The embryos with the special abilities
were clones...clones of Typhon and his family and possibly his
courtiers. He had to get them from somewhere, why not pick (as he saw
it) the best of the best and duplicating them over and over rather cull
multiple unique ones? Tussah implanted an embryo in Silk's mother
knowing that genetically that clone was his son. That's why he called him
"the son not of my body." He was not speaking figuratively. He was
merely stating a fact. (There nothing more Wolfean that offering 
a lie or a figure of speech and suddenly discovering it was true.)
And, finally, the four people Silk met when he briefly died were
Tussah, his birth-mother, Typhon, and Kypris. 

(and if you consider the implications that the Rajan consistently
called the inhumu Juganu his sister, that during soul-travel she
had red hair, and when she wandered into a dark bar drunk the
Rajan at first thought she was Chenille, you might consider that
a)we do have reason suspect who Juganu's mother fed on before
she was born and b) it is possible that fewer people are using
familial terms figuratively that we supposed at first reading.)

~ James Wynn

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