Shooting the moon

Roy C. Lackey · 28 Jun 2005, 01:33 · from 2005-June.txt.gz
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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Tue Jun 28 01:33:57 2005
Subject: (urth) Shooting the moon
Message-ID: <001601c57bbc$0cc607e0$c53ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

Crush wrote (of me):
>Fine. Split away. But I don't need nearly as fine a microscope to split
>this one:
>>I didn't call you a liar. All I said was "that's not quite what is said".
>>I stand by that.
>
>I don't need to be a major league centerfielder to catch the gist of your
>remark that I was subverting the text in some undeclared subtle or not
>so subtle way. Take out "undeclared" and that's all fair game, but
>when doing that you could have posted the full relevant text rather
>than pull a sentence from it and then summarize what the Rajan's
>take on it was -- and then"leave it to the readers" to look it up. It
>wasn't a long reference and you had no problem quoting other
>references. A nasty shot from the bushes IMO, and I'll stand by
>that.

Do you also stand by this (to Chris)?

>But I should say that while you did not consider the post as a retort or
intend
>it as dismissive, I consider "multiplying clones to absurdity" to be the
most
>difficult response to deal with, because....

[snip]

I ask, because you put that phrase in quotes, and went on to add:

>I hope I took it like a man and laughed about it in the sense that I
assumed
>it was intended. (If you don't like people taking pot-shots at the moon,
don't
>drop your pants.) But of all jokes, that one stings the most.

Neither Chris nor anyone else wrote it, at least not in this forum. I
checked. Chris did, however, write "postulate clones beyond necessity". But
that doesn't have quite the same connotation, does it? And "absurdity"
doesn't even come close to "necessity".

Moving on. On the same page and in the same conversation as the passage
we're disputing, Hoof asked (of Scylla), "Did she say Pas would kill her if
he could?" Silkhorn answered, "That is indeed what she said, but I am not
certain it's true and I'm not Pas."

This conversation takes place very near the end of Silkhorn's career on
Blue. He denies being Pas, which is certainly literally true. Then how is it
that this person "who arguably knows as much or more about Pas than anyone",
doesn't know Pas' intentions toward his renegade daughter?

If, as you would seem to have it, Silkhorn is somehow (never mind how it
came to be) the flesh-and-blood culmination of Pas' presumed plan to rule
the colonies by proxy, when was that plan made and by whom? Typhon or Pas?
None, I think, will argue that the two personalities are the same. Typhon,
by all accounts, was a very bad man. His scanned self, Pas, became, at least
for the _Whorl_, a more benign figure, a petty god. This evolution, from
tyrant to local deity, a deity who was evidently regarded as something of a
father figure by all except, perhaps, his rival deities in Mainframe, must
have taken place over the course of three centuries. Regardless of just how
the transformation came about, it happened.

If, per above, the person of Silkhorn was the fruition of Typhon's schemes,
then his plans went miserably awry. Any plans made by Typhon were
necessarily made on Urth before the departure of the _Whorl_. Neither
Silkhorn nor any of his component selves (to say nothing of a hypothetical
Neighbor component) are anything like the former Monarch of Urth. The Typhon
Severian met (both times) was a monomaniac. Any theoretical clones, clones
of sons, or enhanced embryos intended by Typhon to be host(s), eventually,
for the download of the evil personality that had originally been uploaded
to Mainframe, would have to have been provided for on Urth. Who (or what)
was carrying out Typhon's scheme on the ship, three hundred years later? Who
had charge of the embryos all that time? The black market??? Mainframe? And
Pas the Benevolent, chief daddy of Mainframe, didn't know, or do, anything
about it? Ah, you might say, of course Pas knew of Typhon's plans but had
subverted them to his own designs. Very well.

But that brings up another question. You assert that "Silk is a clone of the
son of Typhon and Kypris' original". Why on Urth would Typhon have had such
a hypothetical son cloned? Did Echidna know about it? More importantly, why
would Wolfe give such dubious gene donors to the star of his seven-volume
opus?

We have established, at least to my satisfaction, that Pas is not Typhon.
What particular need, therefore, did Pas have for a clone, much less the
clone of a son, of Typhon? Well, the ship was nearing its destination, and
Pas had duly prepared for the arrival. If Pas wanted to rule the colonies in
the flesh, why not use what Typhon had given him? Mainframe, after all,
could not leave the ship to follow the colonists (which is what subsequently
caused his fellow Mainframe-bound deities to rebel in the first place; they
would lose their worshipers). He arranged for the Tussah clone to be thawed
out and born and raised to adulthood. Presumably he downloaded himself into
Tussah, or only intended to. Then, inexplicably, instead of proclaiming,
shipwide, that it was time for the Plan of Pas to be put in motion, Tussah
decided to go into local politics. Well, maybe Pas was just a victim of bad
timing and poor planning; he only had three centuries to get it right. Just
when he had the Tussah clone where he wanted him and was about to launch the
exodus, the rebellion blind-sided him. He only had time to stash bits of
himself around the _Whorl_ before his "death", which consisted largely of
being deleted from Mainframe.

Tussah, presumably possessed in whole or part (Tussah's motive has to come
from somewhere) by Pas, and cut off from contact with "dead" Pas in
Mainframe, scrambles first to save his own ass then to further Pas' plans.
Instead of sensibly lying low or even moving to another city, he becomes the
conspicuous, contentious leader of a city whose patron is his daemon
daughter. Brilliant! Now what?

After screwing around for a number of years (about seven?), Tussah decided
to have the clone of Typhon's love child (Why that choice? A shortage of
Typhon clones?) implanted in one of his mistresses, Silk's birth-mother. I
don't know where he got that particular clone or why he decided he needed
another one grown, but never mind; only Pas knows. Then he promptly got
himself killed. Then, years after he died, Tussah _somehow_ connived to have
a proper clone of Typhon implanted in yet another woman. That child turned
out to be Horn, eight years Silk's junior. My imagination fails me at this
point; I can't begin to account for these actions.

Wait! Maybe it was Quetzal who was behind all this cloning around. But, no,
where would he have obtained all the inside knowledge needed to have pulled
it off? And why would he have wanted to? He was a scout for the
blood-thirsty inhumi. Wolfe has denied that Typhon had foreknowledge of the
inhumi, and Pas had no reason to feed his colonists to them.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Pas eventually decided to pull himself together after
being "dead" for some thirty years. He started hunting down and "killing"
his rival familial gods and told the colonists to get off the ship. Exodus
Horn but not Silk. And we all know why Silk didn't leave. I don't see how it
can have been part of Pas' plan, but Silk got sidetracked with lust for that
whore, Hyacinth, who had been possessed at the time he fell in "love' by his
genetic mother, Kypris. Maybe that's why Pas put up with it for twenty
years; he and Kypris got their vicarious jollies that way. Anyway, Horn went
to Blue where he lived a fairly nondescript life for twenty years, then got
killed on Green. I, for one, never detected the least hint of Pas, much less
Typhon, in Horn. If he had been intended as a vessel for a god, he must
surely have been a disappointment.

Does that about cover it?

-Roy
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