Shaving Clones

James Wynn · 28 Jun 2005, 16:36 · from 2005-June.txt.gz
This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.
From: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Tue Jun 28 16:36:49 2005
Subject: (urth) Shaving Clones
Message-ID: <14371091.1120001805651.JavaMail.root at wamui-royal.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

>Chris said:
>Now, on your picture Tussah is a clone of the person whose son Silk is a 
>clone of. (Pardon the awful grammatical construction). This is a position to 
>take toward the DNA aspect; do you count it as the answer to the 
>psychological question as well? Because if that's what you are implying then 
>you're putting forward an even stronger assertion than I thought, since it 
>implies that Tussah somehow knows all this.

Yes. I am saying that Tussah KNEW he is a clone of Typhon. It is likely he
even knew that Pas had that name on the Red Sun Whorl (the Rajan was
aware of it). Lemur knows a lot of details about the family of Typhon. 
Those on the "inside" in Viron may know more about the details of the
rulership of Typhon than the sleepers since apparently a lot of their
memories have been wiped and changed.  I strongly suspect that by the
final chapters of "Exodus", Silk knows he is a clone and he knows his
genetic relationship to Typhon. I've hypothesized in my last response to 
Roy that Tussah might not have procured Silk from the black
market although Remora presumed he had. He might well have simply
gone to the refrigerator that Silk and Mamelta found (or one like it).

>I do have some thoughts about Silk's parentage but they are just hazy
>enough that I will have to put them on hold until I can go back and
>re-read the  series to get the context of the passages I'm thinking of...

Okay. Let me know when you start. I might be ready for a re-read by then as
well.

>>Crush asks:
>>And how did he know that Silk would become Calde'? After all,
>>with his leadership skills, he might have ascended to the
>>Ayuntamiento or succeded Quetzal?

>Chris says:
>Well, Quetzal also provides a fairly practical vector for Tussah to count 
>on. Just how much he'd count on Quetzal I don't know, but he's not an 
>insignificant factor by any means.

Actually, I think he's a very powerful factor. But not that powerful I
think. I really think Tussah must have felt able to count on divine
help in that matter.

JW said:
>>Alright, see IMO that *is* a major stretch [that Silk's parents were
>>passengers on the Whorl]. Wolfe remarked about
>>"literary rules" that if "gun is on the table in Act 1, someone has to fire
>>it."  To have unnamed undescribed colonists from Urth who are otherwise
>>unnoted in the story appear in the Mainframe as Silk's parents and then go
>>away is a serious storytelling violation.

Chris responds:
>Do they have to be unnamed? Has anyone ever suggested Mamelta? She actually 
>might be another instance of a "gun on the table", come to think of it. The 
>only thing I can find from Wolfe on the subject of Mamelta is that the 
>etymology is probably "Not Careless".

Funny you should say that. Go back and search the archives for the discussion
on whether Mamelta is Kypris and Silk's mother. Although, I can't remember
whether the arguments *assumed* that Kypris was Silk's mother and that if
Mamelta was one she had to be the other.

However, Kypris *does* say that in life she looked kind of like Hyacinth
(Hy and Mam both had dark hair). And that business I mentioned earlier
about Mamelta's bird "Chico" in the "People" section of "Exodus" (or maybe
"Lake" or "Calde") is a big sign to me that ties her both to Kypris and
"Bird of the Woods" in "The Book of the New Sun".

>This of course seems a stretch. But right now we're only talking about guns 
>on tables needing to be fired, and it's as good an answer as any.

Not much of a stretch to me, but that's just me. That Mamelta is Silk's
bio-mom is exactly what I believe and it might *be* that Silk meets her
in the Mainframe rather than Kypris, but we still have his other father to
account for.


>Elsewhere you suggest that the modified embryos put in storage would be 
>based on Typhon and his family, but if we're talking about a significant 
>number of clones then there is a practical reason you *wouldn't* want to do 
>it this way: genetic diversity. You may laugh this off as a factor but as 
>the number of clones increases it becomes more and more of a concern.And 
>not just for reproductive reasons - entering a new and unpredictable 
>environment, it would be a bad thing for all of your uberleaders to be 
>genetically vulnerable to the same diseases. All things being equal and 
>given the resources you're spending on the project, why not make things as 
>diverse as possible.

Maybe, but once I accepted the possibility that there were multiple embryos
who are clones of Urth's court, REAL familial relationships began to present
themselves as answers to the bizarre thematic relationships I noted on my
first read. There are characters that are treated thematically as the same
person or as related in ways that made no sense. I would literally have
to annotate book to explain these, but when I was able to say "Ah! Hieros!
or "Hah, hah! 'Son' indeed!" suddenly a lot of the wierdness just fell away.

Granted, it *could* be a case where having only a hammer in one's tool-
box, everthing looks like a nail, but I don't think I *did* approach the
story with only a hammer -- I initially tried several other tools, but then
at last saw my problems "driven down"

JW said
>>It only means that Horn was implanted in Viron in a poor family.  For 
>>Tussah to drop his heirs among poor families seems to be is M.O.,
>>presumably to better hide them.

>Chris said:
>Silk's mother was not quite *that* poor. Horn's family lived, basically, in 
>a slum. And arrangements were made, for Silk, as well. He got a very
>good education, and he didn't enter the priesthood by accident.

Well, Chenille's is supposed to be the *natural* daughter of Tussah
and *she* grew up in the same slum. The money got pretty tight
for Silk's mom after Tussah died. Silk's education was her
responsibility alone and no one helped her with it as far as we are
told. Joining the Charter was Silk's decision and it was against
his mother's desires.

>On the other hand there's no apparent reason at all to put Horn where he 
>was, and no special opportunities afforded by that position, UNLESS you 
>count exposure to Silk.

How about exposure to Chenille? How about exposure to Quetzal who
spent time in Horn's district to feed on the inhabitants. He was born well
after Tussah's death. It would have to be someone else who put him
there, and I agree it had to be someone with money. That's why I
suggested Quetzal.

JW said:
>>or under what circumstances Horn came to be there. It seems likely to me
>>that positioning Silk over that manteon (he didn't want to go there) might
>>have been to get the surreptitiously placed embryos together so they could
>>support one another.

Chris said:
>Quetzal certainly had the power to arrange it this way. But it's difficult 
>to explain *why* he would - if he really were making these plans 15+ years 
>in advance, he could have equally arranged to put them together under other 
>circumstances. But this starts to suggest the same sort of long-term 
>micro-management that I find dubious.

It doesn't strike me as micro-management at all. It strikes me as opportunistic.
Silk joined the Charter on his own. That gave Quetzal some real control, butif
he had gone into politics, Q would still have had access to him. The only real
problem would have been if Silk had become a grocier in a small town outside
of Viron. But the gods could have found him an arranged ascension no matter
where he was. Tussah's plan could not have depended solely on Quetzal.
And once again, Tussah calls Silk his son but it does not help him assume
the Caldeship. Thus, I say, he calls Silk his son because it is a fact, not to
help people identify him (what could be more hands-off than that?)

>I am not at all suggesting that the uneducated can't be good leaders. I am 
>however suggesting that if you're going to make an expensive long-term 
>gamble, you'd try to give the child in question every advantage possible. 
>Even the rich in our own world do not make a point of sending there children 
>to poor inner-city schools.

If it were important to hide a child from the eyes of the powerful, then the
best schools might be the worst place for his welfare. The Ayuntamiento
certainly could not know when Tussah had implanted his "heir" or even
if someone were implanting it after he died. You mentioned the question
of whether Silk looked like Tussah. Well, I assert that Horn looked
very much like Tussah indeed. Putting him the in best schools probably
would have been murder.

>>JW said:
>>I'm not sure where the term "face of command" comes from although I've
>>seen it used a lot on the list. I don't think Typhon's powers of leadership
>>come from something special about his face. Neither so for Silk or Horn.

>Chris responded:
>In this case you disagree with Typhon, then. And ultimately Typhon is the 
>one who arranged the pleasure-cruise; if anybody made arrangements to put 
>clones on board, it would have been him.

Based on Mark Millman's hint found the relevant quote on page 139 of
"Sword and Citadel". What Typhon says of his face is that "it is the face that
men are customed to obey". Obviously that is not an issue on the Whorl
unless Typhon intends the colonists to be ruled by physical representations
of monsters.
An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net