The eyes of a clone

Roy C. Lackey · 04 Aug 2005, 22:37 · from 2005-August.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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Thu Aug  4 22:37:05 2005
Subject: (urth) The eyes of a clone
Message-ID: <000a01c5997f$b52c41c0$af3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

Crush wrote:
>I guess I presumed the reference made it clear that Silk was looking at
>Chenille, but you are probably right that I should have clarified that.
>Also, the "flaws" her powder covered don't have to be acne, I suppose. It
>could be discoloration or...well...any number of things. I don't know.
>
>But none of that affects my point which I will hammer again.
>
>Silk was looking at Chenille's sunburned reddish-brown face and according
to
>the literal reading of the text, was looking - in some sense - at the very
>face the calde'.
>
>     "The calde's carved countenance rose again before his mind's eye, and
>it seemed to him that he had seen it someplace else only a day or two
>before...[he] had seen him, in that case, under the auspices of the
>Outsider, in a sense."

Maybe it's because you're reading it piecemeal on amazon; I don't know. But
I'm reading the text from the book. You have the sequence of events a little
out of order. The two pieces of text you conflated above are what Silk was
thinking as he was brought up from Blood's cellar by Potto and Sand and
pushed into the room at the top of the cellar stairs. That room was "full of
lounging soldiers and armored men." Silk had yet to lay eyes on Chenille
that day, didn't even know she was in the house. Potto then pushed him into
another room, the room where the meeting with Marble, Blood, Loris and the
others was to take place, the room where Blood was killed. It was only then
he saw Chenille, page 336 of the Tor paperback. It's another four pages
before Silk realized that she was sunburned and made the connection between
her red face and the color of the wood-carving he had been thinking of
earlier. He even said then, "It's just that Chenille has reminded me of a
childhood incident, Councillor."

Maybe it's irrelevant to your point, but that is "the precise reading of the
text".

Earlier I wrote:
"There is no way to determine the color of the complexion of the face
represented on the bust, no way to distinguish it from the rest of the
wood."

Have you an answer for that? If you don't, then any conclusions drawn about
the color of any of the features of the bust are meaningless, because it's
all the same color.

-Roy

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net