Astral travel in time

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 07 Apr 2006, 09:53 · from 2006-April.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: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Fri,  7 Apr 2006 19:53:24 +1000
Subject: (urth) Astral travel in time
Message-ID: <200604070953.k379rRq2071398 at mailserver3.hushmail.com>

On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 06:01:15 +1000 Dan'l Danehy-Oakes 
<danldo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> To accord Silkhorn the ability to change the
>> past, as Andrew has already suggested, opens up a Pandora's box 
>that,
>> once opened, not only can't be closed again, but potentially 
>lets out more
>> possibilities than the box could ever have held to begin with. 
>Where does
>> Silkhorn's power to change the past come from, and where does it 

>stop?
>
>Okay, to begin with, it probably isn't "his" power, but that of 
>the
>Outsider, Whom he serves. I doubt he even knows he does it.

Just in the context of SilkHorn & Sev, my Big Hypothesis is really 
based on Sev's "iterative" world-line, not on any specifically 
SilkHornian past-changing ability. 

In the New Sun context, the Sev we know has been constructed by the 
Hierogrammates or whoever by layering different histories on top of 
each other (at least two histories, anyway). Or if not layering, 
then replacing one history by another - but I like the layering 
image better, partly I guess because you see the same mechanism in 
Free Live Free.

My hypothesis is that SilkHorn astral-travelling to Urth launches a 
new future Sev world-line, perhaps radically different to the one 
in New Sun. The instigator of the change is no doubt the 
Outsider/Increate, intervening with SilkHorn as his agent. 

Totally making up stories: Perhaps the Increate also finds the 
eternal Hiero/human reproductive cycle distasteful, and from now on 
it will be replaced by something different - perhaps no longer a 
succession of universes, but just one, with a definite end. Etc etc 
etc. (Why he let things get out of hand in the first place - 
dunno!)

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