Borski and cacogens (Long)

Macronaut · 24 May 2006, 14:47 · from 2006-May.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: macronaut at yahoo.com (Macronaut)
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 07:47:31 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Borski and cacogens (Long)
In-Reply-To: <002301c67efc$feba04e0$793ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <20060524144731.59336.qmail at web51106.mail.yahoo.com>

I wrote:

>Wolfe at one point suggests that the Commonwealth
> >>trades in human slaves in exchange for the
> >>Stellar-level technology they receive.  What do
> the
> >>cacogens do with those humans they take?>

I have two ideas about this (if I may propose an
answer to my own question).  My preferred theory is
that no harm is done to them -- they are welcomed into
Heirodule society and raised in that culture and
technology, and possibly even interbreed.  Master Ash
provides evidence that this happens -- reading Sev's
description of him it becomes clear that he has traits
in common both of humans and of heirodules, and he
describes their saving humanity (at least some of it)
from the encroaching ice of his future.  The other
reason this fits for me is Christian symbolism: the
most wretchedly treated on earth are the ones admitted
to the peaceful technological paradise of the
heirodules.  The heirodule practice of buying slaves
also serves as a barometer for man's moral development
in the Commonwealth: if people are still willing to
sell slaves, then mankind is not yet ready for
redemption.  The real interesting piece of evidence I
would love to find is something indicating that Sev
discontinued this practice during his urthly reign.

Anyway, the more mundane explanation is that they are
used as crew on Tzadkiel's ship.  

Macronaut

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com

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