Patera Incus

James Wynn · 15 Aug 2010, 14:29 · from 2010-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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 09:29:18 -0500
Subject: (urth) Patera Incus
In-Reply-To: <F5472B5BDEFE4B3783C68223652EB108@jill>
References: <SNT123-W537E347BAF46EE639CED1CF980 at phx.gbl>	<A1EA69F072294007B1115BEBC592DCEA@jill><4C66931D.9050001 at io.com>	<4C66EFCC.3000903 at gmail.com>
	<F5472B5BDEFE4B3783C68223652EB108@jill>
Message-ID: <4C67F9BE.2000507 at gmail.com>

>> James Wynn-
>> 1.1.2 Second Attempt. This time Incus disguises his handwriting.
>> "You know, my friend, yet it might be more thoughtully be said that 
>> you cannot know, how much I have been looking forward to a _plain 
>> firsthand account_ of the marvelous adventures of our mutual 
>> acquaintance Bee. Bee himself.
>> Incus thinks, "No, it would not do. Fulmar would be utterly thrown 
>> off the scent by _the male pronoun_." [emphasis mine]
>> Question how does the male pronoun throw Fulmar "off the scent"? Off 
>> the scent of what?
>
> Gerry Quinn-
> Of who "Bee" is, surely?  Wasn't it short for a female's name, 
> somebody other than Incus, who had reprogrammed the valet chem? 

That doesn't really work.

1) The valet was a male chem.
"Nor would the trouble and loss of time go entirely unrecompensed; he, 
Incus, would at least have the satisfaction of inquiring just how long 
it had been since the unfortunate valet had received _his_ wages, and 
observing the chem's baffled incomprehension."
Lake of the Long Sun, Chapter X, On the Belly of the Whorl

2) Remember that this is the *second* attempt at a letter. I don't think 
there's any way the first could be interpreted as relating to the valet 
or the experiment.

u+16b9

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