Patera Incus

Gerry Quinn · 16 Aug 2010, 14:16 · 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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:16:32 +0100
Subject: (urth) Patera Incus
References: <SNT123-W537E347BAF46EE639CED1CF980 at phx.gbl>	<A1EA69F072294007B1115BEBC592DCEA@jill><4C66931D.9050001 at io.com>	<4C66EFCC.3000903 at gmail.com><F5472B5BDEFE4B3783C68223652EB108@jill>	<4C67F9BE.2000507 at gmail.com><1507FF804F5A48C09B7E5C5155D69026@jill>
	<4C682D94.10705 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <890EB50323984B8E9FCEF7DB3427DED7@jill>

From: James Wynn 

>> I don't see what the gender of either chem has to do with anything.

> Me neither. When Incus writes "our friend Bee. Bee himself." and then decides "Fulmar would be utterly thrown off the scent by _the male pronoun_", he is not referring to the sex of any chem. But there is no reference to Bittersweet in the first email.

>> The message was: "I can't make it tonight."  The rest is chit-chat. 

> Why not just say, "I can't make it tonight due to Chapter duties"? Why reference Bittersweet at all? Once again, there is no mention of Bittersweet in the first email. Yet it was considered riskier than the second where you suppose Incus is employing a code name for Bittersweet. 

The first letter contained details of his mission: "I am to go to Limna tonight... to consort with fishermen in search of a woman".  That would completely identify him if intercepted, and his calling Remora an old fool elsewhere in it would probably not help his case.


> Incus is attempting to reveal herself to Fulmar, "my dear friend". It seems, she is in love and knows the relationship will not progress as long as Fulmar continues to consider it fraternal. (It's not "Victor Victoria", it's "Yentl".)

It may be so.

> She wants to impart the information in a way that Fulmar will come to the conclusion himself. She is afraid of shocking him.

> It's interesting to me that you presume the letters have to do with a desire to see Bittersweet's demonstration. In my experience, most readers think Incus is attempting to reveal a homosexual love for Fulmar. I hope I at least shown that that is not likely. 

Well, if Incus is in love with Fulmar, whether it is a homosexual or heterosexual love depends mainly on what Incus has under his robe, about which we can really only speculate!  For the record though, I think your theory that Incus is a woman is somewhat plausible, but I wouldn't discount the possibility that he is a man.

- Gerry Quinn
 
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