the prime calcula/ his citadel and other quotes

Gerry Quinn · 15 Jan 2011, 18:16 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:16:12 -0000
Subject: (urth) the prime calcula/ his citadel and other quotes
References: <889274.92593.qm at web161809.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <B30902771A654B288ABC18F893D589FA@jill>

From: "Marc Aramini" <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
> --- On Fri, 1/14/11, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:

>> What colours might they have been that would not be
>> significant, and what do these colours say?

> any other color would have been insignificant.  But blue and black
> are the same colors as Kypris, and Silk's blue eyes are well documented
> as rare.  p670 of Epiphany:

Maybe so... but her memories aren't very suggestive of Typhon's concubine 
Kypris.  And she hasn't had them wiped, because she remembers events to do 
with being transported to the Whorl.  She seems like an ordinary 
middle-class kid with some brothers and a parrot, trained as a computer 
technician, and forced to volunteer as a sleeper on Typhon's colonisation 
mission.  She was one of many: "they said we were going to a wonderful world 
of peace and plenty... we knew they lied."

> "You don't look like her.  Like Chenille.  ... your eyes are blue, but
> hers are brown."  Almost no one in Viron has blue eyes like Silk,
> Chenille probably resembles her biological father Tussah.  So you
> don't think the motherhood feeling he describes while with Mamelta
> is a narrational juxtaposition at all?  Do I really need to explicitly
> state the importance of her eye and hair color?

I don't really get the 'motherhood feeling' reference - maybe I missed it?

As for hair and eye colour, they may be right for Kypris, but the hair 
colour is wrong for Silk even if the eyes are right (though their blue 
colour is described as deeper than that of Silk's).

Also, when Silk meets her first, it says "there was something familiar - 
something horrible that he struggled to deny - in her smile".  But reading 
on, it seems like that is to do with Mucor's possession of her.

One possibility to do with the unusual eyes is that blue eyes are reasonably 
common on Urth, but not in the stock of those who formed the population of 
Viron.  Silk and Mamelta may well come from outside this stock (TBH I'd have 
thought Typhon would have stored sleepers and embryos of the same stock as 
the locals, but it seems that for some reason he didn't bother with this. 
Perhaps he thought outcrossing would be beneficial especially if there was 
some problem causing a population reduction.)

- Gerry Quinn

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