Inhumi in the Whorl

Gerry Quinn · 09 Feb 2011, 18:49 · from 2011-February.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: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 18:49:58 -0000
Subject: (urth) Inhumi in the Whorl
References: <AANLkTimm_-YUU6WRuKEeSpc8-dR9mmqEseOz2PqYajnj at mail.gmail.com>	<611E80A216754B38B9FDAC59E8231AEA@jill>	<4D51DCDC.7040309 at verizon.net><4D522483.2010604 at io.com>	<4D529B79.6010201 at gmail.com><B0F8DAFC559C4BE3979401678445EDF6@jill>	<4D52BD78.8070805 at gmail.com><A8A3D76B6B634C2C8271A01ED098157E@jill>	<4D52D4F7.2000600 at gmail.com><931F1F803B2F4A9485887F50270C6B48@jill>
	<4D52DC91.7080003 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <DFF13FD81D7B4853BECF39768C1A7A80@jill>

From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>
>
>>> Well, we do know that inhumi-powered dream-travel can get the Neighbors 
>>> between planets or to the Whorl, right?
>>
>> No... we've never seen that.  In all cases of dream-travel we've seen, 
>> only souls have been transported.  It's not at all clear that the 
>> Neighbours could transfer natural-state inhumi in this fashion. Maybe 
>> they could, but I find it easier to believe they used spaceships.
>
> Hmmm... crazy idea, but perhaps this is a good reason to reconsider one's 
> reading regarding WHETHER the Neighbors transported natural-state inhumi 
> to the Whorl. Perhaps this is a reason to presume they did NOT infect 
> humanity with inhumi by transporting natural state inhumi to the Whorl and 
> then returning them to Green. That is a complex operation that I would 
> prefer to be hinted at in the text

It's not just hinted at in the text - we're pretty much told that that was 
done.  [Except we don't know they brought the inhumi back to Green 
afterwards.  Maybe they just killed them.]

> --especially since dream-travel, Time-travel, and bodily possession are 
> methods offered in the text.

There's no indication that any of these can be used to transport large 
physical objects, so I assume they probably had other means of doing that. 
Maybe they transported the ring that was given to Horn though - I'm not sure 
about that.

>> Still, what are we arguing about?  We know they got there somehow - it's 
>> doesn't really matter much what technology they used.
>
> Well, it makes a great deal of difference if they used dream-travel (the 
> only method available to them as, so far as I see).

But how could they have infected the Whorl with inhumi uising dream travel? 
(Nor do time travel or bodily possession appear useful in this regard.)

I don't see how they could have got to Green from Blue using dream travel 
either.  It seems to me they must have had spaceships of some kind.

They could have got their astral bodies to Green by travelling with inhumi 
who had come from there.  But they'd have had no reason to build a city 
there, because their own physical bodies would have been sleeping back on 
Earth.

So just like Silkhorn, they use dream travel when appropriate, but at other 
times they use spaceships.  At the end of RTTW, Silk is going in search of a 
spaceship to travel to the Whorl, even though he has previously engaged in 
interplanetary and even iterstellar dream travel.

- Gerry Quinn

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