Inhumi in the Whorl

James Wynn · 09 Feb 2011, 19:22 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2011 13:22:36 -0600
Subject: (urth) Inhumi in the Whorl
In-Reply-To: <DFF13FD81D7B4853BECF39768C1A7A80@jill>
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	<DFF13FD81D7B4853BECF39768C1A7A80@jill>
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>> 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. 

It is, at best, inferrable. But it is a totally unnecessary presumption.

> [Except we don't know they brought the inhumi back to Green 
> afterwards.  Maybe they just killed them.]

Impossible. The inhumi must return to Green to lay their eggs. In your 
scenario, they would have to release the wild inhumi in the Whorl and 
then recollect them for transport back.

>> ...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.)

All they need to do is to influence some portion of humanity to make an 
expedition to Green and ensure some of them are fed on by inhumi.  From 
a technical perspective, that's a much simpler operation.

> 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? If you want to colonize the verdant Green, why not leave your bodies 
behind to build your cities on Green? That's like saying the 
Ayuntamiento had no reason to possess chem bodies because they had 
bodies of their own.

> 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. 

And the Rajan planned to use a Whorl ship to get there. Even accepting 
that he might have to fight inhumi for it. Yet only 60 years 
previously-- the Neighbors had spaceships of their own. So there's not a 
single Neighbor ship left on the planet? Also, he's taking humans with 
him--humans cannot leave their bodies behind for long periods as they 
travel astrally.

u+16b9

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