On dream travelers

Roy C. Lackey · 12 Feb 2011, 02:37 · 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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:37:15 -0600
Subject: (urth) On dream travelers
References: <00ad01cbc95d$1d451800$89d24a0c@rclackey><4D55A29E.4000201 at gmail.com>
	<4D55AB95.2080001 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <004901cbca5d$c5f18460$e8d14a0c@rclackey>

James Wynn wrote:
> All good, Roy. Few additional things...
>
> > Roy C. Lackey-
> > The first of these is that spirit travel is exactly that; the spirit of
the
> > subject makes the journey, not the flesh.
>
> A person in soul travel lighter but he still has mass. He is subject to
> gravity. He also bleeds and receives harm. When the Rajan is climbing
> the rock-face in RttW as inhumi are attacking he says:
>
> "Here I am tempted to write that the cliff-top appeared suddenly above
> me, for that was how it seemed to me. The truth, of course, was
> considerably more prosaic--I [...] had climbed altogether about three
> times the height of the tower, and so so had reached it. I do not
> believe I could have done it in the body that lay sprawled on the floor
> of Judge Hamer's sellaria. Fortunately, I did not have to; the weight I
> lifted--clawing, sometimes, with bleeding fingers at the red
> rock-face--although it felt real, was substantially less than my true
> weight."
> RttW, Chapter 9, Before My Trial
>

Yes, the bodies of dream travelers have weight and seem to otherwise behave
as if they were real, but they are not real. Remember the part about no
digestive tracts. Rigoglio's spirit-travel body received a mortal wound on
Urth, but there was not a mark on his real body back on Blue. I dare say an
autopsy of Rigoglio's spirit body would have revealed anomalies as glaring
as the lack of a digestive tract, to say the least, if that body even
continued to exist after Silkhorn left.

> Secondly a person in soul travel is--from the perspective of other
> humans--entirely human. Even an experience as intimate sex, his true
> nature would not be detectable. Jahlee seduces men guards on Urth. When
> she begins to try to seduce Hide, the Rajan says:
>
> "Honesty compels me to tell you that Jahlee is not an inhuma at present.
> She is a human being here, exactly as we are, and I believe for the same
> reason. But if we return to our real whorl, and I believe that we will,
> she will be again what she was before we came. "
> IGJ page 319

Not even from the perspective of other people are spirit travelers entirely
human; humans can't walk through locked metal doors like Jahlee did in the
Matachin tower, as I cited, and both Merryn and Severian saw her do it.

> > Roy C. Lackey-
> > When Quetzal died on Horn's lander his body reverted to its natural
inhumi
> > shape, the reptilian horror that caused Moorgrass and Nettle to scream
> > (EXODUS, 381).
>
> "Returns to it's natural state" only from the perspective of humans. In
> fact, they never really change. Inhumi wear make-up and costumes. The
> rest of the ruse seems to be performed by something of a "glamour" such
> as Gideon Chase used in "An Evil Guest". Krait presents this ability as
> nothing more than a common, low-rent illusion. But his ability to come
> off as human with only a shirt and pants, or the ability to hide even
> his presence to selected people in attendance during a conversation with
> the resurrected HORN suggests it is a more advanced ability than
> that--although founded on similar principles. The inhumi cause others to
> see them as they want to be seen as Krait explains:
>
> "Krait nodded. "You said you thought he was an old man, and you were
> angry because he had tricked you. You told me some trooper shot and
> killed him." I nodded.
>         "Did you see his corpse?" [...] Did he look like an old man
> then?" [...] He didn't look like an old man anymore, did he? He couldn't
> have."
>         I shook my head.
>         "What did he look like?"
>         "He looked like you."
>         When Krait said nothing, only transfixing me with his hypnotic
> stare, I added, "He powdered his face, and painted it. Like a woman. We
> found the powder and rouge in a pocket of his robe.
>        "So would I if I had those things, just as I wear this shirt and
> these pants, which I took from you. The eyes see what the mind expects,
> Horn. Babbie there, lying still with a green twig in his mouth, could
> make you think he was a bush, if you were expecting to see a bush.The
> young siren you call Seawrack doesn't see me the way you do.[...]
> Knowing that, is it so hard for you to believe that at times she doesn't
> hear me /at all/? [...]If she's listening, she hears you alone, Father.
> Only the murmur of your voice. She probably thinks you're talking to
> yourself, or to your hus."
> ~ OBW, Chapter 10, Seawrack's Ring
>
> u+16b9

What has any of that to do with what I wrote? I wrote:

>When Quetzal died on Horn's lander his body reverted to its natural inhumi
shape, the reptilian horror that caused Moorgrass and Nettle to scream
(EXODUS, 381). This demonstrates that Quetzal did not get to the LSW by way
of spirit travel; his body was his real body, not a spirit-travel body.<

That stands. Quetzal was an inhumu who tried to pass for human. That is why
he drank only beef tea in the presence of humans and used makeup. Like Krait
and Jahlee and Fava, he could fly (CALDE, chap. 1, 25). Inhumi during spirit
travel could no more fly than Silkhorn or Hide or Fava (IGJ, 197). Inhumi
during spirit travel do not have fangs. Quetzal had fangs and used them on
Teasel.

In their natural state, inhumi are described as reptilian and as looking
something like bats when they take wing, which is exactly what Krait hastily
did when he was charged by Babbie soon after getting Horn out of the pit
(OBW, 214). As Krait was dying on Green and could no longer keep up his
human guise, his face looked like that of a "serpent" (IGJ, 82). When both
Quetzal and Krait were wounded, they would let no one look at or treat their
wounds because their true reptilian bodies could not be hidden.

By no stretch was Quetzal's body that of a spirit traveler. Had it been, he
would have had no need of the makeup. He would have been as human as Juganu
or Jahlee.

-Roy

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