The Nebraskan and the Nereid

Gerry Quinn · 17 Apr 2011, 08:16 · from 2011-April.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: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 09:16:31 +0100
Subject: (urth) The Nebraskan and the Nereid
References: <1302999008.1802.16.camel@august>
Message-ID: <35AFC7E28F5E43209C81C07F92484FAE@jill>


From: "Andrew Dubbeld" <andy at foisdin.com>


[SPOILERS BELOW, for anyone who hasn't read it]


>I was recently reading through Endangered Species, and came across The
> Nebraskan and the Nereid. It all seems relatively straightforward, right
> up until the end, when Dr. Thoe Papamarkos dives into the sea, leaving
> her things behind, including a canteen which seems to contain salt
> water, and suddenly there's a dead woman on the beach.
>
> "She smiled, then when he realized he could not convey the news of a
> tragic death with any decency in his inadequate Greek. Thoe would have
> to tell them. He would wait until someone came."
>
> I'm left with a couple of questions that perhaps someone on the list
> might be able to help with:


> - Who is the girl? Is she the woman Sam's seen in the water earlier?
> - Where did she come from and why is she dead?


My understanding is:

The dead girl was the maid at the inn where he stayed, and to whom he made 
love to in the cave.  After he went back to the inn, he complained about the 
bed not been made.  Later the landlady must have said this to the maid.  She 
realised that he had not recognised her, and drowned herself.

Dr. Papamarkos is a Nereid.


> - The introduction to Endangered Species hints that there's either love
> or sex in this story, but where?

Sex for the Nebraskan, love for the maid, I think.


- Gerry Quinn

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