Silk's origin

Andrew Mason · 10 Oct 2011, 19:06 · from 2011-October.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: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:06:44 +0100
Subject: (urth) Silk's origin
Message-ID: <CAM3O41KTbA6w=DGP0=PKOWeYCJqCnnzQHpMmR2DQn=qn9H8dRA at mail.gmail.com>

Gerry Quinn wrote:

> 2. We know Silk was an implanted embryo, so it is no surprise that he has
> two sets of parents; his genetic parents back on Urth a thousand years ago,
> and his surrogate parents in the Whorl.

I think the two sets of parents actually count against the clone
theory; a clone does not have genetic parents in the ordinary sense.
One might call the parents of his source his parents in a way; (this
seems to be the line taken in _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_, where
Number Five is shown a picture of his 'mother', i.e. the mother of the
source of his line, back on Earth). But if Typhon was 'not born' it's
not clear he has parents, and if he does it's hard to see how they are
relevant to the story.

Moreover, we are told in a couple of places that the embryos are the
result of selective breeding, rather than clones.

Regarding who his parents are: Wolfe was once asked about Silk's
ancestry, and replied 'He is the son of the Calde and his mistress'.
This answer, which seems to relate to his birth-mother and adoptive
father, looks like a deliberate deflection of the question, not
telling us what the questioner wanted to know. This in turn suggests
that:
a. It is a significant question, which has an answer - his parents
aren't just Some Guy and Some Girl.
b. It's not meant to be obvious from the story, since when something
is meant to be obvious and readers don't get it, Wolfe is generally
happy to explain (e.g. who is Blood's father, or why did Auk kidnap
Hyacinth).

I think his mother may be Mamelta. I don't know who his father is,
though I take it the answer is lurking somewhere. I can think of a
plausible sequnce of events that would allow it to be Typhon, but I
can also see problems with that - notably, that if spirits on the
Aureate Path appear as they did when they died, Silk should have
noticed that his father had two heads.

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