Like a good Neighbor

James Wynn · 20 Nov 2011, 02:16 · from 2011-November.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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2011 20:16:19 -0600
Subject: (urth) Like a good Neighbor
In-Reply-To: <002001cca714$e3ec4b00$abcf4a0c@rclackey>
References: <002001cca714$e3ec4b00$abcf4a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <4EC862F3.8090209 at gmail.com>

On 11/19/2011 5:42 PM, Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> James has it
> that Horn's spirit died in the pit, along with the body, but the body was
> repaired and a Neighbor's spirit replaced Horn's. In the latter case, who
> brutally raped Seawrack, soon after getting out of the pit? A good Neighbor?

1) Seawrack was designed to be irresistible.
2) Why do you find it impossible that Neighbors would be fallible?

You don't need me to point these things out. Why be provocative?

> While staying at Inclito's house, Silkhorn was yet again contacted by Mucor,
> sans body, to tell him that Babbie had come back to her and Marble. She
> greeted Silkhorn with, "There you are, Silk. There you are, Horn. I've been
> looking everywhere for you." (IGJ, 146-47) Did she not know who she was
> talking to, close to two years after sending her spirit to the Long Sun
> Whorl to search for Silk at Horn's behest?

If she did, she apparently didn't feel the need to greet him, because 
they weren't friends. Maybe she didn't know his name. Maybe she doesn't 
know all there is to know about Neighbors. Maybe the only reason she 
knows that Horn is there is because she has already met the Rajan during 
her mission to the Whorl. So she has some background information.

> At the end of IGJ, Silkhorn was visited by two Neighbors. He asked them,
> "Will the inhumi really drive us away as they did you?" He was answered
> with, "You cannot go where we are." (381) At this point, Silkhorn had made
> astral trips to both Green and Urth. If Silkhorn was being animated by a
> Neighbor at that time, one implication is that the Neighbors had not gone
> away to either Green or Urth when they left the Blue-Green solar system,
> regardless of whether or not Silkhorn possessed an innate Neighbor's assumed
> ability to travel astrally and/or in time.

I'll buy that.

> Another implication is that those two Neighbors didn't know that they were
> talking to a fellow Neighbor, which strikes me as strange since Neighbors
> knew where to find Horn in the pit, on Green and, apparently, Silk on the
> LSW, and Silkhorn there in Blanko territory and still later in Dorp.

Well, I hardly think those are the only two implications.
At least one other is that they know they are not talking to a Neighbor 
nor a human but something utterly unique: a merging of the two. So they 
were speaking about limitations reflected in his humanity.

Even if they didn't know they were talking to Neighborish entity (which 
I doubt) and others did, what of it? Who says the Neighbors know 
everything about each other's business? This is similar to Gerry's 
refutation about the fact that the Rajan claimed to know something about 
the Mother's  worshippers but not /everything/. You're human, Roy. So 
obviously you know everything about the church services of Primitive 
Baptists or the Bahai.

J.

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