Inhumi's secret and numbers on Blue

Lee Berman · 27 Nov 2012, 13:44 · from 2012-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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2012 08:44:27 -0500
Subject: (urth) Inhumi's secret and numbers on Blue
Message-ID: <SNT123-W20AB267115662D4D99D7D8CF5E0 at phx.gbl>

>nate jarvis: If the inhumi were to "fly" through space, I think that would require
>a special morphological configuration distinct from vine or snake or
>"person".....I assume the cell membrane obstacle is based on lack of atmospheric
>pressure rather than the limitations of of cryoprotectants such as
>glycerol, but either might present an insurmountable obstacle.

>Did the inhumi use Neighbors' technology to board the Whorl prior to
>Long Sun? Or hijack a Crew reconnaissance landing on Green?

Yes, I think these are exactly the questions Gene Wolfe expects us to ask. But I differ
from some others in finding that he provides unequivocally likely answers.

The first question boils down to: "Do the Inhumi really overcome impossible biological
challenges to fly through space or do they lie about it?"

>From what we know of the the Inhumi and eliminating the impossible, the "lie" becomes the 
obvious answer. Yet, we are still tempted to believe the lie, despite a dearth of evidence 
for the flight except the words of the Inhumi. (to be fair, I find one bit of evidence: the
inhumi ability to stay alive for years buried underground; but this does not address the 
cellular fluid pressure nor escape velocity questions).

Wolfe also gives us the answer to the second question, the one you post above regarding
the Inhumi using technology or surreptitiously hitching a ride. Inhumi are explicitly 
described as poor at using technology but brilliant at hitching rides.

We don't know how Quetzal got onto The Whorl but we are shown in exquisite detail how
Krait wrangles a ride onto Horn's boat and then onto the lander. Not only does Wolfe show
Krait using manipulation, lies, flattery, forced oaths, impersonation, exploitation of
family etc., but he makes it seem easy and natural for Krait to use these stratagems to tie 
Horn into knots. Plus he has Krait admit he thinks of humans as cattle. Unintelligent, 
easily herded food. (Horn, Sinew, Hoof, Hide etc. are probably not coincidental names
here).

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