Base 9 on the Whorl?

Robert Borski · 11 May 2002, 18:07 · from urth-v0205.mbox · original

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: "Robert Borski" <rborski at charter.net>
Subject: (urth) Base 9 on the Whorl?
Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 13:07:43 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-966 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0205/966.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

In _Nightside the Long Sun_, on p. 29, Wolfe has Maytera Marble presiding
over a mathematics lesson, "watching the children take nineteen from
twenty-nine and get nine, add seven and seventeen and get twenty-three."
This, however, is only possible in a base 9 numbering system, and a strange
one at that, since a conventional base 9 system would only include the
digits 0 to 8 (there should thus no 9, 19, or 29).

The following questions therefore ensue:

Since the number 9 is present, are we to assume that one of the other
numbers has been retired? (If so, it's not evidenced in the Seal of Pas,
which contains all ten digits from 0 - 9. But could these sequences be
artifacts of the pre-launch numbering system?)

Equally possible, I suppose, is the notion that the Whorl, like the ancient
Romans, uses no 0 --meaning that the sequence after the first and second
enneads runs ...8, 9, 11, 12... and 18, 19, 21, 22. But can this be
supported by text citings: i.e., do the numbers 10, 20, 30, etc., occur
anywhere in the narrative?

Also, if we accept the validity of the base 9 system (doubtless enacted by
the Whorl gods to reinforce their sanctity, just as Pas's children have
co-opted the days of the week), how does this change the facts, figures and
chronology of the Long and Short Sun books--from ages of the characters to
lengths of the year--or even, say, the hypothetical distance between Blue
and Green at apogee and perigee?

Robert Borski

--=20

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