1-2-3 Silks? Inhumu secrets

Alice Turner · 20 Jan 2000, 19:58 · from whorl-v0010.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: "Alice Turner" <akt at attglobal.net>
Subject: (whorl) 1-2-3 Silks? Inhumu secrets
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 19:58:59
Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0229 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0010/0229.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Young newt squeaked (actually, I'm not sure what newts do, and anyway, I'm =
ignoring his a)):

> b) How many Silks? I've always liked the much-debated theory that the
> "special embryos" of which Silk is one (and Hyacinth is another? My memory
> fails me on this point) were designed as receptacles for the Mainframe Go=
ds
> to download into as part of the Plan of Pas. (The main sticking point bei=
ng
> whether Mainframe is required to engineer/maintain a theophany). If the
> embryos are designed for this, you would expect there to be a degree of
> redundancy. So maybe there's more than one Silk running around on the Who=
rl
> and/or on Green/Blue? There's no evidence for this that I can recall, but=
 it
> seems an interesting possibility.
> Maybe there's an alternate reading of BOTLS in which different "Silks" ta=
ke
> part in different parts of the story without Horn noticing :-).

This is an interesting question. I don't think there's any doubt at all tha=
t Silk is a "special embryo," maybe the last suviving one (given the mayhem=
 we saw in the holding area), and that his "talent" lies in inspiring the k=
ind of trust that makes him a natural leader. (Hy is not "special.") I don'=
t quite buy the download theory; I don't think there's any real evidence of=
 that, and you have to remember that Kypris is a wild card at best, not an =
indication of any Plan. If you mean that there are two men who share Silk's=
 personality, no, I don't think so. But the answer to your question is poss=
ibly yes, as well. I completely buy the idea that Horn's personality has so=
mehow been *uploaded* into Silk's body. The personality is not exactly a me=
ld; it is Horn, but there are remnants of Silk left, just as you can never =
completely erase every old program from your computer's memory. Silk's own =
personality, meanwhile, just may have melded with that of Pas. But since I =
believe that the!
!
 Pas that Tartaros and Kypris "resurrected" is not a complete program, just=
 a sort of fake "front," it will be interesting to see how that works (if W=
olfe will show it to us--should we sacrifice in hopes?)=20

Alex contributed to the ongoing debate:=20
=20
> True.  I doubt we have enough to figure out the whole secret (or even the=
 key).
> However, Wolfe is also good for sticking clues to Big Secrets early in th=
e text
> and then making you slap yourself on second reading and say "Why didn't I=
 realize
> that?"  I think it's very likely that the whole "inhumi steal their natur=
e from
> us" idea is at the very least going to be an important element of the sto=
ry to
> come (Krait!) and I suspect it has SOMETHING to do with Horn's Solution. =
 Anyway,
> it is very Lupine to take Sweetness and Light as his starting point and p=
ull the
> rug out from under it and us.

I'll grant you this. These books, I predict, are going to be about love, es=
pecially parent-child love; this is just about spelled out as a present and=
 future theme in OBW. But they're not going to be about love in any predict=
able sense--look at the appalling rape of Seawrack, for whom Horn has been =
somewhat in loco parentis. (Does that make mine an anti-prediction? So be i=
t.) They're going to be about loyalty and betrayal and weakness and courage=
 and stupidity and short-sightedness and the horrible human genetic tendenc=
y toward constant, moronic warfare. But love will be the glue that binds th=
is series together, and the inhumi will be a kind of clouded mirror of mank=
ind. Please don't file this thought under Sweetness and Light; it will be a=
nything but.=20

-alga=20

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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