Inhumu's secret

Roberson, John · 21 Jan 2000, 08:07 · 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: "Roberson, John" <RobersonJ at bek.com>
Subject: (whorl) Inhumu's secret
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 08:07:56
Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0234 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0010/0234.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Further speculations on this: I think the "you are what you eat"/chameleon
theory must be a part of the Rajan's threat to the inhumu and therefore
their secret---this seems to be a part of what Krait must have told him as
he was dying.  When he reasons that they hibernate and are very weak when
unearthed, and captures Jahlee, he offers her a cow to break her fast.
Could it be he has figured out that, after hibernation, they have begun to
lose their intelligence and human shape as their bodies use up all the human
blood/DNA they've ingested, and that if captured in their famished state and
offered a cow, that they'll feed ravenously and perhaps adopt a cow's low
level of intelligence and docile nature?  I admit I don't have a lot of
textual basis for this---does Jahlee seem "dumber" after she drinks cow's
blood?  (But the Rajan doesn't let her drink her ravenous fill---perhaps
because he wants her intelligent enough to parley with and do her dirty work
against the Hannese?)  She does seem to assume a human shape pretty quickly,
however, so that ability yet remains.  I dunno....idle speculation, perhaps.
I think Gene has simply withheld (or just not emphasized enough) a few vital
clues that would help us all peg the Secret exactly, so: sweet misery until
the next book....

What do you think of this angle?

-Ram

*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