Horn/Silk as inhumu

Michael Purdy · 16 Aug 2000, 15:42 · from whorl-v0011.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: Michael Purdy <mcp at jhu.edu>
Subject: (whorl) Horn/Silk as inhumu
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 15:42:14
Message-ID: <whorl-v0011-0115 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0011/0115.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Things I find tempting about the idea:
*Could key into the secret of the inhumu:  what if giving yourself=20
willingly to the inhumu somehow allows you to take them over?  Not just for=20
a while, but for good.  They drain you, you die, and are reborn in them.  A=20
very Christian way to defeat an enemy--by helping them.
*Might make the baffling passage near the end of OBW where Horn and Babbie=20
suffer from identity confusion seem a little clearer--perhaps Horn had to=20
drain some of Babbie's blood, and in doing so temporarily took on his=20
consciousness/frame of reference.  Note problems with this below, though.
*Resonates with the sudden revelation that someone you never suspected was=20
telling the story at the end of BOTLS.
*Explains the oft-mentioned lack of appetite in Horn.
*Explains his baffling tendency to keep adopting inhumi.

Problems:
*If Horn being an inhumu keys into the Babbie switch, then the timeline is=20
knocked completely out of whack.  IIRC, the brief Babbie switch takes place=20
before Horn arrives at Parjorucu (don't have the book w/me), when the only=20
inhumu he's encountered is Krait, and he and Krait are both still alive and=20
kicking at this point.  Unless Horn became an inhumu back when one of them=20
was draining Sinew...is that why Krait's blood makes for such a reviving=20
meal in the pit?  Nah, Sinew's his oldest kid, so that couldn't possibly=20
work could it?  Sinew was young when the attack occurred, so Horn and=20
Nettle probably hadn't had the twins yet.
*All of the above fails to account for what went on in the body-switch with=20
Silk in IGJ.  Unless, as someone was speculating, Silk is an inhumu too at=20
the point Horn jumps in.  That just really seems like a bit too much...
*Handwriting and hair are both good objections.

And yet, and yet... I still find the idea tempting.
Michael

*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