From Green to Blue if you're a goose: some numbers
Robert Borski · 01 Sep 2000, 11:41
· 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: "Robert Borski" <rborski at charter.net> Subject: (whorl) From Green to Blue if you're a goose: some numbers Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 11:41:52 Message-ID: <whorl-v0011-0210 at digest.urth.net> X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0011/0210.shtml MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Mnemonic having written: <I don't think it's likely that the inhumu go back and forth as often as people have previously speculated. In both books I believe, Horn says that even when the two planets are at conjunction, the trip between is dangerous and many inhumu do not survive (forgive me for not having and exact reference.)> Here are some numbers I hope will help bring things a little more into perspective about the trip from Green to Blue. They prove nothing other than the arduous nature of the trip for creatures more familiar to us. Green and Blue, at their closest point, are 35,000 leagues apart; this has been determined by Gagliardo, the Soldese astronomer. At 3 miles per league (LEXICON URTHUS), this amounts to 105,000 miles--over four times the circumference around the Earth at the equator. For a flock of geese to fly this distance, it would have to fly, at 50 mph (its normal migratory speed) twenty-four hours a day, a total of 87 days, or nearly three months. Of course, maybe the inhumi can fly faster than 50mph, although I'm still not sure how they propel themselves over that 105,000 miles of void. (I'll spare you my theory about short digestive tracts and le Petomaine-type locomotion.) Robert Borski *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