Divine Silk and Pas (spoilers)

Spectacled Bear · 08 Feb 2001, 12:51 · from whorl-v0012.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: Spectacled Bear <spectacled.bear at pobox.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Divine Silk and Pas (spoilers)
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 12:51:04 +0000
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0145 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0145.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 16:01 2001-02-07 -0800, Jonathan Dale wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Having just finished RTTW and being new to this list, the following
>questions may already have been answered in the current yet-to-be-published
>digest! Apologies, if so.
>
>I was quite astounded by the end of RTTW; not so much the question of
>identity regarding Horn and Silk, but more the chronology of what happens
>when; Wolfe manages to masterfully obscure the precise ordering of events
>until the very end (I managed to get hints by seeing when Horn/Silk
>possessed the azoth).
...
>4. Is the nature of the azoth revealed anywhere but when Horn/Silk cuts the
>boat in two in RTTW? What is the speculation on this - that it is some kind
>of shaped antimatter beam? Also, what's the relationship to the black blade
>that the Neighbour chooses for Horn when he has to clear the sewer - is it
>some strange precursor to the fact that he will one day get the azoth?

A literary echo, I think. The only hint as to how the azoth works
is given when we first see it in _Nightside_, which talks about
reality splitting in two. The fuligin cloaks of the torturers are
compared to the colour of the blade in RttW, which does make it
sound more like a space-time phenomenon than a material thing.
It can be deflected a little by good steel, though, and it doesn't
reach indefinitely. Azoths wouldn't have been allowed on the Whorl
if they were likely to puncture it!

>5. Given the nature of the inhumi/human symbiosis secret, I was unclear on
>the exact specifics of how children were created; in one part of RTTW, the
>process of inhumi mating is clearly explained and somewhere in IGJ Fava
>explains about breaking out of the egg, etc., but I was unclear from where
>the mind was drawn. Is it that a primal inhumi takes on the mind from the
>first victim (which would explain Krait and Sinew) or is it more related to
>who the parents were?

The inhuma drinks blood, develops an egg with a supply enclosed,
and lays it in the water. The mind comes from the blood by the
chemical transfer of memories, as in the Book of the New Sun.

Spectacled Bear.

_____________________________________________________________________
This message has been checked for all known viruses by the=20
MessageLabs Virus Control Centre. For further information visit
http://www.messagelabs.com/stats.asp

*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