Pigs have no wings, but might be gods

David Lebling · 27 Feb 2001, 02:13 · 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: "David Lebling" <dlebling at ucentric.com>
Subject: (whorl) Pigs have no wings, but might be gods
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 02:13:54
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0357 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0357.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<<From: "Patrick O'Leary" <poleary at cecom.com>
Pig as Godling:
Yes, the reference to "ears" and "claws" is probably the best  evidence I've
seen.
Good fishing! Yet, for me, it still doesn't ring true. I guess I'd believe
it if
I saw Pig fulfilling the function of a godling--for aren't they just
clarions
for the gods of mainframe? "Leave the Whorl!" or "Stay on The whorl!"
It's not a question of size. >>

Pig's mercenary troop was being used to drive people from the Whorl. He says
so explicitly. (Don't have the book handy here at work, so no page ref).
This qualifies as "Leave the Whorl!" Also, remember that the Pig we see is
Pig/Silk, and his behavior is rather different than the inaugmented Pig's.

Having met only one for-certain godling, how do we know what the rest are
like? Some of them are clearly aggressive: witness the statement the farmer
(or his wife?) makes about Horn's wounds, that they might have been made by
a (small) godling. The godling we meet later is more-or-less friendly, not
all are such.

In fact, spinning this into more of an idea, what if Horn/Silk's wounds were
made by a godling? I brought this idea up before but didn't have any idea
for a motive. It occurs to me that if a godling commanded Silk to preach the
end of the exodus, he might well have refused, even to the point of
violence. A thin reed to build a theory on, I know...

    Dave Lebling
    aka vizcacha

*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