The Secret

Adam Stephanides · 12 Mar 2001, 21:37 · 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: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) The Secret
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 21:37:38
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0439 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0439.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

on 3/12/01 4:16 PM, James Jordan at jbjordan4 at home.com wrote:

> Maybe I'm having a Senior Moment (more and more since I passed 50), but d=
id
> we ever "decide" what the Big Inhumi Secret is? Surely it's not what Jahl=
ee
> tells Nettle, that they get their intelligence from our blood; we've known
> that all along.

Though Jahlee's words aren't entirely clear, it seems to be a little more
than just that: each inhumu/a derives its "mind" from a specific human whose
blood its parent drank.

I agree it's a disappointment, and somewhat inconsistent; but I think we're
stuck with it.  The theory that Horn substituted a fake secret to protect
Nettle from the inhumi doesn't hold up: the inhumi know that Horn knows the
secret, and they would be able to figure out what he had done.  If he
thought he would be endangering Nettle by writing down that she had been
told the secret, he would have omitted it completely.  (When he wrote these
words, he would have expected to be able to excise anything dangerous from
the manuscript if it ever was published.)

> My guess would be that The Secret is the actual and true way that inhumi
> get from Green to Blue, though we're never told what that is.
> But what have I forgotten.

This doesn't work any better as the secret.  It doesn't fit the revelation
scene with Krait in IGJ.

--Adam

*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