Heads; Scylla; Four Eyes
Alex David Groce · 13 Mar 2001, 14:28
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From: Alex David Groce <Alex_Groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu> Subject: Re: (whorl) Re: Heads; Scylla; Four Eyes Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 14:28:04 Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0448 at digest.urth.net> X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0448.shtml MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Robert wrote: > I agree with you about Abaia and Erebus being space travelers, but > the Scylla you're talking about is not from beyond Urth, she's Pas's > daughter Cilinia, who's secretly joined the undersea cabal > pre-launch. As Horn tells us near the end of RETURN, talking about > Oreb/Scylla, "The Scylla we see is no more than a sketch of the > original Scylla, of the daughter of the tyrant who assumed the name > Typhon, the daughter who had pledged herself in secret to one of the > gods of the Short Sun Whorl that would in time become our Red Sun > Whorl. It was a a form of treason, of rebellion against her father." > It's this Scylla (the "Greater") who's apparently left behind when > young Cilinia/Scylla is scanned into the Whorl's computers (the same > way Typhon-Piaton is). I'm therefore not sure she's ever had the > chance to travel widely on a galactic basis, nor how she's able to > explain to Horn how to contact the Mother, who, we know (because of > Seawrack's ring and otherwise) is allied with the Neighbors. I doubt > that your theory about Neighbor being the lingua franca of the Great > Lords is correct. Several points here. It's not really my theory that Neighbor is their language. I am unconvinced that the "how to communicate with..." is about teaching a language at all. I'm thinking more the equivalent of a summoning method. Also, unless I am mistaken, you're mixing up Scyllas, or perhaps your theory conflates them more than is needed. In my opinion, Great Scylla is a Abaia/Erebus type monster, on Urth prior to Cilinia's birth. Cilinia takes this creature's name as part of her treason. The original Scylla is NOT the daughter of the tyrant, but the space monster. The daughter of the tyrant (as you even say above) betrays Daddy by going over to the creature's side. It is this Great Scylla, who is not Pas's daughter or her scanned image, that I am talking about knowing this language. I think this Scylla is quite plausibly a space traveler. I don't see any evidence for the idea that young Cilinia becomes the monster herself (she betrays Daddy by going over to her future self's side? Not utterly ridiculous, given that time travel is possible here, but still not even remotely supported.) The real Cilinia is buried in a tomb that her astral self eventually goes to also, rather than roaming the seas with her siren spawn. -- "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32 -- Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu) Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department 8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce *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
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