The weapon too heavy to wield

Alan Phillips & Ling Xiang · 28 Apr 2001, 02:03 · 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: Alan Phillips & Ling Xiang <atplx at earthlink.net>
Subject: (whorl) The weapon too heavy to wield
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 02:03:47
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0757 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0757.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I just had an idle thought on what the nature of the inhumi secret may
be.  This may not be supported by the books, but what if the inhumi
inherit not only human intelligence from the blood of thier parents but
also inherit a link to part of the human spirit.  The inhumi would gain
sentience and a "soul" of sorts which is connected (astrally? psychic?)
to the victims of their parents.  If the human victims of inhumi bites
die, then the inhumi children might "loose their souls" i.e. die or
cease to be intelligent.

Here is where we get the "weapon too heavy to wield".  There are 2 ways
to reduce the inhumi to mindlessness, one improbable and one possible:

1) For all victims of inhumi bites to become so altruistic that the
inhumi who share their spirits stop drinking blood and die out.  This,
however, is so unlikely that even the most paranoid inhumi need not fear
it.

2) Kill all humans who have been bitten by inhumi.  This would reduce
all inhumi to animal intelligence.  This may be what Horn/Silk fears.=20
If word of this got out there could be a mass witch-hunt to slaughter
all the inhumi victims.  There are probably many on Blue (and Green) who
would gladly attempt this if they though it would work.  This may be
what the inhumi fear.  Horn/Silk would also be reluctant to reveal
this--less so because of his oath than to prevent the murder of innocent
people.

Again, I haven't re-read the books to try to back this up and you have
to swallow my soul-link theory to make it work but it sounded somewhat
plausible.

--Alan

*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