A couple of points

Kieran Cleary · 03 Sep 1997, 14:19 · from whorl-v0007.mbox · original

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From: "Kieran Cleary" <kierannwn at tinet.ie>
Subject: Re: (whorl) A couple of points
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 15:19:56 +0100
Message-ID: <whorl-v0007-0549 at digest.urth.net>
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[Posted from WHORL, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

> When Kypris shows Silk the picture of Pas, with Silk as one of the heads,
> I asked "which head"?  Is this a picture of the original plan where
> Typhon's "head" rules Silk's body?  Is Kypris turning it around, offering
> to download Silk's personality and use Silk's "head" to rule the
partially
> assembled Pas program?  I wouldn't be surprised if she did that with or
> without Silk's consent and that in the next series we find that "Pas" is
> now an amalgam of Silk and Typhon.

Cool. I hadn't really thought of that. Godly duplicity again. Seems more
than reasonable, despite Typhon's apparent rehabilitation, that Silk,
already accepted as Calde, would merely be used as a mount. Although, as I
quibbled (much) earlier, I have trouble with Pas having to graft his head
onto   some hapless subject for locomotive and presentational reasons when
the technology for personality downloading existed. His appearance as the
two-headed one in tBotNS indicates that he never availed of this
technology. Why not? Although, quibbles aside, I agree that Kypris'
depiction of Silk's head sharing a body with Typhon is, at the very least,
ambiguous.

lasrach


----------
> From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
> To: whorl at lists.best.com
> Subject: Re: (whorl) A couple of points
> Date: Wednesday, September 03, 1997 1:30 PM
>=20
>=20
> [Posted from WHORL, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long
Sun]
>=20
>=20
> On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Kevin J. Maroney wrote:
>=20
> > Second, I have a question about how long the _Whorl_ was actually in
> > flight, and have not been able to find any discusson of this particular
> > piece, nor is my memory of the text good enough to confirm it. Sometime
in
> > the portion of the novel in which Rose/Marble sees the airship, she
thinks
> > about how long she's been around, and comes up with an answer of three
> > hundred years. Then she realizes that she must have misplaced a decimal
> > somewhere.=20
> >=20
> > Does anyone else have any memory of this? The dilapidation of the
_Whorl_
> > is much more credible if it has been in flight for 3000 years.
Certainly
> > the engineers of the _Whorl_ would not have designed a ship that would
be
> > completely falling apart less than 10% beyond the expected travel-time
of
> > the ship?
>=20
> Some points that might explain the condition of the Whorl after only 300
> years:
>=20
> 1)  When Silk meets the woman in the tunnels who had been in suspended
> animation, I seem to remember her making some comment to the effect that
> the "cargo" had had their memories tampered with, which would explain how
> knowledge of the Whorl's nature had expired.
>=20
> 2)  For some reason, people are using as currency computer cards that are
> necessary to run the Whorl.  Vital components may have been raided by
> people in search of "money."
>=20
> 3)  The children of Pas have "killed" (or at least temporarily disabled)=20
> him, apparently so that their toys (the people) won't be able to leave
the
> ship.  They may have dammaged the ship in their battle with him, or
> purposely sabotaged it to keep people from leaving.=20
>=20
> 4)  The Whorl may be set so that the sun starts to fail when it reaches
> its destination so that the colonists are forced to disembark.  Or maybe
> Pas, knowing that he was being hunted, in addition to saving bits of
> himself in various places, set the sun to self-destruct so that even if
he
> was killed, his children couldn't keep the colonists in the ship forever.

>=20
> Does anyone else agree with the idea that bioengineered people like Silk
> and Chenille were originally intended to be permanent host bodies for Pas
> and his children so they could continue to rule when the colonists
> disembarked?
>=20
> When Kypris shows Silk the picture of Pas, with Silk as one of the heads,
> I asked "which head"?  Is this a picture of the original plan where
> Typhon's "head" rules Silk's body?  Is Kypris turning it around, offering
> to download Silk's personality and use Silk's "head" to rule the
partially
> assembled Pas program?  I wouldn't be surprised if she did that with or
> without Silk's consent and that in the next series we find that "Pas" is
> now an amalgam of Silk and Typhon.
>=20
> -Rostrum
>=20
>=20
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