Silk-23 skidooby doo

Michael Andre-Driussi17 Jul 2002, 00:22original as archived

↰ answers Michael Straight · by quotation

5 quoted lines · 1–2 deep

Rostrum quoted me and wrote: Well, since in this reading I take it as Horn alone who sees Hyacinth dead (Silk-43 being completely gone), it is Horn who sees her. Silk-23 comes later, via the eye transfer; and Silk-23 would be even more shocked and distraught over the memory (I'm assuming that Horn and Silk-23 can access the memories of Horn) than Horn, who was the actual witness.

I don't think this works. For one thing, the only way I can swallow Horn steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the obvious during his return to the Whorl (that he is a spirit posessing Silk's body - an almost commonplace idea given Horn's experiences) is that Silk himself is preventing it in order to avoid facing up to Hyacinth's death. For another, it only works if Pas and the Neighbors are in league together, because by your "sinister" reading, the Neighbors wipe Silk-43 and then later Pas completes the plan by engineering the reboot with Silk-23.

No, not exactly. Look, Pig is carrying Silk, right? And has been for some time. Searching for Silk for some time, too. So that whole thing was set in motion some time ago. IIRC there is no monitor where Silk and Hyacinth have been living, just as there was no functional monitor around Silk until the time of big changes in TBOTLS. So in order to get a Silk-soft to Silk-43, a god would have to get a sturdy mount and basically walk on over there, with enough might and majesty to physically drag Silk-43 to the nearest functioning monitor for a forceful switcharoo. Which is why Pig is a good choice for a message carrier, but why Pig cannot replace Silk (lacking the Silk-body). Anyway, it seems to me that Pas and Neighbors are not in league at all, but working at somewhat cross-purposes, coincidentally with the same tool that was lying around moping. It is Horn's mission that makes the Pig mission go through, despite all the screw-ups (blindness, role-reversals). (OTOH, I don't remember if Pig saw Hyacinth dead or not. He was communing with her ghost in the ruins later on, of course -- that was the big tip that he had Silk-soft in him. But it is also perhaps telling, in that the setting is one that would be fresh to Silk-23 . . . well that and extra-poignant to Silk-43, so it is a wash.)

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Another: This contradicts your "Silkhorn gets some Silk from Pig after restoring his sight" theory. Because Pig was posessed fairly recently, and not by pure Silk, but Passilk-42, or maybe Passilk-43 minus a few months (weeks?). The only source of pure, unadulterated Silk-23 would be from the tape backups on mainframe.

Passilk-n would be based upon Silk-23, wouldn't it? Living 20 years in VR heaven, apart from mortal-Silk's ordeals, or kept on tape, I'm not sure what. (I mean, they just show him like a puppet for a second -- less than "visiting day" at Mainframe.) In another post today I mentioned that I don't see any Pas elements in the Narrator, myself, so I'm not comfortable with Pig carrying Passilk rather than Silk.

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Another: It really undermines the whole healing of Silk theme. Silk-23 coming to terms with the fact that he's suddenly older and a widower seems much less interesting than Silk-43 overcoming his grief.

Unless Silk-43 failed to the point of self-destruction, which would tend to illustrate that the 20 years had been disasterous, even for a superman. OTOH, Pig was launched before Silkicide -- I'm not claiming he is on a mercy mission, nor that Pas knows Silkicide will come, only that Pas is going to press Silk back into active service. Quit sulking, Achilles, and get to work!

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Another: Silk-23, recorded when Silk was on the airship, feeling depressed, suddenly finding himself older and Hyacinth dead -- we ought to see a major shift in Silk's personality between when he says goodbye to Pig and when at the end when he gets on Hari Mau's lander. (Maybe the kids didn't understand what had happened and didn't know to depict it?)

I thought Silk-23 was recorded at the pool in the hotel, at the happiest moment in his life. I thought what happened on the airship was he was shown the scan (which he had not been aware of before), and rather than cheer him up, it made him feel even worse. So bad that he nearly . . . well, you know. =mantis= Sirius Fiction booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley 30 copies of "Snake's-hands" until OP! http://www.siriusfiction.com/

Michael Straight17 Jul 2002, 12:58original as archived

↳ follows Michael Andre-Driussi · by subject

2 quoted lines · depth 2

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Michael Andre-Driussi wrote: I don't think this works. For one thing, the only way I can swallow Horn steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the obvious during his return to the Whorl (that he is a spirit posessing Silk's body - an almost commonplace idea given Horn's experiences) is that Silk himself is preventing it in order to avoid facing up to Hyacinth's death.

This is my strongest objection to the theory, which you didn't respond to.

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No, not exactly. Look, Pig is carrying Silk, right? And has been for some time. Searching for Silk for some time, too. So that whole thing was set in motion some time ago.

I guess I'm not clear on this point. My understanding of Pig's story was this: Pig and other mercenaries are looting a manteion and Pig kills an auger (which would put them somewhere in the cultural sphere of Viron, so it can't be that long ago). Silk sees this in the window and posesses Pig (why?). Pig is then blinded (by who? why?) and Silk is stuck. This is the reason for Horn's mission of mercy, not that Mainframe needs the bit of Silk in Pig, but that the bit of Silk is unhappily stranded in Pig and wants to escape just like Scylla wants to esacape from Oreb. My take was that this all happened fairly recently, long enough ago that Pig has gotten used to navigating blind, but not long enough for him to be resigned to his blindness (although how much of that is Silk prompting Pig so that he can escape?)

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Maybe so. I hadn't thought Silk could run around Mainframe by himself. We know there is a composite entity Passilk, and we hypothesise a pure Silk-23 in storage somewhere. But then there are references to Silent Silk and Silver Silk as possibly distinct from Passilk, so maybe. But then, wasn't part of your original evidence for PigSilk --> HornSilk the bit where HornSilk declares that there is a sense in which Pas has come to Blue? That would imply PigPasSilk --> HornPasSilk.

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Is there textual evidence for this? My recollection is that Kypris offers Silk divination on the airship. So I imagine a split at that point. Human Silk shudders at the very idea and walks away. Digitized Silk discovers it's an offer he can't refuse. By your reading, Kypris makes the offer after she's already digitized Silk, and to a later Silk who never gets digitized. What would she have done if the later Silk had said, "Sounds great, beam me up!" Erased the earlier Silk and replaced him with the later one? -Rostrum