Urth Net
Mamelta
↰ answers Marc Aramini
· by quotation
15 quoted lines
Here, Silk resolves not to sleep until his mommy comes
(here, it is Mama). Well, who does he meet in the next
chapter? Mamelta! And later, what do we get in
Epiphany of the Long Sun (Calde,actually) on page 220:
"The Outsider was the dancing man on a toy, and the
water the polished toy-top on which he danced with
Kypris, who was Hyacinth and Mother, too."
Kypris is Mother!? and she is probably Mamelta, too.
Now I understand why the Mamelta scene is so familiar
- it is like the Dorcas scene in Shadow of the
Torturer - except instead of Grandma, we get Silk's
mom! In the scene where he leaves his body, I am
certain that the tall man with blue eyes is Pas, and
the mother (not the one who raised him) was Mamelta.
I agree that Mamelta is quite likely to be Silk's mother. This is partly because of the mother references in the passage where he meets her, and partly because in the scene where he meets his parents on the Aureate Path, one of his fathers says 'We are your fathers and your mothers', and he turns to the second womn and says 'You were my mother. I understand.' This strikes me as a weird thing to say - just repeating what he's been told - unless it's someone he has already met, and he's saying 'You were my mother'.
I'm not at all sure, though, that Mamelta is Kypris. As Gerry says, her description of her life at home doesn't seem to fit the monarch's mistress, and she appears to be on the Whorl as a technician. Besides that, why would Kypris be on the Whorl? Pas has taken a scanned version of her to accompany his scanned self, and if he is sending clones - which I'm not sure of - I can imagine him sending a cloned embryo of her to accompany his cloned self. But the physical Typhon isn't leaving Urth, so why would he pack his mistress off? (Kypris is afraid that he may have killed her - presumably in the sense that Typhon, on Urth, may have killed her original - so she seems to think she was left behind.)
I'm not sure that Silk's father is Typhon - would the Outsider choose Typhon as a person to deliver his message? - but if he is, his mother still doesn't have to be Typhon's lover, if the embryos were produced in vitro.
As for the identifications of Kypris with various characters, I take them to be largely symbolic; Kypris is a love-goddess (and not a purely sexual one, even if that was her original function) so in Silk's imagination she becomes linked with people he loves. (I take it the mother in the 'dancing man' passage is his birth-mother, who is hard to link with Kypris in any literal way.)