The SecretWhorl

I'm guessing that the secret has something to do with how Horn seems to have given Jahlee a human soul. Or that all of the inhumi whom Horn has shown kindness to have found themselves unable to kill him, or even fully devoted to him. There's also that bit in IGJ where Horn mentions that the Vanished People made the inhumi their slaves and that that led to their downfall. Maybe the secret is that the humans can enslave the inhumi by loving (showing kindness to?) them. That seems slightly more practical and unsettling than the idea we rejected before that maybe if humans changed their nature and all loved each other, the inhumi would cease to be monsters (why would the inhumi fear that?). -Rostrum *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

Maybe I'm having a Senior Moment (more and more since I passed 50), but did we ever "decide" what the Big Inhumi Secret is? Surely it's not what Jahlee tells Nettle, that they get their intelligence from our blood; we've known that all along. My guess would be that The Secret is the actual and true way that inhumi get from Green to Blue, though we're never told what that is. But what have I forgotten. Patera Nuttier and Nuttier *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

Though Jahlee's words aren't entirely clear, it seems to be a little more than just that: each inhumu/a derives its "mind" from a specific human whose blood its parent drank. I agree it's a disappointment, and somewhat inconsistent; but I think we're stuck with it. The theory that Horn substituted a fake secret to protect Nettle from the inhumi doesn't hold up: the inhumi know that Horn knows the secret, and they would be able to figure out what he had done. If he thought he would be endangering Nettle by writing down that she had been told the secret, he would have omitted it completely. (When he wrote these words, he would have expected to be able to excise anything dangerous from the manuscript if it ever was published.)

This doesn't work any better as the secret. It doesn't fit the revelation scene with Krait in IGJ. --Adam *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.