Urth Net
The Secret: practical doubts
↰ answers William Ansley
· by quotation
William Ansley: I agree with a good deal of your logic
below. I've been arguing the strongest possible case
for the Secret as an offensive weapon, striving to
explain why the Secret would be so "great and
terrible" that the inhumi supposedly would kill any
human who knew it. I think that, given GW's enormous
interest in military matters, the specific aspects of
my theory about the Secret are probably what he had in
mind in writing TBSS; but he is GW, of course.
Ambiguity attends everything he writes. So yes: there
are doubts about the Secret's applicability, just as
you say. Necessarily so. Still, humans acting upon
knowledge of the Secret could do a good deal of damage
to the inhumi; the crucial difference between inhumi
and mosquitoes is that the former (some at least) are
intelligent, and would be very worried at any
systematic threat to their offspring.
--Nick Gevers.
--- William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net> wrote: > I
really don't see how using astral travel to wipe
68 quoted lines
out the inhumi at
their breeding pools can work.
1) Can we be absolutely sure that the astral
journeys are to real
places and not just "places on the astral plane"
that resemble real
places where one of the travellers has been before?
Certainly some of
the places resemble real places the we have seen
before (the Red Sun
Whorl) but the nature of "reality" during these
astral visits seems
awfully malleable.
2) Assuming astral travel can have physical effects
in the "real
world," I still don't believe that the inhumi could
be wiped out. We
haven't been able to wipe out mosquitos on earth
even though the same
means of attack should theoretically be effective
and we have just
about the same level of motivation to do so as the
human
inhabitants of Blue have to finish off the inhumi. I
think my
mosquito analogy is a good one, since the inhumi
seem to produce
large numbers of (at least at first) not very
intelligent offspring
which are left to fend for themselves.
3) Since astral travel requires the presence of an
inhumi to work,
this method cannot be used to wipe out their
breeding pools without
inhumi cooperation, at least to some degree. Perhaps
the inhumi
cannot prevent at least a few of their number from
being taken
captive, but they could make it difficult. And
surely inhumi are
capable of suicide upon capture. Of course, since
Jahlee was willing
to betray her kind, the argument could be made the
others like her
could be found. On the other hand, one can argue
that Jahlee is a
unique case.
4) Regarding the argument that only the intelligent
inhumi offspring
need to be killed: as long as their are humans on
Green, intelligent
inhumi can arise again very easily, unless all
humans on green are
completely protected from inhumi predation. The only
way to
absolutely assure that no more intelligent inhumi
will arise is to
kill all of them.
Of course you can say, as you have been, that
Silk|Horn didn't
really think the secret could be used effectively,
but you talk as
if your version of the secret can be so used above.