[BLUE notes, spoilers]Whorl

"Gaon" is Hebrew, meaning "genius," according to printform OED. There. Now alga can go to town with the CD-ROM version, and the other new words! (I had the sense that the Neighbors were centaurs, too, just centaurs with more arms. Furthermore, that Seawrack is a human who was taken alive by the Mother at a young age, given gills, and taught certain tricks and magic.) As for the secret. Well blood magic (and "intelligent blood") certainly fits on many points, and I'm happy to use it as the best bet for the time being. A slightly different angle would be another alien lifeform, a symbiotic relationship that gives the bestial vampire a brain, and the brainy symbiot a food-supply and living platform--not that there is any suggestion of this, I think it is just Vance's Durdane bleeding over by association. On the "Wolfe shelf" of tricks, we have all sorts of things to use without anything radically new: alzabo; analeptic alzabo; chem-bio identity confusion from trading parts; the dopey Shadow Children; etc. =mantis= *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.