From: tony.ellis@futurenet.co.uk (Tony Ellis)
Subject: (urth) Re: Roy Trenchard, Abo
Date: Thu, 04 Jun 1998 18:32:11 +0100

Robert Borski wrote:
>This one will attempt to prove that Roy Trenchard, the beggar huckster
>father of VRT, is not human, as everyone in the novel assumes, but a
>full-blooded abo.

This is an inventive, imaginative theory, but I don't see any evidence
in the text to support it. I do see plenty to the contrary.

You asterisk several lines in VRT's rowboat memory, but not this one:
"My mother...had been buttoned into her yellow dress by him." Buttoned
in because the Annese can't handle buttons any more than they can handle
tools or writing. How can Trenchard do that if he's Annese too?

For someone who grew up in a marsh, doesn't RT read rather well? Yet his
wife remained illiterate.

If RT is an abo, why does his son have to keep correcting all his bogus
information about the abos? 

We're shown that VRT lacks the manual dexterity to have made the fake
flint tools RT shows Marsch. That leaves RT. How did he make them, if
he's an abo too?

As for this incredible business of RT cutting off his hands, grafting on
new ones, and then growing a _third_ set... :-)

Why would he need to, when almost everyone thinks the abos are extinct?
The threat to abos RT speaks of is described as coming from gun-toting
farmers out in the country; there is no evidence of the sort of
inner-city witchhunt you suggest. You're also saying that the Running
Blood test took place a mere 15 years ago, but Dr Hagsmith tells us this
is a test that the French applied, which puts it about a century back.
He even says that the French were "supposed" to have applied it -
wouldn't he be a little more certain if it had only happened 15 years
ago?

If RT was a shape-shifting abo, why would grafted human limbs even
accept his alien tissue in the first place? And if they did, why would
this give him the ability to use tools, when the organ that has
"atrophied" is in his brain?

In any event, there is no evidence that the Free People can grow new
limbs. There's certainly no sign in "A Story" that they have this
fantastically useful survival trait. If it comes to that, there's no
evidence in "A Story" that the Free People can change their shape at
all. I think there's an awful lot of misconception in this area - but
that's the subject for another post.

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