From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (urth) protocol officer
Date: Thu,  9 Jul 98 03:33:00 GMT

Matthew Malthouse,

Rather than the JFK riff, I shoulda followed my first impulse:

"Would it be easier to grasp if you considered Sev's ship time and
Yesod high jinks as a sort of Egyptian Book of the Dead?

"Pharaoh died and went into the heavens.  At the umpteenth gate, the
guardian asked, `Do you still claim to be Pharaoh?'  And he looked
within himself and saw that, although being Pharaoh was at the core
of his self-image, his sense of identity, that this too was just a
mask, a thing of Earth, a role he had played while on Earth.  But now
divorced from that stage, apart from that contextual reality, he
could see that it wasn't him, no, it was just another mask he had
confused himself with.  No greater or lesser than the gilded sandals,
the wand and the flail, the double crown--this was just another prop.
Another thing to let go of in the purifying process of working
through the afterlife maze . . . "

Then again, maybe not!  A tangent too far.

=mantis=

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/