From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis@sirius.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) ES Question
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 15:01:55 

>For you Crowley experts:
>
>	Dumb me, no doubt, but a mystery left in my mind from Engine Summer is
>that the people never seem to eat any food and seem to be sustained
>entirely on St. Bea's Bread smoke. Okay, okay, allusions to marijuana
>maybe. But as this is an SF tale, something other than magic must be at
>work. Rush and his buddy seem to last a whole winter with no food, in a
>trance.
>	I'm sure someone has this figured out. So do me a favor, whydoncha, and
>lemme in on the answer.
>

Not that this is a final answer, of course, bfwiw I thought the allusion
was to hashish rather than marijuana.  And "hash" is the name of a
foodstuff, too.

As for the sfnal rational, the stuff was brought back by an interstellar
probe.  Like you said before, mana from heaven.

The winter they spent in a trance, that was due to a different substance,
wasn't it?  (Probably one of the daughters of medicine: those four little
pots.  One was birth allowance, one was lighten the load, one was near
immortality)  Because the St. Bea's Bread was something they smoked three
or four times a day, no big deal; but that winter in the treehouse was
something different for Rush That Speaks, iirc.

Go Ask Alice, I think she knows.

=mantis=



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