Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 20:01:22 -0700
From: maa32 
Subject: (urth) ancient city

to one of my comments about the vanished people on green,I was answered:
>
"? When Horn first met the Neighbors, and they formally turned over
possession of Blue to him as representative of all the people, the Neighbor
who called himself Horn said, in the course of asking permission to visit
Blue at will: "From this whorl we sprang." (OBW, 271)"
>
I am referring to the statement in In Green's Jungles that tells of how the 
city of the Vanished People there was far older than anything on Blue.  Of 
course those neighbors "sprang" up from Blue: they were produced just then 
when Horn fell in the pit on Blue.  On the other hand, the terraformed trees 
did orginally spring up on Urth before being transplanted to Lune, I suppose 
... they just evolved further there.  (obviously, the older cities are 
underwater on Blue so the narrator doesn't really know about them)

As far as Babbie looking completely like Horn in the astral travel: Silk 
looked like a combination of Horn and Silk at certain points.  I argue that a 
huge portion of Horn transfrerred into Babbie at the end of On Blue's Waters, 
but not QUITE all of him. Of course he looks like Babbie, too, but he is 
humanoid (note that he is far more humanoid that Scylla in Oreb).

Also, if we want to talk a little bit more about time travel in these books, 
there is a fascinating conversation between Seawrack and the narrator in On 
Blue's Waters in which she says she can move events from one time in her 
memory to another as she recounts her story; she then says the narrator can do 
that, too.  I was a bit baffled by that - could it be related to a 
time-traversing principle?  After all, "certain mystes" aver that the real 
world exists only in the human mind, and that our dreams are someone else's 
reality.  (Severian as dream of Silk?)

Some good responses to my challenge ... but I'm just not buying the actual 
presence of God and his angels as a valid explanation for a lot of those 
things.  That's a bit too pat, isn't it?  It just doesn't seem like Gene to 
blatantly put them into such a huge role unseen ... why would God manifest 
himself to Silk again after his first enlightenment, which occured outside of 
time and has since stayed with Silk? and how could that be logically 
determined from the text?  
Also, some simple shrimp release their gametes into the water and actually 
form a allopolyploid viable life cycle for a short span, then become haploid 
again to mature. (let me look this up again and see if I can find a source for 
you). Maybe the inhumu are like simple shrimp ... but they do, in fact make a 
point of gathering those vines as symbols of something ... and perhaps that 
something is the hope of leaving behind their vegetative and animal pasts and 
becoming true humans.

And as far as the secret goes, I still argue that its importance lies in its 
ability to incorporate mystical genetic material into offspring in one 
generation: the parents are not the ones who receive the beneficial properties 
of the blood, but their offspring do.  I still argue for a hybrid 
understanding of the secret.

Nice point about Scylla - I guess Cillinia was already in the thrall of the 
sea creature when she was downloaded.

Marc Aramini



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