From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) ancient city
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 01:19:50 -0600

Marc quoted me:
-------------------

"? 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)"
-----------------
and wrote:
>>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.<<

I guess I should have quoted the whole paragraph:

"From this whorl we sprang. You spoke of a hundred years, and of a thousand.
There are rocks and rivers, trees and islands here that have been famous
among us for many thousands of years. This is one such place. I ask you
again, may we visit it, and the others?"

The Neighbors _did not_ spring into existence when Horn fell into the Pit.
They abandoned Blue for, er . . . greener pastures, many thousands of years
earlier.

Marc also wrote:
>>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?)<<

I just finished reading OBW again, and recall no such conversation. Have you
a source? I think you may have meant Seawrack's comments about trying to
forget her life under the sea before she met Horn (OBW, 249):
------------------
    "Not what you think. I was trying to forget the water, and everything I
did in it. Every time I remembered something that happened there, I would
think of something that's happened since I've been with you, some little
thing or something you said, and put it there instead."
    "Can you do that?" I was incredulous, as I still am.
    "Yes!" she said fiercely. "So could you."
-------------------

There's nothing there about time travel.

-Roy


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