Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 09:16:10 -0800
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: (urth) PEACE: Gold hunt's end at the box in the hole

Ahem.

Damien Broderick voiced an opinion of many readers when he proposed to Gene
Wolfe that Weer found buried gold in that expedition with Lois.  Gene Wolfe
said no he did not.  (This was all in an issue of "The New York Review of
Science Fiction" a few years back.)

So the probability wave for that possibility collapsed.  I checked it off
the list ("Weer's sudden fortune at age 50 due to finding hidden gold") and
moved on.

But the fact remains that the diggers seem to have hit a container of some
kind: if it was not the strongbox, then the next most likely item would be
a coffin.  In order to be sure that it was not a strongbox with gold, they
had to excavate enough to determine its size.

Yet it is a tad difficult to imagine them doing further excavation after
Lois has pulled the gun on Weer.  Whatever happens, it is not in the spirit
of easy cooperation.  So maybe she tells him to keep digging, and he does,
and then they figure out it is a coffin.  Then he gets the gun from her.
(I don't think he kills her, even though there is a ready-dug grave right
there.)

Weer confronts Lou Gold, then Sherry makes her visit.  Sherry speaks of her
"magic ring," and aside from the link to the title of this message (the
spooky link between tomb and womb), what she describes can also be termed a
ring of gold.

On another topic: I wrote before that the Bell Witch under Margaret Lorn's
porch was real.  That was rash of me, and I take it back: what I meant was
that if there is a mystery or action in PEACE which could be solved by a
ghostly presence, then it =is= solved that way.  The "witch under the porch
step" thing is there to establish that ghosts can be pinned down (see also
Gold's Necronomicon; elm trees planted on graves); the ghost itself plays
no role, and thus probably isn't there.

=mantis=



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