From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Typhon's vanity and Pas's Two Heads
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 23:20:18 -0600

mantis wrote:
>I dunno, Roy, but it seems to me that the same vanity of Typhon would make
>him more inclined to create a two-headed Pas.
>
>(I guess this is one of those "It isn't a bug, it is a feature!" answers.)

It's a bug!!

>We know that Typhon planned to be one-headed asap.
>
>We know that Typhon had the mountain carved in the shape of his one-headed
>form.
>
>We sense, iirc, that Typhon's two-headed phase was something of a secret,
>something that was disturbing to those who knew and guarded from the bulk
>of the population.

Yes, and that's the problem! "The face--the face!", as he put it. "The face
would be lost, and it is the face that men are accustomed to obey!" To his
way of thinking, he couldn't afford to be seen as a freak with a second
head, a second head that looked like, as Sev put it, "a species of idiot".
That's why he stayed behind the curtain on the mountain. With the peasants
in open rebellion, he had all the more reason to avoid the public eye; with
his authority already challenged, he couldn't afford to undermine it further
by being seen with an idiotic second head on his shoulders.

I suppose it has to do with why he wanted the _Whorl_ built in the first
place. Typhon didn't have an altruistic bone in Piaton's body. He didn't
send the ship out to ensure the survival of all-things-that-had-been-Urth
lest the ice-future foreshadowed by the dying sun should snuff it all out.
Mankind was long ago seeded all over the galaxy, and beyond. Typhon knew
that; he didn't even come from Urth, himself. So why *did* he want the ship
built, especially if he never intended to be aboard himself?

As a colossal monument to his own ego is the only reason I can see, just
like the carved mountain. Typhon planned to live forever, if he could, by
any means he could find. If he could've pulled off his dream of a Second
Empire to rival the First, it would've massaged his ego to someday travel to
a planet or two where he was worshiped as a god. Blue and Green turned out
(whether by accident or design) to be those planets. The decades of delay
while the ship orbited the new short sun were not part of the original plan.
The rebellion by his family screwed up his plan. Had things gone as planned,
I suspect, the gods of Mainframe would have followed the cargo to the new
worlds. Typhon would have been top god from day one. If he showed up someday
from the heavens, the god in Mainframe come as flesh, he had better look
like the image the people were used to seeing in the Sacred Windows and art.
"The face--the face!"

So, it all comes back to one question: did Typhon, when he decided to build
the _Whorl_ and set himself and his family up as gods in it, do so with one
head and one face in mind, or with two?

I think the answer is one. Unforeseen circumstances forced him to act in
haste. He couldn't rid himself of Piaton when the time came for him to be
scanned. It may even be, as Nutria suggested, that Piaton's presence was a
mitigating factor in the mellowing of Typhon into Pas.

-Roy


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