Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 13:14:50 -0800 (PST)
From: Jerry Friedman 
Subject: (urth) Time must have a stop


--- Don Doggett  wrote:
[snip]

> Silk's enlightenment and the stoppage of all action on
> the
> ball court are completely separate events.  So again I ask, why did time
> stop on the Whorl?

Because the Outsider wanted it to.

Since I don't have the text here, I'll accept for the sake of
argument your claims that time stopped rather than something else
happening and this is separate from Silk's enlightenment.  Your
contention is that this happened because of some action of the
_Whorl's_ space drive, maybe coming out of FTL (I don't quite
remember what you wrote), and the Outsider miraculously exempted
Silk from this stoppage.  Right?

I would assume--but correct me if I'm wrong--that the Outsider's
choosing this moment wasn't a coincidence.  For some reason the
stoppage of time was a favorable circumstance for his enlightenment
of Silk.  Do I have that right?

But if stopping time was favorable for enlightenment, than the
Outsider (who is omnipotent) could have stopped time on his own. 
And would have--why not?  So we're choosing between the Outsider's
taking advantage of an event in the _Whorl's_ trip to work a miracle,
or the Outsider's working one miracle to create the right set-up for
another.

If we had some independent evidence that the _Whorl_ did have FTL,
and (better) that Wolfe's imagined FTL involved time stopping at some
point, then your suggestion would tempt me.  But as it is, the
possibility that the Outsider is directly responsible for everything
Silk experiences seems much easier to believe.

-- 
Jerry Friedman



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