From: David_Lebling@avid.com
Subject: (whorl) Horn's Hints
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 15:15:15 



As promised, these are hints Horn gives us about the inhumi's secret:

p. 217: The inhumu had told me that we human beings were the cattle of his kind.
They drink our blood in preference to the blood of animals merely because they
prefer it (this is what he said) ...

p. 315: He [Mehman] and Evensong waited outside while I explained what I had
learned from Krait on Green. ... "Will you do whatever we tell you, if I release
you?" I asked the inhuma. "Or shall I make good on my threat?" ... "I warn you,
if you will not I am going to spread my knowledge everywhere."

p. 317: "It's just occurred to me that you inhumi are rather like a kind of
lizard I've noticed in my garden. It can change colors ... While I acknowledge
that you inhumi are a much higher form of life, it seems to me that the
principle is about the same." ... She only nodded. "You are correct, Rajan."

p 350: "If only we protected one another, they would all be idiots or worse. As
it is, they always get enough to keep them going."

p. 372: "I couldn't kill them here and now, if that's what you mean; but I know
how they might be returned to the mere vermin that they once were -- mindless,
hideous, blood-drinking animals seeking their prey in Green's jungles."

p. 374: "Krait told me why they have to have it as he lay dying. ... He was
thinking of the thing that linked him to me, and me to him -- of the bond of
blood between us."

p. 375:  "That's the kind of thing the inhumi must have done before the Vanished
People reached Green -- reshaped themselves to look like the animals they hunted
... "
"If only we cared about each other sufficiently.  If only all of us loved all
the others enough, they would go back to that. They would still think them
horrible creatures, and they would still be dangerous, as the crocodiles in this
lower river water are. But they would be no worse."

There may be others that I've missed, of course, particularly any that are early
in the book.

I think the foregoing fits pretty well with the theory that it is only by
drinking the blood of intelligent creatures that the inhumi established and
maintain their own intelligence.  In addition, the inhumi may get their attitude
from humans as well -- that is, they are monsters because we are monsters.

If that is the secret, then we have a certain nice symmetry with parts of the
Christian worldview.  That is, we are threatened by evil, but the evil comes
from ourselves.  If we protected each other from it, it would disappear.  In
short, we should all follow the Golden Rule. I won't speculate on how this would
fit with Catholic (or any other) theology, but it seems like too good a match.

This story is, first and foremost, about love.  Not love as in sex or lust
(though that's there, too), but love between father and son, son and father,
husband and wife, even between pet and master.  The secret of the inhumi is that
love will protect us from them.

     --- Dave Lebling
     (aka vizcacha)




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