From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis@sirius.com>
Subject: (whorl) [BLUE notes, spoilers]
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 17:51:04 

"Gaon" is Hebrew, meaning "genius," according to printform OED.

There.  Now alga can go to town with the CD-ROM version, and the other new
words!

(I had the sense that the Neighbors were centaurs, too, just centaurs with
more arms.  Furthermore, that Seawrack is a human who was taken alive by
the Mother at a young age, given gills, and taught certain tricks and
magic.)

As for the secret.  Well blood magic (and "intelligent blood") certainly
fits on many points, and I'm happy to use it as the best bet for the time
being.  A slightly different angle would be another alien lifeform, a
symbiotic relationship that gives the bestial vampire a brain, and the
brainy symbiot a food-supply and living platform--not that there is any
suggestion of this, I think it is just Vance's Durdane bleeding over by
association.

On the "Wolfe shelf" of tricks, we have all sorts of things to use without
anything radically new: alzabo; analeptic alzabo; chem-bio identity
confusion from trading parts; the dopey Shadow Children; etc.

=mantis=



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