(urth) SS Matters Revisited

[studio at studiobl.com]

Re-Posted, with some additions (including supporting quotes):

I am just finishing a third(?) reading of RTTW.  I felt that I was 
beginning to get some
inklings of new insight, and have resolved to re-read the entire BOTN, 
making marginal
notes.

I have a few thoughts and questions, though.

Has anyone worked out a timeline of events.  I found that this time, I 
was able to keep
track of the different time sequences better than previously, but on 
beginning to reread
the first book, I started becoming confused just where SilkHorn's time 
in Gaon fit into
the timeline.

Why is Seawrack missing a limb?  At one point, I thought Babbie had 
bitten it off,
resulting in some kind of psyche transference, but I'm not so sure of 
this now.  The Mother seems pretty powerful--if Seawrack is supposed to 
attract at least in part by physical beauty, why wouldn't the Mother 
completely replace her arm, rather than just cauterize it?  I tend to 
wonder if Seawrack's arm is missing for some specific 
reason...creatures with extra limbs, Seawrack with a missing limb...I 
can't figure it out..

Does Seawrack's ability to trigger uncontrollable rutting behavior have 
any thing to do
with inter-species breeding experiments?

What is the encrusted thing that climbs aboard Horn's boat?

[OBW, Ch6 'Seawrack': "Something climbed into our sloop last night that 
was neither a
beast nor a man, and was not a thing of the sea nor a thing of the 
land, nor even a thing
of the air like the inhumi...In appearance it was like a man of many 
arms and legs, long
dead and covered over with crabs and little shellfish and other 
things...I think it feared
the storm as much or more than we."]

I thought the broken dome on the island had most likely been a 
greenhouse for genetic
experiments.  Possibly human/plant hybrids resulting in the Neighbors.  
--The Neighbors
would then be humans transformed to meet new environmental stresses.  
Why then, would similar domes be at the bottom of the sea, as Seawrack 
mentions?

[OBW, Ch8 'The End': '"I know of places in the sea where there are 
walls like those,"
Seawrack told me.  Her voice was hushed. "'Underwater' is what you 
say."']

Is Horn made part Neighbor on the island?  Or just what the heck 
happens in the pit?

--It does sound as if he is killed in the fall, and somehow restored to 
life by one or
more Neighbor.  I wonder if Horn's spirit isn't temporarily 'stored' in 
Babbie, while the
repairs (or whatever) are made.  When Horn's spirit is being 
transferred to Silk's body
(OBW Ch 16) there is some understandable confusion about who is who and 
where, including some confusion between the identities of Silk/Horn and 
Babbie.

If the Neighbors allowed the Imhumi to became part human in order to 
compare the result
with the result of Inhumi infused with Neighbor blood, where are the 
Neighbor/Inhumi?

[RttW, Ch11 'My Trial': (Horn is speaking) 'That is what the Neighbors 
did. Knowing what their own inhumi were like, they gave us ours so they 
might compare the two.']



Why does Horn's son see a Neighbor sitting on a "tree branch" when he 
looks through Horn's ring?

[RttW, Ch17 'He Took Me With Him': (Hide writes) 'I held it to my 
eye...I noticed the limb of a tree floating upright to starboard.  The 
leaves were still silver and green, and the limb was so big it looked 
like a whole tree even though I would think there must have been a 
trunk floating the regular way since a floating tree does not stick up 
like that. There was somebody sitting in one of the branches, and it 
was one of the Vanished People.']

If the Vanished People were dryads, why wouldn't the ring allow you to 
see a VP in a regular tree?  Why is the tree also hidden, and why is it 
sticking up out of the ocean?


I think much of this fits together as a breeding or hybridization 
program.  The three
races (Neighbors, Humans and Inhumi) are brought together to create 
hybrids that are
desirable somehow to someone.  This is accomplished, in part by 
bringing the colonists
from the Whorl to Blue and Green.  The Whorl is to be sent away with a 
cargo of pure human stock, presumably with the idea to repeat the 
hybridization in another 600 years or so. Possibly this is why the 
Neighbors have 'gone away' --to preserve remaining pure stock for 
future hybridization.

Have the Neighbors really gone anywhere if you can find one just by 
peeping through one of their rings?  What is that damn ring anyway?  It 
seemed like Horn left it on Green when he was placed into Silk's body.  
Then he got a different ring that seem to turn, over time, into the 
original ring.

Is one of the three races the method of hybridization, rather than a 
base stock?  Possibly
the Inhumi?

[An interesting quote from OBW, Ch5 'The Thing on the Green Plain': 
(Horn writes) 'If the inhumas' eggs hatched in our climate, would not 
our human kind become extinct? What tricks Nature plays! If they are 
natural creatures at all.
	But they surely are.  Natural creatures native to Green.  Why would 
the Neighbors create something so malign?']

If the gods have hidden in animals, is Echidna in Babbie?  Is someone 
in Oreb?  Is Oreb
even the original Oreb?  Could Scylla be in Oreb for some reason?  I'm 
not sure why I
think this last, I seem to remember some connection between the two, 
possibly from the
Long Sun Books.  A lot of what happened around Lake Limna seemed fishy 
to me.  I think
there is a lot of hints in that portion of the book that I couldn't 
quite get.

[Regarding the gods hiding in animals, RttW, Ch16 'Hari Mau': (the 
Whorl crew surgeon M'to is talking to SilkHorn after the operation to 
transplant one of SilkHorn's eyes into Pig)
'"...You know about the animals?"
	"What animals?"
	"Great Passilk is supposed to be mad at his wife and half his 
sprats...people say they've turned themselves into animals to get away 
from him."]

Anything about the ocean-dwelling giants confuses me.  I still don't 
quite get it about
Abaia and whatnot.  Was he just an alien who was scheming to take over 
Urth?  Where does the Mother (in Blue's ocean) fit into the picture?  
She seems to be less malign than Abaia and his wives.  For one thing, 
the Mother seems to be involved in helping Mucor survive.  Either 
Seawrack or the Mother are probably the ones chasing fish up onto the 
rock for Mucor to eat.



I wonder if Mucor is able to assist with the transference of the 
psyches of others--kind of
like a human Sacred Window.  If she could appear to the blind Pig, she 
may have offered to release the trapped PasSilk.  She may also have 
been removing some rider from Babbie when Horn returned to Maytera's 
island with her eye.  ...either Echidna, some part of Echidna, or even 
part of herself...a sort of recording mechanism by which Mucor could 
plant part of herself, then retrieve it later and access its memory.

In Rttw, Ch1 'The Bloodstained Men', Hide tells Horn about a dream.  
Hide has dreamed, among other things, that he hides under a 
multi-legged couch and discovers that a girl is already hiding there.  
Hiding under a multi-legged thing sounds like hiding in spirit inside a 
hus, but who is the girl?  Hide never says.

I don't doubt that some of these questions have been answered 
before...searching the Urth archives can be kind of frustrating, 
though--lots of slogging through barely related
material that results from searching a keyword.

Brian Lovely

Studio bl
http://www.studiobl.com