(urth) Travelin' Jahlee

[thalassocrat at nym.hush.com]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 14:38:36 -0700 "Roy C. Lackey" 
<rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

>I believe that when the _Whorl_ first reached the Short Sun 
>system, landers
>were sent down to scout the planets. That could have been the 
>point of
>contamination, whether it involved the Neighbors or not. I think 
>that's what
>Silkhorn was hinting at in his talk with Abanja. (ibid., 370-371)

Just to be clear, Silkhorn does say later that the Neighbors took 
inhumi to the Whorl, and using them studied humans for a long time 
(RTTW 235-6).

In the passage you quote, he says that landers must have been sent 
down from the Whorl before Auk's party left. But it seems clear to 
me that at this point he doesn't know about the Neighbors' 
responsibility for the inhumi on the Whorl, and my guess is that he 

here surmises (incorrectly) that landers are the only way inhumi 
could have reached it. (Jahlee establishes in this passage that the 

Whorl is too distant for inhumi to reach unaided from Green.)  Is 
there any other evidence in the text for such pre-exodus lander 
traffic, apart from this passage?

I've always assumed that Jahlee's lander comment in the IGJ passage 

is just a lie, maintaining the fiction that she's human (Silkhorn 
has just revealed that she had been on Green before; if she's a 
human, she must have left by lander, and so on).