(urth) Travelin' Jahlee

[Roy C. Lackey]

Thalassocrat wrote:
[snip]
>sure knowledge that Quetzal was prolocutor for 33 years.
>
>Now, in COTLS, Quetzal tells Silk he has known about Pas' supposed
>death for "thirty years, since shortly after his death, in fact"
>(p130 in Epiphany). So presumably Quetzal was already prolocutor a
>couple of years before Pas' death.

Is it just coincidence that Q's attainment of office more or less coincided
with the death of Pas? I doubt it. I'm not implying cause and effect, just
noting the correlation.

>Horn speculates that it would have taken Quetzal at least 15 years
>to work his way up the hierarchy & attain the prolocutorship. I
>don't know how good that estimate is, but assume it's roughly
>correct. Then if Quetzal did arrive on the Whorl on a lander, the
>Whorl must have been in orbit for more than 15 years before Pas'
>death.
>
>During that time, he didn't trigger the "Plan" and order everybody
>out; why not? A sensible seculation might be that he was studying
>Blue & Green, sending down scouting parties etc etc, before making
>the decision - presumably if the planers didn't check out he could
>set the Whorl on course for another star. This would fit well with
>the Quetzal-on-lander speculation.
>
>But then wouldn't the Crew be aware of the scouting? Why would Pas
>hide it from them? Silkhorn makes it clear in the Abanja passage in
>IGJ that he believes the Crew were not deliberately lying about
>Auk's lander being the first. And wouldn't Pas know then that Green
>wasn't a good destination, even if he didn't recognize the threat
>of the inhumi? But when the landers go, the passengers get not the
>slightest hint of what's down there - no maps, no nothing. If Pas
>had been spending time studying the planets, it certainly doesn't
>show.

But Silkhorn was also sure that landers *had* been sent out before Auk's.
Who cut that big cable down at the Pole? When did it happen, and why? Was
that the reason for Mainframe's and the Crew's ignorance of the comings and
goings?

[snip of stuff I can't refute] <g>

>Just quickly on Neighborly astral travelling: it might be different
>from what Silkhorn does, but I don't know of any reason to suppose
>so. The Neighbors Silkhorn encounters seem generally to be present
>in astral form - eg his first encounter, in OBW. Their sleeping
>bodies are presumably on "the Neighbor Whorl". The Neighbor who
>names it thus gazes towards the "Western stars" when he does so,
>which makes me think it is a "real" place, located amongst them.

Yes, but . . . the way it's phrased, "We found a way to leave and we left,
seeking a new and a better home." "Found a way" doesn't sound to me like
they just boarded their spaceships and went elsewhere. There would have been
nothing novel about that if they had had a high-tech civilization, which
they apparently once did, judging from the ruins on Green. I think there
must be something more to it.

-Roy