(urth) Shaving Clones

[Chris]

Crush said:
> >Chris said:
> >Now, on your picture Tussah is a clone of the person whose son Silk is a
> >clone of. (Pardon the awful grammatical construction). This is a position 
>to
> >take toward the DNA aspect; do you count it as the answer to the
> >psychological question as well? Because if that's what you are implying 
>then
> >you're putting forward an even stronger assertion than I thought, since 
>it
> >implies that Tussah somehow knows all this.
>
>Yes. I am saying that Tussah KNEW he is a clone of Typhon. It is likely he
>even knew that Pas had that name on the Red Sun Whorl (the Rajan was
>aware of it). Lemur knows a lot of details about the family of Typhon.

I think this is a bigger assertion than you appear to think it, at least 
based on the cursory treatment of it so far.

Knowing some details about the history of Typhon, knowing that Pas is 
Typhon, these are significant things to be sure - and one can imagine a few 
vectors this knowledge might be acquired. It seems *unlikely*, though, that 
Pas himself would deliberately make it known to anyone because it simply 
doesn't offer him any advantage.

That said, the only way I can possibly think of for Tussah to know *who* he 
was a clone of is to get it directly from one of the gods. Presumably Pas, 
because Tussah's conjectured position in Pas's plan puts him at odds with 
the other gods. [Unless, of course, ALL the cloned embryos on board are 
clones of Typhon, which would immediately tell you who you were a clone of 
given the knowledge that you were grown from one of those embryos. But 
you've denied this possibility, and I don't find it especially likely 
either.] Why would Pas tell him this? Neither Typhon nor Pas seem inclined 
to invite someone into an equal partnership if they could just use them as 
an instrument instead.

Telling him who Silk was supposedly a clone of seems similarly unmotivated, 
if not counterproductive. And I suspect that there would be even fewer 
people who might have that information from the beginning.

The answers to these questions are going to have a distinct impact on just 
what you think was actually going *on* here.

Also, elsewhere you state more explicitly than before:
"I do say that SILK and TUSSAH and were part of the Plan of Pas with
respect to Viron. But it was not necessary for Typhon to plan it from
Urth. Tussah's implantation could be argued to be timed with the Whorl's
arrival to Blue, but Silk's was done by Tussah after Pas's erasure."

But this puts Pas/Typhon in the position of doing *just* the kind of 
planning that seems most problematic, and least likely, given the shape of 
his overall plan from the beginning. And there seems no reason at all to go 
to the trouble of raising Tussah from an embryo and engineering his rise to 
Calde-hood, instead of just working with whoever happens to be in place at 
the time.

>Funny you should say that. Go back and search the archives for the 
>discussion
>on whether Mamelta is Kypris and Silk's mother. Although, I can't remember
>whether the arguments *assumed* that Kypris was Silk's mother and that if
>Mamelta was one she had to be the other.

Maybe something's wrong with the archives, or with my brain, but google is 
giving me a set of hits that don't include this discussion. I looked for 
conjunctions of "Mamelta" with both "Kypris" and "mother", separately, and 
no dice.

>Not much of a stretch to me, but that's just me. That Mamelta is Silk's
>bio-mom is exactly what I believe and it might *be* that Silk meets her
>in the Mainframe rather than Kypris, but we still have his other father to
>account for.

Well, assuming we are actively distinguishing between Kypris and the 
biological person that became Kypris, suggesting that Silk meets Mamelta 
rather than Kypris in Mainframe would imply that the same would apply to his 
father; since we know Typhon doesn't make it on the Whorl, it would imply 
that Silk's father is someone other than Typhon. So I don't think that 
interpretation is favorable for your purposes.

> >On the other hand there's no apparent reason at all to put Horn where he
> >was, and no special opportunities afforded by that position, UNLESS you
> >count exposure to Silk.
>
>How about exposure to Chenille? How about exposure to Quetzal who
>spent time in Horn's district to feed on the inhabitants. He was born well
>after Tussah's death. It would have to be someone else who put him
>there, and I agree it had to be someone with money. That's why I
>suggested Quetzal.

Chenille? That is no better an answer than Silk - it implies 
micro-management of her life to put her in that neighborhood, and for *no* 
apparent reason. And it implies a sort of micro-management that is 
mysterious and counter-intuitive, because it lands Chenille in a brothel and 
both Horn and Chenille in a slum so that they can be in proximity to each 
other, for.... what reason?

And exposure to Quetzal doesn't seem any more or less likely in that 
neighborhood, nor are we given any indication that Horn and Quetzal had any 
familiarity with each other. So if Quetzal put him there for that purpose, 
he apparently never followed through with it.

Did Quetzal put him there to feed on, then? If so he could just as easily 
have put his personal veal-calf in a more controlled environment.

It's possible to throw out lots of "reasons" to go to that much trouble to 
put a clone in Horn's position, but none of them seem to be any *good*.

>It doesn't strike me as micro-management at all. It strikes me as 
>opportunistic.

Placing Horn in that neighborhood 15 years prior to the start of the story 
is not "opportunistic" because at the time he would have been placed there, 
there was no significant opportunity to take advantage of there.

>If it were important to hide a child from the eyes of the powerful, then 
>the
>best schools might be the worst place for his welfare. The Ayuntamiento
>certainly could not know when Tussah had implanted his "heir" or even
>if someone were implanting it after he died. You mentioned the question
>of whether Silk looked like Tussah. Well, I assert that Horn looked
>very much like Tussah indeed. Putting him the in best schools probably
>would have been murder.

To fly under the radar you have to place him in the worst place you can 
find? A nice middle-income neighborhood would have done just fine for 
concealment.

> >>JW said:
> >>I'm not sure where the term "face of command" comes from although I've
> >>seen it used a lot on the list. I don't think Typhon's powers of 
>leadership
> >>come from something special about his face. Neither so for Silk or Horn.
>
> >Chris responded:
> >In this case you disagree with Typhon, then. And ultimately Typhon is the
> >one who arranged the pleasure-cruise; if anybody made arrangements to put
> >clones on board, it would have been him.
>
>Based on Mark Millman's hint found the relevant quote on page 139 of
>"Sword and Citadel". What Typhon says of his face is that "it is the face 
>that
>men are customed to obey". Obviously that is not an issue on the Whorl
>unless Typhon intends the colonists to be ruled by physical representations
>of monsters.

Incorporating Mark's insight here creates something of a pretzel of logic 
that is difficult to straighten out, but let me try it this way:

The first question is, did Typhon possess special genetic powers of 
leadership, or not?

If no, then Silk/Tussah (who *do* possess such special genetic abilities) 
are not of Typhon's line. So your answer here has to be "yes".

The second question is, if Typhon did possess special genetic powers of 
leadership, then why did he have to worry so much about his face?

One possibility is the one that has been widely assumed: that his genetic 
leadership ability manifested in some way related to his face. In which case 
you *would* expect clones of Typhon and his son - who shared this genetic 
leadership ability - to look alike.

If Typhon's concern for his face was unrelated to this superlative 
leadership ability then it would seem like more mundane factors like 
familiarity provide only minor motivation to go to so much 
trouble/discomfort, balanced as they are by the fact that as familiar as his 
face might be, the whole two-headed monster thing isn't exactly familiar (or 
positive, either). It gets points for intimidation, but a big penalty for 
anybody inclined to view him as a freak of "nature".

[And of course even without connecting the leadership genes to facial 
features, one still expects Typhon's son (if he is to have similar 
abilities) to take after his father quite a bit.]