(urth) The eyes of a clone

Roy C. Lackey rclackey at stic.net
Wed Jul 27 21:02:09 PDT 2005


The four people Silk saw in his vision during his brief 'death' in the
tunnel collapse were, first, his mother, the woman who carried his embryo to
term and raised him, the woman he calls "Mother". Second was the man with
the face of the carved bust in his mother's closet, Tussah. Third was the
tall, blue-eyed man who said "We're your parents." and "Your fathers and
your mothers." This blue-eyed man is presumed to be Silk's biological
father. Fourth was the reticent woman who is not described and who is his
presumptive biological mother. With this much there is little, if any,
dispute that I am aware of.

Where Crane came from, blue eyes were so rare that Silk's were only the
third pair he had ever seen. Though not so rare in Viron, Silk estimated
that only about one in one-hundred people there had them. He said he took
particular note of people with blue eyes because he had been teased about
his as a kid. Nineteen-year-old Chenille, who wished she had blue eyes but
didn't (they are several times described as being "dark eyes"), told Silk
that there was one current and one recent, former whore (Arolla) at Orchid's
with blue eyes. Since Crane served as whorehouse physician, presumably those
two were the other two blue-eyed people he had seen before meeting Silk. If
that leaves out Hyacinth, I can't help it. Mamelta must have been the fourth
person Crane saw who had blue eyes.

Typhon's eye color is not given in the Urth cycle, but he has yellow hair,
which is often the case for people with blue eyes, just as is the case with
Silk. So it is very possible, even likely, that Typhon had blue eyes. Some
hold that the tall, blue-eyed man in Silk's vision was Typhon. It's
possible, but if so it's the only instance that I am aware of of Typhon
being depicted as monocephalic in the LONG SUN or SHORT SUN books. After
all, Silk noted the blue eyes but, if he saw two pairs of eyes and two
heads, he didn't think them worth mentioning.

I don't know Tussah's eye color, but his facial features ("wide, flat
cheeks, the narrow eyes, the high, rounded forehead, and the generous mouth"
[CALDE, chap. 10] ) were so much like Chenille's that the resemblance is
what convinced Silk that she was Tussah's natural daughter. Chenille's "dark
eyes" are later specifically labeled as brown, and Horn thought that beneath
her dyed curls her hair was "dark". (EXODUS, 338) Horn also said that Silk
didn't look like Chenille.

By now, anyone who cares will have guessed where I'm going with this. Crush
has insisted that both Tussah and Horn are clones of Typhon and that the
tall, blue-eyed man in Silk's vision was Typhon. I don't have proof that
Tussah wasn't a clone of Typhon, so I'll let that go, for now. But I do find
it more than a little queer that Silk failed to notice that both men in his
vision looked exactly alike. I would be even more amazed that Silk also
failed to notice how much Horn looked like a fifteen-year-old version of the
men in his vision -- he could see the resemblance of the older teen,
Chenille, to Tussah, after all -- but for the fact that Silk didn't see the
resemblance because it wasn't there.

Chapter 1, NIGHTSIDE:
"With a slight shock of insight, Silk realized that this unaccustomed
perpendicularity was in imitation of his own, and that Horn's clear, dark
eyes were very nearly level with his."

Dark eyes, like Chenille's. Brown eyes. If the blue-eyed man in the vision
was Typhon, then Horn can not be a clone of his.

-Roy




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