(urth) Planet of the Inhumi

[Roy C. Lackey]

Jeff Wilson wrote:
[snip]
> I wonder if the question of time frames might be addressed by tarting up
> my old PLANET OF THE APES hypothesis with a reverse plot-twist: Instead
> of Green and Blue being Lune and Ushas, maybe the conventionally driven
> Whorl was intended as some kind of round-trip sleeper mission for the
> benefit of Typhon's plans for the Urth, but the Outsider/the Yesodis
> redirected it to Blue and Green instead, so that it serves the
> Increate's purpose as a mission mission to the Inhumi and the Neighbors.

The ship was never intended for a round-trip mission. The internal time that
passed since launch was 332 years, as indicated by the date on that letter
that Quetzal had sent out to all the manteions endorsing Silk as Calde. The
infrastructure had been failing for decades; the retreating lake, messed up
weather, the Long Sun on the fritz, few living civilian chems, few working
glasses, etc.

Hammerstone figured that Pas had planned for the ship and things in it to
last for 200 or maybe 250 years. At the time he spoke, the ship had been
cooling its heals in the Blue-Green system for at least thirty years, since
the rebellion in Mainframe by the gods who didn't want their worshippers to
go away and leave them.

So much time had passed on Urth since Typhon died (unfettered, btw) behind
his curtain on Mt. Typhon that Nessus had grown far beyond the part where
Rigoglio had once lived, such that the neighborhood was in ruins and long
abandoned.

Wolfe said in the List Q & A that the Blue-Green system was the ship's
intended destination. It wasn't designed to make a round-trip.

-Roy