(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 78, Issue 38

[Gerry Quinn]

Nice list, James.  Couple of points relating to the bits below:

I'm not convinced that "No human embryos at all" should be taken as applying without exception to every city in the Whorl.  Horn could not reasonably know this, after all.  I would tend to say that they were all destroyed in Viron, and Viron was reasonably well-ordered, so they were probably all or nearly all destroyed in most cities.  But that's really just a case of what I prefer in literary terms - as far as the story is concerned Silk is more or less unique even if there are probably some cities here and there that we didn't hear of in which embryos engineered for leadership are present.

With regard to Mucor, I think the line simply means that without Silk, Mucor would eventually have starved herself to death or otherwise killed herself.

- Gerry Quinn


  From: James Wynn 
  It is unlikely that Silk was originally the only one with gifts of his sort. However, he might have been the last. Or there might be others in plain sight. They would undoubtably be persons in positions of leadership--leadership gained without certification or struggle. His gift was the ineffable power of leadership. Silk had qualities that Urth scientists had quantified as those that caused others to follow him, that is leadership. Typhon, a test tube baby himself, probably had those enhancements as well. He had that "voice of command" and telepathic ability. It's implied that the embryos were granted disparate abilities, but it is hard to imagine that anyone would have thought only one with Silk's would be necessary. By the the time of the evacuation, the human embryos had all been lost. Perhaps, they were all located beneath Viron because it was the Cargo most like the Commonwealth. Or perhaps Viron's embryos were raided last of all. Some animal embryos survived. 

  The relevant citations are below:

    "We [colonists] had shared out everything when we landed, we who had come from Old Viron and the new people, the sleepers, the ones who had slept three hundred years in the caverns of the Whorl. Do you know about them, Mora? Their memories had been tampered with, like Mamelta's, so they were confused in strange ways. [snip] The tools and the seeds and the frozen embryos, though there weren't many of those. No human embryos at all. They'd been taken, every one of them. Special talents, you see-untamed and unpredictable abilities that were supposed to help us; but they had been taken by those who had broken the seals. Taken and sold, long ago. [...] Silk had been one of them. Silk had been our leader. That was his talent, leadership. People trusted and followed him, and he tried-I tried very hard, Mora, not to mislead them, not to lead them astray and betray them. But Silk had remained behind in the Whorl with Hyacinth, and it almost destroyed us."
    IGJ, Chap 10

  -------------

    "There were human embryos among their supplies, ancient embryos preserved by cold far beyond that of the coldest winter nights. Sometimes the looters simply left those embryos. Sometimes they wantonly destroyed them, and sometimes they took and sold them, packing them in ice in an attempt to preserve them until they could be implanted. [...] There were human embryos as well. There were also seeds, kept frozen like the embryos, so that they would sprout even after hundreds of years; but it is with the human embryos that you and I have to do, because Mucor was such an embryo. So was Patera Silk. I set out to explain Mucor, but there would be no Mucor-or so I believe-without Patera Silk. Nor would either of them exist without Pas, who was called Typhon on the Short Sun Whorl." 
    RttW, Chap 6


  Personally I find it enigmatic that the Rajan claims here that "there would be no Mucor without Patera Silk". 

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