(urth) lameness

[James Wynn]

> But the daughter of Tussah's body Chenille has dark eyes, and her body 
> type is one more like Auks, according to Horn.  I can't see that 
> Tussah is a clone of Typhon at all, because Silk is stated to have a 
> runner's physique and look nothing at all like Chenille in that last 
> comparison scene, as if they are not genetically in any way shape or 
> form related.
>

Despite the reference in the characters section, I've never been happy 
with the idea of her as a NATURAL "natural daughter". Nothing gets 
drummed in over and over in the text as the mannish quality of Chenille. 
But as the natural daughter of Tussah it would be unlikely that she 
would have blue eyes if her mother's eyes were brown.

> The text does nothing to undercut this, indeed showing the calde's 
> face as one of his parents, and another face as the other.
>

I had this conversation with Roy at one point. He waved it away with "My 
reading is different." Let's go back to the text in Chapter 9 of "Calde":

"Two men and two women. He blinked and stared and blinked again.
"Oh, Silk! My son!" She was in his arms and he in hers, melting in tears 
of joy. "Mother!" "Silk, my son!"
The whorl was filth and stink, futility and betrayal; this was 
everything--joy and love, freedom and purity.
"You must, my lad." A man's voice, the voice of which Lemur had been a 
species of mockery. Looking up he saw the carved brown face from his 
mother's closet.
"We're your parents." He was tall and blue-eyed. "Your fathers and your 
mothers."
The other woman did not speak but her eyes spoke truth.
"You were my mother," he said. "I understand." He looked down at his own 
beautiful mother. "You will always be my mother. Always!"
"We'll be waiting, Silk my son. All of us. Remember."

Clever, clever, Wolfe. There's no intimation of what the other face 
looked like. Only ONE father speaks. This is a categorical error of the 
kind that is so common in Wolfe. He does it all the time: A someone 
speaks. and then there is a new line in the text and the person speaks 
again. It's unusual in books general but it is very common in Wolfe's 
writing and this is not the only place it happen even in The Book of the 
Long Sun. But people assume one talks and then the other ONLY because 
they believe the faces are different. We only have the description of 
ONE of the fathers' faces.

> There are a lot of reasons Tussah can't be a clone of Pas, and not the 
> least of which would be that Councillor's recognition, like Lemur, 
> whose body is supposedly built after SOMEONE Silk sees in his parental 
> vision - probably not the Calde, that's for sure.
>

If Lemur expected people not to notice that he had had a whole-body 
prosthesis then his chem body and voice must have been made to look like 
his original (just as Potto's body was chubby and hardly god-like). In 
fact, there is plenty of evidence that that is the case. The fact that 
Silk's father had Lemur's voice is another can of worms that doesn't 
bother me at all--I have a ready explanation, but I don't think anyone 
else does.

> I think Lemur's appearance is certainly modeled after Pas.
>

Heh heh heh.

u+16b9
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