(urth) Marble on Urth

Roy C. Lackey rclackey at stic.net
Wed Jun 1 12:19:44 PDT 2011


First, I want to address the recently debated issue of how long it had been
since the _Whorl_ left Urth, because it may have some slight relevance to
what follows. The date on the letter Quetzal had sent to all the manteions,
in which he endorsed Silk as calde, was "30th Nemesis 332" (CALDE, p-173).
Silkhorn, shortly after the Battle of Blanko, put the number of years at
about 355 (IGJ, 323). Estimates of how much time had passed on Urth since
Rigoglio had lived there ranged between 2,500 and 1,000 years (IGJ, 325).

James Wynn wrote, quoted, wrote:
> >> 3)  They absorbed her personality so readily because that is what
> >> chem-technology is designed to do. That's why Marble can remember
Urth's
> >> short sun.
> > I don't follow this - why in any case would Marble not remember the
> > short sun? Wasn't she created under it?
>
> Does she recount a single memory regarding her life under Urth's sun as
> does Rigoglo?

She remembered when she first woke, naked, in what seems to be a factory or
storage room containing other fem chems, and trying to boot up (EXODUS,
119-20). She was given clothes suitable for a maid (125).

She remembered standing in a sun-drenched field in a line of servants as
they and chem soldiers waited for the transport ship that would take them up
to the _Whorl_:
----------------
    Enormous darkness high overhead, blotting the sun-drenched field, the
straggling line of servants in which she had stood, and the soldiers'
precise column. She had seen it descend from the sky, at first a fleck of
black that had seemed no bigger than a flake of soot; had said, "It looks so
dirty." A soldier had overheard her and called, "Why don't you dust it?"
    Everyone had laughed, and she had laughed, too, though she had been
humiliated to tears, had tears been possible for her. Angry and defiant, she
had met his eyes and sensed the longing there. And longed.
    How tall he had been! How big and strong! So much steel! (CALDE, 285)
-----------------


> I contend her memories are from those of a bio. Additionally, there is
> this from Nightside.
>
>     "Maytera Marble could remember the short sun, a disk of orange fire;
>     and it seemed to her that the chief virtue of that old sun had been
>     that no list, no menu, ever appeared unbidden beneath its rays."
>
> Either:
>
> 1) This makes no sense because until relatively recently no list or menu
> appeared to Marble "unbidden" under the Long Sun either.
>

Apparently Marble's body had been on the fritz for quite some time. She
stopped voluntarily calling up the list of defective parts a long time
before, probably because there was nothing she could do about getting new
parts or getting her old ones repaired:

"She could bring up a list of her nonfunctioning and defective parts
whenever she chose. She had not chosen to do so for close to a century; but
from time to time, most often when the cenoby lay on the night side of the
long sun, that list came up of itself." (NIGHTSIDE, 30)

> 2) The reason no such list or menu appeared to her under Urth's sun was
> because she was a bio.

We both know that Marble was a chem, not a bio. No list of defective parts
appeared to her on Urth because she had none; she was fresh from the
factory. (Hammerstone said that chems had been stockpiled for ten years
before being transported up to the _Whorl_.) Her name, when she was the
"maid-of-all-work" at the cenoby on Sun Street, had been Magnesia. Even the
housemaid Molybdenum, Hammerstone's lost sweetheart, had been manufactured
on Urth, so I don't see how you could conclude that either chem maid had
ever been a bio on Urth. And fat Betel died some 45-50 years before the
opening of NIGHTSIDE, nearly three centuries after the _Whorl_ left Urth.

-Roy




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