(urth) Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy

Roy C. Lackey rclackey at stic.net
Wed Nov 16 12:30:52 PST 2011


António Pedro Marques quoted and wrote:

> Marc Aramini wrote (16-11-2011 18:50):
> > --- On Wed, 11/16/11, Roy C. Lackey<rclackey at stic.net>  wrote:
> >> First of all, Babbie's spirit-travel body looks generally like a man's
> >> body, but not quite. His hands aren't really hands; his hands have only
> >> two big fingers, suggestive of his normal cloven hooves (RTTW, 354).
> >> And he wears glasses (346). Yet the spirit-traveler's body is supposed
> >> to be a manifestation of how that person perceives himself to be at his
> >> core, in his heart, if you will. Horn never wore glasses.
> >
> > Scylla in Oreb looks like a mix between a big fat crow and something
more
> > humanistic, but defintely not purely like the human.  Animals possessed
> > don't seem to look purely human.
>
> In support of this:
>
> - the inhumi look completely human because they have only one soul, and
that
> is the human one they develop from their prey;
>
> - the Rajan looks a bit like Horn because there's still some Horn in him,
> but there is Silk also (and Pas?), so there's more than one soul;
>
> - Oreb looks strangely anthropoid because there's Scylla in him along with
> the real Oreb;
>
> - when Scylla leaves, Oreb, for all his specialness, looks just like Oreb;

On the final astral trip of the books, when Cilinia's ghost is put to rest,
the bird and the girl are separated. Oreb goes back to looking just like a
bird, and the bit of Scylla in him manifests itself as a young girl (RTTW,
387-388). She sat on the floor with Severian and the others (389). She was
over in the corner of the mausoleum looking at her coffin while the bird sat
on Hoof's shoulder (391). And the girl stopped talking like Oreb (392).

-Roy




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