(urth) vanished people=Hieros

[Jeff Wilson]

On 11/6/2011 8:50 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> Another thing I wanted to comment on is the scene in Urth where Sev looks up and Apheta is peering at him from Green[sic].
>
> I'm sure there's SOME cosmological hint there I simply have not been equipped to handle; I never paid enough attention to the hierogrammates and their tools.


 From the end of Chapter XXII:

"The sphere was like a wall. At its center, just as I had seen it 
pictured on board, was the ship.
I have written that I sought to stop. It was difficult, and soon I could 
not resist. It may be that the void held some attraction like that of a 
world. Or perhaps it was only that the pressure of the wind on the air 
held static around me was so strong that I was driven forward.
Or perhaps the ship had some hold upon us both. If I dared, I would say 
that my destiny drew me, yet Gunnie cannot have been drawn by the same 
destiny, though perhaps her quite different fate drew her toward the 
same place. For if it were merely the wind, or the insensate hunger of 
matter for matter, why was Apheta not drawn with us?
I will leave it to you to explain these things. Drawn I was, and Gunnie 
too I saw her flying through the void behind me, twisting and whirling 
as the universe twisted and whirled, saw her just as one leaf twirling 
in a spring storm might see another. Somewhere behind or before us, 
above us or below us, was a wide circle of light, spinning, frantically 
spinning, a thing like Lune, if such a thing as a moon of the most 
brilliant white can be imagined. Gunnie fluttered across it once or 
twice before she was lost in the diamond-decked blackness. (And once it 
seemed to me—and still seems when I call that frantic memory forth—that 
I saw Apheta's face as she leaned from that moon.) "

This demonstrates that the Yesodis are able to open channels into Briah 
to faciliate sending and receiving massive objects like people as well 
as light, which facilitates spying, even without mirrors at at the 
immediate terminus.

There's another moon-like apparition of Apheta in XLVIII, but Sev admits 
he's drunk and sleepy, so it's not compelling.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >