(urth) vanished people=Hieros

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Tue, 11/8/11, António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's just that 'the City of the Inhumi is Nessus' is an
> extraordinary claim 
> *even considering that Green is Urth's future*.
> _______________________________________________

In real life it would be, not in a Dickensian type of fiction where coincidences and shared settings and unity of setting and theme are at least a possibility.  How else could we ever make the comparison if Gene did not give us the comparitive information?  Would the city of the inhumi map to Thrax or Saltus?  No, of course not, and there is no hinting that they remind him of those places, where Silk never goes.

For me, the mere fact that him looking in the mirror and remembering things Silk remembers should indicate to our post OBW narrator that he is indeed the rebooted Silk, but he denies his senses  because he would have to accept harsh realities he cannot.  This directly applies to his inability to really see what he is looking at on the future Urth.  

In any case, problems in accepting it are not entirely my responsibility to close: I was looking for a mechanism, had the wrong one in mind, was prompted by a revelation that had resonance in the text and a possible mechanism - that does not happen with random jokes; I am satisfied at least that part of the setting is accounted for, and no ignorance of the narrator can undo that - he doesn't know who, when, or where he is a narrator who furthermore claims in the text "perhaps no one does" undertand exactly what's going on.

To have it be any city other than Nessus would simply create an insoluble puzzle ... unfortunately in this case I DO think it's insoluble, because even when the truth is presented categorically in 6 words only one or two people even entertain it as a possibility.  Wolfe obeys rules in his fiction, Chekov's gun style, but it isn't easy to see.  

I'm not certain anyone could ever have come up with that solution if Gene had not let it slip :(.  And no one believes it anyway except me and MAYBE one other list poster (confirmation bias, I know).  But with the hints in the text that provide a the narrator thinking about Green before the evil of the inhumi when he winds up on urth and the somewhat frequent comparisons between Nessus and the city of the inhumi and statements like "the city will look to the sky for a sign but no sign shall it have" or stuff like that, I am quite quite certain those words were sincere.