(urth) vanished people=Hieros

[David Stockhoff]

On 11/9/2011 1:56 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
>
> --- On Wed, 11/9/11, António Pedro Marques<entonio at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> From: António Pedro Marques<entonio at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
>> To: "The Urth Mailing List"<urth at lists.urth.net>
>> Date: Wednesday, November 9, 2011, 10:36 AM
>> David Stockhoff wrote (09-11-2011
>> 18:32):
>>> On 11/8/2011 5:36 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>>>> *From:* Marc Aramini<mailto:marcaramini at yahoo.com>
>>>> **
>>>>> To have it be any city other than Nessus would simply create an insoluble puzzle ...
>>>> Only if you reject the possibility that two different cities could be similar in certain respects.
>>>> - Gerry Quinn
>>> So, two cities by a river could be made of stone with clustered rocket landers as towers? That's clearly possible, but which cities would those be?

>>> Most cities are by rivers.
>>> Cities not made of stone would not physically endure long
>>> after abandoned.
>>> The rocket tower is the one linking element. Acceptable,
>>> but not strong.
>>>
> The other linking element is how when he thinks about the cities he is somehow "reminded" of the other one.  Does Paris remind you of New York? maybe, but Houston remind you of Seattle or Thrax remind you of Nessus?
>
> The narrator has shown he can't make identifications when he has a reason to deny them: NO, I told you I'm not Silk.  "Looked in the mirror?"  Not Silk! "read this passage?"  Okay, [nodding] I'm Silk.  His denial is STRONG.
>
> So the rocket is not the only linking element (and indeed, though I risk weakening my own argument, it's not even entirely clear from context whether that tower is originally from the city or an old abandoned one from the Whorl, but Wolfe is ambiguous as always)

The word your argument is missing here, Marc, is "iconic." That rocket 
lander is iconic. It means something in the Sun Cycle: it is itself. To 
recognize it on Green it is to understand either that there is a 
spacefaring civilization in Briah that builds cities out of rockets or 
that this is Nessus. It's like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes.

How it got there is another story. Demonstrating that will require an 
accumulation of evidence that may not be achievable. But this is not a 
murder trial with its standard of "beyond reasonable doubt." The 
conclusion is known---all you have to do is get there.