(urth) inhumi secret

[Jerry Friedman]

> From: nate jarvis <natejarv at gmail.com>
> If everyone on Earth stops having sex or doing needle drugs for what?
> a year? then we all go and get AIDS tests, then AIDS is cured.
> 
> THAT sounds more likely than everyone being nice to one another to
> wipe out vampire-like monsters they'd rather lynch.
> 
> Horn seems to to feel if he revealed the secret it would spell trouble
> for the inhumi as well.

Thanks to Andrew Mason for pointing out the "too heavy for our hands"
line, which I'd forgotten.

Also, even if one person or a few people start treating others better, it
would be bad for the inhumi.  And it would help others treat each other
better, which in turn would help others.  In particular, if people raised
their children better, the children would grow into better people, and so
forth--and I don't need to say that parents' effects on their children are
an important theme of BotSS.  I think Wolfe wants us to picture this
and connect people's effect on the inhumi to parents' effect on their
children.

(What would happen if an inhumu got the Rajan's personality or
spirit or ka or whatever they get?)

On the subject of Wolfe recommending an impossible spreading
transformation of society, let me quote some non-fiction, "The Best
Introduction to the Mountains":

"He [Tolkien] uncovered a forgotten wisdom among the barbarian tribes who had proved (against all expectation) strong enough to overpower the glorious civilizations of Greece and Rome; and he had not only uncovered but understood it. He understood that their strength -- the irresistible strength that had smashed the legions -- had been the product of that wisdom, which has now been ebbing away bit by bit for a thousand years. 
  
"Having learned that, he created in Middle-earth a means of displaying it in the clearest and most favourable possible light. Its reintroduction would be small -- just three books among the overwhelming flood of books published every year -- but as large as he could make it; and he was very conscious (no man has been more conscious of it than he) that an entire forest might spring from a handful of seed. What he did, then, was to plant in my consciousness and yours the truth that society need not be as we see it around us. 
  
[Government chains us.] 
  
"It need not be so. We might have a society in which the laws were few and just, simple, permanent, and familiar to everyone -- a society in which everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder because everyone lived by the same changeless rules, and everyone knew what those rules were. When we had it, we would also have a society in which the lack of wealth was not reason for resentment but a spur to ambition, and in which wealth was not a cause for self-indulgence but a call to service. We had it once, and some time in this third millennium we shall have it again..."
 
Jerry Friedman