(urth) 5HC

[Richard Simon]

On 27/08/2014 14:42, Marc Aramini wrote:
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>Luckily, we still have the description of the girls legs on Ste. Anne as grotesquely long and like staffs which jives with the heronlike walk of abos in "A Story" and we still have the head scars on one of the men who arrested Marsch who looked like the other two (scarring of the head which has significance in Fifth Head for an abo man of reproductive age).  We also have the fact that the three men resemble each other so much as to be of a family (though of course the mundane explanation is the bottleneck effect of a genetically similar population, I know).  

I believe the human populations of both planets are the descendants of three separate waves of settlement.

The last wave comprises the newcomers from Earth who now form the dominant culture. They invaded and overcame the French settlers who, a few generations earlier, had formed the second wave.

The first wave came from Earth a very long time before these two, possibly before the evolution of modern Homo Sapiens, although they were able to interbreed with modern humans. On Ste. Croix, their bastard descendants live as an underclass — as slaves, among the 'demimondaines' of Saltimbanque Street ('Marsch's' companion of the house is described as having 'grotesquely long' legs) and so on — though it seems there has been some interbreeding with the settlers from the next two waves. On Ste. Anne, they were the Annese – the 'abos', Sandwalker's people and have also interbred with the succeeding settler populations. The 'abos' and 'new' Earthmen are well integrated, though few will admit to the taint of aboriginal ancestry, apart from an eccentric beggar who claims it falsely.

The Shadow Children are what is left of the serpentine, shapeshifting aborigines of Ste. Anne. When the first humans arrived on that planet, the aborigines imitated them and mingled with them – though, of course, there was no interbreeding; that would not have been possible. However, it seems that at least some of the original human settlers resisted this, and were able to see the SC for what they really were. Perhaps the others fell victim to the drug to which the SC are habituated. We know – from 'Marsch's' 'story' – that the drug helps the SC construct their reality and makes it more convincing to those who are under its influence. Sandwalker's people have learned to shun the drug and resist inoculation with it.

The SC retain, dreamlike, fragments of human culture they absorbed from the settlers of the first wave. Thus they can speak of starcrossers and the legend of Atlantis, things Sandwalker's people (the original humans, whose original culture and technology have perished, and who live like – what's the word Wolfe uses? – dendritic hunter-gatherers on Ste. Anne, have long forgotten.

It is the Shadow Children who have their brains in their thoraxes.
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