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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Nice list, James. Couple of points relating
to the bits below:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>I'm not convinced that "No human embryos at all"
should be taken as applying without exception to every city in the Whorl.
Horn could not reasonably know this, after all. I would tend to say that
they were all destroyed in Viron, and Viron was reasonably well-ordered, so they
were probably all or nearly all destroyed in most cities. But that's
really just a case of what I prefer in literary terms - as far as the story is
concerned Silk is more or less unique even if there are probably some cities
here and there that we didn't hear of in which embryos engineered for leadership
are present.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>With regard to Mucor, I think the line simply means
that without Silk, Mucor would eventually have starved herself to death or
otherwise killed herself.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>- Gerry Quinn</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
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style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV
style="FONT: 10pt arial; BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=crushtv@gmail.com href="mailto:crushtv@gmail.com">James Wynn</A>
</DIV>It is unlikely that Silk was originally the only one with gifts of his
sort. However, he might have been the last. Or there might be others in plain
sight. They would undoubtably be persons in positions of
leadership--leadership gained without certification or struggle. His gift was
the ineffable power of leadership. Silk had qualities that Urth scientists had
quantified as those that caused others to follow him, that is leadership.
Typhon, a test tube baby himself, probably had those enhancements as well. He
had that "voice of command" and telepathic ability. It's implied that the
embryos were granted disparate abilities, but it is hard to imagine that
anyone would have thought only one with Silk's would be necessary. By the the
time of the evacuation, the human embryos had all been lost. Perhaps, they
were all located beneath Viron because it was the Cargo most like the
Commonwealth. Or perhaps Viron's embryos were raided last of all. Some animal
embryos survived. <BR><BR>The relevant citations are below:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>"We [colonists] had shared out everything when we landed, we who
had come from Old Viron and the new people, the sleepers, the ones who had
slept three hundred years in the caverns of the Whorl. Do you know about
them, Mora? Their memories had been tampered with, like Mamelta's, so they
were confused in strange ways. [snip] The tools and the seeds and the frozen
embryos, though there weren't many of those. No human embryos at all. They'd
been taken, every one of them. Special talents, you see-untamed and
unpredictable abilities that were supposed to help us; but they had been
taken by those who had broken the seals. Taken and sold, long ago. [...]
Silk had been one of them. Silk had been our leader. That was his talent,
leadership. People trusted and followed him, and he tried-I tried very hard,
Mora, not to mislead them, not to lead them astray and betray them. But Silk
had remained behind in the Whorl with Hyacinth, and it almost destroyed
us."<BR>IGJ, Chap 10<BR></BLOCKQUOTE>-------------<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>"There were human embryos among their supplies, ancient embryos
preserved by cold far beyond that of the coldest winter nights. Sometimes
the looters simply left those embryos. Sometimes they wantonly destroyed
them, and sometimes they took and sold them, packing them in ice in an
attempt to preserve them until they could be implanted. [...] There were
human embryos as well. There were also seeds, kept frozen like the embryos,
so that they would sprout even after hundreds of years; but it is with the
human embryos that you and I have to do, because Mucor was such an embryo.
So was Patera Silk. I set out to explain Mucor, but there would be no
Mucor—or so I believe—without Patera Silk. Nor would either of them exist
without Pas, who was called Typhon on the Short Sun Whorl.” <BR>RttW, Chap
6<BR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>Personally I find it enigmatic that the Rajan claims
here that "there would be no Mucor without Patera Silk".
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