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From: "Tony Ellis" <tony.ellis@futurenet.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) Easter stuff
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 13:22:36 +0100

Lots of interesting posts while I was away from my pc for Easter. A few
thoughts:

Allan Lloyd wrote (of Kevin Malone)

> This story is to me one of Gene’s more obvious Christian parables. The
> clues in the text
> are almost too many to mention...
>
Welcome, Allan. I suppose it's too much to hope that your e-mail was a
victim of international datelines, and that the actual date it was sent
was a day earlier than the date shown? Only Fooling. Sorry.

Roy wrote:

> 3) Who was the beautiful, weeping woman Sev saw in the loggia of the
> Secret House, being led away by six Praetorians? Ch. XLI, _Urth_ This was
> right after resurrecting the dead assassin and right before emerging behind
> the throne. He can't recall who she is.
>
She's the Contessa in Dr Talos's play, who relates seeing a mysterious
figure as she was led away by guards. (I must admit, I thought this was
what you had in mind when you suggested that the play was changing the
future rather than reporting it.)


Mitchell A. Bailey wrote: (Of the Nature of the Aborigines of St. Anne)

> The strangest inhabitant of a certain green world was one which I,
> taking a cue from Mr. Borski, will call the pleiomorph...
>
As you say, the various explanations for what has happened on St Anne
are so finely balanced it may be that we are supposed to choose our own.
Here's why I haven't chosen yours:

> It may well have come not to possess what we would call a natural form
> of its own, so completely did it live in disguise. The Shadow
> Children remember them as wormlike creatures which lived in holes
> beneath the roots of trees.
>
What the Old Wise One actually says is "'We had no names before men came
out of the sky... We were mostly long, and lived in holes between the
roots of trees.'" My point being, the Shadow Children remember
-themselves- as being this indigenous, primitive lifeform.

The Old Wise One is, of course, an unreliable narrator. Earlier he
speaks of the Shadow Children as the space travellers, and Sandwalker's
people as the indigenous shape-changers, which ties into your
"Atlantean" interpretation. -But-, he later takes this back. The Wise
Old One is a telepathic construct, and he is influenced by the minds
that make him. When he is being generated only by the last Shadow Child
and by Sandwalker, he says "Now I am half a man, and know that we were
always here..."

It depends on how much credence you want to give to that remark, but for
a long, long time now it's been my theory that the Shadow Children were
on St Anne first. They may have been indigenous or, as the Wise Old One
also says "it may be that all are one stock" and that they are the
remnant of a truly unimaginably ancient human migration. Either way,
they were telepathic, and had a very tenuous sense of self. When the
"Atlanteans" arrived from Earth, they so impressed these creatures that
they began to emulate them, to the extent that eventually they came to
think they -were- the humans. At the same time, the real "Atlantean"
colonists became so seduced by the dreaming life of St Anne that they
lost first their technology and then even the ability to use tools. They
became Sandwalker's people.

> Quite probably no Terran of the latter wave of colonization, French or
> English-speaking, ever encountered or spoke to a Shadow Child personally
> after that first landing
>
No? What about "animals shaped like people" Mary Blount remembers
playing with as a little girl? "...the children, the little ones, you
know." What about Robert Culot's grandfather, who knew that there were
"many races" of Annese, and saw something "sometimes like a man,
sometimes like old wood."?


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/



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