I just went through episodes 61-64 in a space of two days, and really loved all the observations and discussions you guys have made.
Following are few tidbits of my observations
When the fighting was over, the military commander here to our good fortune made a decision which proved to have great consequences. Perhaps I should say he made two. First he decreed that every conquered Frenchman and French woman was subject to compulsory labor to rebuild installations destroyed by war - but he allowed those who could raise money to purchase exemptions.
They were never wholly stripped of authority, and now they are an influential element once more in life of our world. At the same time they were regaining lost ground it became customary to increase the number of unremunerated workers from other sources, principally criminals and orphaned children.
No, I must have been telling you that on saint Croix some men are free- in fact, most men are free. While on Saint Anne and, for that matter, Earth, most are slaves.
Although you guys have gone in great lengths regarding the discussion of slavery, I am just amazed like how dissimilar the culture of both planets have gone on to develop, under the same colonizing force.
Saint Anne although it is not an ideal culture, seems a bit better than Saint Croix, which seems to me like a complete corrupt society, where slavery and money are means of power.
And what does Constant mean when he says that most men on Saint Croix are free ?
I think what Constant may be referring to the fact that although a man has a job on Earth,, and means of living, but at the end of the day he has an authority above him, to whom he reports to, and who is ultimately responsible for his pay.
May be Wolfe may be referring to Forlesen short story where in he shows us the meaningless everyday corporate life.
Constant
I read Phantom comics when I was young, and he always referred to as Ghost who walks in the comics, because everybody thought that he could not be killed, but the secret is that their were generations of people playing the role of Phantom, could something similar be happening with Constant ?
Unfortunately I lost the tapes while I was in the field.
At Roncevaux I had the opportunity to catch up on the literature of my profession.
All the tapes which the officer has gone through so far, have they been doctored by V.R.T ? Because V.R.T is quite capable of imitating someone's voice.
Also all the facts he writes about Dollo's law just seem like something written by a bookish experience, rather than an experienced anthropologist.
Roncevaux they are convinced that the free people are extinct.
The ab original culture was, and is, dendritic.
I think we should entertain the possibility that the abos as a species may could have gone extinct after they came in contact with the humans.
And although they may still exist among us by imitating the human form, but as a species they must have surely gone extinct, and those living among the humans just can't remember how they existed previously or how to reconnect with ones existing in the back of the beyond.
I think you guys did an excellent job when you analyzed the word dendritic, it means that abos and the trees are heavily linked, but even in A Story, we do not get how exactly this species reproduce, and there seems to be some involvement of trees in it.
Cassilla's saliva had streaked his body; now he felt pleasure in removing it.
This kind of other worldly experience took place in A Story, when Sandwalker is given a small part of drug by the shadow child, immediately he feels
Every part of him had vanished, so that he saw without eyes and felt without skin, hanging, a naked worm of consciousness amid blazing glories.
Could the above two experiences be linked with each other ?
I have the same ability, though not to the extent she did; but I chose to cover everything with this beard instead, because I was afraid of it - frightened of myself.
I thought, then, that my mother was somehow in my cell with me, for I saw her eyes in the dark.
How could my mother have taught me to become a man? She knew nothing.She tried to teach me all I would need to know to live where I was not living and am not living now. How am I to know what there was of this place and that place I did not learn?
And now we have a VRT who is an human, abo hybrid he has neither skills to survive as a human, and neither can he keep living as an abo is the back of the beyond, because either he can't find any abo like him or maybe they exist in such a form, that is not possible to interact with them.
In human society he must be despised as he is an hybrid, because any such children which are born from colonizers and existing culture are always considered an abomination in any society, because a colonizing force is always considered as evil by the aborigine culture, and children born from such are always considered as abomination.
But in this case it is not the abos who despise Victor, but basically the French colonists, so may due to this he calls the abos the Free people, because their society does not have boundaries like the human society, where each one is identified as per his race/region/religion.
Also VRT idol worships his mother as she is an abo, and from the instances which he recalls she has been kind to him, so clearly his motivation for coming to Saint Croix is to find his mother, because he searches for her in the back of the beyond for a period of three years.
Sumant Nankar: "Also VRT idol worships his mother as she is an abo, and from the instances which he recalls she has been kind to him, so clearly his motivation for coming to Saint Croix is to find his mother, because he searches for her in the back of the beyond for a period of three years." That would indeed give him a motive to travel to St. Croix (in addition to the possibility of obtaining a position at the University). As we are told that VRT"s father had apparently prostituted his mother, a fact which VRT probably knew, it could give other reasons than the carnal for why he was spending so much time at the Maisson de Chien - he could have been trying to find his mother among the prostitutes. As Casilla, the apparently Abo slave whom the unnamed officer is using sexually, is described in an identical manner (her face appearing older after sex), it is at least possible that Casilla could be VRT's mother, which would be pretty tragic - the officer listening to the tapes of the interrogation of VRT while having sex with his mother. This is yet another parallel between the Maitre of the first novella, an unnamed intelligence asset who is essentially a glorified pimp, with the Maitre of the third novella - an unnamed officer who is using a prostituted slave sexually.
You went on quite a binge! As we draw nearer to the end of the book it's getting harder and harder to comment on your observations without tipping my hand too soon, but I'm really excited for your thoughts on our conclusions and solutions.