The Unholy Consult Post-Release SPOILER THREAD

[.H.]

6 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

On designing inchoroi to be damned - that's true. But why would you design them to seduce? That's not a warrior ability in any real way, and it's certainly not necessary to do horrible things when you're 10 feet tall and are strong.

One, I think that was just the fucked up flavor that Aurang came out as.  In other words, it was just some more damnation thrown into the mix, because when you are heaping up damnation, why not?  For example, I doubt that Sil was a real seducer...

Two, I think it probably was more minor when Inchoroi were massive and physically powerful.  But as the gafts took his strength, he fell back on what else he had, unable to reclaim that physical prowess again.  So, his frailty compounded his recourse became his only real strength perhaps, the only thing he could actually leverage then.

3 minutes ago, PapushiSun said:

I don't think they were. Their seductions are clearly sorcery, which the Inchoroi could've only learned after arrival on Earwa.

Not just sorcery, Aurang has grafts for pheramone production too.  He designed himself for it.

3 minutes ago, PapushiSun said:

I think I remember RSB's comment about the womb plague being a kluge. But I didn't read that as saying the womb plague being unintentional, just a rough workaround to accomplish the death of birth. Stopping births is necessary.

Nope, it was a boo-boo, through and through.  They were reverse engineering Nin'janjin's DNA to make Sranc and Bashrags.  To save their Nonman allies, Bakker told us, they made them immortal.  By accident, that same thing killed the women though.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, .H. said:

Well, actually it seems the pre-Arkfall they were pretty proficient warriors.  Sil sounds like he was pretty "built for war" and heck, even Aurang claims he wrestled Ciolgli himself and bested him.  He says it was "gaft after graft" that "sapped his monumental frame."  Plausibly some grafts also made Aurax into a grovelling idiot too, unfortunately.

That's all possible, and good points. 

That said, creating a weapon race whose gifts are hand-to-hand combat when you could instead, say, build tanks and airplanes and drones and the like seems really weird. You have the ability to wage massive biological combat via your creation, and instead you choose to create a bunch of randomly big dorks? My disbelief is riled. Now that we've confirmed that the Inchoroi aren't actually that awesome and are kind of stupid, it's hard for me to imagine that the thing that created them (and the thing that created Ark) is that dumb. 

I mean, seriously: why would your design of a space and dimension-tripping General Intelligence creature that needs to go to inhabited world after world and obliterate the population to a specific number or lower be 'well, we'll have winged demon-looking things with big dicks along with firebreathing dragons that talk about pussy a lot'. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you're wanting to go after world after world with various meh technological ability and you know you have to at least deploy the No-God for a while, I wouldn't want to wage a bunch of wars with biological units that are controllable but fallible and not particularly efficient; I'd wage a war with microbiology. 

The other thing to note is that somehow, the discovery of the Womb-Plague led to the discovery of the No-God. Do you have any other alternate hypothesis for this? I don't. Until it was revealed that the No-God was an Ark prosthesis nothing made sense to me, because I had thought the No-God was a synthesized version of something that the Consult did - but apparently it's not. 

1 hour ago, .H. said:

Indeed though, for all Aurang's crappy ideas, he does actually (round-aboutly) get the No-God functional, via Shae though.  So the rapey, seduction route almost works, really.  That doesn't mean it was the mods-operandi for every world.  In fact, I think it's just the opposite really.  The plan was descend on a world and have Ark watch it die screaming, checking for the "code flash."

The whole thing went to shit though when Ark fucked up and crashed into Eärwa, killing itself...

To be clear, Shae and Mek get the No-God going as far as I can tell. The Inchoroi couldn't do it for 4000 years. 

[Faint]

Is there no one taking the death of Kellhus at face value? That he died; no, it was not part of his master plan; and yes, he utterly failed.

I truly feel that this was what Bakker was going for and am somewhat flabbergasted that many are still operating under the old – in my opinion, outdated – default assumption (i.e., this is just another layer of a deeper plan).

I find this doubly strange since I think Esmenet and Kelmomas (or, rather, their interactions with Kellhus), were used quite effectively to lampshade this ultimate failure, particularly in the early chapters of this last book.

In any case, my view of things has piqued my curiosity even more for the final two books in the series now that the Dûnyain superhero has been done away.  I really credit Bakker with committing so strongly to the fake messiah narrative and upending the narrative expectations so thoroughly going into the last third of the story.

[.H.]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

That said, creating a weapon race whose gifts are hand-to-hand combat when you could instead, say, build tanks and airplanes and drones and the like seems really weird. You have the ability to wage massive biological combat via your creation, and instead you choose to create a bunch of randomly big dorks? My disbelief is riled. Now that we've confirmed that the Inchoroi aren't actually that awesome and are kind of stupid, it's hard for me to imagine that the thing that created them (and the thing that created Ark) is that dumb.

Well, there are a few plausible ways to square it, in my mind.

First, on why create a weapon's race?  Well, one, growing things is a bit easier, manufacturing wise, than making, say, a tank.  Like, for example, I can (along with my wife) make babies, but I can't make a tank (at least not one worth a shit).  All I really need is food.  To make a tank, I need a bunch of different raw materials and a fairly precise manufacturing technique.  Even without women, cloning with subtle changes seems less demanding than a complex industrial process, even if they are somewhat related.

Second, I think part of it though is also what the DûnSult boys tell us, that it's not just the number that is important, it's a process piece. So, where they could probably carpet bomb the planet and get the magic number, the "code flash" just won't be the same.  I think you need, so to speak, some malicious boots on the ground. 

15 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I mean, seriously: why would your design of a space and dimension-tripping General Intelligence creature that needs to go to inhabited world after world and obliterate the population to a specific number or lower be 'well, we'll have winged demon-looking things with big dicks along with firebreathing dragons that talk about pussy a lot'. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you're wanting to go after world after world with various meh technological ability and you know you have to at least deploy the No-God for a while, I wouldn't want to wage a bunch of wars with biological units that are controllable but fallible and not particularly efficient; I'd wage a war with microbiology. 

Well, only Wutteät was around before Eärwa, so it's not like dopey-dragon was an Ark design.  Heck, he even positively screams of Aurang design...

I mean, I get it, biological units are not as precise as mechanical ones, but those are harder to transport, harder to manufacture and probably don't give the malicious screaming, torture-driven results Ark is looking for.  Same reason why Tekne-nukes from orbit weren't the answer either.  Or carpet bombing plagues.

One advantage of biological units is that they are fueled by whatever can be eaten as food, where if you want to make a Soggomant tank, you'd need to extract whatever ore, process and refine it, smelt and forge it, then somehow smithy it into the shape you want.  That's provided you find whatever the hell Soggomant is made out of.  A bio unit needs only two gametes and food, in a way.  Plus, crunch all you want, they'll make more, if they breed and mature fast enough, you just need to feed it organic material, it would hardly matter what sort.

Another thing is, I don't know that with a fully functional Ark, that the No-God needs to be fielded at all.  Perhaps even, a functional Ark even "solves" it's "perceptual problem."  The Ark might well just need to sit and wait, code reading while the world suffers.

31 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

To be clear, Shae and Mek get the No-God going as far as I can tell. The Inchoroi couldn't do it for 4000 years. 

Good point.  They simply were not built to reverse engineer the Tekne.  Especially not Aurang, because it seems like he got a double helping of damnation heaping, but at least that worked to seduce those two...

[Kalbear]

17 minutes ago, .H. said:

Second, I think part of it though is also what the DûnSult boys tell us, that it's not just the number that is important, it's a process piece. So, where they could probably carpet bomb the planet and get the magic number, the "code flash" just won't be the same.  I think you need, so to speak, some malicious boots on the ground. 

To be really clear here, what they said wasn't that you need malicious boots - you need the Ark Prosthesis to be active. Causing things to die violently seems like a really odd thing, whereas simply having the prosthesis active and reading  the data as a requirement makes a lot more sense. Or are you saying that you need both the No-God active AND waging a messy, brutal war? 

17 minutes ago, .H. said:

Well, only Wutteät was around before Eärwa, so it's not like dopey-dragon was an Ark design.  Heck, he even positively screams of Aurang design...

I mean, I get it, biological units are not as precise as mechanical ones, but those are harder to transport, harder to manufacture and probably don't give the malicious screaming, torture-driven results Ark is looking for.  Same reason why Tekne-nukes from orbit weren't the answer either.  Or carpet bombing plagues.

Again, I'm cool with it being a biological system and not making planes, but if you're able to do things like the womb plague and the indigo plague, it's clear you can kill via plague. And that is WAY more efficient than beating things up or even shooting them with lasers, especially on a preindustrial planet. 

Heck, if you need torture and suffering, plagues are way better too. Dying noisily for a few weeks is far more suffering than getting killed by a sranc.

17 minutes ago, .H. said:

One advantage of biological units is that they are fueled by whatever can be eaten as food, where if you want to make a Soggomant tank, you'd need to extract whatever ore, process and refine it, smelt and forge it, then somehow smithy it into the shape you want.  That's provided you find whatever the hell Soggomant is made out of.  A bio unit needs only two gametes and food, in a way.  Plus, crunch all you want, they'll make more, if they breed and mature fast enough, you just need to feed it organic material, it would hardly matter what sort.

I don't argue any of this; I argue that the efficiency of a bunch of random 10-foot rape demons is about the least efficient design, especially if they need laser weapons to function properly. Create a bunch of bees that sting, then. Or create a bunch of waterbear types that also poison. (sidenote: if you're saying that you need people to die via messy death, using laser weapons should make it clear that this isn't the case either). 

17 minutes ago, .H. said:

Another thing is, I don't know that with a fully functional Ark, that the No-God needs to be fielded at all.  Perhaps even, a functional Ark even "solves" it's "perceptual problem."  The Ark might well just need to sit and wait, code reading while the world suffers.

Per the DunSult, that isn't accurate. You could be right, but it seems unlikely to me.

 

[jurble]

9 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

 Create a bunch of bees that sting, then. Or create a bunch of waterbear types that also poison.

Eh,not every planet they land on is presumably Earwa with its medieval tech.  The Inchoroi were needed to fight more advanced civilizations and presumably could with their Armory still functioning.

[.H.]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

To be really clear here, what they said wasn't that you need malicious boots - you need the Ark Prosthesis to be active. Causing things to die violently seems like a really odd thing, whereas simply having the prosthesis active and reading  the data as a requirement makes a lot more sense. Or are you saying that you need both the No-God active AND waging a messy, brutal war? 

Fair point, what he said was:

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“Our Salvation lies in the art of human extinction, not the fact,” his burnt brother explained

Which I took, possibly mistakenly, to mean that war is a fact of it, not just a simple resolution to a number.  I might have misinterpreted though.

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Again, I'm cool with it being a biological system and not making planes, but if you're able to do things like the womb plague and the indigo plague, it's clear you can kill via plague. And that is WAY more efficient than beating things up or even shooting them with lasers, especially on a preindustrial planet. 

Heck, if you need torture and suffering, plagues are way better too. Dying noisily for a few weeks is far more suffering than getting killed by a sranc.

It's true, but it seems that for some reason, in Bakker-verse, those things aren't the same.  I mean, I guess I could devise a reason why, but I don't know why for sure.

7 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I don't argue any of this; I argue that the efficiency of a bunch of random 10-foot rape demons is about the least efficient design, especially if they need laser weapons to function properly. Create a bunch of bees that sting, then. Or create a bunch of waterbear types that also poison. (sidenote: if you're saying that you need people to die via messy death, using laser weapons should make it clear that this isn't the case either). 

Well, indeed, the Heron Spear and it's ilk were probably there just in case something stubborn actually came along.  I don't think they really used them in a widespread manner, since there seem to only be a couple of them.

But we just don't know exactly what the Inchoroi looked like pre-Arkfall.  For all we know, they could have started off pretty svelte and over the millennia, have adopted graft after graft to accommodate various needs on various worlds (OK, huge alien dongs aside...).  Or maybe it was all part of what sort of death's really get the "code flowing."  I don't know, of course.

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Per the DunSult, that isn't accurate. You could be right, but it seems unlikely to me.

Hmm, not sure what I missed?  They mentioned needing the No-God to take the field?  Even so, that is with Ark-that-is-broken.  We can only speculate what Ark, fully functional, was capable of.

[Kalbear]

19 minutes ago, .H. said:

Fair point, what he said was:

Which I took, possibly mistakenly, to mean that war is a fact of it, not just a simple resolution to a number.  I might have misinterpreted though.

Right - it's a conversation about why they need the No-God. Kellhus asks why not nuke, and they respond because they need the No-God, basically. 

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Well, indeed, the Heron Spear and it's ilk were probably there just in case something stubborn actually came along.  I don't think they really used them in a widespread manner, since there seem to only be a couple of them.

Seemed like there were a lot, early on - that was what they relied on until the weapons broke and they didn't know how to fix them. There's a line somewhere about 'eventually their weapons of light failed'. 

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But we just don't know exactly what the Inchoroi looked like pre-Arkfall.  For all we know, they could have started off pretty svelte and over the millennia, have adopted graft after graft to accommodate various needs on various worlds (OK, huge alien dongs aside...).  Or maybe it was all part of what sort of death's really get the "code flowing."  I don't know, of course. 

So one big mystery is 'how does figuring out the womb-plague give clues to the No-God?' 

Another mystery is 'how does reducing the population to 144k stop the Outside from flowing back once it gets over 144k?' 

 

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Hmm, not sure what I missed?  They mentioned needing the No-God to take the field?  Even so, that is with Ark-that-is-broken.  We can only speculate what Ark, fully functional, was capable of.

The way the DunSult were talking seemed to me to indicate that this was how Ark functioned. We're talking about the very few sentences, mind you, so there's no real absolute answer, but here:

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"Only the Object can Shut the World against the Outside", the one eyed Dunyain explained.

"Yes..." the Aspect-Emperor said, "The one hundred and forty-four thousand..."

"The Object is a prosthesis of Ark." the teeth-baring Dunyain continued, his reflection no larger than a pinky for his position at the end. "A code lies buried in the ebb and flow of life on this World. The more deaths, the brighter this code burns, the more Ark can read..."

"So the Ark is the No-God?" Anasurimbor Kellhus asked.

"No", the burt Dunyain replied. "But then you know as much. "

"And what is it that I know?"

"That the No-God collapses Subject and Object", the one-eyed monk replied. "That it is the Absolute"

The way I interpret this is that the Ark prosthesis has been part of Ark and isn't something added to it. It wasn't created by the Consult, it was discovered, and they had no idea how to get it to work save by throwing bodies in. They need something that will reduce the population, and how they do it - by causing deaths while the No-God is running so that Ark can read it - is important to its function of sealing the Outside. All of this implies that this is the way that Ark had sealed worlds before. 

Now, I could be wrong here. It could be that it's just another random thing. 

30 minutes ago, Ajûrbkli said:

Eh,not every planet they land on is presumably Earwa with its medieval tech.  The Inchoroi were needed to fight more advanced civilizations and presumably could with their Armory still functioning.

Fighting more advanced civilizations is still more effective with biological weaponry at a microscale. It'd be far more effective to fight our planet right now with a bioplague than it would to fight it with winged demons that have laser weapons. It'd be more effective to fight us with swarms of deathbees too, for that matter. 

[Hello World]

27 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

So one big mystery is 'how does figuring out the womb-plague give clues to the No-God?' 

Where is it said that the womb-plague gave them clues about the No-God?

What happened was that they understood that they needed to use the No-God but they didn't know how. When they tried to make their nonmen allies immortal (Ninjanjin and the others who looked into the inverse fire) they realized that their serum kills female nonmen. So they decided to use it on the larger Nonmen population because at least it accomplishes part of the No-God's function which is to reduce the population in Earwa to 144K.

[Hello World]

1 hour ago, Faint said:

Is there no one taking the death of Kellhus at face value? That he died; no, it was not part of his master plan; and yes, he utterly failed.

I truly feel that this was what Bakker was going for and am somewhat flabbergasted that many are still operating under the old – in my opinion, outdated – default assumption (i.e., this is just another layer of a deeper plan).

I agree. I think it's one thing for Bakker to finally give us Kellhus's motives/plan and let us decide whether it makes him "good" or not. (For example, I think the DunSult's motives are perfectly legitimate.) It's another thing entirely for him to leave it up to the reader's interpretation whether what Kellhus said to the Consult in the end is true or not. Which is to say that we didn't really get an answer to the most important question in most reader's minds: what does Kellhus really want? The question only changed from "was he trying to save the world from the Consult or not?" to "does he want to turn the world into a living Hell or not?" And it could still go either way.

Which is why I'm not buying a lot of these comments here and on TSA. I'm just gonna go with the only explanation that gives the story any resolution for me: Kellhus failed, pure and simple. His "only Darkness" (Esmenet) and Kelmomas fucked him over.

The only thing is that Kellhus already saw himself "descending as hunger" in the outside, so he's some sort of Ciphrang right now.

[.H.]

12 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

The way I interpret this is that the Ark prosthesis has been part of Ark and isn't something added to it. It wasn't created by the Consult, it was discovered, and they had no idea how to get it to work save by throwing bodies in. They need something that will reduce the population, and how they do it - by causing deaths while the No-God is running so that Ark can read it - is important to its function of sealing the Outside. All of this implies that this is the way that Ark had sealed worlds before. 

Now, I could be wrong here. It could be that it's just another random thing.

Right, right, we aren't really disagreeing, I don't think.

I believe that the Sarcophagus has always been a part of the Ark and always been needed as part of the 144k plan.  What I disagree with was the idea that it always needed to be fed a soul, in the way it was/is post-Arkfall.  My crackpot theory is that feeding it a particular soul to start it back up is/was needed because Ark was dead after the Fall, it's native soul having fled it.

So, on those previous worlds, simply parking the Ark and having the Inchoroi, et al, rampage the planet was probably sufficient for code generation all those past times, no need to get the Sarcophagus out, or feed it, or anything.  In other words, the Sarcophagus was always already active, because Ark was.

The whole problem comes when Ark dies crashing into Eärwa, I think.

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, .H. said:

So, on those previous worlds, simply parking the Ark and having the Inchoroi, et al, rampage the planet was probably sufficient for code generation all those past times, no need to get the Sarcophagus out, or feed it, or anything.  In other words, the Sarcophagus was always already active, because Ark was.

The whole problem comes when Ark dies crashing into Eärwa, I think.

Okay, so again I ask - why does the Womb Plague lead to the No-God discovery? And why does the Indigo Plague happen at all? 

 

19 minutes ago, Hello World said:

Where is it said that the womb-plague gave them clues about the No-God?

I'll see if I can dig it up; I think it was in the TGO thread that Bakker posted in, but it might have been in the Q&A from earlier. 

19 minutes ago, Hello World said:

What happened was that they understood that they needed to use the No-God but they didn't know how. When they tried to make their nonmen allies (Ninjanjin and the others who looked into the inverse fire) they realized that their serum kills female nonmen. So they decided to use it on the larger Nonmen population because at least it accomplishes part of the No-God's function which is to reduce the population in Earwa to 144K.

Again, this is apparently not how this happened, and the plague and killing of the females was accidental, not deliberate. (I'll see if I can find that reference as well). 

[Kalbear]

Okay, a potentially interesting bit from the AMA:

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3) Were the Inchoroi aware of the No-God before the Arkfall? If yes, did they try to "summon" It on other planets they exterminated?
(3) RAFO.

4) Was Sil the King of the Inchoroi before the Arkfall?

(4) No, and RAFO.

in the same place, he says this with reference to Koringhus:

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As for the new character, I'm hoping his narrative purpose will be clear come the conclusion of TUC.

Koringhus's narrative purpose is...clear?

[.H.]

24 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Okay, so again I ask - why does the Womb Plague lead to the No-God discovery? And why does the Indigo Plague happen at all?

I must have missed it, how do we know that the Womb-Plague lead to the No-God?  The No-God only gets activated post-Consult, presumably when Shae makes his advances in soul-trapping and figures out how to get a soul stuck in the thing again.

24 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Again, this is apparently not how this happened, and the plague and killing of the females was accidental, not deliberate. (I'll see if I can find that reference as well). 

It was in response to my question on tSA:

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The simplest way to look at the Womb Plague is as a kluge. The Inchoroi are stuck with the remnants of a technology they can no longer understand. At the same time, think of what it is the No-God, as a technology, yields the Inchoroi: the death of birth. They attempted to give immortality to their Nonmen allies to begin with, to save their souls, realized afterward that their gift was fatal to their women. This yielded a crude tool they needed to accomplish at least part of the No-God's function.

 

24 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I'll see if I can dig it up; I think it was in the TGO thread that Bakker posted in, but it might have been in the Q&A from earlier.

I can't find this one though, sorry.  I don't recall him saying that the Womb-Plauge was a step toward the No-God, rather a step in accomplishing it's purpose (stopping the cycle of souls).  That in the above quote.

[jurble]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Koringhus's narrative purpose is...clear?

Dying is shortest path to the Absolute.  The No-God is the Absolute and so the soul that encounters him passes him no further.  I'm telling ya, it's clear as day.

[Kalbear]

Also amusingly, apparently Madness knows the ultimate fate of Koringhus/Crabicus and thinks we'll be pleased, so go ahead and harass him further about that one

ETA: here's the link to him saying that God shattered God, @MisterGuyMan

[Faint]

25 minutes ago, Hello World said:

Kellhus failed, pure and simple. His "only Darkness" (Esmenet) and Kelmomas fucked him over.

There is also the sheer amount of written material to drive this point home. I find it no coincidence that many of the readers seemingly not grasping this narrative arc are the very same that cannot understand what the point of all the Esemnet/Kelmomas material was about (although, to be fair, much of it was indulgent as well). 

[Kalbear]

16 minutes ago, .H. said:

I must have missed it, how do we know that the Womb-Plague lead to the No-God?  The No-God only gets activated post-Consult, presumably when Shae makes his advances in soul-trapping and figures out how to get a soul stuck in the thing again.

It was in response to my question on tSA:

 

I can't find this one though, sorry.  I don't recall him saying that the Womb-Plauge was a step toward the No-God, rather a step in accomplishing it's purpose (stopping the cycle of souls).  That the above quote.

Maybe that's it, and I simply am misremembering. I could have sworn that it was the Womb-Plague that gave Shae the key to understanding the No-God, and that was stated somewhere. But I can't find it, at least not yet.

Sorry to take up folks time.

[Kalbear]

As penance, here's Bakker confirming that some souls become Ciphrang

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As I think I mentioned in response to Locke's question on topos, the boundaries between the World and the Outside can also wear then with individuals, and not simply places. Those souls that are too strong to eat, that go on to become Ciphrang, sometimes begin the transition before they kick the bucket..

Still not clear if you can become one of the 100, however.

[jurble]

Going through old threads to find my oldest Bakker-related post, to see if I deserve any cookies for prediction I found this.  A cookie to Maia!