“Maruman is a robot. Explain how this could be so with his role in The Obernewtyn Chronicles.â€We define Maruman to be 100% robotic, with no living parts. However, The Obernewtyn Chronicle's Beforetime is set a long way in the future and their technology is greater than ours, so we do not confine him to early 21st Century robotics. With the exception of misfit abilities, all animals and humans do not appear to have changed significantly in the time between now and the Beforetime, so we have compared the robotic Maruman to regular 21st Century cats.
"The truth is that his mind is such a mess generally it is a wonder he can think straight even some of the time ... The amazing thing is that his mind seems to have adapted itself. There are the most extroadinary links and by-passes - yet somehow it all functions. ..." -Christa speaking to Elspeth, Farseekers, p23
Maruman's mind appears warped to Elspeth and the other misfits - of course it does, they're comparing it to regular animal and human minds. But Maruman's mind isn't regular, it's robotic.
"...His pain and strange mind make him receptive to us and allow us to use him." -Agyllian speaking to Elspeth, Farseekers, p27
The Agyllians are, understandably, pretty happy they found a perfect Moonwatcher they can communicate with the Seeker through. But how unlikely is that, they just
happened to find a cat with the perfect, yet inexplicable, mutations of the mind who
happened to live close enough to the Seeker for them to plant him there, and on the way
happened to have not died at an inconvenient moment. Sure, maybe the Agyllians found a regular cat and distorted his mind for him, but are birds that were terribly experimented on really going to repeat the treatment on another animal? Besides, how would anyone know what to do to it? "The most extroadinary links and by-passes" is how Christa described it. How long and how many cats would it have taken for the Agyllians to work out what to do?
Thousands of animals and
years would have been spent working this out! Clearly there was very little extra Beforetime knowledge of the brain since they had so little idea about misfits, so it's just preposterous to imagine the Agyllians could really have manipulated Maruman's mind for him.
But, then if it was natural mutations, how did it happen? Christa (
Farseekers, p23) and Elspeth (
TSK, p41) both believed it occured when he was a kitten, yet this is later disproved.
The most likely thing was that he was the survivor of a farmer's attempt to drown an unwanted litter, but that beginning, however traumatic, would not explain the strange distortions of his mind. -TSK, p41
It took me a moment to realise with shock that it was Maruman, but not Maruman as I knew him, old and scarred. He was whole and young and his two eyes gleamed as he grew wings and sprang into the sky.
'Merimyn!' the girl cried, laughing. -TSK, p704
Merimyn has a regular mind, yet if Merimyn is Maruman then how did Maruman get his strange, yet so useful, distortions? Merimyn was a regular cat, owned by the girl who "reminded [Elspeth] strongly of the stone figure of the frowning girl at Stonehill. (
TSK, p704)" He dreamed of Elspeth.
He died. All cats do, when they're old. (Except Maruman, it seems. Although he has fallen into disrepair a bit - the missing eye, the patchy fur. Of course, since he never gets to go visit the only people who know he is a robot and might have the technology required to replace these, it's not like he could grow more fur like regular cats, he's stuck that way.)
The Agyllians needed a way to contact the Seeker. They needed a good Moonwatcher. They're really smart, and they lived in the Beforetime, which it's probable to say had more advanced robotics than we do now. They designed a robotic cat, and modelled him on the cat who had dreamed of the Seeker.
It's not that hard to imagine. The Agyllians were in an enviable position in that they knew what he would be required to do - walk the dreamtrails (perhaps how he picked up some of Merimyn's old memories), converse with other animals (something no humans would have known) and converse with Beastspeakers - and they could test this. They could have got a computer like INES to design the majority of the electronics or perhaps there were some very handy plans lying around. A computer could predict how a robot will react, we don't know enough about living brains (which, afterall, evolved rather than being designed, they don't follow logic) to do this, which is why the Agyllians couldn't have perfected their possible distorting a real mind in a computer. But they could design a new one, a robotic one.
After all, the Agyllian mystic ruthlessly used the old cat's distorted mind as a conduit because those distortions meant he could not be spied upon. - TSK, p42
Having a Moonwatcher they can communicate with and can watch the Seeker from seems to be a pretty useful idea to the Agyllians. They could tune Maruman to Elspeth, to ensure only she was allowed into his mind to receive messages from them. They could control him using all the outdated satellites still floating away up in space, whereas we know farseeking doesn't work over long distances or the Blacklands. (Maybe this would explain his aversion to the moon, sick of getting messages? ;) ) This was one damn good plan of the Agyllians. And, even better, no one will pick up on it because they've never seen robotic animals! Elspeth doesn't even know what jeans are, she's not going to recognise computer technology where she doesn't expect any! She's not a teknoguilder, and she doesn't need to be as she and everyone else never actually modify or upgrade Maruman in any way, so she has no idea what she's looking for. It's the perfect plan!
Ignoring the quotes, which it was the consensus we do in the commenting thread, that's 804 words. I tried to cover all the major points, and even though I only actually found three sets of quotes, I think it works ok. I haven't put in a real conclusion, do we need one? It will push us further over the word limit, but I guess if we wrote a short one it might be ok. What do you guys think? - Cat