{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1076", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 1076, "subject": "Relative & Absolute", "messages": 6, "voices": 5, "first": "1998-09-01T16:42:00+00:00", "last": "1998-09-02T16:26:46+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "m.driussi", "address": "m.driussi at genie.com" }, "date": "1998-09-01T16:42:00+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Relative & Absolute", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Tony A. West,\n\nInteresting point regarding the two \"first\" meetings of Severian and\nOB&F on ship Tzadkiel (chapters 4 and 26 of URTH).\n\nHere are some observations:\n\nIn the meeting of ch. 4, only Severian says it is the first time.\nSeverian asks, \"You have not met me before?\" and F answers, \"Though\nwe do not know you [as a friend], yet you know us [as friends].\" So\nthey allow Severian to rattle off his theory unchallenged, or they\nthink their oblique oracular statements set him straight, if this\neditorially enhanced reading of F's phrase is correct.\n\nIn the meeting of ch. 26, OB&F had been sent by Tzadkiel to escort\nSeverian to the place of parting, the hall of weeping masks.\n(Imagine their surprise that he had found his own way there!)\nSeverian only sees B&F; Ossipago is offstage (unleashing the dogs,\nheh). This might be critically important, since in ch. 4 we are told\nthat O is the one with good memory; and we know that O is a machine\nraising the child-like (if not actually juvenile) B&F, so it might be\nthat for all their angelic beauty and oracular talking, B&F are as\nscatter-brained as little kids sent to the market to buy something\nfor mom. That is, they might not remember meeting Severian before,\nwithout their \"auxiliary brain\" there to remind them.\n\nOkay. We are back to trying to piece together the subjective\ntimeline of OB&F.\n\n1) They get their mission in Yesod (outside of time or in reverse\ntime) after Severian passes the test.\n\n2) They get onboard the Ship (itself going in and out of time) by\nfoot or by teleport. They see Severian twice, either ch. 4 first or\nch. 26 first. (I'm leaning toward ch. 26, myself.)\n\n3) They land on Urth at the beginning of Severian's Reign and hang\nout with him for ten years (forward time), until he gets onto the\ntender that will take him to the Ship.\n\n4) They continue their mission by flying their time rover saucer back\nin time. They mess with Baldanders by moving either forward or\nbackward--that is, maybe they skip back one hundred years and then\nhop ahead by decades, watching Baldanders's progress and egging him\non; or they do it backwards, giving him nothing on the first for\nthem/last for him visit, then giving him presents on subsequent\nvisits (and straining causality for us monkey brains).\n\n5) They travel further back, to the era during which the light of the\nwhite fountain first reaches Urth. In this stage at least we know\nthat they \"pass themselves\" at one point--since they are also on the\nShip slowing down circa Typhon's Era, slowing down so the tender can\npick up Severian and Gunnie. (And they find Severian in the\ntomb--very surprised!)\n\nNote that the tender itself burns up time in slowing down--thus the\ndrop off point must be decades, perhaps centuries before the landing\ntime. So Ship drops off Severian at 100 years before the Revolt\nagainst Typhon; then Ship burns up more time in Briah space (scooting\naround at sublight speed eats up compressed time) before dropping\nOB&F at 100 years before the Reign of Severian. The respective\ntenders (Age of Monarch, Age of Autarch) decompress time across space\nas they decellerate from near light speed and bring the passengers to\nthe landing zones--right on time!\n\n=mantis=" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "CRCulver", "address": "crculver at aol.com" }, "date": "1998-09-02T08:37:19+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Relative & Absolute", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Mantis said:\n\n\nThe fact that Barbatus and Famulimus are consistently child-like puzzles me.\nIf the Hierodules have notoriously short lifetimes, how do we account for the\nperpetual youth of B&F?\n\nChristopher R. Culver \nhttp://members.aol.com/crculver/index.html\n------------------------------------------------\n\"The darkest dreams are the ones that come true.\"\n-Warren Defever" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Peter Westlake", "address": "peter at harlequin.co.uk" }, "date": "1998-09-02T10:25:04+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Relative & Absolute", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 04:37 1998-09-02 EDT, CRCulver at aol.com wrote:\nMantis said:\n\n\nThe fact that Barbatus and Famulimus are consistently child-like puzzles me.\nIf the Hierodules have notoriously short lifetimes, how do we account for the\nperpetual youth of B&F?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Isn't it only Baldanders who says they have short lives?\nMaybe he is fooled by the way their time interacts with\nhis: if they spent a score of years with him, then went\nback forty or more, the discontinuity might make him think\nhe was dealing with different people. Two visits, with the\nsecond lot of visitors saying \"hello, pleased to meet you\"\ncould very easily give that impression.\n\nPeter." } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Mark Millman", "address": "mark_millman at hmco.com" }, "date": "1998-09-02T09:12:37+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Relative & Absolute", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "On 2 September 1998, Christopher R. Culver wrote:\nMantis said:\n\n\nThe fact that Barbatus and Famulimus are\nconsistently child-like puzzles me. If the\nHierodules have notoriously short lifetimes,\nhow do we account for the perpetual youth\nof B&F?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Just off the top of my head, I can offer the following possibilities:\n\n1. They're not human, despite their appearance, and so humans don't look\nfor the right signs of aging in them, assuming there even are visible\nphysical changes. A related possibility is that they simply don't outlive\ntheir youth--they are physically young right up until they die, as is true\nof many species of animals, and don't have a senescent stage in their\nlives.\n\n2. Their lifespans being so short, they don't have time to develop \"old\nattitudes\", causing them to seem child-like to humans for their entire\nlives.\n\n3. They only do the traveling and field-work that we associate with them\nduring their actual, physical years of youth (regardless of how long they\nin fact live). They're seen only briefly at any given time (i.e., they\ndon't seem to spend even months, much less years--Father Inire\nexcepted--with Severian or Baldanders), and their continual reappearances\ncould, to them, seem close in time due to the effects of traveling on the\nship Tzadkiel (taking into account both relativistic time dilation and\n\"time travel\" as such. So this period of their lives could be analogous to\nthe schooling of human children, with their visits to Severian (or\nwhomever) corresponding to the exams.\n\n4. They do only live twenty years--in the form in which we know them. As\nthey were crafted by the Hierogrammates, the Hierodules, whether of one\nspecies or many, may have a larval stage, and Famulimus could parallel\nApheta (though on different planes of existence). Thus their lives would\nliterally end, and new ones begin, and during the lives in which humans\nknow them, they would always be, in the most exact way, children.\n\nAny other ideas out there?\n\nMark Millman" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Jon Camfield", "address": "griffjon at mail.utexas.edu" }, "date": "1998-09-02T16:26:46+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Re: Relative & Absolute", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "John Gersten wrote:\n[snip]" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Are B&F born in the future? Do they then \"age\" as they pass backward in\ntime (from Sev's point of view)? This would seem to be the case. But\nthen how can they interact, even briefly, with people whose physiological\nand neurological processes are, time-wise, working backward from their\nown? Perhaps they use artificial means to briefly sort of \"snap\"\nthemselves around to Sev's time-arrow direction? Or am I just\novercomplicating things (in a Wolfe book?!? )?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I always saw this as similar to Merlin-- he lived backwards (born in our\nfuture, dies in our past (link:Green man:passing through all of our future\nin coming here). He operates 'forward' in that he can interact with us\nnormally, and no other explanation exists. sorta Kant-ian: we apply the\nideas of causality to the universe, but it is not necesarily there as we\nthink of it.\n\nI wish I had TBotNS here with me, so I could look through it and map the\nOB&F meetings better, though what Mantis says looks to be what I was\nthinking originally.\n------------------------------------------------------------------\nJon Camfield \"GriffJon\" |Webmaster, Plan II Honors Program:\ngriffjon at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu | www.dla.utexas.edu/~plan2\nGriffJon at mail.utexas.edu |Webmaster, Broccoli Project:\n | www.utexas.edu/students/brocproj\nHomepage, Gallery, Resume: |Channel Manager, Undernet #Poetry\n ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~griffjon | www.tripod.com/~ircpoetry\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n\"The most incomprehensible fact about nature is that it is comprehensible\"\n-- Albert Einstein" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Jon Camfield", "address": "griffjon at mail.utexas.edu" }, "date": "1998-09-02T16:26:46+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Re: Relative & Absolute", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "John Gersten wrote:\n[snip]" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Are B&F born in the future? Do they then \"age\" as they pass backward in\ntime (from Sev's point of view)? This would seem to be the case. But\nthen how can they interact, even briefly, with people whose physiological\nand neurological processes are, time-wise, working backward from their\nown? Perhaps they use artificial means to briefly sort of \"snap\"\nthemselves around to Sev's time-arrow direction? Or am I just\novercomplicating things (in a Wolfe book?!? )?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I always saw this as similar to Merlin-- he lived backwards (born in our\nfuture, dies in our past (link:Green man:passing through all of our future\nin coming here). He operates 'forward' in that he can interact with us\nnormally, and no other explanation exists. sorta Kant-ian: we apply the\nideas of causality to the universe, but it is not necesarily there as we\nthink of it.\n\nI wish I had TBotNS here with me, so I could look through it and map the\nOB&F meetings better, though what Mantis says looks to be what I was\nthinking originally.\n------------------------------------------------------------------\nJon Camfield \"GriffJon\" |Webmaster, Plan II Honors Program:\ngriffjon at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu | www.dla.utexas.edu/~plan2\nGriffJon at mail.utexas.edu |Webmaster, Broccoli Project:\n | www.utexas.edu/students/brocproj\nHomepage, Gallery, Resume: |Channel Manager, Undernet #Poetry\n ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~griffjon | www.tripod.com/~ircpoetry\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n\"The most incomprehensible fact about nature is that it is comprehensible\"\n-- Albert Einstein" } ] } ] }