Subject: (urth) Relative & Absolute

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Sep 1998 16:42:00 +0000

Tony A. West,

Interesting point regarding the two "first" meetings of Severian and
OB&F on ship Tzadkiel (chapters 4 and 26 of URTH).

Here are some observations:

In the meeting of ch. 4, only Severian says it is the first time.
Severian asks, "You have not met me before?" and F answers, "Though
we do not know you [as a friend], yet you know us [as friends]."  So
they allow Severian to rattle off his theory unchallenged, or they
think their oblique oracular statements set him straight, if this
editorially enhanced reading of F's phrase is correct.

In the meeting of ch. 26, OB&F had been sent by Tzadkiel to escort
Severian to the place of parting, the hall of weeping masks.
(Imagine their surprise that he had found his own way there!)
Severian only sees B&F; Ossipago is offstage (unleashing the dogs,
heh).  This might be critically important, since in ch. 4 we are told
that O is the one with good memory; and we know that O is a machine
raising the child-like (if not actually juvenile) B&F, so it might be
that for all their angelic beauty and oracular talking, B&F are as
scatter-brained as little kids sent to the market to buy something
for mom.  That is, they might not remember meeting Severian before,
without their "auxiliary brain" there to remind them.

Okay.  We are back to trying to piece together the subjective
timeline of OB&F.

1) They get their mission in Yesod (outside of time or in reverse
time) after Severian passes the test.

2) They get onboard the Ship (itself going in and out of time) by
foot or by teleport.  They see Severian twice, either ch. 4 first or
ch. 26 first.  (I'm leaning toward ch. 26, myself.)

3) They land on Urth at the beginning of Severian's Reign and hang
out with him for ten years (forward time), until he gets onto the
tender that will take him to the Ship.

4) They continue their mission by flying their time rover saucer back
in time.  They mess with Baldanders by moving either forward or
backward--that is, maybe they skip back one hundred years and then
hop ahead by decades, watching Baldanders's progress and egging him
on; or they do it backwards, giving him nothing on the first for
them/last for him visit, then giving him presents on subsequent
visits (and straining causality for us monkey brains).

5) They travel further back, to the era during which the light of the
white fountain first reaches Urth.  In this stage at least we know
that they "pass themselves" at one point--since they are also on the
Ship slowing down circa Typhon's Era, slowing down so the tender can
pick up Severian and Gunnie.  (And they find Severian in the
tomb--very surprised!)

Note that the tender itself burns up time in slowing down--thus the
drop off point must be decades, perhaps centuries before the landing
time.  So Ship drops off Severian at 100 years before the Revolt
against Typhon; then Ship burns up more time in Briah space (scooting
around at sublight speed eats up compressed time) before dropping
OB&F at 100 years before the Reign of Severian.  The respective
tenders (Age of Monarch, Age of Autarch) decompress time across space
as they decellerate from near light speed and bring the passengers to
the landing zones--right on time!

=mantis=

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

---

From: CRCulver <crculver at aol.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 08:37:19 +0000

Mantis said:
<we know that O is a machine
raising the child-like (if not actually juvenile) B&F>

The fact that Barbatus and Famulimus are consistently child-like puzzles me.
If the Hierodules have notoriously short lifetimes, how do we account for the
perpetual youth of B&F?

Christopher R. Culver <crculver at aol.com>
http://members.aol.com/crculver/index.html
------------------------------------------------
"The darkest dreams are the ones that come true."
-Warren Defever

---

From: Peter Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 10:25:04 +0000

>If the Hierodules have notoriously short lifetimes, how do we account for the

Isn't it only Baldanders who says they have short lives?
Maybe he is fooled by the way their time interacts with
his: if they spent a score of years with him, then went
back forty or more, the discontinuity might make him think
he was dealing with different people. Two visits, with the
second lot of visitors saying "hello, pleased to meet you"
could very easily give that impression.

Peter.

---

From: Mark Millman <mark_millman at hmco.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 09:12:37 +0000

On 2 September 1998, Christopher R. Culver <crculver at aol.com> wrote:

> The fact that Barbatus and Famulimus are
> consistently child-like puzzles me.  If the
> Hierodules have notoriously short lifetimes,
> how do we account for the perpetual youth
> of B&F?

Just off the top of my head, I can offer the following possibilities:

1.  They're not human, despite their appearance, and so humans don't look
for the right signs of aging in them, assuming there even are visible
physical changes.  A related possibility is that they simply don't outlive
their youth--they are physically young right up until they die, as is true
of many species of animals, and don't have a senescent stage in their
lives.

2.  Their lifespans being so short, they don't have time to develop "old
attitudes", causing them to seem child-like to humans for their entire
lives.

3.  They only do the traveling and field-work that we associate with them
during their actual, physical years of youth (regardless of how long they
in fact live).  They're seen only briefly at any given time (i.e., they
don't seem to spend even months, much less years--Father Inire
excepted--with Severian or Baldanders), and their continual reappearances
could, to them, seem close in time due to the effects of traveling on the
ship Tzadkiel (taking into account both relativistic time dilation and
"time travel" as such.  So this period of their lives could be analogous to
the schooling of human children, with their visits to Severian (or
whomever) corresponding to the exams.

4.  They do only live twenty years--in the form in which we know them.  As
they were crafted by the Hierogrammates, the Hierodules, whether of one
species or many, may have a larval stage, and Famulimus could parallel
Apheta (though on different planes of existence).  Thus their lives would
literally end, and new ones begin, and during the lives in which humans
know them, they would always be, in the most exact way, children.

Any other ideas out there?

Mark Millman

---

From: Jon Camfield <griffjon at mail.utexas.edu>
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 16:26:46 +0000

John Gersten <jgersten at slip.net> wrote:
[snip]
>Are B&F born in the future?  Do they then "age" as they pass backward in
>time (from Sev's point of view)?  This would seem to be the case.  But
>then how can they interact, even briefly, with people whose physiological
>and neurological processes are, time-wise, working backward from their
>own?  Perhaps they use artificial means to briefly sort of "snap"
>themselves around to Sev's time-arrow direction?  Or am I just
>overcomplicating things (in a Wolfe book?!? <g>)?

I always saw this as similar to Merlin-- he lived backwards (born in our
future, dies in our past (link:Green man:passing through all of our future
in coming here).  He operates 'forward' in that he can interact with us
normally, and no other explanation exists.  sorta Kant-ian: we apply the
ideas of causality to the universe, but it is not necesarily there as we
think of it.

I wish I had TBotNS here with me, so I could look through it and map the
OB&F meetings better, though what Mantis says looks to be what I was
thinking originally.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Camfield      "GriffJon"  |Webmaster, Plan II Honors Program:
griffjon at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu   | www.dla.utexas.edu/~plan2
GriffJon at mail.utexas.edu      |Webmaster, Broccoli Project:
                              | www.utexas.edu/students/brocproj
Homepage, Gallery, Resume:    |Channel Manager, Undernet #Poetry
 ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~griffjon | www.tripod.com/~ircpoetry
------------------------------------------------------------------
"The most incomprehensible fact about nature is that it is comprehensible"
-- Albert Einstein

---

From: Jon Camfield <griffjon at mail.utexas.edu>
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 16:26:46 +0000