When Severian as a very young boy runs his first errand to the Witches Tower, he tells us "I was ushered into the presence of an old woman who sat in the only chair I had yet seen there, staring through a glass tabletop at what appeared to be an artificial landscape inhabited by hairless, crippled animals."
But what might these hairless, crippled animals be?
Of course, Severian at this age may not fully appreciate what he's seeing, but it does seem the Cumaean may be attempting some sort of clairvoyance, looking at something a good deal away in time or space.
If there were only one hairless, crippled animal, I'd suggest it was the bottled mandragora Severian finds in the long-abandoned autarch's quarters in the Citadel. But there's more than one.
Now to backtrack a little. Of the over 400 characters in New Sun, only two of them speak in blank verse, and I think this is meant to suggest the two are linked. They are the Cumaean and Famulimus. So could therefore the Cumaean be attempting to link up clairvoyantly with Famulimus, who I propose is a relative? Famulimus and Barbatus are named, after all, after Roman gods who look after children--just as they're looked over by Ossipago, their robot babysitter. In other words they're children and the Cumaean is their mother. As for the artificial landscape and immobility I'd like to suggest Famulimus and Barbatus are in their refrigerated berth aboard the Quasar/Flying Cloud, which as we see in UotNS, appears to be filled with water--hence their immobility.
That or they're the prototypes for Josepha's toy imp, which is replaced by a frog when Thecla and Thea are young girls (not that the two are mutually exclusive).
Robert Borski