Subject: (urth) Aquastors, eidolons

From: Charles Dye <raster at highfiber.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 19:04:57 +0000

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

This is mantis, speaking to the Whorl list.  I've moved it over to Urth
for no better reason than that I'm more familiar with that work:

>Whoops--in my previous message, "coo coup/fish & fowl," I used the
>word "eidolon" when I should have used "aquastor" (even though I
>think that they might be used interchangably by the commonality of
>the Commonwealth, for my own sense of mental cohesion I like to keep
>them separate: "eidolon" as beam-to-the-brain ghost, and "aquastor"
>as physically manifested ghost of hologrammic silvery dust).

I tried to make this distinction myself once, and I came away with
the impression that "aquastor" and "eidolon" were two words for the
same technology, or perhaps just slightly different implementations.
I don't have the reference here, but I definitely recall Barbatus using
the word "tangible" to describe eidolons.  There's certainly room
for disagreement on this, but my interpretation is that aquastors
or eidolons are manufactured from locally available matter, held
together for a time by sheer force of mechanical will, and revert
(usually!) to the original material when the mind's control lapses.

The material used to construct aquastors should be finely divisible,
readily available, and ideally should have interesting electrical
properties.

>[Since "quaesitor" in early Roman times was a criminal investigator
>(mainly homicide, I think), I continue to wonder if "aquastors" are
>ghost detectives--that is, investigators of the living on behalf of
>the dead.  Or there are the "quaestors," deputies of magistrates,
>that grew through the years of the Republic from a population of two
>to forty until Augustus reduced them to twenty: this job was the
>entry-level magistry sought by ambitious young men.  In context of
>"aquastor" this suggests a hierarchy and government of the dead.]

This is so poetic, and so nicely reasoned, that it hurts me almost
physically to disagree.  But ... Michael, I think you've outwitted
Wolfe on this one!  Aquastors dissolve to mist when released.  If
you read "mist" literally instead of as a bit of poetic description,
you get a much simpler (but less beautiful) derivation for the word
"aquastor."

raster at highfiber.com

("Mental cohesion?"  Punintentional?)

---

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 04:49:00 +0000

Reply:  Item #7172613 from RASTER at HIGHFIBER.COM@INET#

Raster,

First of all, we both agree that the words seem to be used
interchangeably as a synonym for "phantom."  And I'll bet I can get
you to agree that the originating mind can be organic as well as
non-organic ("mechanical" is not quite right, since even our puny
present thinking engines aren't mechanical in nature), so we agree
there, too.  (Next: grappling with the idea that the range of these
phantom projecting deus ex machinas is measured in =time= rather than
=space=.)  As for aquastors being made of water, that's in the Lexicon,
but, somehow unsatisfied, I continue to poke around for other layers.
(I think Gene Wolfe once mentioned that they were like tulpas--see short
story "Melting"--which makes perfect sense.  But they aren't called
"tulpas," they are called "aquastors," and he doesn't usually make up
words.  Or so I've been led to believe. <g>)

The bit of Barbatus talking is probably from within the pyramid in
URTH, where Severian is =finally= coming to grips with the idea that
he died back at the beginning of the novel.  Another part is where
aged Eata says he thinks the Severian before him is a ghost.

However, for my pointers I took precedence within the text: and the
aquastor definition is given in CITADEL on the ride from behind enemy
lines to the beach, I believe.  In Cyriaca's charming sketch of
posthistory, she tells of a time when ghosts that nobody else could
see were beamed into people's heads directly as guardian angels--thus,
something different from the solidified hologram being assigned to
"aquastor."

(Did you catch this a few months ago as a new science factoid: I'm
fuzzy on the details, but it seemed to be just that--a solid-o-gram
projector that spits individual atoms into place, not only negating the
need for mist/smoke that a hologram needs to be cast upon, but also
making an ersatz shell 3-D form.  I must be garbling an awful lot but
I'm not making it out of . . . water . . . )

Back to Barbatus: without the text in front of me, I think you are
right in the sense that B is (maybe) saying that an eidolon can become
an aquastor, and that a sufficiently powered aquastor can gain more and
more substance until it is as independent and as real as humans are.
(Kinda like the phantom warriors of Barsoom, if you recall.)

In psychic terms they're made of ectoplasm!

Re: Mysteries of PEACE, when I asked if Ms. Gold had an accident I
meant was she killed, and if so, was it because she was pregnant.

=mantis=