Very differing reactions to my suggestion re Inire as Father In Ire. I think this illustrates Wolfe's fundamental and deliberate ambiguity; he's assiduous in the Urth Cycle at keeping open the possibility that Sev's actions serve the purposes of Erebus and Abaia, that the Ragnarok future would be the more merciful to Urth's population, at least allowing time for its partial evacuation (according to Ash). Further, I feel that one of Wolfe's major themes is the sheer inscrutability of any Divine Plan: from a human perspective, the ultimate intentions of the Hierogrammates, let alone the Increate, are vast and remote, allowing for almost any local cruelty as a side-effect of the progress to some ultimate salvation on the cosmic scale. This leaves the problem of how mere mortals should confront this cruelty, in the execution of which Severian is necessarily, at least from the immediate Commonwealth viewpoint, a dupe. I think it's too pat to maintain that the people of Urth are just literary constructs whose demise is unimportant, or krill in the path of the inevitable orca of Destiny (to quote mantis, perhaps inaccurately); surely Wolfe wants us to appreciate the magnitude of the human tragedy wrought by the Deluge, as a measure of the terrible (if necessary) cost of Faith. //-------------------------------------- Nicholas Gevers potto at webmail.co.za