Subject: (urth) More Infrequently Asked Questions

From: Talarican <chemmie at mindspring.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 22:46:20 +0000

I must be suffering advanced enigma intoxication, seeing riddles under every
bed.

II:VIII When Sev immerses himself at Saltus in his memory of the undines'
puppet-show dream, just before being kidnapped by Vodalus' cultellarii, he
has a revelation: "Then very suddenly I ... understood why it was that Abaia
had sent me this dream, and had sought to enlist me in the great and final
war of Urth."  He declines to explain his sudden enlightenment about the
origin and purpose of his dream, preferring to go on with subsequent plot
events (the kidnapping). What did Sev now understand, and how did he extract
that enlightenment from the dream?

IV: XXIII After the wounded Severian is rescued by the Autarch, he revels in
a memory (or hallucination?) of Master Malrubius lecturing "Look to your
'Q'",  followed by a rambling complaint about his thankless and nearly
futile
efforts
to educate the apprentices, ending with the unfinished sentence "There was a
boy, but he...".
But he what? (" - but he betrayed the guild and was sent away" -?)
And was this an authentic memory of something the "real" Malrubius
"actually" said to young Sev at some point?
To whom is the remembered Malrubius referring here?
Palaemon, perhaps? Is Malrubius old enough to have taught Palaemon as an
apprentice? (Is Palaemon perhaps younger than we have been led to believe,
having met with some injury during his sojourn which crippled and nearly
blinded him? Became or was replaced by a cyborg or cacogen or some such, as
has been speculated before? Come to think of it, Palaemon shouldn't be much
older than fifty, at most sixty, in the year following Sev's exile, if
Palaemon was a young man of Sev's age or a bit more thirty years previously
as related by Winnoc)
Or, as is strongly suggested by the text, is this a hallucination rather
than a memory, with Sev projecting his own recent disgrace backward into his
recollection of Malrubius, i.e. the boy referred to is Sev himself (the real
Malrubius of course died years before Sev advanced to captain of
apprentices). Another possibility in this same vein is that Sev projects his
knowlege of the exile of young journeyman Palaemon into this vision, as Sev
had already encountered Winnoc by this time.
Or is this perhaps an eidolonic visitation by the Malrubius-persona of the
Hierodules' thinking engine which sends him Malrubious-aquastor later, in
which case what purpose did it serve?
Or some combination of all of the above?

III: XXVI When Sev and Typhon arrive in the cavern behind the eyes of Mount
Typhon, Sev asked how they rose the mountaintop after seeming to fall DOWN a
steep descent in that floating luge or rollercoaster conveyance. Typhon
replied "Why should gravity serve Urth, when it can serve Typhon?..." Did
the old empire master antigravity? Could that have been one of its sins,
antigravity being an "unnatural act", so to speak, like FTL?

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

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From: Peter Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 11:34:48 +0000

At 22:46 1999-12-29 -0500, Talarican wrote:

... some excellent questions, and not the usual ones either ...

>antigravity being an "unnatural act", so to speak, like FTL?

They must surely have learned to direct gravity at will, or been able
to fake it convincingly. There would be plenty of room for machinery
in the mountain, too.

I don't think it should be seen as a sin, since the flyers aren't.

Spectacled Bear.