{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/287",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 287,
    "subject": "Sev's dad & aunt",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-01-06T01:11:00+00:00",
    "last": "1998-01-06T01:11:00+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0006-0427@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "m.driussi",
        "address": "m.driussi at genie.geis.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-01-06T01:11:00+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Sev's dad & aunt",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Christopher,\n\nalga is right.  As for Sev's mother, I prefer using \"Katharine\" for\nthe patron saint of the torturers and the role played at the feasts\nof the torturers, \"Catherine\" for the mother.  Just to make a distinction,\nif there is any real difference in the metaphysical/time-travelling,\nloop-the-lupine-loop sense of things.\n\n Dorcas + \"Charonus\"\n        |\n      Ouen + Catherine (an exultant or of exultant)\n           |\n         Severian, Merryn\n\nDorcas: an optimate (see TBOTNS appendix re: social classes).  She\nis the only representative of this class in the text.\n\n\"Charonus\": the old guy dragging the Lake of Birds, probably a former\ncommoner who tried to become optimate and fell hard.\n\nCatherine: as a fallen Pelerine, she is presumed to be exultant or\noptimate (see Ava talking about the Order in volume four).  However,\nshe doesn't seem very tall, so she might not be an exultant; yet\nSeverian's biological background suggests, if not requires, that there\nbe an exultant back there.  One solution bandied about is that\nCatherine is (1) a runaway khaibit (2) from the same exultant family\nthat has the half-sisters Thea and Thecla (see the undetailed \"family\narms\" on one of the critically important books Sev brings to Thecla);\nsaid exultant family might, in turn, (3) be one of the \"northern clans\"\n(Thecla's family has holdings at Lake Diuturna, quite northern), (4)\nperhaps even the very same family whose crest one of the other torturer\napprentices draws above his bunk (but NOT NOT NOT the detailed crest of\nSeverian's mausoleum, I don't usually think, at least--at one point we\nare told the exultants, like the autarch, is always buried\nelsewhere--but at another point there might be a line about Severian's\nmausoleum housing an exultant family).\n\nBack to khaibits: because they are clones, unagumented by the biotech\nmagic that makes exultants so tall--in fact, khaibits are the raw\nmaterial that allows exultants to be tall.  Thus khaibits are of the\nblood yet not really exultants.\n\nAnyhow, if I remember right, John Clute proposed (in that seminal\nessay of his) that Thecla is an indwelling aunt.  Meaning, if we take him\nliterally, that Catherine is an escaped khaibit of the Thea/Thecla\nbloodline (generation previous to Thea/Thecla).  Or something like that?\nWell that's what I usually think--and she doesn't age between torturer\nfeasts because she's living in the same Atrium of Time area that\nValeria lives in.  That's another one of my details.\n\nHappy New Year!\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}