Subject: (urth) Nutria's first hint

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.geis.com>
Date: Sun, 01 Feb 1998 02:12:00 +0000

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

Reply:  Item #6848705 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET02#

>Yeh, I've seen you say this more than once, but I don't
>recall the evidence, let alone proof.  Inquiring minds
>want to know....

Well gosh, Nutria, that's a helluva way to ask about something that,
in all honesty, seems to me to be so blindingly obvious that I guess
I never bothered to publish it anywhere.

By preface, let me point out for what seems to me to be the umpteenth
time yet I understand it cannot be so . . .

A science oriented mind, reading the scientifantastic fabulations of
THE DYING EARTH, might well ask itself--"But how can this be?  How
can the sun be guttering and about to go out?  Since at =that= late
stage of stellar evolution it would have =long= since grown to such
enormous size as to sterilize if not vaporize the innermost planets,
including the Earth itself?"

After all, these are the facts as we currently understand them.

Without further ado, then, here is your first hint.  (It's free--the
ones that come later will cost you.)

"Increate, it is known to us that those who will perish here are no
more evil in your sight than we.  Their hands run with blood.  Ours
also. . . . by thy will they may, in that hour, have so purified
their spirits as to gain thy favor.  We who must confront them then,
though we spill their blood today . . . You, the hero who will
destroy the black worm that devours the sun; you for whom the sky
parts as a curtain; you whose breath shall wither vast Erebus, Abaia,
and Scylla who wallow beneath the waves; you that equally live in the
shell of the smallest seed in the farthest forest, the seed that hath
rolled into the dark where no man sees. . . . have mercy on those who
had no mercy.  Have mercy on us, who shall have none now" (II, ch.
4).

But wait--I would almost swear that I did see this obvious fact
printed somewhere . . .

"The time scale of the tetralogy is never made explicit, as the
characters possess no clear idea of their history, and only a few
details--such as the fact that Urth still has seven continents--can
be adduced to suggest that theage of the Commonwealth lies millions
of years (as opposed to tens or hundreds of millions in our future.
The sun is faltering, an event not expected for billions of years,
but we know (from Typhon's account of his reign) that this proved a
sudden, unpredicted calamity, and two further references--at
Morwenna's execution and in Dr. Talos's play--suggest that it is
being consumed by a tiny black hole" Feeley, "The Evidence of Things
Not Shown," NYRSF No. 31, March 1991, pg. 8.

Drat, he gave away some of the other hints!

=mantis=