{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4734",
    "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": 4734,
    "subject": "Baby Severian",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2006-10-18T19:40:53+00:00",
    "last": "2006-10-18T19:40:53+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<001201c6f2ed$55c850c0$f23ec6d8@rclackey.stic.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Roy C. Lackey",
        "address": "rclackey at stic.net"
      },
      "date": "2006-10-18T19:40:53+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Baby Severian",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Severian seems to have been the product of natural childbirth. He said\nthat women \"big with child\" were cut open and the babies removed. There was\napparently some sort of prohibition against torturing obviously pregnant\nwomen, which is part of the reason Gurloes warned Severian against knocking\nThecla up. Her pregnancy \"might force a delay in her torment and bring\ndisgrace on the guild.\"\n\nEarly on, Severian said that his earliest recollection was of \"piling\npebbles in the Old Yard.\" That isn't true, and he knew it wasn't true when\nhe wrote it. Piling pebbles requires a certain degree of motor skills that\nan infant acquires only as it matures and gains strength and coordination.\nHe later relates two memories from an earlier age. The second of those\nmemories was triggered by the mandragora. He remembered crying his head off\nin a basket when he was still \"not old enough to crawl\". The other memory\nwas of his mother:\n\n\"[ . . .] a breast running with warm milk. It was my mother's breast then,\nand I could hardly contain my elation (which might have wiped the memory\naway) at having reached back at last to her, after so many fruitless\nattempts. My arms sought to clasp her, and I would, if only I could, have\nlifted my eyes to look into her face. My mother certainly, for the children\nthe torturers take know no breasts. The grayness at the edge of my field of\nvision, then, was the metal of her cell wall. Soon she would be led away to\nscream in the Apparatus or gasp in Allowin's Necklace.\" (CLAW, chapter\nXXVII)\n\nThe key part of this quote is \"the children the torturers take know no\nbreasts\", which seems to contradict his earlier statement about wet-nurses.\nBut does it? Not necessarily. While \"take\" certainly applies to a child cut\nfrom its mother's womb, it might equally apply to any small children a woman\nhad with her when she was handed over to the torturers. As Severian said in\nchapter II of SHADOW, \"None of us [he and his fellow apprentices] were born\namong the torturers, for none are.\" He goes on to say:\n\n\"Since that time our numbers have been repaired solely from the children of\nthose who fall into our hands. In our Matachin Tower, a certain bar of iron\nthrusts from a bulkhead at the height of a man's groin. Male children small\nenough to stand upright beneath it are nurtured as our own; [. . .]\" This is\nthe proof that some women came to the tower with children in tow. The\nsentence continues: \"[a]nd when a woman big with child is sent to us we open\nher and if the babe draws breath engage a wet-nurse if it be a boy.\"\nObviously, the height test would be irrelevant to a baby newly cut from its\nmother.\n\nIn order for all the stated conditions for conscription to the guild to be\nsatisfied, and for the memory of nursing at his mother's breast to be true,\nthe implication for Severian is that *he was not born in the Matachin\nTower.*\n\nThe early memory of nursing in a cell suggests that he and his mother were\nbrought to the tower when he was less than six-months old and still too\nyoung to crawl, much less pile pebbles.\n\nSo where was he born? If we are supposed to believe that Ouen's Catherine\nwas his mother, and that Ouen's professed ignorance of her pregnancy is\nvalid, then she was probably not 'showing' at the time she was \"taken\" by\n\"the law\". I don't know where she was held between the time she was \"taken\"\nand when she was sent to the torturers.\n\nThe Old Autarch opened his whorehouse about that time. His newly-imposed\nlack of manliness seems to have resulted in his lack of attention to his\nconcubines, as evidenced years later by the fact that Thecla was missing\nfrom among them for a whole year without his noticing. It may be that\nCatherine was simply returned to wherever she had been before running away.\nIt may be that she didn't become a real problem for the autarch (or whomever\ncaused her to be picked up) until her pregnancy became obvious and/or she\ngave birth.\n\nIt would probably be an embarrassment for a eunuch to have a ceremonial\nconcubine with child, and the child itself would be an inconvenience. Give\nthem both, quietly, as was the case with Thecla, to the torturers.\n\n-Roy"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}