Subject: (urth) Sev's common lineage (another Catherine candidate)

From: Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:29:16 +0000

In RttW 19, there was a client of the torturers called Tigridia. She was 
on the third level, where people were "yelling and screaming all the 
time." Her only physical description is that she has "big eyes." Juganu 
was attracted to her, and wanted to stay and free her. Silk tried to 
pull him back, resulting in a fight. "The woman got in it, and we had a 
real fight going until the boy ran off and got the key to her room."

The name Tigridia has two possible legends. One is as a sister of Saint 
Patrick. She is sometime credited as the mother of seventeen other 
saints. The other is as the daughter of a nobleman named Sancho, who 
became a nun. Both of these could be tied to the history of Catherine. 
Could Tigridia be her alias in prison? The association of Tigridia = 
tiger = cat = Catherine could be made.

There are mysteries about how the fight ended. Did Severian just join 
the fight and help stop it? Or did the sight of him cause the woman to 
break down? This is probably a changed timeline, so it doesn't matter if 
Sev sees her face.

I think she is a viable candidate for Catherine as a long-term prisoner. 
What do others think?

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:42:11 +0000

>I think she is a viable candidate for Catherine as a long-term prisoner.

Khaibit clones closely resembled their originals; that was the whole point
of the way the Old Autarch set up his brothel. Any pretty girls would have
sufficed for his stable, but he wanted to further degrade the exultant
concubines he held hostage by prostituting their facsimiles, complete with
exultant names, to low-life patrons of the Algedonic Quarter. My point is,
whether the Katharine maid was khaibit or original, Sev saw her many times
and knew her face well. So, unless you are willing to throw out the entire
Urth Cycle because Silk's astral visit stopped the coming of a new sun by
changing the future, starting from the day of Silk's visit, then it does
matter if he saw Tigridia's face. She should have looked like the Katharine
maid.

Sev's elevation ceremony was about a year and a half after the time of
Silk's visit. When he wrote of that ceremony ten years later, he speculated
on where the maid might have come from. Unless he deliberately lied by
omission and misdirection, he didn't see that maid in that crazy woman's
cell.

Btw, if the woman Sev saw in the loggia on the last day of Urth had anything
to do with his birth, and if the last day of Urth never happened because
there was no New Sun, then she would never have been taken back in time that
day, whether to give birth to him or simply to go nuts in a cell or to
provide a convenient corpse in the necropolis. In other words, if Silk's
visit stopped the coming of the New Sun, I don't think Sev would even have
existed for Silk to meet, particularly if Catherine was born in his future.

-Roy

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From: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com <thalassocrat at nym.hush.com>
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:08:51 +0000

On Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:42:11 -0700 "Roy C. Lackey" 
<rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
>there was no New Sun, then she would never have been taken back in 

>time that

For me, of course, this is an argument against the woman being 
Catherine. I'm sticking to my Catherine = Ouen's sister story, at 
least until I make up one I like better :)

As to who this woman is: no idea! But shortly after we hear Valeria 
being told that the cacogens have landed a man and a woman in the 
grounds of the House Absolute. Maybe ...

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From: Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com>
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:46:19 +0000

> existed for Silk to meet, particularly if Catherine was born in his future.
I didn't claim the changes Silk made were drastic enough to prevent Sev 
from being the one to bring the New Sun. That could still happen in this 
timeline. What could happen is that Sev would eventually write a 
slightly different BotNS from the one we have, in which he mentioned the 
resemblance of Tigridia to the maid. Or he could lie by omission as he 
often does and write exactly the book we have.

If the changes were sufficient to throw off Sev's destiny, the 
experience of Master Ash suggests that the Tigridia of this timeline 
would fade out to non-existence. (It would be interesting if that's how 
the fight ended -- Juganu would no longer have a reason to stay). But 
she was real enough earlier to have borne Sev, so Sev himself will not 
vanish in this iteration, at least. Silk and crew could have all the 
adventures they wrote about, even if they wiped out the New Sun future. 
(This is assuming that Typhon created the Whorl and sent it off before 
he met the Conciliator, so there are no side-effects on their own history).

We know in Wolfe's time theory that loops which eliminate their own 
causes don't retroactively wrap around and undo themselves. For example, 
once Sev has seen a complete Talos play with the last-day scenes, and 
gone back as the Conciliator to tell about it, he no longer needs to 
make any more trips to that time. The play will be completed using 
information that came from itself. General Whitten's eliminated trip to 
get information about the bomb in "Free Live Free" is another example.