Subject: (urth) Claw Power in BOTNS

From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.geis.com>
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 01:10:00 +0000

vizcacha

(and anybody else following this "how can the white fountain power
the Claw in BOTNS when it doesn't exist yet, except possibly as much
as a half dead/half live cat?" investigation),

Oh dear, the things I forget!

Look here, a passage in URTH (ch. 20), where Apheta is talking to
Severian after a disclaimer about how she doesn't know much:

"I cannot say whence you drew [energy for miracles] when you were on
Urth.  Partly from yourself, no doubt.  But not all or even most can
have come from you, or you would have perished.  Perhaps from your
world, or from its old sun.  When you were on the ship ["Tzadkiel"]
there was no world and no sun near enough, so you took what could be
drawn from the ship itself, and nearly wrecked it.  But even that was
not sufficient [to resurrect the murdered steward]."

Okay!  This passage gives us the answer that the white fountain was
not involved; that Severian basically made an empathetic
pledge/sacrifice of life essence, vril, what-have-you, for each
miracle, and the Claw brokered a more-than-matching grant from any or
all of the local energy sources.

Further, this opens wide vistas in re-examining certain events in
TBOTNS.  For example, when Sev pledges by his sword to the old sun,
"his life for mine," and then the notules kill the uhlan: this seems
like a clear case of a deal with the (sky father) sun.  When Severian
performs an execution and feels the power flowing through his legs:
this might be a deal with the (bloodthirsty mother) Urth.

In looking at this in the past, I wondered if the "temporal banking
model" which Wolfe gives to explain Severian's power in TBOTNS could
be expanded into different banks: the bank of the Mother Urth, the
bank of the old sun, etc.  I then went into a maze of thinking that
Erebus, Abaia, and all the other titans were sitting at the top of
similar energy pyramids, perhaps by their various signal elements
(water, ice, etc.).  But since that seemed kinda weak (even with
Lune's causing 4.5 times the tidal force for the Water Dept.), I
speculated that the black hole at the heart of the old sun was
feeding them.  (Problem with this: if Erebus and Abaia are descended
from Typhon, then how come the faltering sun predates them?  If they
aren't relatives of T then that problem is erased--they were just
Baldanders-types doing an end-run around Typhon and probably had a
hand in manipulating the breakup of his dynasty into feuding
siblings.)

Anyway, point is: Severian is an energy vampire.  So one starts
watching for clues and cues of this.  Did Severian trigger the
earthquake when the Convulsor hit him in order to utilize =that=
energy, or was the earthquake an unrelated side effect of something
else?  (I mean, aside from the mythologically satisfying: "And the
Earth trembled in mourning for him.")  Do "deposits" to the Earth
Mother bank (executions) allow for later "withdrawals with interest"?
Likewise the Old Sun Father bank?

Anyway, here is a model that does away with many of the more thorny
issues in the paradox of the half-dead/half-live white fountain.

=mantis=

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

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From: sph1635 <sph1635 at utsph.sph.uth.tmc.edu>
Date: Sat, 02 May 1998 12:41:30 +0000

for is that of the time at the end of SWORD, when Severian enters the
forrested hills for some weeks without any food. What I had always assumed
is that energy was released from the claw when it's pyx case broke. But,
then I remembered (from somewhere, I do not have any proof right now) that
Severian does make reference to the lake and how it resembles the gem. So
is it from one of these sources that Severian is able to survive in the
hills  without any nourishment? If not, then what is sustaining him?
						Xury

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From: Peter Grimes <grimes at waste.org>
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 15:37:31 +0000

> hills  without any nourishment? If not, then what is sustaining him?

Humans can survive for several weeks without food as long as they have
water.  Severian does describe himself as feeling weaker and weaker
over this period of time.

Plus he already has the power of the New Sun in him because it started
travelling towards Urth so long before that.

Between the two its no mystery how he survives.

-Dave

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 09:13:02 +0000

> as a half dead/half live cat?" investigation),

[Theory about Severian getting power from Urth, Old Sun, etc.]
 
> issues in the paradox of the half-dead/half-live white fountain.

While these ideas are tantilizing, I just wanted to go on record as really
liking the time-twisting ideas about Severian being able to use the white
fountain because it will exist in the future.   There's lots of good SF
precedent for that kind of thing -- take this passage from a Greg Egan
story ("Eugene") I read just yesterday [minor spoiler]:

 "You've invented time travel!"

 "No.  Suppose you fed the genetic profile of an embryo into a computer,
 which then constructed a simulation of the appearance of the mature
 organism; no time travel is involved, and yet aspects of a possible
 future are revealed.  In that example, all the machinery to perform the
 extrapolation exists in the present, but the same thing can happen if the
 right equipment--equipment of a more sophisticated kind--exists in the
 potential future.  It may be useful as a mathematical formalism, to
 pretend that the potential future has a tangible reality and is
 influencing the past--just as in geometric optics, it's often convenient
 to prentend that reflections are real objects that exist behind the
 mirrors that create them--but a formalism is all it would be.

 "So because you might invent such a divice, we can see you, and talk to
 you, as if you were speaking to us from the future?"  "Yes."

Probably complete nonsense, but I love it anyway.  (Most of Egan's stuff
has less handwaving than that, btw.  His short-story collection
_Axiomatic_ is quite mind-blowing; it plays with ideas of mind and
consciousness and identity that mix Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hoffsteader,
and Oliver Sacks with quite original stuff of his own).

-Rostrum