{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/962",
    "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": 962,
    "subject": "Cenotaph, Warp, Cast",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-07-11T18:08:00+00:00",
    "last": "1998-07-11T18:08:00+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0016-0055@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "m.driussi",
        "address": "m.driussi at genie.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-07-11T18:08:00+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Cenotaph, Warp, Cast",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Adam,\n\nAs I pointed out, Severian has =just seen his cenotaph=, so he knows\nthat something is afoot.  Something rotten in the state of Denmark,\ner, the Commonwealth.  OTOH, he seems to assume that only the 100\ndays he has experienced subjectively have passed in the objective\nuniverse, so he would figure that Valeria is not dead of old age, but\nhe might worry for her safety as a prisoner of the warlord Agia,\nBaldanders, Loyal to the Group of Seventeen, or whoever else might\nhave staged a coup, if there was a coup.\n\nAll he knows consciously is that he has been officially presumed\nand declared dead, which is by itself a very bad omen.\n\nRe: Severian not knowing the ship was traveling through time.  Huh.\nSo all that talk about the centuries washing against the hull (even\nmentioned in TBOTNS, iirc) was just poetry that he didn't really\nbelieve?  I thought the part he didn't grasp at first was that he\nwould see people on the ship from the subjective past and subjective\nfuture(s): the \"time warping\" aspect of the ship ducking in and out\nof hyperspace.  That he could meet O, B, and F on the ship for the\nfirst/last time; that there could be two Burgundofaras; that there\nmight even be his successor to the Phoenix Throne on the ship (this\none didn't prove to be true).\n\nRe: Clinton in China, and other mundane examples of 20th century\ntechnology.  The problem here is that, with telecommunications and\nall, Clinton doesn't have to have to name a \"temporary president\" to\ngovern while he's gone--and besides, the chain of command has been so\nhammered out that there is a vice president, and speaker of the\nhouse, and so on down to the janitor.  So if (when) Clinton has to\nhave surgery to remove the alien implants, what do you know!  For the\nfew hours when he is under general anesthesia there actually will be\na \"temporary pres\" in charge of the USA, running breathlessly to a\npress meeting where (s)he will say, \"I'm in charge!\"\n\nWhich is why I was trying to use medieval and mythological models.\nThe universe is a big place, Horatio, and when you go to another one,\nthat's another big place, further still.\n\nYour regentless and successorless Commonwealth of Severian's swift\nsilent abdication is sounding more and more fascinating.  Please\ncontinue fleshing it out--I can't wait to see what happens!\n\n(Valeria [weeping]: He said he was just going out for some ice cream,\nbut he never came back.\n\n(Claviger General: Did he act strange in the weeks before his\ndisappearance, autarchia?  Engage in weird new hobbies, keep odd\nhours, invite strangers over?\n\n(Valeria: Well, there was that zero-gravity party . . . with the\nhuman skulls floating around the room . . . and those other meetings\nwith all those wild people in their outlandish clothes, talking about\ngobbledygook . . . I don't know, maybe I was wrong, but I just\nlaughed it off at the time.\n\n(Claviger General: Autarchia, does your husband have a substance\nabuse problem?  Analeptic alzabo addiction is treatable, if caught in\ntime . . .\n\n(Valeria: Oh, I don't know!  He said--he said he was just\nexperimenting!  Why me?!\n\n(C.G.: Don't take it personal, autarchia.  Some autarchs just can't\nhandle the pressure, the commitment of a relationship and a\nCommonwealth.  So one day they just walk away, start a new life\nsomewhere else.)\n\nRe: the mysterious lovely woman, yes this has been gone over time and\ntime again, but for some inexplicable reason (probably just that I\nhaven't written that essay, and might not ever!) the repetition\ndoesn't bother me yet: she (is/is like) the Contessa Carina.  From the\nplay \"Eschatology & Genesis.\"  Re-read the play right now, you'll\nsee.\n\nMechanics of hyperspace:\n\nMy model insists that time in Yesod travels in a direction opposite\nthat of Briah.  This is based upon the two universe model of\n\"Procreation\" (ES), where it is explicit, and certain elements of\nURTH.\n\nOne URTH element is that the ship sails to Yesod, eating up time\nin a big way (centuries against the hull).  They spend a day there,\nand then this curious detail--rather than take the ship back, Sev and\nGunnie are teleported to Briah and picked up by the ship in passing.\n\nTeleportation (even between universes) implies \"simultaneous.\"  So\nthe simultaneous moment between Yesod and Briah is represented\nthere/then.\n\nYet after a trivial bit of deceleration (which contains its own\napparent paradoxes, I'll be the first to admit, but I won't open that\ntangential can whole of worms right now) they are dropped off on an\nUrth a thousand years (or more, depending upon your model of\nposthistory) in Severian's past (and who can say how it compares to\nGunnie's past).  Thus, one \"day\" in Yesod is about one thousand years\nretrograde in Briah.\n\nWhich goes a long way toward explaning how ships/the Ship can ever\nget back to Briah from Yesod--since the deceleration will always eat\nup as much time as the acceleration, at best a ship/the Ship would be\nskipping into the future at a period of (2 x acceleration time),\nrather like the Last House.  (That is if we take \"the end of the\nuniverse\" as being a spacial boundary dividing Briah/Yesod rather than\na temporal boundary signalling Grand Gnab.  If a temporal boundary,\nthen return to Briah becomes more or less impossible if Yesod time\nisn't retrograde, and certainly much more difficult even if Yesod\ntime is retrograde.)\n\nAnd since we see the Ship eclipsing the Sun in the Miracle of Apu\nPunchau, we know that it can travel rather far into the past.  (Or,\nalternate view: the Ship =is= just skipping forward in time, but it\nhas been doing so for a very long time, and the only way to go back\nin time on the Ship is to teleport onto the closest convenient\ntimefrane ship and go forward from there.  Say there's a Ship at\n1492, 1550, 1775--depending upon what you want to do, you send agents\nto the Ship at the time nearest your goal.  So the Ship at Apu\nPunchau time gets the trans-temporal tachyon message: \"Occlude the\nSun over South America for a while.\"  And they do.)\n\n(Convoluted.  I like the other way better.)\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
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