Severian's skin color

Chris · 22 Jun 2005, 23:27 · from 2005-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rasputin_ at hotmail.com (Chris)
Date: Wed Jun 22 23:27:04 2005
Subject: (urth) Severian's skin color
In-Reply-To: <15061289.1119478008901.JavaMail.root at wamui-cypress.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F222B0C16825D7627EE633386EA0 at phx.gbl>

Crush said:
>Well, after Pas re-emerged and began to purge the Mainframe of the rebel
>modules, I'm sure there were plenty of opportunities for Silk to encounter 
>it.
>But if an aspect of Pas were hiding in Silk, I can't imagine him agreeing 
>to
>Silk's resignation and hermitage. That doesn't sound like any simulation of 
>Typhon.

It depends on what state Pas was in, I suppose. I don't think there was 
enough left of him to form a coherent person, and what is left is bound up 
into the persona uploaded by Silk, and the combined Passilk is probably 
technically different from either of them, but much more like Silk than 
Typhon.

Given this even in the best case it might be impossible to know just what 
Typhon lost, and whether possible memories of Severian would be among what 
remained.

>If Roy Lackey and Blattid are correct in their posts that Silk is a clone
>of Typhon, then he would carry Typhon's very face back to the Whorl
>to meet Severian. As appealing as that would be to me. I don't believe it.

Well, I don't have much to say for or against the clone theory, but to me it 
always seemed a little beside the point. The DNA Silk had in his meatybits 
is only of peripheral interest (at least to me), and the only problem I have 
with the clone theories is that they tend to make that aspect central to 
their interpretation.

>Well, I consider it self-evident that Typhon's scan occurred after he got 
>his
>new body, since Pas has two heads.

True, and I find this to be dead-on convincing personally. But at the same 
time it seems almost impossible to maintain continuity either way, because 
there's a pretty strong case going the other way. I hate to suggest it but 
perhaps this is just the product of an error on Wolfe's part.

>But this is irrelevant to our discussion since I find it hard to believe 
>Pas was in
>Silk when the Rajan entered his body.

But it would make a difference, regardless of whether Pas was there, if we 
were to believe that Silk had knowledge of Severian. At that point in the 
story, if I recall correctly, Silkhorn was no longer narrating. Was there 
any point where he and Severian were "off camera" and could have had a 
conversation the narrator wasn't privy to?

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net