Water Thieves

Charles Dye · 14 Jun 1998, 21:07 · from urth-v0013.mbox · original

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: raster at highfiber.com (Charles Dye)
Subject: (urth) Water Thieves
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 21:07:16
Message-ID: <urth-v0013-0057 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0013/0057.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Quoth Mantis:

>You remembered two of the water clock passages I'd forgotten--the one
>I'm vaguely thinking of is the one used to explain how the master of
>the house's clock manages to stop "precisely" at the moment that the
>master dies . . . mainly that with all the deathbed activity, none of
>the slaves fills the water pan for the clock, then when the doctor
>wants to jot down the time of death he looks at the clock, which
>stopped at some arbitrary time, and the doctor uses that time as
>being as good as any, and everybody else goes "whoo" (and the master's
>dog begins to howl since they've forgotten to feed him as well as
>water the clock <g>).

A bit of spooky magic explained in flat commonsense terms.

>Can't remember where this one comes from.

Spoken by Thecla.  Which makes the magician conducting Severian's
anacrisis say "whoo" as Sev's in solitary and Thecla's dead.  There's
a simple explanation, of course.  (And Severian continues to come up
with simple explanations for the jungle magicks until it's almost too
late.)

raster at highfiber.com


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

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