The Katharine maid

Jeff Wilson · 26 Oct 2006, 05:13 · from 2006-October.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:13:42 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Katharine maid
In-Reply-To: <004301c6f8b9$3f1c5f20$403ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
References: <004301c6f8b9$3f1c5f20$403ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <45404406.6080303 at io.com>

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Jeff Wilson quoted and wrote:
> 
>>> The external technology for the eidolons is alien, but the animating
> spirit
>>> comes from a living person. The eidolon of Severian created on the Ship
>>> differed from the original in that his bum leg was repaired. None but
>>> Severian knew knew about Triskele, so the dog's eidolon came from his
> mind.
>>> The dog's missing leg might as easily have been restored, but Severian
>>> remembered him as having three legs, just as the maid remained fixed in
> his
>>> famous memory.
>> Whose memory does the maid come from?
> 
> It may have come from his memory of her annual feast appearance. It may have
> come from one of his extra-textual time trips to the past. It may have come
> from some other person.

I don't think it would be Severian's memory. Presumably, it would be 
someone available whenever the jailers guild was reformed into the 
all-male Brotherhood, long after the Conciliator had departed and Ymar 
had ascended.

>> Does this imply Brother Cook and Brother Porter are likewise eidolons?
> 
> Huh? They weren't eidolons. I don't understand.

They seem to be menial functionaries, and they don't have saints' names, 
suggesting they are not like other residents of the Commonwealth.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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