What's So Great About Ushas?

Roy C. Lackey · 15 Jun 2008, 18:00 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:00:59 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
Message-ID: <002101c8cf11$c765f280$39ce4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Andrew quoted and wrote:
>>Without the Conciliator, there would have been no Claw, no order
>>of
>>Pelerines to guard it. If no Pelerines, what was the monastic
>>order
>>Catherine ran away from that led to her imprisonment by the Guild,
>
>>which led
>>to both Severians having been born into their clutches in the
>>first place?
>
>Maybe I'm missing your point, but surely you have that problem
>however you think of Sev1? Unless you believe that he became the
>Conciliator too, which I can't see at all.

If neither version of Sev became the Conciliator, then no one did. The
circumstances of his birth were contrived, and some power or powers had been
orchestrating the event long before that, possibly for generations, for the
express purpose of producing the man who would bring a new sun. Time travel
was used to do it.

Would Ymar have established the autarchy without the Conciliator? Doubtful,
because if the Conciliator hadn't killed the Prefect, the Guild would not
have changed. Would Talos even have written the play? No, because Canog
could not have heard the Conciliator's speech or written his book upon which
the play was based. The Curtain wall would not have been breached, which had
allowed young Sev to sneak off to play and dream in that mausoleum that
would probably not exist with those particular symbols above its door. The
Conciliator religion was a necessary component of the circumstances
governing and influencing both Severians' formative years.

If you break the causal chain that stretches from the arrival of the New Sun
and Ushas, all the way back to the Conciliator in Typhon's time and forward
again to Ushas, you radically alter the circumstances that put Sev1 in the
Matachin tower. Without a Conciliator, Sev1 almost certainly would not have
been there to bring a dead dog back to life.

>On the other hand, I don't think it's too much to imagine a
>parallel to the Pelerines, based on something other than the New
>Sun religion.
>
>>
>>The biggest problem I have with this theory is that it violates
>>the
>>integrity of the Urth Cycle as a stand-alone work, and it turns
>>the sense of
>>it upside-down in doing so. It also dooms Urth to the ice-future,
>>the
>>"do-nothing" future that Wolfe has disparaged.
>
>On the first point, I don't agree. Even taking BOTNS alone, without
>UOTNS, I think we are at least invited to imagine that maybe it's
>not going to be all beer and skittles when the New Sun arrives.

I agree.

>Perhaps the biggest hint: Sev himself, a torturer with no hint of
>Christ-liness apart from his recapitulation of parts of Jesus'
>life: what kind of salvation can we expect from him? The inversion
>is there, hidden if at all by its obviousness.
>
>Also, the cosmology propounded by aquastor-Malrubius - what is
>remotely attractive about it? Dt Talos' play. The hints in the
>stories of Gabriel and the small angel and Gabriel versus the cock,
>that perhaps the shadowy higher beings are not connected to the
>Increate.
>
>The most creepy sign: Sav praying at the Pelerines' altar, but in
>the end praying only to himself. By the end of UOTNS we know that
>Sev is the Conciliator. Put the two together and you have at least
>a broad hint that there's nothing very holy going on here.

Back to the dog. Where did the supernatural ability to raise the dead come
from, an ability not even the god-like Hierogrammates possessed? You can
argue that Sev2 got it from the White Fountain he fathered in Yesod, and
that by the time of his boyhood had completed most of its journey to Urth,
even if he was unaware at the time of his mystical connection to it. How
else could Sev1 have done it? The alternative is to believe that Sev was
born with the raw power, which makes him a candidate for divinity.

>I think that Wolfe intended this to be a "horror story" from the
>start, but even if I'm wrong he at least allowed plenty of scope
>for ambivalence.
>
>On the second point, I take Wolfe as referring to Urth society as
>depicted in UOTNS, dwindling on a resource-depleted world. But in
>the larger context, this is not the condition of humanity as a
>whole - it's already spread, it's not degenerating on Urth. It
>doesn't need Urth reborn to save humanity from the ice death.

Right, but Urth is still the ancestral home of the race, and as such is
important to the designs of both the Hierogrammates and the Increate.

-Roy

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