Sev's common lineage

Roy C. Lackey · 01 Jul 2008, 04:20 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:20:39 -0500
Subject: (urth) Sev's common lineage
Message-ID: <001b01c8db31$d4c32b60$52cd4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

b sharp quoted and wrote:
>Nessus was already two days drowned when Sev saw the woman, and the House
>Absolute was shortly to be inundated, so where was she being taken, and
>how?

[snip]
>>I think Wolfe put the woman in UotNS on the Path of Air mostly to connect
her to the Play and Countess Carina, (whom Dave, through her maids, has
neatly connected to Catherine, even without the physical resemblance).<<
[snip]
>>Marc Aramini- Roy's nuts and bolts interpretations and insistance that
real-world logic should be obeyed might leave gaps in understanding.  Surely
Eschatology And Genesis is best interpreted as symbolic art within art
rather than as a mechanical reality.<< [snip]

What I find ironic in your disagreement with Dave Tallman is that his
identification of the woman in the loggia with the Countess in the Play is
due, in part, to trying to "map" (my term) information garnered about the
Countess in the Play onto the loggia woman (who is presumed to be
Catherine), such as her age. The numbers in the Play, if the "map" is valid,
and real-world logic force him to the conclusion that the loggia woman was
born during the forty years Sev was gone.

>>In my view, we are  sort of told that Ultan's Library, which is at
basement level,  extends  from the Citadel to the House Absolute (in
hyperspace or something?).  Rudesind's art gallery at ground level, has a
similar connection. I see the Path of Air as a similar portal but with a
terminus at the top of a Citadel tower (probably Valeria's).<<

In the Play, the Praetorians were only escorting the Countess to her suite
after Meschia had knocked her down. She reappeared in another scene with the
torturers, but she was not there to be tortured, and wasn't. That's not a
very good map from which particulars of Catherine's life can be
extrapolated.

No one is going to get to have it both ways. Either mapping an Urth Cycle
character to someone in the Play is valid, or it isn't. You can't pick which
literal items suit a given theory and dismiss whatever doesn't fit with so
much hand waving about symbolism.

>>Responses to Roy:
Obviously Thais isn't in her 70's so if she is Thea's kaibit, she, like the
loggia woman, had access to the Path of Air or some other time portal.  I'm
not sure why else a girl in her 20's on flood day would have any reason to
give Severian knowing glances.<<

Are there any characters in the Urth Cycle who *don't* have access to one of
these increasingly ubiquitous and textually elusive time machines? Why on
Urth would anyone have had any reason to preserve one of the Old Autarch's
old whores by spiriting her away in time somewhere, so she can pop up on
Ushas fifty years later?

-Roy

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