Sev's common lineage (another Catherine candidate)

Roy C. Lackey · 03 Jul 2008, 20:42 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 15:42:11 -0500
Subject: (urth) Sev's common lineage (another Catherine candidate)
Message-ID: <000a01c8dd4d$48271400$fbcc4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Dave Tallman wrote:
>In RttW 19, there was a client of the torturers called Tigridia. She was
>on the third level, where people were "yelling and screaming all the
>time." Her only physical description is that she has "big eyes." Juganu
>was attracted to her, and wanted to stay and free her. Silk tried to
>pull him back, resulting in a fight. "The woman got in it, and we had a
>real fight going until the boy ran off and got the key to her room."
>
>The name Tigridia has two possible legends. One is as a sister of Saint
>Patrick. She is sometime credited as the mother of seventeen other
>saints. The other is as the daughter of a nobleman named Sancho, who
>became a nun. Both of these could be tied to the history of Catherine.
>Could Tigridia be her alias in prison? The association of Tigridia =
>tiger = cat = Catherine could be made.
>
>There are mysteries about how the fight ended. Did Severian just join
>the fight and help stop it? Or did the sight of him cause the woman to
>break down? This is probably a changed timeline, so it doesn't matter if
>Sev sees her face.
>
>I think she is a viable candidate for Catherine as a long-term prisoner.
>What do others think?

Khaibit clones closely resembled their originals; that was the whole point
of the way the Old Autarch set up his brothel. Any pretty girls would have
sufficed for his stable, but he wanted to further degrade the exultant
concubines he held hostage by prostituting their facsimiles, complete with
exultant names, to low-life patrons of the Algedonic Quarter. My point is,
whether the Katharine maid was khaibit or original, Sev saw her many times
and knew her face well. So, unless you are willing to throw out the entire
Urth Cycle because Silk's astral visit stopped the coming of a new sun by
changing the future, starting from the day of Silk's visit, then it does
matter if he saw Tigridia's face. She should have looked like the Katharine
maid.

Sev's elevation ceremony was about a year and a half after the time of
Silk's visit. When he wrote of that ceremony ten years later, he speculated
on where the maid might have come from. Unless he deliberately lied by
omission and misdirection, he didn't see that maid in that crazy woman's
cell.

Btw, if the woman Sev saw in the loggia on the last day of Urth had anything
to do with his birth, and if the last day of Urth never happened because
there was no New Sun, then she would never have been taken back in time that
day, whether to give birth to him or simply to go nuts in a cell or to
provide a convenient corpse in the necropolis. In other words, if Silk's
visit stopped the coming of the New Sun, I don't think Sev would even have
existed for Silk to meet, particularly if Catherine was born in his future.

-Roy

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