b sharps's Inire theory

Roy C. Lackey · 06 Jul 2008, 09:08 · from 2008-July.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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 04:08:00 -0500
Subject: (urth) b sharps's Inire theory
Message-ID: <000a01c8df47$cd779f20$f1d14a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Jeff Wilson quoted and wrote:
>> The theory that Inire is Rudesind, Fechin and Boatman (maybe some others,
>> but not now) is predicated on similarity of physique, simian in nature.
The
>> other component is that Inire is a Hierogrammate. Like Tzadkiel (hell, he
>> may *be* Tzadkiel), he is capable of assuming any form, large or small.
>
>Stop. There is no evidence Tzadkiel can assume _any_ shape. It has
>several at its disposal, but we do not know if they are finely
>customizable. Also, we do not know that Hierogrammates are a race that
>share the same abilities. They might be a society or a class of beings
>in the way the Megatherians are, with varying abilities and hindrances.

I don't know how many forms a Hierogrammate can assume, but the apport on
the Ship started out as a fur-ball and eventually morphed into the small,
hairy man-shape that was Zak. (See long paragraph, URTH, IX, 68, near end)
Zak became Tzadkiel of the Trial. Sev later met giantess Captain Tzadkiel
who turned one of her fingers into a woman-sized version of herself. The
captain seemed to be ignorant of Trial Tzadkiel's doings. She spoke of her
*race's* ability to change shape and said that broken-off pieces of her
larger self would inform her greater self of anything they learned. (XXIV,
176, last page) Small Tzadkiel also was ignorant of her larger self's doings
with Sev.

>>  he can have multiple versions of
>> himself that maintain separate existences that need not be aware of each
>> other at any given time. Thus the Boatman and Rudesind can both be
telling
>> the truth to Severian about their life stories, even while living
>> simultaneously.
>
>This hypothesis seems safely unfalsifiable. If they have separate lives
>and memories, how is it remotely useful to consider them the same
>character?

Useful? In the same way that Tzadkiel found the practice useful, I suppose.
Trial Tzadkiel became Zak just for kicks, so he could get to know Sev. Inire
could marry for the love of young women, just as men do. But he could do it
more than once, and at the same time, if he was a Hierogrammate. And he
could manipulate events to cause Sev to become the New Sun. Note that I said
that split-off versions *need not* be aware of another version's doings, but
they could if they wanted to, particularly Rudesind and Inire. They may all
get together, by and by.

-Roy

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