What's So Green About Ushas?

Roy C. Lackey · 15 Jul 2008, 20:44 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:44:35 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Green About Ushas?
Message-ID: <000a01c8e6bb$9aeaa180$a3cd4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Tony Ellis quoted and wrote:
>(FWIW, I have a hard time fitting the futuristic Green Man into the
>prospective Hieros line. He seems to be rather a pacific fellow whose kind
>will not even kill to eat. It's hard to imagine his kind will produce the
>cruel men who fashion Hierogrammates in Briah. Maybe he signals the end of
>the senseless cycles.)

>>I don't think the Green Man future is meant to be the one that
produces the Hierogrammates, because I don't think it's the one to
which Severian returns as a god at the end of UotNS, although that
sometimes seems to be the assumption.

>>When Severian escapes from Apu-Punchau's tomb in the final chapter of
UotNS and the corridors of time stretch around him, he says:
"Bright-winged, the small Tzadkiel fluttered beside one. The green man
raced beside another. I chose one that ran as lonely as I..." That's
the one he follows back to Ushas.

>>That seems to suggest that the Green Man future is one that gets the
New Sun but doesn't get Severian the demi-god, and humanity works out
its own arrangement with the universe.<<
-----------------------------------------------------------

I don't think the Corridors necessarily led to alternate realities, just
different points in time. Ash and his house disappeared because the ice
future was no longer probable. When Sev made to force him out of the house,
he said, "But your world is your world. I can exist there only if the
probability of my existence is high." (CITADEL, XVII) And he went poof when
he left the protection of the Last House. The Green Man had been held
prisoner in Saltus, so he could exist outside the Corridors in Sev's world
because the probability of his future existence was high.

When Agia and the Green Man rescued Severian in the jungle, the Green Man
said "We are your children . . ." (CITADEL, XXX) That suggests that his kind
were descended from the new peoples that Sev found on Ushas when he returned
from the stone town. That is corroborated by what the Green Man said to Sev
in Saltus, "I am a free man, come from your own future to explore your age."
(CLAW, III)

-Roy

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