"The Autarch's Face"

Charles Dye · 11 Jul 1998, 13:42 · from urth-v0016.mbox · original

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: raster at highfiber.com (Charles Dye)
Subject: (urth) "The Autarch's Face"
Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 13:42:46
Message-ID: <urth-v0016-0058 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0016/0058.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

So saith m.driussi at genie.com (mantis) :

>This detail sparks other associations: for the current inquiry we
>will assume that the coins have Valeria's face.  However, the
>mysterious coin of TBOTNS, which had a womanly face on it from a
>model never really identified, a coin given by Vodalus to Severian,
>turned out to be a fake coin.  Who was the model?  (People seem to
>assume that it is the old Autarch, unmanned and androgynous.
>Personally I think it is more likely to be Tzadkiel.)

Another mystery:  How can Vodalus not recognize the Autarch whom
he hates and wants to destroy?  Especially if his profile is in
circulation on the coinage?  The old Autarch (oh, call him
"Appian," I like the Claudian connection) is supposed to have
acted as one of Vodalus's servants.  Sounds like a recipe for
assassination to me!

Putting someone else on the coins helps, but not much.  Surely
the court would notice, and Vodalus is not some farmer from
Podunk.  He'd hear rumors, right?  Thea was *at* the court!
"The face on the chrisos doesn't look much like the Autarch.
He's chubbier, and he has thinner hair and no wings ...."

raster at highfiber.com

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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