Digest Urth, or brains thereo

Craig Christensen · 16 Jul 1998, 08:04 · from urth-v0017.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: Craig Christensen <2644 at mn3.lawson.lawson.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Digest Urth, or brains thereo
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 08:04:00
Message-ID: <urth-v0017-0020 at digest.urth.net>
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From: "Mark Millman" <Mark_Millman at hmco.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Digest Urth, or brains thereof
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 12:04:38

Rostrum wrote:
>...
> I have to admit some confusion on that point.
> Wouldn't anyone judging the Autarch also
> have to know the words in order to recognize
> them?  Shouldn't any such person be able to
>speak "the words" and pose as the Autarch?
>...

>And Mark Millman replied:
>... For one thing, many of the words command mechanical
>contrivances, so all a putative Autarch would have to do, for
>example, would be to open the door behind the throne...

This was my thinking, too- the Autarch's oldest personalities remember  =20
how to operate the voice-recognition machinery.  The episode I remembered  =20
was near the end of CITADEL (Father Inire's Letter) where Severian opens  =20
the door to the Autarch's quarters with a word.  I scanned this at home  =20
last night, and I noted a mention of 'words' a little further on, at the  =20
beginning of his conversation with the homunculus.  The homunculus opens  =20
by saying (something like) "Why have you interrupted my contemplation of  =20
your world?" and Severian replies (something like), "I now know this  =20
world to have seven continents, of which only part of this one honor the  =20
holy words."

Where I had thought that the use of words was a simple use of old  =20
technology appearing magical in this age, I think that this last tidbit  =20
indicates something more.  It seems that the use of 'words' elicits  =20
control over the populous.  Or maybe just voluntary allegance.

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

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