Wolfe's Puzzles

Lee Berman · 10 Jul 2010, 05:51 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 01:51:23 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's Puzzles
Message-ID: <SNT123-W52AE66C3C8EA2DAECC1441CFB60 at phx.gbl>

A number of years ago my brother asked me for something new to read
and I gave him BotNS. After he read it he told me he had "figured out
the secret". I was a little intrigued (though not too hopeful) with
what he'd come up with.  He told me he had figured out that Dorcas was
really Severian's grandmother.

Now I am no literary genius but, like some others, I thought that was 
pretty clear and not a puzzle. But since my brother is at least reasonably 
intelligent I must conclude that Dorcas'family status should be considered
one of the puzzles of BotNS though prehaps a relatively easy one. 
I felt the same about the "puzzle" which suggests incest between Agia and
Agilus though, again, I guess that wasn't obvious to everyone on first 
reading.

I think a somewhat harder one (pre-UotNS) is that Severian was the 
Conciliator. I did get that one...I think maybe on my second reading. 
But once I started searching online for answers I found there were many
mysteries I was unable to solve that others had. 

Notable among these is the Maid playing Holy Katharine identified as 
Severian's mother. I could never have gotten that on my own.  
There is nothing tangible in the text to "prove" this as fact but there
is an appealing literary leap of faith to it which allows most of us 
(I think) to accept it as a reasonable working possibility.

I like the puzzles where there are competing theories. Wolfe openly 
invites us to solve the mystery of Hethor's mirrors. Borski reasonably 
argues that any mirrors big enough to summon a giant slug would be too
big to carry around on a long journey, hence Hethor must be a shape-
shifter. Andre-Driussi counter-argues for the more parsimonious and
text-supported theory that the mirrors consisted of sail-scraps from the 
ship, so even large ones could be conveniently folded up and carried.

Both Borski and Andre-Driussi are smarter and more knowledgeable about
Wolfe and literature in general than me. Yet it took them some 20 years
of pondering before they came up with those theories.  I keep that in 
mind as I occassionally purvey my own feeble theories and mystery 
solutions.

Last year I participated in an online Wolfe book-of-the-month club; 
specifically each of the 12 Sun series books was read over the course of
a year. I was very pleased that Mantis (Andre-Driussi) participated and 
I took as full advantage as I could to pick his brain during the course of
it. A shame he (and Borski) don't participate here anymore  (that I know 
of). I saw Son O' Witz there but no others from here that I recognized. 
Is Roy C. Lackey now our eldest statesman? Maybe Tony Ellis or Dan'l?

Anyway, the group came to one puzzle that none of us could make heads nor
tails of, including Mantis, (at least I inferred that from his silence). It
regarded a series of numbers, arranged in a pattern which was found on the
Seal of Pas.

5553  8783  4223  9700  34

2221  0401  1101  7276  56

SEALED FOR THE MONARCH

I am no cryptographer type but I gamely gave the puzzle a few days of 
intense thought and effort. I mostly tried combinations of adding the
numbers together, since Silk makes the sign of addition over them 
(and various other things) I tried working in base 9 since that 
might be in use in Viron math. No luck. I could not come up with an answer.  

The best I could come up with is that it might be a cool solution if the
9 groups of 4 numbers could be be manipulated into letters to spell out
GENE WOLFE (since he often puts wolf[e]s into his stories. But I couldn't
find a way to do that. Perhaps someone else can or come up with some other
good solution.

I guess another 9 letter solution could be Typhon-Set, the evil, bisexual
Egyptian god of desert wind and drought, after whom the Greek multi-
headed monster Typhon was patterned. His Persian cognate is the god/demon
Pazuzu, which could be the source of the (nick)name "Pas".

(I reject the explanation of derivation from "Pan"and "pastoral" as a false,
too easily given clue. How is Typhon like a frolicking pipe-playing goat god?) 

Anyway, I also searched this Archive for solutions to the Seal of Pas but
didn't find anything.  Did I miss something? Is there a known solution out
there? I truly hope Wolfe has enough respect for his readers to not have made
this an unsolvable snipe hunt to make idiots like me play pointlessly with 
numbers and letters for hours upon hours.

With that assumption, my point (aside from random story telling) is that 
there are some easy puzzles in these stories but some really, really 
difficult ones also that take smart people many years to figure out (or 
are never figured out at all). But the mere presence of these complex 
puzzles and the occasional appearance of an interesting solution keeps
me inspired.

(FWIW, I think my own best, unique contribution is probably not this Father
Inire stuff, which I am still trying to refine, with help from y'all. 
I like best my ideas about time travel structures in BotN, which I've 
posted about at least a few times in the past.) 		 	   		  
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