Undines

Lane Haygood · 20 Jul 2010, 21:02 · from 2010-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: lhaygood at gmail.com (Lane Haygood)
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:02:09 -0500
Subject: (urth) Undines
In-Reply-To: <af8de3f3a6b44c07377ced425b122199.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>
References: <SNT123-W192538D20564C3542E254DCFA00 at phx.gbl>
	<af8de3f3a6b44c07377ced425b122199.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTikGWnlqqBRoUhkrBaZFxm-LkQ8CTDH4cXYQe8j1 at mail.gmail.com>

Why not Dorcas herself?  She has connection to rising from water/watery deaths.

LH

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:
>> We are led to believe Severian gains his connection to the New Sun/White
>> Fountain via intercourse with Apheta. I hope she didn't have to kill him
>> for that to happen (though many female bugs do that sort of thing).
>
> I interpret this as the Yesodis collecting a gene sample so that the White
> Fountain can be attuned to him; this may also explain some of Juturna's
> transcending of dimension, since she shares roughly half his chromosomes.
> Despite the name, I don't think the White Fountain gives him underwater
> breathing, since the its power is blocked by even the limb of the earth,
> and the stars don't shine deeply under the water.
>
>> Elsewhere, aren't we told that Severian's Yesod tests were all a sham?
>> And that Tzadkiel had already imbued Severian with his White Fountain
>> connection on the ship. Again we have the possibility that eidolon
>> formation allows this.
>
> I got the impression that there's no one time where he is imbued so much
> as the WF sends out power on a frequency that he receives whenever its
> light shines upon him, including frequencies that pierce storms and
> clouds. This doesn't mean that he always has the skill or knowledge to use
> that power, depending on where along his personal timeline he is.
>
>
>> If not that then perhaps he became a water-breathing eidolon at the end
>> of Sword. He had B, F and O above him and perhaps Juturna and Abaia in the
>> lake below him. Perhaps either were capable of doing it though one seems
>> more likely than the other.
>
> Juturna tries to coax him into the water and apparently other people are
> taken below the waves. If it isn't all a murder plot or dinner for the
> hungry undines, it implies that undines can convert humans to breathe
> water, and perhaps that the converted humans may even breed
> water-breathing children who later return to the land, like Idas. A
> symbiote could be involved, similar to the Green Man's "pond scum".
>
> There remains the question of where the undine in Severian's family tree
> is. Was Dorcas' husband some kind of spy for Abaia?
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

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