Father Inire: teratoid

Lee Berman · 15 Dec 2010, 19:02 · from 2010-December.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:02:32 -0500
Subject: (urth) Father Inire: teratoid
Message-ID: <SNT123-W151469D2FBB1DDB3D2C363CF140 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn- It may just be alienese for 'quantum reflector' or whatever the proper term 
>for the mirrors is.That the sign seems teratoid to Severian may not reflect its true meaning, 
>even if it is intended as a hint to the reader that monsters can lurk in mirrors.  Then again he 
>associates the symbol with cacogens, whom he thinks of - at least at this time - as monsters.
>An actual meaning of 'monsters' seems a bit unlikely, especially engraved on 
>every panel.

Since this entire story is from Severian's point of view, we can only discern meaning based on what
he understands and what we think he doesn't understand but we do. He wrote BotNS as an experienced,
knowledgeable Autarch. We are often left unclear whether he is reporting his later interpretations of 
things as this knowledegable ruler or his interpretation of events as they happened to him as a 
young Torturers journeyman.

I'd guess the symbols were put on the panels by their maker. If I had to guess who made them I'd guess
Father Inire and they serve as a maker's mark. If Severian chooses to call these symbols "teratoid" it 
might be that he understands Father Inire better than we think or know.

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