The Outsider

Son of Witz · 18 Dec 2010, 16:30 · 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: Sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org (Son of Witz)
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 08:30:22 -0800
Subject: (urth) The Outsider
In-Reply-To: <4D0C6454.50603 at io.com>
References: <992115.57023.qm at web84102.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<B52E8752-75F0-49DD-A661-7A2437A3A3BC at butcherbaker.org>
	<4D0C6454.50603 at io.com>
Message-ID: <3AB6E4C7-BB56-4920-9614-E3BBD5E29614 at butcherbaker.org>

On Dec 17, 2010, at 11:35 PM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

> On 12/17/2010 7:35 PM, Son of Witz wrote:
>> True, it may mean between suns. But I'd wager Ultan is learned enough to
>> choose his words carefully, and would likely know as much about this
>> stuff as Malrubius's aquastor.
> 
> I don't see any way for Ultan to know about Yesodi-level goings on and yet feel free to share it so casually with someone he can't positively identify.
> 

Well...

Are we convinced that Severian going to Ultan isn't part of his being steered?
Do we take Ultan at face value when he just knows, off the top of his head, that a book is leaning in such a way on such a shelf, even when he's been blind for years and his apprentice has no idea about?  This is a book that seems soooooooo important to Severian that he carries it through the entire BotNS. It is plausible that this is a truly random event, but NOTHING else about Severian's life, or the tasks he's assigned, seems random at all, so it is just as likely, perhaps more likely, that Ultan has had a hand in shaping him.

This book is treacherous.

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