When Did You Last See Your Father?

Peter Westlake · 13 Apr 1999, 10:02 · from urth-v0025.mbox · original

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From: Peter Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) When Did You Last See Your Father?
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 11:02:52 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0025-0066 at digest.urth.net>
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At 00:43 1999-04-09 -0500, Roy C. Lackey wrote:
>On Thu, 8 Apr 1999 20:06:20 Robert Borski wrote:
>
>>>Anybody willing to buy that this may also be symptomatic of morning
>sickness? Severian and Dorcas have been having sex long enough for her to
>be entering this stage of pregnancy, and it's interesting to note that nine
>or so months later, when Severian sees Dorcas for the last time in Oldgate,
>"on the floor near her was a basket, not small yet not large either." Could
>this basket perhaps contain a baby?<<
>
>    Damn! I just reread the series, noted and wondered about the basket
>(seemingly irrelevant to what was going on; she wasn't on a picnic), then
>forgot it. I think you're right. The idea of morning sickness had also
>occured to me when I read the vomiting scenes. I should have put them
>together!

And later Roy wrote:

>    Okay, I accept that the woman Sev sees being led away, as Tony Ellis
>(and mantis, in the archives) states, is in the role of the Contessa, but
>who was she in the "real" world, outside the play, on the last day of Urth?
>Both she and Sev seem to recognize each other. From where, when? If she is
>less than forty years old, as suggested by her desirability, then Sev
>couldn't have seen her on Urth, because he has been gone that long. Why was
>she apparently being arrested?

Maybe she's a little older than that; could she have been born at the
very start of Severian's reign, for instance?

SBear.

Peter Westlake, Harlequin Ltd, Barrington Hall, Barrington, Cambs CB2 5RG.

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