Fish and Caves

Gerry Quinn · 23 Dec 2010, 21:10 · 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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:10:04 -0000
Subject: (urth) Fish and Caves
References: <SNT123-W272FC51D18556DF4B58BCACF1C0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <7DF779CFB9664754BCD65CA5BCCD087E@jill>

From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>>Gerry Quinn: Interesting too that he distinguishes the brides of Abaia 
>>from the
> "feignings of the sea goddess" - and just WHICH sea goddess does he mean?
>
> For me, the meanings are pretty clear. The words are spoken on Blue so 
> there is
> only one sea goddess he can mean.  The "feignings of the sea goddess" 
> refers to the
> female figure that erupts out of the water formed from The Mother's back 
> and who speaks
> in Her voice to Horn.

But he's speaking to people who have all just seen Monster Scylla on Urth. 
So it's not so clear.

I don't recall the female figure you mention, but as I've said I have only 
read the Short Sun books once.  The figure I associate with the Mother is 
Seawrack, who is plainly detached.  Seawrack claims to be human, but if so 
she has been heavily modified by the Mother.

How are Silkhorn's audience to know he does not mean creatures like 
Seawrack?

I agree with you though that he probably means the Mother rather than 
Monster Scylla.  Still, there is a possible ambiguity there.

> The Undines in various sizes that he describes are distinguished from that 
> "feigning" because
> these are beings which have been pinched off and separated from the main, 
> bulky corpus of the
> sea-bound god/demon. The reason it is important to distinguish attached 
> from detached beings is
> that once a human  (or larger or smaller) sized being is separated, the 
> possibility of rebellion
> becomes possible. This possibility is most clearly raised with the 
> tinkerbell Tzadkiel who is
> supposedly being punished with banishment.

Monster Scylla certainly has or can produces attached figures (feignings?), 
as seen on their astral visit to Urth.  The ancestry of the undines is still 
not entirely certain.  You assert they are detached parts of some sea 
monster, and it seems logical given that Monster Scylla seems to be budding, 
but there is no proof of it.  Severian himself thinks Juturna once lived on 
land, but grew too large; this is after she injures herself trying to leave 
the water to get him.  (This happens before Baldanders jumps in Lake 
Diuturna, so that's not where Severian got the idea.)

- Gerry Quinn

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