Mystery of Agia

David Duffy · 20 Jan 2011, 23:04 · from 2011-January.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: davidD at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy)
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 09:04:51 +1000 (EST)
Subject: (urth) Mystery of Agia
In-Reply-To: <1D636C62-2D4D-47E8-90B4-327840AFB2B9 at liftingfaces.com>
References: <758650.8590.qm at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
	<1D636C62-2D4D-47E8-90B4-327840AFB2B9 at liftingfaces.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.1101210857010.27054 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>

On Thu, 20 Jan 2011, Ryan Dunn wrote:

>
> Some other stuff that bugs me about the twins...
> . .
>
> IN AGILUS'S CELL:
>
> "I pushed her away - not into a chair this time but against the wall. 
> Her head struck the stone, and though it must have been padded by her 
> abundant hair, the sound was as sharp as the tap of a mason's hammer. 
> All the strength seemed to leave her knees; she slid down until she was 
> sitting on the straw. I would never have guessed that Agia was capable 
> of weeping, but she wept.
>
> (I've expressed my issue with the specificity of this passage before, 
> how Severian goes to the trouble to set up her volume of hair against 
> the sound of her skull hitting the wall, and how she goes slack, quiet, 
> then weeps... does not black out.)
>

I think he mentions this because she hit the wall very hard. 
Most people have heard a definite bone-on-stone thump -- I don't think 
the noise of the mason's hammer is metallic.  Even though she does not 
lose consciousness, she is stunned.  Agilus is just depressed.

But yes, they're not ordinary twins, and we've already met Dr Veil.

Just 2c, David Duffy.

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