Merger

Lee Berman · 29 Jan 2011, 04:18 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 23:18:17 -0500
Subject: (urth) Merger
Message-ID: <SNT123-w23AAA0AED7C575C7E26656CFE00 at phx.gbl>

> Can someone hook me up with the story where Appian is named?

The name of the story I think you are looking for is "The Cat".

>Jeff Wilson: It may be that they were looking for a candidate with suitable psionic 
>potential that they could then magnify.

Toward the end of Citadel I think, Severian ponders that he seems to have revived Triskele
before he received The Claw. He has two theories.

1. He will succeed in bringing the New Sun and such an awesome power of planetary resurrection
can't help but echo backward in time and confer a small dose of it to younger Severian.

2. He will fail to bring the New Sun and be unmanned. But the hierogrammates will bestow upon
him a nice parting gift to make up for his lost testicles and the gift of resurrection will
be bestowed retroactively in time.

Well, we know from UotNS that Severian succeeds and that the power of resurrection is beyond the 
hierogrammates' power (though perhaps they could give it as a gift without being able to wield it
themselves).

But Severian's success would seem to point to the validity of #1, just as he had hoped. 

Moreover, the white fountain is given a bluish color, iirc. It is doppler shift as it is moving toward 
Urth but it seems also to mirror the Claw's (encased) color in theme, perhaps further suggesting
the White Fountain  is sending him some partial Claw-like power. Perhaps it is less effective as it is 
coded to his older self. 

Still when Severian is young, the White Fountain is extremely close to Urth relative to the full journey 
it travelled. Only 60 years left on a journey which started at the dawn of civilization. (not that Wolfe 
had to have all that explicitly worked out as he finished CotA; I have the feeling that at that point of
writing he envisioned the white fountain simply placed in the black hole, not travelling through space to
get there).

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