Merger

Gerry Quinn · 30 Jan 2011, 18:16 · 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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:16:37 -0000
Subject: (urth) Merger
References: <SNT123-W3196F4C797300AA5435AE9CFE30 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <3304A05A4B0B49418728D98FFE47A7C9@jill>

From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>> 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.
>
>>Jeff Wilson- Would that not also undo the emasculation?
>
> Heh. Restoring my own crotch might be a high priority if I had the power 
> of resurrection.
> Lucky Severian didn't have to, I guess (though as far as we know he 
> remained childless).
>
> I still argue that a simple, non-emasculating vasectomy would have done 
> the trick. Something
> fishy going on there. You'd almost think there was a conspiracy to put 
> androgyny into the
> story as much as possible.

The whole business as explained by Malrubius's aquastor doesn't make a whole 
lot of sense.

(1) Why be concerned that the particular autarchs who undertook and failed 
the trial might found a dynasty?  I don't see why a dynasty founded by them 
should be worse than a dynasty founded by some autarch who never undertook 
it.

(2) Severian had time to sire plenty of heirs between the time he became 
Autarch and the time he departed for Yesod.

One can make various speculations.

For (1) it might be that an autarch who went to Yesod would gain so much in 
knowledge or credibility that a dynasty would be more likely.  It might 
instead be that a dynasty started by such an autarch would be symbolic of an 
inward-turning Urth, unwilling to try again for redemption.

For (2) it might be that the consequences operate backward in time so that a 
failed autarch would be born an androgyne.  We know nothing of Appian's 
history in this regard.  About Ymar we know that he once spurned a beautiful 
woman and followed a dog, which does not go against the theory but hardly 
constitutes strong evidence for it.

Nothing appears terribly convincing.  So was Malrubius's aquastor lying, 
perhaps not about the price of falure, but about its purpose?  Might the 
willingness to proceed despite the risk of such consequences be part of 
Severian's trial?  That has a certain degree of plausibility.

Wolfe doesn't seem to give any clues, so it's hard to know.

- Gerry Quinn

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