do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Jeff Wilson · 20 May 2011, 02:37 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 21:37:44 -0500
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
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On 5/18/2011 6:31 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> Then (a) what would be the "source" of the water (or rather of the
> energy that drives the water) and (b) since surely people still live in
> Tibet, was the Flood universal at all?

b) The global cooling of Sev's time could have rendered Tibet/Nepal/etc 
an iced-over hinterland with too little oxygen even for genetic 
acclimation by "real" people. But I would think that some of the 
underpeople must have survived for mythic parallel reasons, and if they 
made it, there's no way to rule out a few humans in the mix. Of course, 
Severian himself survives to "contaminate" Ushas with the sins of Urth, 
so there might as well be other Urth humans in the woodpile on that 
account as well.

a) The source of energy driving the Flood would be the tides from the 
advent of the White Fountain. The only hints we are given as to its size 
or scale is that its purpose  is to renew the sun, and that Typhon 
relates he was told the sun had dimmed by 7 parts in a thousand IIRC. 
This could mean a lot of things depending on which scaling laws we 
choose to interpret it the value give, from 7/1000 the mass of the sun
down to zero and back up to the same figure in negative mass. The 
closeness of approach matters of course, but I can't recall if tides 
scale by the inverse third or fourth power of distance.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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