do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

David Stockhoff · 20 May 2011, 11:32 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 07:32:22 -0400
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
In-Reply-To: <4DD5D3EA.5080805 at io.com>
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Message-ID: <4DD65146.80409 at verizon.net>



On 5/19/2011 10:37 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> 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 third or fourth power of distance.
>
>
Of course---the tides themselves! In that case, there is no way any but 
the oldest mountains could be overwhelmed, but I think you're 
right---there is enough evidence in TBOTNS to believe that even in the 
Commonwealth very few people had permanent settlements among mountains.


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