Problematic element in chronology

Gerry Quinn · 31 May 2011, 17:39 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 18:39:47 +0100
Subject: (urth) Problematic element in chronology
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Message-ID: <484B197D1F2B48ADA4873A4B5697FE91@jill>

From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>

> Perhaps the only the Rajan could see the light of Sol's sun. He was only 
> asking the others to imagine it. Perhaps he wasn't seeing it with human 
> eyes. Just sayin'.

He says it will be visible to everyone.
"Soon it will be evening," he said. "If we still haven't gone, we'll go up 
onto the roof of this house. Standing on the tiles I will point and you will 
peer until at last you see a certain dim red star. It's a long, long way 
from here. Think of it now, the sky like black velvet strewn with diamonds 
in the bottom of a grave, and among the diamonds a minute drop of blood.

[The grave imagery echoes Silk's dream early in BotLS.]

> There was a discussion on this list between Mantis and (I think) Jerry 
> Friedman some years ago about the distance between Urth and Blue based on 
> 350 years of travel, 500 years of travel, 1000 years of travel.
>
> Don't we know (based on the vase Lemur destroyed) that they've been in 
> transport for just over 500 years? Assuming this all occurs during the 
> time of Severian's childhood., that just suggests an overall time dilation 
> of 2, right? That's fast, mind-blowingly fast, but not impossibly fast.

I think there is a fair amount of text suggesting that the journey took in 
the region of 300 years subjective.  I assume the vase was already old when 
it was brought aboard.

Time dilation factor of 2 or 6, I'm not sure it matters all that much.  The 
energy needed is equal to the Whorl's mass multiplied by the time dilation, 
and in either case is enormous!

- Gerry Quinn

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