Urth Net
A Wooden Leg Named Smith
↰ answers Roy C. Lackey
· by quotation
Roy quoting me:
7 quoted lines · 1–3 deep
Perhaps the Claw (or Severian) cannot heal artificial persons, but only natural persons ...,<<
... What I was addressing,
however, was the contention that the Claw worked by reaching
back in time to a point before the pending problem. If the
Claw's power was a function of time, why should the presence
of prosthetics present a problem? Would it not work for a man
with a wooden leg who was wounded woefully by a weapon?
Per se I do not think it would represent a problem (though I suspect that if it was the wooden leg that was woefully wounded the Claw would either fail or make it take root).
But in the cases of Jonas and Jolenta we don't have "the presence of prosthetics" -- Jonas actually came into existence as, and Jolenta has become, in a different way, an entirely artificial person, and I suspect that the Claw fails/refuses to work with such.