Wolfe; it hurts!

Two questions that might be sort of remedial: First, if I'm not mistaken, Severian makes reference to having thousands of personalities to draw from after becoming Autarch. Now, seeing as how my Lexicon Urthus tells me there are have been far less than a thousand known Autarchs, where does this legion come from? Are they somehow the result of Thecla's previous meals, and I just missed it? Second, and I KNOW this has been debated before so just feel free to ignore it if it's redundant, what the HECK is going on with Merryn at the end of the Book of the Short Sun? Even ignoring the reference to her being other than human, why does Severian seemingly deny knowledge of a sister when confronted with the fact that he has the name of a twin in BOTNS, but acknowledges to SilkHorn that she is his sister at the end of BOSS? Could it be that the lil' Severian that SilkHorn meets is actually one of the alternate unsuccessful versions? Or perhaps a further refinement? ***************************** Seth Lombardi sethlombardi at hotmail.com sethopopotropolis: http://pages.prodigy.net/nlom/blogg.html AIM: melombardi "Two faces are alike; neither is funny by itself, but side by side their likeness makes us laugh" -Pascal

Seth writes:

Unless I've missed it, I don't think Sev makes this claim. It's Merryn who says: "He's my brother ... We're brothers & sisters, we witches & torturers" (Ch 13). I don't think there's any claim of real kinship in that, just some smart-ass irony. What's the reference to her being other than human?

Assumes you believe LU. :-) Matthew