Merryn and Triskele

I think what Andrew is getting at is the rather glaring lack of apparent recognition between Merryn and Severian at the end of CLAW. From Sev's personal perspective, the meeting in the stone town took place less than two years after the time he first found Triskele. (I can elaborate on the time frame with citations from the text, if necessary.) Presumably the interval was the same for Merryn. During the time he had Triskele was when Silkhorn & Co. made their astral visit to him. Seeing someone walk through a steel wall should have impressed Merryn, and it did. I don't think she would be likely to ever forget her experience in the torturers' tower, or the young apprentice who caused her to be there. For the record, Sev had Triskele for only a week. (SHADOW, chapter IV, p-31, Timescape hb.) -Roy

I posted this back in 2003: ------------------------------------------------------------- Quite a lot more time than a week must separate Silk's visit to Urth from Dorp (RTTW Ch 13) & his final visit from New Viron (Ch 19). But in both passages, Sev has Triskele, whereas in Shadow Sev tells us he only had the dog for a week - Ch IV: "A week after I had carried him down, I found only Triskele's hobbling footprints in the mud..." Either: (1) Wolfe made a little mistake. (2) Silk can & does astral travel through time as well as space. (3) Silk's first visit somehow changes things, so that Triskele stays longer (the blankets he has in RTTW aren't mentioned in Shadow ...) (4) Some other thing. I pick (1). ------------------------------------ I can't remember the detqails of the longer-than-a-week conclusion, but I recall it was pretty obvious. Now instead of picking (1) I'm suggesting that (3) is worth thinking about.

Is it clear that more than a week passes for Sev? I ask because we know that at least some of the Narrator's astral travels are also travels in time...

If it is "clear" that more than a week passed on Urth between the Narrator's visits, then I would go for 3. --Dan'l

Do we know that? Not denying it, but I don't recall anything which suggests time travelling.

I'm deeply suspicious that the accelerations allowable in the Whorl (without the lakes sloshing all over everywhere, etc) would give you sufficient relativistic compression to make a thousand-year journey only last 300. Michael Andre-Driussi and I have batted this one around a little, and the question comes down to, "how fast can the Whorl accelerate." So, uh, SilkHorn would seem to be going into the future. Not merely outside the light cone, but into the future even if there IS a Universal Time (me, I don't see what's wrong with regarding the comoving frame as Really At Rest and thereby declaring time, relative to the comoving frame, to be Real Time, and applying relativistic shrinkage to everything else). Adam

<thalassocrat at nym.hush.com>

You must know I'm a huge proponent of the idea that Silk can become unmoored in time, if he focuses on location. The biggest argument against time travel is that that tyrant guy who was a sleeper on the whorl obviously says that a lot of time has passed on Urth and he no longer recognizes his city. The best argument for time travel is more easily dismissed: when Inclito's mother tells of the man who dies from the snake tooth in her youth, somehow Silkhorn and Oreb (or a darned good facsimile of them) show up in the story, something that definitely happened in the past. Maybe Silk heard the story, and that night when he fell asleep he went off to live it. Or maybe, as those against time travel would say, she just told him into the story to screw with him. Either way, it's weird. Aramini

Shrinkage works both ways, but when frames are brought back to relative rest, the one that has experienced greater acceleration has experienced less duration. However, I don't think GW really believes in relativity, or at least it doesn't have physical meaning in the New Sun books, and by extension, the Long and Short Suns.

Seems to me you can get that compression with something less than 0.01g, if your magic space-engine gives you constant boost up to 0.95c or beyond. Or no? But anyway I have no idea how noticeable 0.01g would be; would you get sloshing etc?

A 1% grade is certainly enough to ensure you don't, say, put a ball down on a shelf. And there's no indication in the Whorl that you have to build things on slopes to counteract the effects of acceleration. I was figuring a thousandth of a G would be more reasonable. But on the other hand....we really have no idea how the Whorl is powered, do we? Of course one could say that of course Wolfe doesn't believe in relativity inasmuch as spacetime is a static rather than a dynamic concept, which does not appear to allow for free will. Put another way, free will is a refutation of the notion that time is essentially spacelike. Adam

no slosh, and the tiny acceleration would be swamped in the effects of the Whorl's spin gravity.

How problematic would Coriolis effects be in day-to-day life on the Whorl, anyway? Do we know how big it is? Adam

It should into present a problem with day-to-day living, but given the Whorl is of a size that towns are visible overhead, any activity involving flying objects will be visibly affected. For instance, a ball thrown or hit against the rotation of the Whorl will be seen to go farther than one hit traveling with the rotation.

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com writes:

remember gy = c One g for one year = speed of light one thousandth g would take a while hartshorn

Excuse me, but these speculations on the relativistic effects of acceleration on the Whorl have nothing to do with the astral travels Dan'l mentioned. Silkhorn did his traveling while on Blue. How long it took the ship to get from Urth to Blue, and how much time has passed on Urth since it voyaged, is another subject. I agree with Andrew in that I see no evidence in the text to suggest that astral travel also involves time travel. -Roy

But it isn't: knowing whether Severian is in Blue's past light cone, its future light cone, or outside its light cone entirely is a relevant question. It only becomes irrelevant if we take as a given that relativity doesn't exist in the New/Long/Short Sun universe, and even then we're left with the question of, if there is a Universal Now and astral travel is instantaneous, then is Severian in the same Now that Silkhorn is?

Well, if it is instantaneous--and it must be, or Silkhorn would be gone a very long time on his trip to Urth--then either there's no relativity in Wolfe's universe, or it does. Adam

This is given to us during the storytelling context. The Narrator travels into at least two peoples' stories that have already happened -- and at least one of them is quite surprised at it, in a way that shows that she perceives that her own past has been changed. I can't be much more specific, because it's been a couple of years since I reread SS. --Dan'l

Dan'l wrote (of time travel)

Chapter 9 of In Green's Jungles, if people want a reference. Fava is telling the story of what is clearly her own childhood on Green, and for some reason brings Silkhorn into it. Silkhorn tells us that he starts to imagine the scene vividly, and Fava then seems very surprised to find herself describing how she was rescued by Silkhorn, as if that wasn't what had happened. Silkhorn actually starts narrating the story directly to us, as something happening to him. But exactly what is going on here? Fava describes this person as 'stocky', which sounds like Horn rather than Silkhorn, and says that he wanted to use her to frustrate his son's plans, which sounds like something Horn would have wanted to do when he was on Green. And why did Fava introduce Silkhorn (or Horn) to her story in first place? Because that actually happened? Or was Fava's childhood too long ago for Horn to have been there? I wonder if Fava genuinely did see Horn while he was on Green, and in revisiting that time Silkhorn 'overlaid' that self with his new self. A similar thing happens in Free Live Free. But this topic needs a thread, possibly a website, all of its own. Certainly Silkhorn demonstrates some sort of power to travel back in time.