Sev's common lineage (another Catherine candidate)

In RttW 19, there was a client of the torturers called Tigridia. She was on the third level, where people were "yelling and screaming all the time." Her only physical description is that she has "big eyes." Juganu was attracted to her, and wanted to stay and free her. Silk tried to pull him back, resulting in a fight. "The woman got in it, and we had a real fight going until the boy ran off and got the key to her room." The name Tigridia has two possible legends. One is as a sister of Saint Patrick. She is sometime credited as the mother of seventeen other saints. The other is as the daughter of a nobleman named Sancho, who became a nun. Both of these could be tied to the history of Catherine. Could Tigridia be her alias in prison? The association of Tigridia = tiger = cat = Catherine could be made. There are mysteries about how the fight ended. Did Severian just join the fight and help stop it? Or did the sight of him cause the woman to break down? This is probably a changed timeline, so it doesn't matter if Sev sees her face. I think she is a viable candidate for Catherine as a long-term prisoner. What do others think?

Khaibit clones closely resembled their originals; that was the whole point of the way the Old Autarch set up his brothel. Any pretty girls would have sufficed for his stable, but he wanted to further degrade the exultant concubines he held hostage by prostituting their facsimiles, complete with exultant names, to low-life patrons of the Algedonic Quarter. My point is, whether the Katharine maid was khaibit or original, Sev saw her many times and knew her face well. So, unless you are willing to throw out the entire Urth Cycle because Silk's astral visit stopped the coming of a new sun by changing the future, starting from the day of Silk's visit, then it does matter if he saw Tigridia's face. She should have looked like the Katharine maid. Sev's elevation ceremony was about a year and a half after the time of Silk's visit. When he wrote of that ceremony ten years later, he speculated on where the maid might have come from. Unless he deliberately lied by omission and misdirection, he didn't see that maid in that crazy woman's cell. Btw, if the woman Sev saw in the loggia on the last day of Urth had anything to do with his birth, and if the last day of Urth never happened because there was no New Sun, then she would never have been taken back in time that day, whether to give birth to him or simply to go nuts in a cell or to provide a convenient corpse in the necropolis. In other words, if Silk's visit stopped the coming of the New Sun, I don't think Sev would even have existed for Silk to meet, particularly if Catherine was born in his future. -Roy

For me, of course, this is an argument against the woman being Catherine. I'm sticking to my Catherine = Ouen's sister story, at least until I make up one I like better :) As to who this woman is: no idea! But shortly after we hear Valeria being told that the cacogens have landed a man and a woman in the grounds of the House Absolute. Maybe ...

I didn't claim the changes Silk made were drastic enough to prevent Sev from being the one to bring the New Sun. That could still happen in this timeline. What could happen is that Sev would eventually write a slightly different BotNS from the one we have, in which he mentioned the resemblance of Tigridia to the maid. Or he could lie by omission as he often does and write exactly the book we have. If the changes were sufficient to throw off Sev's destiny, the experience of Master Ash suggests that the Tigridia of this timeline would fade out to non-existence. (It would be interesting if that's how the fight ended -- Juganu would no longer have a reason to stay). But she was real enough earlier to have borne Sev, so Sev himself will not vanish in this iteration, at least. Silk and crew could have all the adventures they wrote about, even if they wiped out the New Sun future. (This is assuming that Typhon created the Whorl and sent it off before he met the Conciliator, so there are no side-effects on their own history). We know in Wolfe's time theory that loops which eliminate their own causes don't retroactively wrap around and undo themselves. For example, once Sev has seen a complete Talos play with the last-day scenes, and gone back as the Conciliator to tell about it, he no longer needs to make any more trips to that time. The play will be completed using information that came from itself. General Whitten's eliminated trip to get information about the bomb in "Free Live Free" is another example.