"Myfather'smountedguard"

As for the issue of the Old Autarch being Thecla's father -- he cannot be her or Thea's biological father, as I've said before, and recently. It's this simple: Thecla is an exultant; the Old Autarch is decidedly not. He is a little guy, scarcely taller than Cyriaca. One must be born an exultant, of exultant stock. See the first appendix to CLAW. One born of the mating of an exultant and common person is taller than the average commoner, but notably shorter than an exultant. A person of such mixture is regarded as a bastard, such as the fat guy outside Agilus' cell.

The date of the unmanning of Appian is probably crucial here. How much older is Thecla? How long back was Appian unmanned?<<

He was unmanned not too long before Severian was born, then opened the whorehouse about the same year Sev was born. See chapter XXIV, CITADEL. The best determination I can make of Thecla's age is that she is a little older than Sev, but not a lot older. Maybe 23-25. -Roy

-----Original Message----- From: Mo Holkar / UKG [mailto:lists at ukg.co.uk] Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 12:31 AM To: 'The Urth Mailing List' Subject: Re: (urth) "Myfather's mounted guard" At 18:34 18/11/2008, Son of Witz wrote:

what are my qualms then?: just that most of the added details only add to the plowman's meaning and add very little to the soothsayers' or transcendental meanings. This book is like what Dorcas says about the floating cathedral (It is the Catheral of the Claw that jumps into the air when it's set afire, right?) She says "It seems to me that what you call the third meaning is very clear. But the second meaning is harder to find, and the first, which ought to be the easiest, is impossible." So, I guess since the first meaning is so difficult, Borski should be commended for connecting the breadcrumb trails with some neon paint. However I can't help but feel that what Wolfe wanted us to take away was the third and second meanings, and he used the ambiguity of the first to lead us further than plot. I'm not sure where to credit it, but an esoteric teaching I've heard is "there is no escape through the horizontal" and I would argue that most of these readings leave us wandering in the labyrinth. I find the transcendental readings, the vertical dimension, lead us out of the labyrinth and into even MORE interesting territory than the labyrinth of incestuous time warped bloodlines and religio-political manipulation.

Just to pick up on your larger point here, I feel the same way -- although Wolfe unhelpfully blurs the issue by including some plot puzzles that are important to the higher meanings (eg Dorcas's identity). So it's easy to get step-by-step drawn into deeper and deeper puzzling over implied or possible layers of meaning concealed within arcana of plot, in the hope that a discovered correspondence may shed a new light on something important. I guess a (playful) comparison might be made with Church history. Some theologians back-calculate the date of Creation and determine the numbers of angels that can fit in various places, while others are only interested in the revealed Word of the Gospels. Wolfeanism is too young to have yet had a Reformation, but give it a few hundred years... Mo