the wall and baldanders

What is the deal with Baldanders claiming he never dreams the morning after the show at Cteiphon's Cross, when the morning after Severian sleeps next to him he describes having a dream, possibly the same dream as Sev? The Wall is a Long Sun class colony ship, isn't it? Sticking up out of the ground like the ships in the Citadel. Either incomplete or mostly buried.

You mean the Wall around Nexus? I think it's a cyclothron (a particle accelerator). Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 10:39:37 -0400 From: transentient at gmail.com To: urth at lists.urth.net Subject: (urth) the wall and baldanders What is the deal with Baldanders claiming he never dreams the morning after the show at Cteiphon's Cross, when the morning after Severian sleeps next to him he describes having a dream, possibly the same dream as Sev? The Wall is a Long Sun class colony ship, isn't it? Sticking up out of the ground like the ships in the Citadel. Either incomplete or mostly buried.

...that's a really good idea. My question is, wouldn't constructing such a ship in-atmosphere be much more difficult than doing it in space?

The Wall's big, but not that big.

As I recall, he had a dream with images from Severian's memory (I feel I should call it a Memory), and Severian had a dream with images from Baldanders's memory or thoughts or future or something. But that's a good question. Maybe Baldanders stopped dreaming? Maybe it was a random lie?

It seems too circular for that, unless you think it's the end layer, like the first coil of a pot. But I don't think building a Whorl-class ship on Earth or Urth, instead of in space, makes any sense at all (which is my answer to John Watkins's question). Jerry Friedman

Isn't it directly stated that the Whorl (and thus presumably any ship of its class) was constructed by hollowing out/inflating an asteroid?

Yeah. From the list of proper names in RTTW: "The WHORL, a spaceship whose vast interior cavity constitutes a small world -- originally, an asteroid." -Roy

It would most likely be vastly more difficult to build the thing on earth. But if you have access to good contragrav technology, not impossible, right? Wasn't Typhon at odds with some hiero-people when he was building the Whorl?

I'd always thought the Wall was just a scaled-up version of the Citadel wall. (And I thought that one was a blast shield for lifting spaceships like the Matachin tower.) That requires thinking that in some earlier age, planetfall-capable spaceships were a lot bigger - but not Whorl-sized. Paul

I assumed Nessus was really really big. It's very old, still expanding, and yet there is a bunch of real estate inside the wall that is rural. How big in diameter does the Whorl need to be? Fifty miles? Apparently the Citadel is in the center of Nessus...and Sev leaves it, spends all day and all night walking, stays at the Inn and meets Dr Talos and Baldanders, encounters Agia, has a crazy ride in a fiacre, winds up at the Sanguniary Field, then after executing Agilus and rejoining the troupe, it seems like the next day they don't have to walk too far to get to the Wall. It seems to me he could have crossed a pretty considerable distance in that time.

They might have similar diameters, but the Whorl is similarly long or longer lengthwise, and is visibly (from the outside) made from an asteroid. The Wall is overtly artificial and there's just not enough room for miles of height extending into the sky or depth below the soil. The best-sounding guess I've heard is that the great Wall surrounded the world's primary spaceport in some earlier age, partly for controlling ingress and egress and partly as a protective berm in case of an accident. The towers of the citadel are the grounded ships of course, and the citadel's curtain wall was added in a later but still antique age to form a redoubt within the Wall. The curtain wall is generally masonry, but the Great Wall may also be an atom smasher or otherwise serve a third purpose.