Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 20:44:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Michael Straight 
Subject: Re: (urth) Severian's dream ideas

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, maa32 wrote:

> friends" and moving to Blue, as well as why it is mentioned that Urth is 
> saltier than Urth twice, 

I think you mean Urth is saltier than Blue?  Isn't that just because the
dying sun means more water is frozen in the polar caps, thus the ocean
salt is more concentrated?

> as well as why Babbie treats Hoof differently than he 
> treats other characters and points to his Horns -> disprove that Babbie is 
> Horn and my Tree theory loses most of its strength 

You almost had me wavering on this one, because it's the best explaination
I've seen for Marble's prophesy about riding a beast with three horns --
which is the sort of pun Wolfe likes.

However, when the Rajan records the prophesy, he writes the aside "She
actually said this," as if to answer a skeptic who wouldn't believe she
could have made such an accurate prophecy, which would indicate that the
Rajan knows at that point in the narrative how the prophesy came
true.   But this is written long before the point where you think Horn's
spirit went into Babbie, so it must refer to something that happened
earlier.

Did Horn ride a three-horned beast on Green?  Did the godling that picked
him up outside Blood's house have horns?

> another, and you need to say who was watching Silk in his forest eucharist in 
> In Green's Jungles when he had his back turned 

Surely the Outsider?

> you? Especially by math; math doesn't appear in the books, but hybridization 
> and genetics does; in the very first chapter. 

But there's a much simpler explaination for the hybridization lecture at
the beginning: it forshadows the Silk/Horn hybrid.  Occam's razor.

> tenable than purely animal life.  And my Urth/Blue theory simplifies the 
> Scylla complications: she is related to the old Scylla, and really can tell 
> the narrator how to find Seawrack.  How can Scylla travel between stars; and 
> why would the destination of the Whorl happen to have the sister of old Scylla 
> unless Typhon and Scylla where in big cahoots? 

The Mother is an undine, which we know from the Urth books can "swim
between the stars" (maybe that's literally true, maybe it's just a poetic
way of saying they have access to starships). Scylla the daughter of
Typhon rebelled against him by collaborating with one of Typhon's enemies,
the "greater Scylla," also an undine.  Typhon's daughter probably has a
real name (like "Pas" is really Typhon) and she may have taken her Whorl
Divinity name from the "greater Scylla" on Urth.

It's possible that the fact the Whorl ended up in the Blue/Green system is
due to mechanations of the Urth undine, attempting to deliver the ship
into the clutches of her sister the Mother.

-Rostrum


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