Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:41:12 -0700
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: Re: (urth) Daddy Typhon?

The mantis/nutria loop:
>> >Pas is not yet dead when Silk sees his dead biological parents in the
>> >Outsider's "Mainframe," so he cannot be Silk's father.
>>
>>Ah, but we are talking =biological= life here, not VR life in Mainframe.
>>And I'm sure you will agree that Typhon, the biological pre-form of Pas, is
>>long dead by the time of Silk; as is Typhon's extramarital girlfriend.
>
>         I meant Typhon, not Pas. Sorry.
>         But, no, I won't agree. You certainly remember more details than I
>do, so help me out. Sure, Typhon's original body is gone, but his soul is
>alive, if asleep, waiting to be awakened by Severian and finally slain. So
>he ain't dead.
>         Or have we decided that when Silkhorn goes to Urth to visit
>Severian he goes back in time? In that case Typhon would be dead. But it's
>hard to imagine Wolfe has him in the same Outsider heaven as Silk's
>"adoptive" parents. Typhon does not seem like the "loving" type that Silk
>sees during his period of death.
>         Still, Typhon is not dead, not for another 20-30 years, from what
>I can tell.
>         Help me out here.

That is a somewhat thornier question than the easier one I thought I was
addressing.  The short answer is that it has to do with what blattid was
working on earlier today: how many ways do the non-corporeal parts of a
person divide/separate, how are these elements different from each other,
and how many places can a person be at one time?

To bear down for a moment on the point you have raised.  In TBOTNS we have
Typhon dead (absolutely dead -- not in suspended animation, but dead) and
then reanimated by the Claw.  (If you are sticking to the suspended
animation notion then I guess this argument is lost on you and I'm wasting
my fingers.)

We understand that the Claw does this trick by bending time back . . . so
the "Typhon" essence who is restored to the body is the last one who was
there, a thousand years earlier.  Just as Dorcas was raised from the dead.

Meanwhile, the VR version of Typhon, made prior to Typhon's death (prior to
the rebellion, too) has been living through a few centuries of experience
on the Whorl.  Pas goes through some pretty rough experiences and may be,
as a result, softer and kinder than Typhon: that sense we have noticed in
which TBOTLS is like a rehabilitation of the old tyrant.

As it turns out, TBOTSS all takes place a few years before Severian meets
Typhon arisen.  Until this moment, as I try out different permutations, I
had never thought of a system whereby the Claw restores Pas-360 to the body
of Typhon . . . I simply thought that Typhon's real soul was being
reinstated in the corpse, and Pas is a separate entity with a separate
evolution and a separate soul (if such things exist for VR entities), like
the chems but without a body.  (The Typhon Severian meets sure doesn't seem
rehabilitated from the Typhon of URTH.)

On the one hand, we have Typhon in literally two places at the same time:
an awakened tyrant on Urth and a benign god on a starship hundreds of
light-years away.  But as we have seen with Severian, slivering off into
Apu-Punchau and all the others (not to forget the enigmatic Claw
itself--likely element of the first Severian), things that were once the
same become different and independent.

Or, if we go along with my notion that the blond couple is the original
scan of Typhon and , then Typhon is in =three= places at once!  (In
contrast to Severian, who has separate selves decently scattered across
separate centuries.)

=mantis=



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