From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Typhon sleeping or dead?
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 04:56:01 -0500

mantis quoted Blattid and wrote:

>Blattid wrote:
>>I think the question of whether Typhon is dead or in SA might be
>>ambiguious ... I had certainly read him as being in SA up to this
>>posting: in my reading of the passage, he appears to be hooked up
>>to a device which sort of dehydrated him and kept his precious
>>bodily fluids in a jar until it was time to reconstitute him,
>>orange-juice-like. Perhaps I'm wrong...
>
>I would not deny the planned ambiguity, I would not deny the reading that
>says it is suspended animation, after all, and thus the time of Typhon's
>revival is purely a fluke, an authorial coincidence to cause a little
>picaresque action in an otherwise dull wilderness. 

Okay, then I will deny it: Typhon was dead, not in SA; the text says so. Sev
prophesied (it was easy, since it came from memory) while on Mt. Typhon
(URTH, Chapter XXXIX):

    "'I'll tell you this. This morning I've been studying this mountain and
the speed with which the work here is going forward. From those things, I
know Typhon has only a short time to live. He'll die on the red couch where
he lies now; and without his word, no one will dare to draw aside the
curtain. One after another will creep away. The machines that dig like men
will return for fresh instructions, but they won't receive them, and in time
the curtain itself will fall to dust.'"

-Roy


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