From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Typhon and Quetzal
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2003 14:51:10 -0500

Don wrote:
>If Silk and Typhon are the same it would only be necessary for
>Quetzal's mother (or do I have the morphology wrong?) to have fed on
>Silk.  Or his mother could have fed on Typhon without his knowledge.
>This also handily explains how Quetzal knows so much about Typhon.
>Still there is the resolution of Quetzal's age vs. Silk.  A problem for
>sure.

An insurmountable problem. Quetzal had been Prolocutor for more than thirty
years, and it would have taken him years more to reach that position. Silk
was 23 years old. It's not physically possible for Quetzal's mother to have
fed on Silk.

As for Quetzal's mother having fed on Typhon, that would require her having
been on Urth prior to the building of the _Whorl_. There is no textual
evidence in the Sun Cycle to support the inhumi having been on Urth that I
am aware of. The list of characters in EXODUS specifically states that
Quetzal was "native to Green". How could she have gone form Urth to Green to
give birth a thousand years later? (The interval between Typhon and
Severian.)

If you want to use the Ushas is Blue/Green theory to cover the problem of
spatial distance, then you run into a temporal problem. The time between
antediluvian Typhon and the Blue that Horn migrated to is too vast to have
been bridged by the lifespans of Quetzal and his mother. For the Neighbors
to have evolved on postdiluvian Urth, for their civilization to rise and
fall (both on Blue and Green), would have taken tens of thousands of years,
if not longer.

And the future that Sev bought, at the expense of millions of lives, would
seem to have been an epic boondoggle. Not to mention that there isn't a
Green Man to be seen. And Silk, the virtual saint, thought so highly of the
Increate/Outsider's new world that he packed up his things and left for
greener pastures.

-Roy


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